The exceptions were novels he serialized weekly in magazines he edited and owned a piece of.ĭemand was huge. (The final installment was a “double part,” and cost two shillings.) Then the novels were published as books, in editions priced for different markets. First, they were issued in nineteen monthly “parts”-thirty-two-page installments, with advertising, bound in paper and priced at a shilling. He was by far the most commercially successful of the major Victorian writers. People took off their hats when they saw him on the street. Working people read his books, and so did the Queen. Thomas Adolphus Trollope called him “perhaps the largest-hearted man I ever knew.” He was a literary celebrity by the time he turned twenty-five, and he never lost his readership. He gave money to relatives (including his financially feckless parents), orphans, and people down on their luck. He and his wife, Catherine, had ten children and many friends, most of them writers, actors, and artists, whom it delighted Dickens to entertain and travel with. He wrote fifteen novels and hundreds of articles and stories, delivered speeches, edited magazines, produced and acted in amateur theatricals, performed conjuring tricks, gave public readings, and directed two charities, one for struggling writers, the other for former prostitutes. He seems to have never not been doing something. His normal walking distance was twelve miles some days, he walked twenty. Charles Dickens took cold showers and long walks.
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