>writes 15 novels
>150+ years later
>all of them are still in print
Wtf. This guy has superpowers, a writer is lucky to have 1 novel still around more than a hundred years after his death. This guy has 15 (!).
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>best work
A Christmas Carol
>worst work
A Tale of Two Cities
For me, it’s Our Mutual Friend, and Barnaby Rudge, with Martin Chuzzlewit in a distant third. The Pickwick Papers is delightful but I’m hesitant to call it good. Wasn’t there a Pickwick club on IQfy a few years ago?
Dickens is the most famous English writer after Shakespeare.
By what metric?
famousness
Not that anon, but in the Oxford Book of Literary Quotations, I think Dickens has the second highest number of entries after Shakespeare.
FUN FACTOID: Mrs Gamp was William Faulkner's favourite character in literature. (Well, presumably he said she was. He might have been lying.)
>I think Dickens has the second highest number of entries after Shakespeare.
That would most certainly be Alexander Pope. But more people read Dickens than Pope today, and even more, I suspect, read Austen.
>That would most certainly be Alexander Pope.
Yes, thinking about it, Pope is much more quotable than Dickens. He's really soundbite-y, whereas Dickens never says anything in less than a paragraph. Thinking further, poets should always beat novelists, and of course the KJV is going to be in there. Probably first; maybe second after Shakespeare.
I had a look on the official page, and got this:—
There are few surprises here, with poets and other writers leading the field. In terms of representation in Oxford dictionaries of quotations, the most prolific authors are the Authorized Version of the Bible, and Shakespeare. Both have contributed to the English language to such an extent that they dominate both literature and popular culture. Then there is inevitably a huge gap before we find a select literary group of Tennyson, Milton, and Samuel Johnson, followed by Alexander Pope and George Bernard Shaw, and next a gang of poets: Lord Byron, T. S. Eliot, John Keats, Rudyard Kipling, and William Wordsworth. Oscar Wilde and the first non-literary figure Winston Churchill are in the same bracket.
The top American writers Mark Twain and Ralph Waldo Emerson emerge next, along with Blake, Shelley, W. H. Auden, and Charles Dickens, and then women’s voices are heard at last, led by Jane Austen and George Eliot (though we do not know how many of the contributions of Anonymous, the third most quoted, may be of female origin).
Walter Scott bros...not like this. How could we fall to the dick-son?
Walter Scott was Scottish, moron.
Scotland was part of England, moron.
Go back.
homie what?
>Scotland was part of England
It's still part of england or are you one of those larpers for scottish independence?
It wasn’t and isn’t part of England, moron.
Alright, I'm moronic, I got confused between the UK and England.
Understanding the difference between Scotland and England is very integral to understanding the works of Walter Scott... Hope this helps you in future.
At least you didn’t double down. Based of you to own your mistake.
The one that people often don't know is the difference between Britain and the UK. Basically:
Britain = England, Wales and Scotland
UK (United Kingdom) = Britain + Northern Ireland. (Sometimes you hear the phrase "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.)
I hear Americans saying "British" a lot where I would say "English". For example, an American might say "Dickens was a British writer" whereas I would definitely say "Dickens was an English writer." That might be because they want to differentiate between the country and the language, or because distinguishing between England / Scotland / Wales is more of a deal for us who are actually here. To the USA we're all just a tiny blob thousands of miles away, I guess.
He's a great storyteller and creator of characters.
>creator of characters
That's the real truth of it, right? It's a talent Dickens shares with Shakespeare. The man can create characters that feel like real people, that are interesting and compelling and make you want to dive into them.
Do you want to know his superpower?
He didn't write novels. He wrote serials for newspapers.