Author of Oliver Twist, conscience of the Victorian age
The most popular novelist of Victorian England. His childhood, when his father’s imprisonment forced him into a factory as a child laborer, left him a lifelong sympathy for the lowly. In Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations, orphans, paupers, and exploited children take the stage; with a pen full of feeling he exposed the vast gulf of rich and poor and the injustice of the industrial age. His novels ran mostly as serials in the papers, read by tens of thousands, and all but single-handedly drove the social reform of his day.
In Oliver Twist, the starving Oliver, holding out his empty bowl, tremblingly asks the master for a little more: "Please, sir, I want some more." That timid request struck like thunder at the time, putting the cruelty of the workhouse before all England. Dickens turned one child’s single sentence into an indictment of a whole system.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.