The beginning of my relationship with Charles Dickens was a set of Junior Illustrated Classics my favorite aunt sent to me for Christmas. Among other classic tales heavily abridged and extensively illustrated for children was Great Expectations. The story of Pip’s transformation from working class boy to gentleman appealed to me, as did the haughty Estella and the unbelievably creepy Miss Havisham. Boy, was I in for a surprise when I tried to read the “real thing” in junior high! Suddenly, one of my favorite stories had become buried beneath drifts of descriptions. So many words piled up that it was hard to find the story anymore!

The same was true for A Tale of Two Cities. The bloody Terror and the noble sacrifice against the backdrop of the French Revolution suddenly became stodgy and dull beneath the burden of Dickens’s paid-by-the-word prose. How could anyone learn to love such a work? Only the blessedly short A Christmas Carol lived up to the versions I’d already seen on television, if somewhat more weighted with dated turns of phrase. What was it that made Charles Dickens so great? The plots were great, but wading into the words remained a challenge for me until my late 20s.

It was then I encountered Nicholas Nickleby, Charles Dickens great expose of Yorkshire boarding schools and celebration of 19th-century theatre. It was as if I’d received a key that opened a whole new world. Sure, the long descriptions and colorful caricatures were still in place, but there was something more. It was as if a window once fogged by the inaccessibility of the language had suddenly become transparent. I could see into his world and felt, at times, as if he could see me.

For contemporary readers, Dickens’s language remains the greatest challenge and reward of reading his books. We even have a word “Dickensian” to relate the complexity of the novelistic worlds he created. Even better, he gives us a window on a world in which he lived, which tells us far more about this particular time and place than any historical novel or book of history. He relates, in stories of high melodrama, the types and tropes of a particular time and place. For contemporary readers, it’s a window into the past. For readers in his day, it was a reflection of their own and a clarion call for social change.

Born February 7, 1812 to a naval clerk and the daughter of instrument makers, Charles Dickens lived a life that was always crossed by his parents’ profligate spending. Informally educated, he was sent to work in a shoe polish factory at the age of 12 when his father's expensive tastes landed the family in debtor's prison. Living in a boarding house and saving his meager earnings to help buy his imprisoned family food, this experience was to make a lasting impression on Dickens, later shaping the direction of his life and work. It was also the beginning of Dickens’s support of his family, an obligation that would last for the remainder of his life.

The death of a wealthy relative offered the Dickens family reprieve from debtor’s prison, and Dickens briefly returned to school before family finances required him to return to work once more. At 15 Dickens begin work as a law clerk, later becoming a court and parliamentary reporter before publishing his first short story at the age of 21. Sketches by Boz would follow (initially he used the pen name “Boz” instead of his own), then the popular The Pickwick Papers before Dickens would tackle his first major work: Oliver Twist.

Oliver Twist is the story of a workhouse orphan who falls in with a band of thieves before his noble origins are revealed and he can find his true home. Its shocking depictions of the workhouse and exposure of an innocent (and high born) child to low company outraged the public. Like most of Dickens's books, it would stir controversy and public outcry, uniting readers of different backgrounds with its sentimental depictions of the deserving poor.

Later books would follow this pattern. Nicholas Nickleby would expose the abuses at boarding schools where unwanted children were sent for years at a time to experience limited education at the hands of brutal school masters. Old Curiosity Shop is about the dangers of gambling. Bleak House is about the labyrinthine legal system that was frequently stacked against the powerless or destitute. Little Dorrit takes its themes of the debtors prison from experiences the Dickens family experienced firsthand.

2012 is the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth. We’ve seen the release of Claire Tomalin’s biography Charles Dickens: A Life to celebrate this anniversary. “Masterpiece Theatre” is launching a new television adaptation of Great Expectations. And the Charles Dickens Museum has released Charles Dickens: The Dickens Bicentenary 1812-212 written by Dickens great-great-great-granddaughter and containing images and documents from Dickens personal archive relating to his life and works.

Despite the difficulty of his language, Dickens’s work has frequently been associated with children. Oliver Twist is the first English-language novel to feature a child as a primary protagonist. Dickens’s plots frequently feature the young people at the mercy of a cruel or indifferent society. For young readers interested in this author and his work, there are many great abridged versions and children’s biographies about different aspects of the author’s life.

I like both the Classic Starts Series, which features attractive hardbound illustrated volumes abridged for young readers. The DK Eyewitness Classics are also interesting, as they call out various aspects of the text into sidebars with pictures and notes about the historical situations and artifacts that pepper Dickens’s novels. And as a fan of reading aloud, I find that Dickens novels work very well either read by an ambitious adult reader or in audiobook format. This evokes the way 19th-century fans of his would have experienced the author’s serial format, often read aloud from magazines or newspapers.

This year sees the publication of Deborah Hopkinson’s A Boy Called Dickens, a fictional account of Dickens’s life while he was a child in the blacking factory. He was so ashamed of this episode in his life that he hid it from his wife and children, refusing to write or speak about it until composing his memoirs towards the very end of his life. While we know the experience to be genuine, there is something marvelous about transforming these episodes into fiction, just as Dickens used these experiences in his own life and work.

Andrea Warren wrote a provacative volume titled Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London, which gives a great deal of historical context to the life and work of Dickens as it relates to the life of the poor. Mustering staggering statistics about the working poor (particularly the lives of destitute children), Warren relates how Dickens’s works influenced public opinion to enact social change, and provides the histories of various charitable institutions he supported. This book surprised and moved me; you can find a more extensive review I wrote for this book on Teenreads. 

Children’s biographies of Dickens abound. I think that Charles Dickens: Scenes from an Extraordinary Life by Mick Manning is very accessible, while Charles Dickens: England's Most Captivating Storyteller by Catherine Wells-Cole probably has the best historical documents and photographs. Both of these are worth a look for readers interested in Dickens’s life and work. But my favorite book discovered in my recent Dickens odyssey is Michael Rosen’s Dickens: His Work and His World illustrated by Robert Ingpen. Richly illustrated with evocative images of Dickens’s most infamous characters, this book is an excellent overview to the author and his work, and also contains several brief, but passionate, essays on why his work still matters. Printed in an oversized picture book format, don’t be fooled by this slender volume: it will provide interest and entertainment for child and adult readers alike. It includes an excellent timeline contextualizing Dickens with prominent events of his day and “spot-the-character” illustration containing characters from all his novels (with a key at the back).

At his final public appearance, in a state of physical and mental decline, Charles Dickens thanked his audience. "From these garish lights," he said, "I vanish now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, affectionate farewell." This reading was the last time Dickens would be seen in public. He died three months later at the age of 58, but two-hundred years after his birth, the worlds and characters he created live on.

What is your favorite story from Charles Dickens? In your opinion what does or doesn't make him still relevant to today's readers?