To say that Charles Dickens was an important figure in 20th century Western literature would be a ridiculous understatement. In truth he was the center of the British literary world for much of that century; from the Great Depression until the Vietnam War he was the English-speaking world’s pre-eminent novelist, crafting works of fiction and social commentary that earned him the admiration of millions of readers-- not to mention many of his literary peers. And even now, more than four decades after his death, he continues to be regarded as one of the giants of British literature.

     Born on February 7th, 1912 in the English coastal town of Portsmouth to a Royal Navy pay clerk, Dickens grew up in one of the town’s more humble neighborhoods; that upbringing would play a key role in shaping his outlook on the world and providing inspiration for some of his early literary works. Even before he knew he wanted to be an author he spent many of his childhood days poring over any reading material he could get his hands on. By the time Dickens was ten years old he had memorized the entire contents of his parents’ collection of newspaper clippings about the sinking of the Titanic; at sixteen he could recite the famous “to be or not to be” monologue from Hamlet verbatim.

     Dickens had aspired to be an author since the age of thirteen, but it was early in his second year in college that he made up his mind once and for all to pursue a career as a professional writer. Under the pseudonym “Boz”, he began publishing satirical pieces in the humor section of his campus newspaper and drawing attention for his wit; by the middle of the year, his column had become the paper’s second-most popular feature. Eventually his humor articles caught the eye of a certain London magazine editor, and at the age of 26 Dickens made his debut on the national literary scene with a mock interview feature in which he supposedly questioned Nelson’s Column for a frank opinion about the habits of British drivers.

     But the young author’s work would abruptly turn in a far more serious direction with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. Few people in Britain, or anywhere else for that matter, were in the mood for something as frivolous as the Nelson’s Column spoof when simply having food in the house was a matter of life and death. Accordingly, Dickens turned his talents toward addressing some of the major social issues confronting Britain at that time. His stark writing technique proved to be ideally suited to the commentaries he would now write for newspapers like the Times of London and the Daily Telegraph; in later years some of those commentaries would be credited with spurring major poverty relief efforts in Britain, most notably his poignant account of a coal miner’s family in Wales in the spring of 1932. As one of his most faithful readers, future British prime minister Clement Attlee, put it: “Dickens has a marksman’s eye for the heart of the matter....seemingly stone-faced men have been moved to tears by just a sentence or paragraph from his pen.”

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      One of the most common tropes among fans of British literature is that Dickens’ longtime friendship with fellow author George Orwell was a historical inevitability. Certainly they had enough in common to serve as the basis for a friendship. They both came from modest backgrounds; they’d both taken up writing as a career in their early 20s; they both had a deep love for the written word; and they both despised totalitarianism in every form. In fact it was partly at Orwell’s encouragement that Dickens penned his first major world affairs commentary, a scathing indictment of Hitler and the Nazis published by New Statesman shortly after the Reichstag fire. At a time when some Europeans were reluctantly accepting fascism as a grim necessity for getting out of the Depression and others were wholeheartedly embracing it as the sociopolitical wave of the future, Dickens had instead chosen to condemn it; he called the Nazi ideology “a cancer of the soul”, scorned Adolf Hitler as “a puffed-up street thug”, and vilified the Storm Troopers as “the most visible and ugly symptom of a plague which will one day kill us all if it is not rooted out at the source.”

     Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop quickly retaliated for Dickens’ attacks on the Nazi regime: less than a week after the New Statesman commentary was printed Ribbentrop declared Dickens persona non grata in Germany and Goebbels ordered all of Dickens’ writings banned from German print media. Dickens hardly seemed to mind about being banished from the Reich; if anything, he regarded it as a vindication of his loathing for the Nazis. That loathing would only become more intense after Hitler’s June 1934 purge of the Storm Troopers. In fact some literary scholars have argued that von Fagen, the scheming pickpocket who is the central villain of Dickens’ 1935 novel Oliver Twist, was partly modeled after the Nazi who helped Hitler oversee the purge-- SS commander- in-chief Heinrich Himmler.

     In 1936 Dickens and Orwell both put their anti-fascist beliefs into action, volunteering to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and joining thousands of like-minded fellow Englishmen in what Dickens would later call “the greatest adventure I had faced up until that point in my life”. He was wounded twice, received the Republican forces’ highest medal for valor, and worked tirelessly to help injured Spanish civilians in the aftermath of the Nazi air raid on Guernica. He would spend over two years on the front lines in Spain before finally being sent home to London in October of 1938.

      Once back in England he proceeded to attack prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s decision to accede to Hitler’s demand that Germany should be allowed to annex Czechoslovakia’s Sudeten region. In perhaps his harshest newspaper opinion article written up to that time, Dickens-- who had also been very critical of the British government’s failure to stop Hitler from occupying Austria --prophetically said that Chamberlain’s surrender on the Sudeten question “will plunge Europe and the world into catastrophe”. When the Spanish Civil War ended in the spring of 1939 with the occupation of Madrid by Falangist troops, he described the event as “an ominous portent of our future under fascism”. He was genuinely and deeply worried that one day a second Spanish Armada might cross the English Channel with a German invasion force in tow; he instructed his wife Catherine that if there came a day when Britain was faced with invasion she was to send all his papers to America to keep the Nazis or their allies from seizing or burning them.

   His fears over the prospect of a war between Nazi Germany and Britain only sharpened as tensions in Europe escalated during the summer and early fall of 1939. When Hitler broke his Munich pledge and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia, Dickens for the first time began giving serious thought to moving out of London in order to keep himself and his wife safe from being casualties of the bombing raids military experts had predicted would mark the start of the next world war. As the territorial dispute between Poland and Germany over Danzig worsened Dickens wrote a series of articles urging the Chamberlain government to put Britain’s industries and armed forces on a full war footing at the earliest possible moment; around this same time, he offered to join the Territorial Army if it would help Britain’s defense when war came.

   On the morning of September 1st, 1939 Dickens was chatting with an old friend in London’s Piccadilly Circus when news came over the BBC that the German army had invaded Poland. The author-journalist blanched at the news of the invasion, suspecting it was the prelude to the Anglo-German war he had been expected and dreading for months; sure enough, two days after the invasion was announced Dickens heard Chamberlain telling the world Britain had been forced to declare war on Germany. Minutes after the speech ended, the piercing wail of sirens drove Dickens and his family to seek refuge in an air raid shelter.

    It was during the air raid warning-- which turned out to be a false alarm --that Dickens first conceived the idea for what would later become his seminal novel of life in wartime England, David Copperfield. Set in one of Manchester’s lower-class neighborhoods, Copperfield tells the story of a young boarding school inmate struggling to cope with not only war but also with malicious classmates and less-than-sympathetic teachers. George Orwell, who had himself endured years of misery in boarding school during his own childhood, pronounced Copperfield “the single greatest book I have read for ten years.” Of course a few school headmasters might have begged to differ with him on that score, but most people who read the novel were inclined to side with Orwell on the matter.

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    In March of 1940 a then 28-year-old Dickens began writing the first draft of the book which would permanently secure his credentials as a world-class novelist: A Christmas Carol. Loosely adapted from a 1936 short story he’d submitted for a special holiday issue of Britain’s most popular children’s magazine of the time, Carol introduced one of the most enduring characters in modern literature-- Ebenezer Scrooge. A miser whose attitude toward the world in general and Christmas in particular has been soured by the traumatic experiences of his younger days, Scrooge is compelled to rethink his selfish ways by the most dramatic means possible when three spectral beings visit him on Christmas Eve and show him the grim destiny that awaits if he continues on his bitter egocentric path. His epiphany, and decision to adopt a more altruistic mindset, are punctuated by one of the most memorable closing lines in all of English literature: “God bless us every one!”

     Dickens’ publisher initially reacted with skepticism when the idea for Carol, but the author won him over by giving an impromptu one-man show in which he portrayed all the major characters and then making a short but compelling argument that the novel would be more than just a sentimental holiday concoction. By the time he returned to his flat he’d secured the publisher’s personal guarantee to publish Carol on submission of the final draft. Two months later, in a frenzy of activity which astonished even his closest friends, Dickens had that final draft ready to turn in.

     It may have been more than just creative inspiration that fueled Dickens’ burst of writing and editing. The invasion and occupation of Norway and Denmark in April of 1940 had amplified already intense fears of a Nazi invasion of Britain, and when the Wehrmacht smashed into the Low Countries and France the following month it felt to Dickens as well as many of his fellow Britons like the End of Days had arrived. He was determined to make certain the book was completed and published before a German bullet struck him down. In the end, his fears of a Nazi invasion would prove to be groundless, but those fears were nonetheless a highly powerful motivator as he strived to get Carol ready for publication.

      During the first few months after Carol hit bookstore shelves in Britain, events would serve to put Dickens more in the public eye than he’d ever been before and make him the face of a country persevering in the face of the greatest threat to its survival since the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th century...

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      When Winston Churchill rejected Hitler’s final attempt to persuade the British government to make peace with Nazi Germany, it set in motion the most ruthless bombing campaign any air force in the world had tried to carry out up to that time. With the blessing of Hitler and his most senior air force commander, Reichsmarschall Herman Goering, the Luftwaffe began a savage campaign aimed first at knocking out the RAF’s fighter outposts and radar stations and then at breaking the will of the British people. But to Hitler’s and Goering’s dismay it failed to accomplish either objective; in the end, it would only inspire the British people to fight even harder and give Dickens the perfect platform for speaking out against the Nazis.

      In the early days of the Battle of Britain Dickens would come on the BBC and deliver running accounts of the latest German air attacks against Britain; when the Luftwaffe began venting its wrath against London proper and CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow took on the task of reporting German air raids on the British capital for listeners back in the States, he made it a point to frequently bring Dickens on as a guest commentator, calling him “the most knowledgeable man on these horrors one could wish to meet.” Over the course of the next several months Dickens’ voice would become as well- known to American audiences as that of President Franklin Roosevelt; when Roosevelt was sworn for his third term as commander-in-chief in January of 1941, one of his first official acts was to extend the celebrated author a personal invitation to visit the White House.

      Roosevelt’s invitation would plant the seeds for Dickens’ first visit to the United States and for his next great novel, the satirical book Our Mutual Friend. Friend, which pokes fun at the more pretentious aspects of New York upper-crust society, scandalized the Manhattan elites when it was published in serial form in Harper’s Weekly during the spring and summer of 1941 but delighted millions of everyday people on both sides of the Atlantic and inspired more than a little interest among Hollywood’s top movie executives. By the time Friend was published in hardcover format in September of 1941 no less than two dozen directors were in the running to helm a potential silver screen version of the novel. Dickens’ arrival in New York in the first week of October only served to heighten interest in the project.

      Dickens was an instant hit with American audiences wherever he spoke during his tour of the United States. During a state dinner at the White House he delighted President and Mrs. Roosevelt with an improvised one-man performance of Oliver Twist’s most famous scenes. In New York he was given the keys to the city by then-mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. In Los Angeles he was feted by Hollywood’s biggest tycoons and stars. In Miami he spent an afternoon comparing notes on combat experiences with fellow Spanish Civil War veteran and writer Ernest Hemingway. In New England he visited the Revolutionary War battlefield sites at Lexington and Concord. In New Orleans he met with black poet Zora Neale Hurston and accompanied her on what he would later describe as an “enlightening” tour through the French Quarter.

       On December 5th Dickens arrived in Hawaii for what was scheduled to be the final stop on his U.S. tour. He was due to give a recital of excerpts from David Copperfield for naval personnel and their families at the U.S. Navy Pacific fleet base in Pearl Harbor the following Monday. However, events would conspire to drastically change his plans....

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       It was just before 8:00 AM on the morning of December 7th when Dickens awoke to the distant sounds of planes droning and air ride sirens wailing. Rushing to his hotel room window he saw a sight all too familiar back in London but which until that morning had been unimaginable to his American hosts: thick puffs of anti-aircraft fire dotting the sky. Turning on the radio on his bedside table in hopes of getting further information about what was happening, he heard the grim news that Japanese planes were attacking Pearl Harbor. He then flagged down a taxicab and rode it to the besieged Pacific Fleet headquarters with the intention of volunteering his services to their first aid personnel to assist in tending the injured. He ended up remaining at the first aid station well into the night, finally collapsing from sheer exhaustion just after 10:45 PM. The next day, at the request of the Evening Standard, the author telegraphed his observations about the Japanese attack on Pearl; that telegram marked the beginning of an unexpected second career for Dickens as a war correspondent whose work soon became a daily feature in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. Not that Dickens abandoned his calling as novelist entirely-- in fact his experiences traveling with Allied forces during the spring and summer of 1942 were a major inspiration for his 1943 bestseller Martin Chuzzlewit. Chuzzlewit, the story of a London newspaper columnist who accompanies a U.S. Marine brigade during its advance across a nameless Pacific island, was heavily influenced by Dickens’ own experiences in trying to adjust to American culture; as the war went on some American readers identified him so thoroughly with the book’s main character that GIs eventually nicknamed him “Chuzzlewit” in tribute.

   Dickens finally returned to London in the spring of 1944, just in time for the start of the Nazi V-weapon campaign that would terrorize the city for months. Dickens, his family, and his neighbors spent many anxious days and sleepless nights sheltering from V-1 or V-2 attacks as Hitler made one last desperate attempt to break the will of the British people. Once again Dickens showed his worth as a war correspondent, delivering clear and fast reports on these attacks to BBC listeners throughout England and newspaper readers around the world; Winston Churchill would later be moved to praise Dickens as “the greatest battlefield correspondent of our age” as a result of the veteran author’s accounts of the V-weapons campaign.

   The Normandy invasion and the Allied push across western Europe in the summer and early autumn of 1944 provided the main inspiration for Dickens’ next novel, The Pickwick Papers. Chronicling the exploits of the fictional Barchester Regiment in France against the German army, Pickwick marked his first novel-length attempt at a straightforward adventure yarn. The title character, an infantry sergeant with a fast trigger finger and an equally quick temper, was a composite of a dozen real-life British Army troops who Dickens had met during his early days as a war correspondent and struck a deep chord with readers when the novel was first published in hardcover in January of 1945. It also stirred the interest of motion picture industry titans, and a bidding war for the film rights to Pickwick quickly ensued; 20th Century Fox ended up winning the competition, paying out $500,000(US) in September of 1945 to secure the screen rights to the book.

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     The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 were one of the most unnerving events of Dickens’ adult life. Even before the full destructive potential of the A-bomb became clear, he had been alarmed by the initial accounts of the devastation wrought in those two cities by the new weapon. He would have further cause for concern over the next few years as the Soviet Union broke the American monopoly on nuclear weaponry and an arms race between the two superpowers kicked into high gear. Indeed his fears regarding the Bomb were so intense that one night in mid-October of 1948 he would wake up screaming from a nightmare in which he witnessed London getting incinerated by multiple atomic bomb blasts.

     That nightmare in turn would provide the inspiration for the start of what a London Times literary critic would later refer to as Dickens' “nuclear period” in which his novels focused primarily-- and sometimes exclusively --on the subjects of nuclear war and its aftermath. The first such novel of this era was his 1953 tragedy Nicholas Nickleby, in which an idealistic medical volunteer traveling to Japan to treat the survivors of the Hiroshima A-bomb is driven to sorrow, madness, and eventually suicide by the grotesque physical and spiritual injuries he is confronted with in the course of his work. Based partly on the actual experiences of British and U.S. doctors who had treated survivors of the A-bomb attacks, Nickleby stirred passionate feelings both for and against it when it first hit the bookstores; with the possible exception of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, there was no book published in the English-speaking world during the second half of the 20th century that aroused more controversy among readers.

     Dickens’ next venture into post-nuclear fiction was the appropriately titled 1956 novel Hard Times. Set in a Chicago devastated by an unnamed global conflict, the novel depicts a metropolis going to pieces physically and spiritually-- as one New York Times reviewer summarized it, “a picture of the City of the Big Shoulders on its last legs”. None of the tropes now commonly associated with post-nuclear or post-apocalyptic fiction appeared in Hard Times, but then again they didn’t need to; Dickens’ portrayals of everyday people suffering the consequences of atomic war were disquieting enough. Some political and cultural historians now credit Hard Times with helping to inspire the nuclear test ban movement of the early 1960s along with the nuclear weapons freeze movement two decades later.

    Two years after Hard Times first went into print Dickens refocused on his native Britain for his next book, Bleak House. Centered around working class apartment dwellers in Liverpool, Bleak House interlaces the personal drama of a crumbling marriage with the larger story of a NATO-Warsaw Pact diplomatic rift that soon escalates into war; the novel’s final pages show its two main characters violently arguing with each other about infidelity just as a Soviet hydrogen bomb explodes over their apartment building. The critical reaction to this grim climax was sharply divided, but in spite of that division Dickens gained a Nobel Prize in Literature nomination along with the praise of anti-nuclear activists for who the book offered a sharp rallying cry in defense of the cause of global disarmament.

    But of all the novels and short stories Dickens turned out during his “nuclear period”, perhaps none have lingered in the mind or pulled at the heartstrings more than a book he started work on in the spring of 1960 and finished just in time for the Cuban missile crisis. Despite its whimsical- sounding title, The Old Curiosity Shop may well be the darkest novel which Dickens wrote during his career; it’s certainly the gloomiest he published in the post-World War II era. Set chiefly in post-World War III London, it shows a family and a civilization disintegrating in the aftermath of full- scale global nuclear war. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev is said to have openly and repeatedly wept while reading Curiosity Shop’s climax, in which the central character Little Nell dies from radiation poisoning; President of the United States John F. Kennedy would later confide to his brother and attorney general Robert Kennedy that finishing the novel had left him emotionally and psychologically devastated. Kennedy and Khrushchev would both credit Old Curiosity Shop with being a key motivator in the decision to resolve the Cuban missile crisis by diplomatic means rather than going to war.

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    Writing the climax of Old Curiosity Shop had taken a steep personal toll on Dickens and left him thoroughly depressed. So in the spring of 1963, seeking to lift his spirits and those of his family, he returned to America for a vacation that like his first Stateside visit twenty-two years earlier would start in New York City and finish in Hawaii. Yet out of all the places he visited during his journey, few would have a greater impact on the late stages of his writing career than a Minnesota forest he hiked through during the second month of the trip; while passing by a small clearing he happened to notice a small cricket chirping. That moment would serve as the creative spark for what may be his most famous work for young people: The Cricket On The Hearth. Published in 1964, Cricket shows everyday life in London from a unique viewpoint: that of the book’s title character, a cricket who lives atop the Lord Mayor’s fireplace. The book’s breezy text and cheerful illustrations made it a hit with young readers on both sides of the Atlantic-- and more than a few older ones too for that matter. Film and stage icon Lawrence Olivier, who in the early 1950s had had gotten considerable and well-deserved acclaim for his supporting role as a Royal Marine officer in the screen adaptation of The Pickwick Papers, wrote Dickens an enthusiastic fan letter hailing Cricket On The Hearth as “a revelation”.

    There were some people, however, who didn’t quite share Olivier’s appreciation for Dickens’ work. Over three decades after one totalitarian regime had declared Dickens persona non grata in Nazi Germany, another despotic government-- China’s Mao Zedong dictatorship --not only banned the author from its soil but made possession or distribution of his works by Chinese citizens a crime punishable by death. Although this decree was chiefly motivated by the general anti-Western fanaticism being engendered in China at the time by the Cultural Revolution, experts on both China and Dickens suggest it may also been the result of Mao’s personal outrage over an April 1965 Canadian television interview in which Dickens denounced the Chinese Communist ruler as “the Devil’s personal minion in Asia”.

    Dickens’ harsh words regarding Mao, though sounding more like those of a right-winger than of the committed liberal he’d been for most of his adult life, were perfectly consistent with his long-standing hate for all kinds of despotism. He boycotted a 1967 Madrid literary symposium out of lingering anger towards the Franco regime’s ongoing persecution of Spanish political dissidents; the following year he marched in a rally outside the Soviet embassy in London protesting the occupation of Czechoslovakia. And in what would be his only visit to Japan during his lifetime, he delivered a speech to a group of university students in Tokyo in which he condemned North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung in such bitter terms even he himself was surprised by his language. (In response the North Korean government staged massive rallies in which the author was denounced as “the mortal enemy of all working peoples” and effigies of him were burned along with copies of his books seized by North Korea’s secret police.)

    Shortly after Dickens returned home from his visit to Japan, his health began to steadily and irreversibly decline. This knowledge lent a heightened sense of urgency to his final literary works, one of which was the completion of a long-delayed anthology project of his old “Boz” articles from his university days. The anthology, titled Sketches By Boz and printed in the spring of 1967, introduced Dickens’ humor to a whole new generation of readers who ate it up; the book’s sales were no doubt helped to a degree by the fact that one of its biggest fans was Beatles founder John Lennon, a friend of Dickens since the two met backstage at the group’s U.S. debut in 1964.

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Dickens’ final trip abroad, a visit to western Europe in the early summer of 1969, had to be cut short because of his steadily growing health problems. However, he did finally manage to accomplish something he hadn’t been able to do in his younger days: he traveled to Paris, a city that had fired his imagination since the age of twelve and was a key setting of his 1966 Cold War espionage thriller A Tale Of Two Cities. Among the personal high points of his stay in the City of Lights were a banquet at which the most prestigious literary society in France bestowed him with a plaque in honor of his contributions to Western literature; an evening tour through the Left Bank’s cafes with an old friend from his war correspondent days; and a private visit with new French president Georges Pompidou, an admirer of Dickens since the early ‘50s.

    His Paris sojourn also provided the inspiration for him to complete the final draft of what would be the last novel he published during his lifetime: The Mystery Of Edwin Drood. Inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and the noir thrillers that had been a Hollywood staple since the late 1940s, Drood narrates the stark account of a London private investigator who travels to San Francisco at the request of his American cousin to investigate the disappearance and subsequent murder of a mutual friend. As had been the case with many of Dickens’ previous works Edwin Drood quickly found its way to bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic; Warner Brothers would buy the movie rights to Drood in 1972, and within three years a screen adaptation of Drood starring Michael Caine and Clint Eastwood would be playing to packed theaters all over North America.

     Dickens sold his London home in August of 1969 and moved to a smaller residence in Swindon; it was there he would spend most of the final months of his life. But even with his strength continuing to decline Dickens kept up a lively interest in the outside world-- he denounced the South African government’s racial separation policies, continued to speak out in support of nuclear disarmament, wrote letters of support to American GI’s coming home from Vietnam, and read every magazine and newspaper article regarding world affairs he could get hold of. In January of 1970 he made his final public appearance, visiting Buckingham Palace to accept a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II; the following month he received a mountain of letters and telegrams in honor of his birthday from devoted readers, many of whom included Dickens’ peers in the literary world.

     On June 8th, 1970 British television viewers who tuned in to the BBC evening news expecting to see battlefield reports on the fighting in South Vietnam or recaps of that day’s FIFA World Cup matches in Mexico instead saw an ashen-faced newsreader trying desperately to hold back tears as he reported that “Charles Dickens has been admitted to hospital with a severe heart condition....he is not expected to last the night.” The next morning doctors solemnly announced Dickens had died at the age of 58. For millions of his devoted readers around the world, it felt like a death in their own family; within minutes after the official announcement of his passing came Londoners started spontaneously gathering outside his old home for a vigil in his memory. During the next week, literary critics throughout the world would write glowing tributes to his legacy as an author.

     Dickens’ June 13th funeral brought his life full circle. Friends, family, and literary peers gathered in his birthplace of Portsmouth to pay their final respects; he was laid to rest in a gravesite directly adjacent to those of his parents. In recognition of his father’s Royal Navy service, a squad of cadets from the Britannia Royal Naval College accompanied his casket to the gravesite.

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     Nearly four and a half decades after Dickens’ passing his work still looms large in the collective imagination. In an irony Dickens himself would no doubt have appreciated, two of the countries where his writing is most popular are Spain and Germany-- two of the very same countries where it was banned for much of his literary career due to his fervent denunciations of totalitarianism. Franco’s death in 1975 and the subsequent restoration of democracy in Spain opened up the gates for a resurgence in interest among Spanish readers in Dickens’ writings; today nearly one out of every six books sold in Spain is a translation of one of his novels or anthologies. The current Spanish prime minister is said to be a Dickens aficionado, as are the deans of Spain’s two largest universities and the head of Barcelona’s central public library.

    In Germany clubs known as “Dickens societies” meet once a week to talk about Dickens’ life and work and reenact scenes from his best-known books. The first such club, using books donated by American GIs stationed in the then-West German capital of Bonn, was established in 1953; by 1980 over a hundred and fifty Dickens clubs were operating in West Germany, and after the reunification of West and East Germany in 1990 the movement mushroomed by leaps and bounds. Today there are more than 400 “Dickens societies” in Germany, the largest of which is based in the heart of Berlin and is host to an annual convention of Dickens fans in honor of the author’s birthday.     There are plenty of other examples that could be cited to illustrate how deep and lasting an impression Dickens made on the world’s collective consciousness. We could mention the bidding frenzy now going on over the publishing rights to a just-rediscovered and previously unprinted Dickens manuscript, a children’s story titled Little Dorrit. We could refer to the Charles Dickens Cultural Arts Centre in Johannesburg dedicated by Nelson Mandela in 1994 shortly after his historic election as president of South Africa. We could visit the New York Public Library’s Dickens memorabilia collection, widely regarded as the largest such inventor to exist outside Great Britain. We could talk about the Portsmouth Dickens Museum that now stands on the site of his childhood home. We could even discuss a proposed Dickens theme park now on the drawing boards in South Korea.

    But of all the legacies Dickens left to the world, perhaps the one he might be proudest of is the children’s hospital in Toronto which he helped endow in 1958. The dedication plaque in the courtyard near its main doors quotes a comment Dickens made to Orwell shortly after they volunteered to fight in Spain and would later be quoted in the final chapter of A Tale Of Two Cities as its heroes await execution by a KGB firing squad: “This is a far, far better thing we do now than we have ever done.”