Charles Dickens

Life and writing

Charles Dickens lived from 1812 to 1870. The Dickens Fellowship’s chronology documents his early life in Portsmouth and London, his reporting work and the publication of Pickwick Papers in instalments in 1836–37. The archive’s existing historical author record already carries those lifetime years. This profile adds referenced reading context without changing its identity or merging separate labels. A novelist’s documented life and a character’s dialogue supply different kinds of evidence, so the two are kept distinct.

Chapter I of The Pickwick Papers makes a quarrel disappear through a comic distinction between ordinary and Pickwickian language. Chapter VI places The Ivy Green within an encounter where a listener records the verse. The archive’s short Pickwickian label is a compressed anthology form, not a verbatim sentence from the novel. Its ivy passage keeps the opening four lines and closing couplet while omitting intervening lines from the first stanza. Reading the complete scenes reveals the rhetoric and narrative frame that those shortened selections leave out.

Reading this voice

Read chapters I and VI, noticing who speaks and how the surrounding listeners respond. These checked locations support related reading, while the archive wording and Bartlett source links remain unchanged. The 499 associated entries include 67 historical anthology records and 432 contributor-supplied records whose broader attribution is independently unverified. The linked e-text does not specify its print edition, and lifetime years do not establish dates for the individual excerpts.

Subjects to explore

Words to begin with

• In a Pickwickian sense.
• Oh, a dainty plant is the ivy green, That creepeth o'er ruins old! Of right choice food are his meals, I ween, In his cell so lone and cold. Creeping where no life is seen, A rare old plant is the ivy green.