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Introduction
Charles Dickens occupies a towering position in the pantheon of English literature, his novels filled with characters so vivid that they have long outlived their pages.
Figures such as Ebenezer Scrooge, David Copperfield, Miss Havisham, and Sydney Carton have entered cultural memory as archetypes, representing greed, resilience, eccentricity, and sacrifice.
Yet Dickens did not construct these “immortal characters” in isolation. He was both a shaper of his age and a product of it, writing within a crowded literary marketplace populated by novelists, essayists, and philosophers whose voices resonated with his own.
His friendships, collaborations, and even rivalries with contemporaries provided him with techniques, themes, and tonal registers that he transformed into unforgettable personalities.
This essay explores how the innovations of Dickens’s contemporaries—most notably Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Lamb—shaped his artistic imagination. Each of these figures influenced a particular dimension of Dickens’s character creation: Collins lent suspense and psychological depth; Gaskell pressed Dickens toward greater social realism; Carlyle underscored the moral stakes of modern life; and Lamb infused Dickens’s prose with a sentimental, reflective tone.
In addition, Dickens’s rivalry with other Victorian novelists, including William Makepeace Thackeray and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, sharpened his own creative strategies. Together, these influences provided Dickens with a palette from which he could paint characters at once particular to their time and yet universal in their appeal.
By situating Dickens within this vibrant web of intellectual exchange, we can better understand how his immortal characters emerged—not as isolated strokes of genius, but as the imaginative offspring of a shared literary culture.
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Context: Dickens in the Victorian Literary Marketplace
To grasp the extent of Dickens’s dialogue with his contemporaries, it is necessary to appreciate the unique conditions of the Victorian literary world.
Unlike earlier novelists who depended on wealthy patrons or small print runs, Dickens worked in a period when the expansion of literacy, the rise of lending libraries, and the advent of serial publication created a mass reading public (Altick 117).
Serial publication, in particular, shaped Dickens’s methods of character construction. Writing in monthly or weekly installments required him to craft characters who were memorable and immediately engaging, capable of sustaining readers’ interest across months of publication.
In this environment, Dickens’s characters functioned as more than narrative tools; they became cultural phenomena. Readers eagerly awaited each new installment to learn the fates of figures like Little Nell or Pip, and they discussed these characters as if they were living acquaintances.
The porous boundary between fiction and life was part of Dickens’s genius, but it also reflected the competitive marketplace in which he wrote. Other novelists and essayists were similarly striving to captivate this expanding audience, experimenting with style, theme, and form. Dickens’s attentiveness to their work—sometimes in admiration, sometimes in rivalry—fueled his own innovations.
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| Charles Dickens, 1868 From a photograph by Gurney, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
Moreover, Dickens was not simply a novelist; he was an editor and journalist, deeply enmeshed in the networks of Victorian print culture.
As the editor of Household Words and later All the Year Round, he published the works of Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins, creating professional and personal collaborations that deeply shaped his craft.
His friendships with thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle brought philosophical depth to his moral vision, while his admiration for Charles Lamb introduced him to a mode of reflective sentiment.
Thus, Dickens’s characters are best understood as products of an ongoing dialogue with a community of writers, rather than as solitary inventions.
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Wilkie Collins
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I. Wilkie Collins and the Sensation Novel
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Among Dickens’s closest literary companions was Wilkie Collins, often hailed as the father of the sensation novel.
Their friendship extended beyond the literary to the personal: they traveled together, collaborated on stage performances, and co-wrote pieces such as The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices (1857).
Yet their creative exchange was most fruitful in narrative technique.
Collins’s hallmark was the sensation novel—a genre built upon mystery, secrecy, psychological intensity, and the dramatic revelation of hidden truths. This mode of writing directly influenced Dickens’s methods of character construction, particularly in his later works.
One of the clearest examples of Collins’s impact is Great Expectations (1860–61). The novel’s central conceit—that Pip’s anonymous benefactor is not the aristocratic Miss Havisham, but the transported convict Magwitch—embodies the mechanics of the sensation novel.
Dickens sustains suspense across serialized installments, carefully planting clues while concealing the full truth until a pivotal revelation. This strategy echoes Collins’s mastery in works like The Woman in White (1859), where narrative suspense depends upon delayed disclosure and shifting perspectives. By adopting these techniques, Dickens created characters who are not static figures but dynamic entities whose hidden depths emerge gradually, reshaping the reader’s moral evaluation.
Equally significant is Collins’s influence on Dickens’s psychological portrayal of character. The sensation novel often probed the darker recesses of the human mind, exploring themes of obsession, guilt, and repressed desire. In Dickens’s hands, these psychological nuances enriched his characters with moral complexity.
Magwitch, for example, initially appears as a menacing criminal but gradually reveals himself to be a man of loyalty, sacrifice, and paternal devotion. Estella, too, emerges not merely as a cold beauty but as the tragic product of Miss Havisham’s manipulation and the daughter of convicts—a revelation that undercuts rigid Victorian notions of inherited status. These characters owe much to the psychological layering Collins popularized.
Beyond narrative suspense and psychological depth, Collins also inspired Dickens to experiment with multiple narrative perspectives. While Dickens rarely abandoned the central voice of his protagonist or omniscient narrator, the layering of voices in Bleak House (1852–53)—with Esther Summerson’s first-person account alongside an impersonal omniscient narrator—suggests Dickens’s awareness of Collins’s narrative innovations.
Collins’s use of testimony, letters, and shifting narrators in The Moonstone (1868) demonstrated how character could be refracted through multiple lenses, a technique Dickens employed selectively but effectively to broaden the reader’s engagement with his creations.
It is worth noting that the influence flowed both ways. Dickens’s interest in social critique and moral allegory also left its mark on Collins, whose later works incorporate sharper commentary on class and gender inequality. Nevertheless, in the realm of character construction, Collins provided Dickens with tools of suspense and psychological intrigue that enabled him to create figures of enduring fascination.
Characters such as Magwitch, Estella, and even the enigmatic Miss Havisham bear the imprint of the sensation novel, their mystery and gradual unveiling contributing to their immortality.
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65)
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1771-1845), {{PD-US}}
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
II. Elizabeth Gaskell and Social Realism
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If Collins pushed Dickens toward suspense and psychological depth, Elizabeth Gaskell encouraged him to sharpen his engagement with social reality.
Gaskell, author of Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1853), and North and South (1855), was both a friend and contributor to Dickens’s journal Household Words.
Her works were distinguished by their unflinching portrayals of industrial life, class conflict, and the struggles of working families.
While Dickens had always displayed an eye for social injustice—Oliver Twist (1837–39) had already exposed the cruelties of the workhouse—Gaskell’s rigorous realism prompted him to refine and deepen his depictions of class, labor, and poverty.
In Gaskell’s novels, characters are often situated within the harsh machinery of industrialization. John Barton, the working-class hero of Mary Barton, embodies the desperation of the laboring poor, caught between unemployment and starvation. Margaret Hale in North and South negotiates the divide between industrialists and workers, revealing the human cost of economic progress.
These characters do not function as caricatures or mere mouthpieces; they emerge as individuals whose lives illuminate systemic injustice. Gaskell’s ability to blend personal narrative with social critique set a model for Dickens, who increasingly sought to depict his own characters not just as eccentric individuals but as products of broader economic and legal structures.
This shift is particularly evident in Great Expectations. Pip’s rise through “great expectations” is not merely a personal story but a commentary on the fluid yet precarious nature of social mobility in Victorian England. The revelation that his wealth comes from a transported convict destabilizes the conventional association between gentility and moral worth.
In reshaping Magwitch from a threatening criminal into a benefactor, Dickens complicates the rigid binaries of class and morality that had characterized some of his earlier portrayals, such as Fagin in Oliver Twist. Here, Dickens moves closer to Gaskell’s realism, in which characters are shaped as much by social circumstance as by innate disposition.
The influence of Gaskell is also evident in Bleak House, where Dickens’s depiction of Jo, the homeless crossing-sweeper, echoes Gaskell’s commitment to representing marginalized voices. Jo is not merely a symbol of poverty but a character whose suffering indicts a legal system indifferent to human life.
Similarly, in Hard Times (1854), Dickens addresses industrial society directly, portraying characters such as Stephen Blackpool with dignity and moral strength in the face of systemic exploitation. Critics have long noted the parallels between Stephen and Gaskell’s working-class protagonists (Sanders 192).
What distinguishes Dickens’s engagement with Gaskell’s realism is his capacity to merge it with his own flair for caricature and sentiment. While Gaskell leaned toward sober documentary detail, Dickens never entirely abandoned his penchant for grotesque exaggeration or theatrical dialogue.
Instead, he integrated Gaskell’s influence selectively, layering nuance and humanity onto figures who might otherwise have remained flat symbols of social types. The result was a richer gallery of characters: Magwitch as the reformed criminal, Stephen Blackpool as the moral conscience of Hard Times, and Jo as the voice of forgotten London. These figures endure precisely because Dickens combined Gaskell’s realism with his own narrative energy, crafting characters who are socially grounded yet emotionally universal.
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Thomas Carlyle
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III. Thomas Carlyle and the Critique of Modernity
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Beyond novelists, Dickens was also profoundly shaped by the moral philosophy of Thomas Carlyle, whose essays and histories articulated a fierce critique of the materialism and social dislocation of the nineteenth century.
Carlyle, in works such as Past and Present (1843) and Sartor Resartus (1836), diagnosed the spiritual malaise of an industrial age obsessed with wealth, utility, and mechanical progress.
He warned against a society that measured human value by material success rather than moral character, and he advocated a return to sincerity, duty, and spiritual authenticity.
Dickens, who admired Carlyle and moved in the same intellectual circles, absorbed these ideas and dramatized them through his characters.
In Dickens’s novels, Carlyle’s moral urgency is echoed in the fates of characters who pursue wealth and status at the expense of integrity. Pip, in Great Expectations, embodies the dangers of Carlylean “mechanical” living: his obsession with becoming a gentleman renders him spiritually impoverished, estranged from Joe, his loyal father figure.
Only when Pip recognizes the emptiness of his ambition and acknowledges the humanity of Magwitch does he achieve moral renewal. This trajectory mirrors Carlyle’s insistence that true greatness lies not in external trappings but in sincerity of heart and duty to others.
Similarly, in Dombey and Son (1846–48), Mr. Dombey exemplifies the destructive power of materialist pride. His devotion to business and status blinds him to genuine human connection, particularly with his daughter Florence.
Dickens’s critique of Dombey resonates with Carlyle’s warnings about the dehumanizing effects of the “cash nexus”—the reduction of all human relations to economic exchange. By portraying Dombey’s eventual downfall and Florence’s triumph through love and compassion, Dickens dramatizes the Carlylean contrast between hollow materialism and authentic moral responsibility.
Carlyle’s influence also pervades A Tale of Two Cities (1859), where the French Revolution is depicted not only as a historical upheaval but as a moral allegory. Characters such as Sydney Carton, whose redemptive self-sacrifice restores meaning to an otherwise wasted life, embody Carlyle’s vision of heroism through duty and sincerity.
Carton becomes immortal precisely because his final act rejects personal ambition in favor of a larger moral truth—“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.” Though Dickens’s artistry gives the line its enduring resonance, the underlying philosophy reflects Carlyle’s ethic of moral responsibility in an age of chaos.
What Dickens absorbed most from Carlyle was a sense of moral drama: the conviction that literature must do more than entertain—it must expose the spiritual perils of modern life and hold up models of virtue, sincerity, and sacrifice. This philosophical grounding lent Dickens’s characters a moral weight that distinguishes them from mere caricature.
Figures like Pip, Dombey, and Carton are not only individuals but also embodiments of the larger Victorian struggle between materialism and authenticity. Their endurance in cultural memory owes much to the Carlylean gravitas that Dickens infused into their arcs.
Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
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IV. Charles Lamb and the Spirit of Sentiment
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While Dickens absorbed suspense from Wilkie Collins, realism from Elizabeth Gaskell, and moral urgency from Thomas Carlyle, his prose also drew warmth and reflective intimacy from Charles Lamb.
Best remembered for his Essays of Elia (1823), Lamb cultivated a style that blended wit, nostalgia, and personal confession.
His essays wander through memory and everyday experience with a gentle humor and a wistful tone that celebrates the ordinary while reflecting on its transience.
Dickens admired Lamb deeply, and critics have long observed echoes of Lamb’s sentimentality in Dickens’s narrative voice, particularly in his treatment of childhood and memory.
One of the clearest demonstrations of Lamb’s influence lies in the retrospective narration of Great Expectations. The adult Pip recounts his childhood with a mixture of regret, tenderness, and moral self-examination. His voice often softens moments of past folly with affectionate humor—such as his rueful recollections of being ashamed of Joe at the Satis House.
This tone, neither wholly ironic nor wholly tragic, recalls Lamb’s ability to infuse memory with moral reflection. Just as Lamb transformed his personal struggles—his sister Mary’s illness, his own frustrations—into essays of quiet dignity, Dickens uses Pip’s retrospective voice to dramatize the process of learning from error and reconciling with the past.
Lamb also influenced Dickens’s creation of characters who embody eccentricity suffused with warmth. Lamb’s essays delight in ordinary figures—old schoolmasters, London clerks, family acquaintances—rendered memorable through affectionate detail. Dickens took this principle and magnified it into his larger-than-life portraits of figures such as Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield or Mr. Jarndyce in Bleak House.
Like Lamb, Dickens imbued his eccentric characters with emotional resonance, ensuring they were not merely comic types but also vessels of kindness, endurance, or melancholy.
In addition, Lamb’s blend of humor and sentiment shaped Dickens’s Christmas writings, especially A Christmas Carol (1843). The story’s nostalgic vision of childhood joy and family celebration, alongside its moral appeal to generosity, resonates with Lamb’s essays on holiday customs and the warmth of domestic life.
Scrooge’s transformation is not only a moral awakening but also a recovery of sentiment, a reentry into the affectionate world that Lamb so often celebrated. By weaving Lamb’s tone into the narrative, Dickens created a character whose redemption feels both universal and deeply personal, ensuring Scrooge’s immortality in cultural imagination.
Finally, Lamb’s model encouraged Dickens to embrace the essayistic within the novel—those digressive passages where the narrator steps aside to reflect, moralize, or recall. In Bleak House, for instance, the narrator laments the plight of Jo in terms that transcend the plot, becoming an essay on human neglect. Such passages show Dickens fusing narrative with reflection, much as Lamb did in prose shorter and more intimate.
Through Lamb, Dickens discovered how to balance satire with tenderness, caricature with affection, and narrative with meditation. The result was a style uniquely capable of endowing characters with emotional durability. Figures such as Pip, Micawber, and Scrooge remain immortal not only because of their narrative roles but because of the sentimental voice—at once humorous and reflective—that frames their stories.
V. Other Contemporaries: Rivalry and Exchange
While Collins, Gaskell, Carlyle, and Lamb exerted the most direct influence on Dickens’s creative imagination, the wider Victorian literary field also played a critical role in shaping his character construction. Dickens was never a solitary genius working in a vacuum; he was acutely aware of his rivals, collaborators, and critics, and his characters often reflect his negotiations with competing literary styles. Among these figures, William Makepeace Thackeray, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Anthony Trollope stand out as important interlocutors.
Thackeray and the Realist Satire
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Thackeray cultivated a more ironic, restrained, and socially observant style, often exposing the hypocrisies of middle- and upper-class life with detached wit.
Unlike Dickens, who filled his novels with eccentrics, grotesques, and sentimental figures, Thackeray prided himself on presenting “a novel without a hero,” populated by flawed yet plausible characters.
For Dickens, Thackeray was both rival and stimulus. Their careers often ran in parallel: Vanity Fair was serialized just as Dickens was publishing Dombey and Son, and critics frequently compared the two. Thackeray’s insistence on plausibility likely pushed Dickens to temper his caricatures with greater psychological realism, particularly in his later works.
Characters such as Lady Dedlock in Bleak House or Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend show Dickens striving for a more layered portrayal of women, perhaps in part to rival Thackeray’s Becky Sharp. Though Dickens never abandoned his exuberant style, Thackeray’s realism reminded him that characters must also resonate with psychological credibility if they were to achieve longevity.
Bulwer-Lytton and the Dramatic Flourish
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, now remembered as much for his florid style as for his once-immense popularity, influenced Dickens in subtler ways. Bulwer-Lytton was a master of melodrama and historical romance, his novels filled with dark villains, imperiled heroines, and elaborate rhetorical flourishes.
While Dickens’s genius far surpassed Bulwer-Lytton’s, he nonetheless absorbed aspects of this melodramatic tradition, especially in his early works. The villainous energy of Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist or the gothic eccentricity of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations reveal Dickens’s willingness to draw upon melodramatic archetypes.
At the same time, Dickens’s friendship with Bulwer-Lytton encouraged him to refine his endings. Famously, Dickens altered the conclusion of Great Expectations after Bulwer-Lytton suggested that the original ending was too bleak.
The revised ending, in which Pip and Estella meet again with a hint of reconciliation, has remained canonical, ensuring the novel’s enduring emotional appeal. Here we see not only influence but direct intervention, with Bulwer-Lytton shaping the destiny of two of Dickens’s most memorable characters.
Anthony Trollope c1870s {{PD-US}}
Trollope, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Trollope and the World of the Everyday
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Anthony Trollope, author of the Chronicles of Barsetshire (1855–67) and The Palliser Novels (1864–79), represented yet another strand of Victorian fiction: the novel of everyday life, centered on domesticity, politics, and gradual moral development.
Trollope’s characters are notable for their ordinariness; they lack Dickens’s flamboyant eccentricity but gain in psychological subtlety.
While Dickens often criticized Trollope’s plodding realism, the comparison nevertheless influenced him.
Trollope’s patient attention to the workings of middle-class households underscored the importance of grounding character in ordinary experience.
Though Dickens rarely emulated Trollope’s understated approach, he incorporated elements of ordinariness into his own character repertoire. Joe Gargery in Great Expectations, for example, embodies the steady virtues of honesty, kindness, and humility, standing in contrast to the dramatic eccentricity of Miss Havisham.
Similarly, in David Copperfield, characters such as Agnes Wickfield provide a stabilizing moral center. While Dickens’s genius lay in creating the extraordinary, his awareness of Trollope’s ordinary characters ensured that his novels contained a balance—eccentricity offset by realism, grotesque figures complemented by steady moral exemplars.
Taken together, Thackeray, Bulwer-Lytton, and Trollope illustrate the breadth of Dickens’s literary dialogue. Each represented a different current of Victorian fiction—ironic realism, melodramatic flourish, and domestic subtlety—and Dickens’s characters gained durability by incorporating, resisting, or transforming these competing models. His immortality as a novelist lay in his ability to absorb the strengths of others while reshaping them into something uniquely his own.
VI. Synthesis: Crafting Immortal Characters through Dialogue with Contemporaries
Examining Dickens’s contemporaries individually demonstrates the range of literary, philosophical, and stylistic currents he absorbed. Taken together, however, a more intricate picture emerges: Dickens’s immortal characters are not merely the product of one influence but the synthesis of multiple, often competing, inspirations. Through this creative dialogue, he produced figures whose complexity, emotional depth, and moral resonance ensured their survival in literary memory.
From Wilkie Collins, Dickens inherited suspense, intrigue, and psychological layering. Collins’s mastery of the sensation novel encouraged Dickens to introduce delayed revelations, moral ambiguity, and complex backstories, giving characters like Magwitch, Estella, and Miss Havisham an enduring intrigue. Gaskell’s realism complemented this by situating characters within socially and economically determined contexts.
Dickens’s engagement with Gaskell sharpened his depiction of poverty, class struggle, and the moral consequences of industrial society, ensuring that his characters’ eccentricities were grounded in credible circumstances.
Thomas Carlyle’s philosophical influence added moral weight. Dickens’s protagonists often navigate a world dominated by materialism, bureaucracy, and social indifference; their choices and ethical growth reflect Carlyle’s insistence that spiritual authenticity and personal responsibility define true greatness. Pip’s moral development, Carton’s ultimate sacrifice, and Dombey’s partial redemption all exemplify this integration of ethical philosophy with narrative psychology.
Meanwhile, Charles Lamb’s essays provided a tonal model, infusing Dickens’s narration with reflective sentiment, humor, and affectionate attention to memory. This influence shaped the narratorial voice and lent emotional resonance to characters whose experiences might otherwise have been purely moral or dramatic exemplars.
Pip, Micawber, and Scrooge, among others, are remembered not just for their actions but for the warm, contemplative lens through which they are presented.
Interactions with Thackeray, Bulwer-Lytton, and Trollope further refined Dickens’s approach. Rivalry with Thackeray sharpened his commitment to psychological plausibility; friendship and critique from Bulwer-Lytton encouraged dramatic impact and attention to satisfying resolutions; and awareness of Trollope’s ordinariness emphasized the importance of credible, everyday virtues.
In each case, Dickens selectively incorporated these lessons, synthesizing them into a distinctive narrative style that could accommodate both the extraordinary and the familiar.
This synthesis is perhaps most visible in Dickens’s later works, such as Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) and Bleak House (1852–53), where the grotesque, the sentimental, the socially grounded, and the morally urgent coexist seamlessly. Characters such as Bella Wilfer and John Harmon navigate complex social structures while retaining emotional depth; figures like Mr. Riah or Jo highlight Dickens’s commitment to realism and social critique; and narratorial interventions echo Lamb’s reflective tone.
By combining multiple influences, Dickens created characters who are simultaneously eccentric, credible, morally resonant, and emotionally compelling—a combination that few writers have matched.
Ultimately, the durability of Dickens’s characters stems from this intricate interweaving of literary currents. Each figure is the product of imagination, observation, and dialogue: imagination in Dickens’s unique vision, observation in the careful depiction of society, and dialogue with contemporaries in both form and content.
Dickens did not merely imitate his peers; he transformed their innovations, reconfiguring them to serve his moral, social, and emotional purposes. The result is a gallery of characters that transcends time, each imbued with qualities that resonate across centuries.
Conclusion: Dickens as Synthesizer and Innovator
Charles Dickens’s enduring power as a novelist lies not only in his prodigious imagination but also in his ability to absorb, engage with, and transform the literary innovations of his contemporaries. Through the narrative suspense of Wilkie Collins, the social realism of Elizabeth Gaskell, the moral philosophy of Thomas Carlyle, and the reflective sentiment of Charles Lamb, Dickens developed a multi-layered approach to character creation.
Add to this the influence of rivals and peers like Thackeray, Bulwer-Lytton, and Trollope, and it becomes evident that Dickens’s genius was shaped within a vibrant ecosystem of Victorian literature.
The characters he created—Pip, Scrooge, Miss Havisham, David Copperfield, Sydney Carton, and countless others—are immortal precisely because they embody the synthesis of these diverse influences. They are psychologically complex, socially grounded, morally resonant, and emotionally compelling.
They navigate suspenseful plots, industrial landscapes, ethical dilemmas, and sentimental reflections, reflecting a literary lineage as much as they reflect Dickens’s singular artistry. In every eccentricity, every moral triumph, and every act of redemption, the imprint of his contemporaries can be traced, carefully transfigured into a narrative language that was uniquely his own.
In crafting these characters, Dickens achieved a rare balance: he retained the immediacy and dramatic energy that enthralled Victorian readers while embedding his figures in a moral, social, and psychological realism that continues to speak to modern audiences. His work demonstrates that literary immortality does not emerge in isolation; it is forged in dialogue—between the writer and society, between the author and fellow writers, and between narrative innovation and enduring human truths.
Dickens’s characters endure because they are not only reflections of a particular era but also embodiments of universal human experience, brought to life through the rich, transformative interplay of his contemporaries’ ideas and his own visionary creativity.
In the final analysis, Charles Dickens exemplifies the symbiosis of influence and innovation. He reminds us that literature thrives on exchange: the conversations among writers, whether collaborative, competitive, or philosophical, generate characters who continue to live in the imagination of readers long after their creators have passed. Through this intricate network of influences, Dickens forged characters who are, in the truest sense, immortal—timeless figures that continue to illuminate, challenge, and delight readers across generations.
Works Cited
Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900. University of Chicago Press, 1957.
Carlyle, Thomas. Past and Present. Chapman & Hall, 1843.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Bradbury & Evans, 1852–53.
Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. Bradbury & Evans, 1849–50.
Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. Bradbury & Evans, 1846–48.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Chapman & Hall, 1860–61.
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Bradbury & Evans, 1854.
Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Chapman & Hall, 1864–65.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Chapman & Hall, 1859.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. Chapman & Hall, 1848.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. Chapman & Hall, 1855.
Lamb, Charles. Essays of Elia. Edward Moxon, 1823.
Sanders, Andrew. Charles Dickens: Resurrection of the Social Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, 1992.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. Punch, 1847–48.
Trollope, Anthony. Chronicles of Barsetshire. Various Publishers, 1855–67.
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