The central English novelist of the 19th century and the most consequential literary critic of industrial capitalism in the language. Dickens's childhood experience — his father imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea, the twelve-year-old Charles sent to paste labels in a blacking factory — gave him a lifelong inability to accept the Victorian social order's explanations of itself, and he spent forty years producing fifteen novels, dozens of Christmas books, a magazine, and an extraordinary body of journalism that interrogated nearly every institution of industrializing England: the debtors' prison (Little Dorrit), the workhouse (Oliver Twist), the chancery court (Bleak House), industrial towns (Hard Times), the public schools (Nicholas Nickleby), the American slave states (American Notes), and the whole administrative-financial complex of the City of London (the Circumlocution Office of Little Dorrit; Merdle's collapse in the same book).
The early novels are comic-picaresque: The Pickwick Papers (1837), Oliver Twist (1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1839). The mature novels — Dombey and Son (1848), David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853), Little Dorrit (1857), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1861), Our Mutual Friend (1865) — combine the comic invention with a steadily darker social analysis. Bleak House, built around the endless chancery suit Jarndyce v. Jarndyce that consumes the lives of everyone it touches, is one of the major novels of the century in any language; Hard Times (1854), set in a fictional Coketown and structured around the utilitarian headmaster Gradgrind's destruction of his own children, is the shortest and most pointed of his anti-industrial books and was treasured by Marx.
His influence on political and social thought — via his own readership, and via the entire 19th- and early-20th-century tradition of the social-problem novel he effectively invented — is large. Orwell's essay "Charles Dickens" (1939) is the classic 20th-century reading: Dickens as a moralist whose characteristic move is to diagnose institutions while insisting that the remedy lies in a change of heart, a reformer rather than a revolutionary, and — despite the limits this imposes — "generously angry."