Charles Dickens was one of the most famous and successful writers in 19th-century England. Along with 14 novels, many of them rich in topical allusion, he produced a body of work as reporter, essayist, correspondent, and editor that constitutes a lifelong account of the facts of Victorian life as he knew them. Dickens was a lover of facts in his work as a reporter, but his nonfiction work is anything but a mere collection of data. In his reporting and commentary, Dickens is often an outraged reformer, uncompromising in his attacks on privileged interests. In the early sketches, he is a writer trying to achieve a synthesis of art and social criticism. The surviving letters, some 14,500 of which the editors of the ongoing Pilgrim Edition have collected, reveal a man of astonishing energies, who attempted to impose an artist’s vision of order on every aspect of his life and work. In the late essays, Dickens emerges as a restless, poetic wanderer who masterfully blends observation, autobiography, and allegory. Much of this prose is valuable as a window on the novelist’s attitudes and preoccupations, but most of it stands on its own, the work of an acute observer and dedicated craftsman.
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