ABSTRACT
Charles Dickens is as central to the Victorian novel as Tennyson is to Victorian poetry. Dickens’s struggling, unhappy childhood, as the son of a poor, debt-ridden dock clerk, brought him into contact with debtors’ prisons and forced him into work in a blacking factory at the age of twelve. By perseverance he became office boy, journalist, and finally original contributor to periodicals. His satirical Sketches by Boz proved popular and the Pickwick Papers, following hard after, made his name. A literary appetite of a distinct kind was served by the detective stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), who capitalized on the taste for mystery and problem-solving in the sphere of criminal investigation. It must be admitted that there is an element of artistic unreliability in Dickens’s human studies. Sentimentality and moralism sometimes flatten characters out of their authenticity: emotion and rhetoric may be tastelessly over-amplified.
