The nineteenth century saw the novel emerge as the dominant literary form in England, a period when serialized fiction reached readers across every level of society. Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsmouth, and worked as both a writer and a journalist across several decades of that era.

Those two vocations ran alongside each other throughout his career. His fiction appeared in serialized form, and the range of what he produced was considerable. The Pickwick Papers was among his earliest works, followed by Oliver Twist and then David Copperfield. Hard Times: For These Times, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit extended the body of work further, as did A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations. Taken together, these titles span a wide stretch of his working life and show how consistently he moved between different kinds of stories and settings.

What Dickens brought to the literary culture of his time was fiction that combined his work as a journalist with his output as a novelist, keeping him a visible presence in the public life of the period. The serialized format meant his characters were a recurring presence in readers' lives over months rather than arriving all at once. His journalism ran alongside that fiction rather than separately from it, and the two strands of his career overlapped for much of his life.

Dickens died on June 9, 1870, at Gads Hill Place in Higham. By that point he had produced a substantial list of novels, including works as varied as A Christmas Carol, Bleak House, and Great Expectations, alongside his journalism — a body of output that stretched from The Pickwick Papers through to the final years of his life.