Charles Dickens should have been a happy man.The father went to debtors'
prison, but the son left an estate of over one million dollars ( 1952 value).
Dickens, called by Tolstoy "a genius such as is met but once in a century,"
left school to work at age fifteen and became famous at age twenty-four,
finishing his years as the most famous writer of his time.His was the greatest
success story of the nineteenth century, but he died a tormented man, a man
running to meet death head-on, driven by manic-depression. Dickens was
like an engine that could not be turned off. By the time he was fifty-seven,
his body was breaking down, his brain bleeding and dying.

Dickens was a man of his time, one might even say the man of his time,
very much a part of his age. He was Victorian England, and no doubt that
was part of the reason for his success as a writer: he dreamed the dreams
of the century and its nightmares too.He lived in an ugly era when England,
Europe, and America industrialized.Previously, England had been a nation
of farmers, many of them on their own small holdings. Industry was largely
confined to what families made in their own cottages, though a few water‐
powered factories existed. The population was only some eight million at
the beginning of the nineteenth century. It ballooned to twenty-two million
by 1850, despite massive emigration to all parts of the British Empire and
the United States.Within England there was huge dislocation, and hamlets
and villages died as the countryside emptied out.Company towns—built,
owned, and run by factory owners for their profit—sprouted wherever money

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