Charles Dickens scenes in "The Pickwick Papers" are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. Karl Marx asserted that Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together". George Bernard Shaw even remarked that "Great Expectations" was more seditious than Marx's "Das Kapital". The exceptional popularity of Dickens's novels, even those with socially oppositional themes ("Bleak House", 1853; "Little Dorrit", 1857; "Our Mutual Friend", 1865), not only underscored his almost preternatural ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also ensured
Charles Bentley (painter) Charles Bentley (painter) Charles Bentley (1805/6–4 September 1854), was an English watercolour painter of coastal and river scenery. Bentley was born in 1805 or 1806, the son of a master-carpenter and builder living in Tottenham Court Road, London. He was sent to work colouring prints for Theodore Fielding to whom he was eventually apprenticed in order to learn aquatinting. Bentley became a lifelong friend of another, rather younger, pupil of Fielding, William Callow. During his apprenticeship he was sent to Paris, probably to assist work on the plates for "Excursion sur les Cotes et dans les Ports de Normandie"' (Paris,