Celebrated international author
In his twenties, Dickens (or 'Boz' as he was then known) ascended like a rocket into the skies of literary London. Success followed success. By his mid-forties Dickens was at the top of the tree: an internationally celebrated author of eleven masterly novels; the prosperous editor of a successful magazine, Household Words; and an author and personality adored by an immense, world-wide readership.
Crisis strikes again
His novels are all full of the joys and comforts of family and domestic life and the home a refuge from the trials and sufferings of the world. To outward appearances, this seemed to be the case with his private life too, as a happily married man with a loving wife, Catherine, and ten children. But in fact Dickens' home life was an increasingly troubled one and his letters from those period show an intense sense of unhappiness and dissatisfaction, that was to erupt in the second great crisis of his life, in the course of which he seemed to tear up one of the most central values and beliefs that underpinned all his work: the importance of domestic love and happiness.
In his twenties, Dickens (or 'Boz' as he was then known) ascended like a rocket into the skies of literary London. Success followed success. By his mid-forties Dickens was at the top of the tree: an internationally celebrated author of eleven masterly novels; the prosperous editor of a successful magazine, Household Words; and an author and personality adored by an immense, world-wide readership.
Crisis strikes again
His novels are all full of the joys and comforts of family and domestic life and the home a refuge from the trials and sufferings of the world. To outward appearances, this seemed to be the case with his private life too, as a happily married man with a loving wife, Catherine, and ten children. But in fact Dickens' home life was an increasingly troubled one and his letters from those period show an intense sense of unhappiness and dissatisfaction, that was to erupt in the second great crisis of his life, in the course of which he seemed to tear up one of the most central values and beliefs that underpinned all his work: the importance of domestic love and happiness.
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