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Charles Dickens: Historical photographic portraitHistorical photographic portraitJeremiah Gurney · Public domain

499 collected words

Charles Dickens

Life dates: 1812 AD — 1870 AD

English novelist and journalist whose comic scenes expose how words, institutions and personal claims shape relationships. Identify a fictional speaker before treating a familiar phrase as the writer’s direct advice.

▷ Play this voiceSearch these words ↗Place in time ↗lifewisdomlovefaithtruthhappinessmindwork

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

communicationjudgementfriendshipnature

Words to begin with

Profile sources and editorial notes

Agent-assisted editorial profile, updated 2026-10-05. A human reviewer is not recorded. Biographical context does not independently authenticate every quotation attributed to this person.

  • The Dickens Fellowship — Life of Charles Dickens ↗

    Original limited factual paraphrase and documented lifetime. Modern biography text and images are not reproduced. Profile identity does not independently verify every associated quotation. Checked 2026-10-05.

  • Historical related reading — The Pickwick Papers ↗

    Catalogue US-public-domain declaration and historical English text checked with retained download hashes. Original reading guidance distinguishes fictional voices, anthology provenance and limited passage comparisons. Checked 2026-10-05.

Quotations and sayings

02c. 1841 AD
I believed, from the solitary and thoughtful way in which my mother murmured her song, that she was alone. And I went softly into the room. She was sitting by the fire, suckling an infant, whose tiny hand she held against her neck. Her eyes were looking down upon its face, and she sat singing to it. I was so far right, that she had no other companion. I spoke to her, and she started, and cried out. But seeing me, she called me her dear Davy, her own boy! and coming half across the room to meet me, kneeled down upon the ground and kissed me, and laid my head down on her bosom near the little creature that was nestling there, and put its hand up to my lips. I wish I had died. I wish I had died then, with that feeling in my Heart! I should have been more fit for Heaven than I ever have been since.
Charles Dickens / quote
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04c. 1841 AD
There's one thing you may be sure of, Pip," said Joe, after some rumination, "namely, that lies is lies. Howsever they come, they didn't ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, and work round to the same. Don't you tell no more of 'em, Pip. That ain't the way to get out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don't make it out at all clear. You are oncommon in some things. You're oncommon small. Likewise you're a oncommon scholar.""No, I am ignorant and backward, Joe.""Why, see what a letter you wrote last night! Wrote in print even! I've seen letters––Ah! and from gentlefolks!––that I'll swear weren't wrote in print," said Joe."I have learnt next to nothing, Joe. You think much of me. It's only that.""Well, Pip," said Joe, "be it so or be it son't, you must be a common scholar afore you can be a oncommon one, I should hope!
Charles Dickens / quote
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05c. 1841 AD
The kind of submission or resignation that he showed, was that of a man who was tired out. I sometimes derived an impression, from his manner or from a whispered word or two which escaped him, that he pondered over the question whether he might have a better man under better circumstances. But he never justified himself by a hint tending that way, or tried to bend the past out of its eternal shape.It happened on two or three occasions in my presence, that his desperate reputation was alluded to by one or other of the people in attendance on him. A smile crossed his face then, and he turned his eyes on me with a trustful look, as if he were confident that I had seen some small redeeming touch in him, even so long ago as when I was a little child. As to all the rest, he was humble and contrite, and I never knew him complain.
Charles Dickens / quote
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06c. 1841 AD
Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together, as I may say, and one man’s a blacksmith, and one’s a whitesmith, and one’s a goldsmith, and one’s a coppersmith. Diwisions among such must come, and must be met as they come. If there’s been any fault at all to-day, it’s mine. You and me is not two figures to be together in London; nor yet anywheres else but what is private, and beknown, and understood among friends. It ain’t that I am proud, but that I want to be right, as you shall never see me no more in these clothes. I’m wrong in these clothes. I’m wrong out of the forge, the kitchen, or off th’ meshes. You won’t find half so much fault in me if you think me in forge dress, with my hammer in my hand, or even my pipe. You won’t find half so much fault in me if, supposing as you should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in at the forge window and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old anvil, in the old burnt apron, sticking to the old work. I’m awful dull, but I hope I’ve beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so God bless you, dear old Pip, old chap, God bless you!
Charles Dickens / quote
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09c. 1841 AD
My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand, gave her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally timid and very sensitive.
Charles Dickens / quote
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20c. 1841 AD
It’s all right now, Louisa: it’s all right, young Thomas,’ said Mr. Bounderby; ‘you won’t do so any more. I’ll answer for it’s being all over with father. Well, Louisa, that’s worth a kiss, isn’t it?’‘You can take one, Mr. Bounderby,’ returned Louisa, when she had coldly paused, and slowly walked across the room, and p. 18ungraciously raised her cheek towards him, with her face turned away.‘Always my pet; ain’t you, Louisa?’ said Mr. Bounderby. ‘Good-bye, Louisa!’He went his way, but she stood on the same spot, rubbing the cheek he had kissed, with her handkerchief, until it was burning red. She was still doing this, five minutes afterwards.‘What are you about, Loo?’ her brother sulkily remonstrated. ‘You’ll rub a hole in your face.’‘You may cut the piece out with your penknife if you like, Tom. I wouldn’t cry!
Charles Dickens / quote
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