Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens learned about hardship the hard way. When his father was thrown into debtors' prison, the boy of twelve was sent to paste labels on bottles in a grim riverside factory, an experience of shame and abandonment he never forgot and never stopped writing about. That wound became the engine of his genius: a furious, tender sympathy for the poor, the orphaned, the overlooked, and a refusal to let comfortable readers ignore them.

He became the most popular novelist of his age, his stories devoured in monthly installments by readers who wept and cheered and waited at the docks for the next chapter. He filled his books with unforgettable people — Oliver Twist asking for more, Ebenezer Scrooge waking changed on Christmas morning, the long-suffering souls of David Copperfield and Great Expectations. He made readers laugh and cry, and then, having won their hearts, he turned them toward the workhouses, the slums, and the injustices of his time.

He wrote at a furious pace, performed his own work to spellbound audiences, and worked himself toward an early grave at fifty-eight. We honor him as the great-hearted storyteller of the modern city — the writer who proved that a novel could be both wildly entertaining and a force for mercy, and who taught a whole society to look, at last, at the human beings it had been trying so hard not to see.