Charles Dickens Dickens enjoyed reading as a youth. Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time, and remains one of the best-known and most-read of English authors. His works have never gone out of print, and have been adapted continually for the screen since the invention of cinema, with at least 200 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens's works documented. Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime, and as early as 1913, a silent film of "The Pickwick Papers" was made. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded
Racism in the work of Charles Dickens of the 1840s, and his creation of the antisemitic caricature of the character of Fagin. Authors Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux, in their book "Dickens in Context" examine this puzzle as to how one can square away Dickens' racialism with concern with the poor and the downcast. They argue this can be explained by saying that Dickens was a nativist and "cultural chauvinist" in the sense of being highly ethnocentric and ready to justify British imperialism, but not a racist in the sense of being a "biological determinist" as was the anthropologist Robert Knox. That is, Dickens did not regard