Entrance to the Charles Dickens Museum in London. This used to be Dickens’ home when he was writing his earlier novels, like The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist.Published between 1833 and 1836, Sketches by Boz was a collection of short stories that Dickens created under the pseudonym “Boz.” Dickens adopted the name from a character called Moses in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield.Dickens’ copy of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. 1834. Professor of English John Mullan writes, “It is telling that, Shakespeare apart, the English literary work to which Dickens refers most often is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a novel that, in the mid-nineteenth century, was on the dubious border between literature and popular entertainment” (Introduction, The Artful Dickens).Dickens the Great Magician (c.1880s) by Joseph Clayton Clarke Kyd. Dickens loved being an entertainer, which also translated to an interest in performing magic tricks.Charles Dickens giving a public reading of the chapter from Oliver Twist where Bill murders Nancy. 16 March, 1870. The intersection of literary Dickens and popular entertainer Dickens.Dombey and Son worksheet, recto. From the very first outlines of the plot, we can already see Dickens has a relatively clear idea of where the story might lead him.Untitled frontispiece for Dombey and Son; published along with the last issue on April, 1848.Staplehurst rail crash; 9 June, 1865. Dickens was a passenger on the train along with Ellen Ternan, and in this image he is depicted helping the other injured passengers. Dickens never fully recovered from this accident.Dickens in America. Dickens traveled to North America in 1842, during which time he wrote American Notes for General Circulation. Historian David Olusoga points out, “That Victorian capacity for being passionately committed to anti-slavery as both a moral principle and an article of British national identity while at the same time holding old racial ideas and dabbling in new ones can be seen in the writings of one of the most famous men of the age, Charles Dickens…Dickens’ vivid heartfelt denunciation of American slavery exists on the same pages as his highly derogatory racialized descriptions of the black people he encountered…There is no question that Dickens’ revulsion at slavery was real and that it stayed with him in later life, but so did his dislike of black people and their physical appearance” (Chapter 7, Black and British).
