Description

Dickens's works combine brutality with fairy-tale fantasy; sharp, realistic, concrete detail with romance, farce, and melodrama.; the ordinary with the strange. They range through the comic, tender, dramatic, sentimental, grotesque, melodramatic, horrible, eccentric, mysterious, violent, romantic, and morally earnest. He believed novels had a moral purpose-to arouse innate moral sentiments and to encourage virtuous behavior in reader community and also in general public. It was his moral purpose that led the London Times to call Dickens "the greatest instructor of the Nineteenth Century" in his obituary. During his lifetime, Charles Dickens was the most famous writer in Europe and America. When he visited America to give a series of lectures, his admirers followed him, waited outside his hotel, and peered in windows at him. In their enthusi asm, Dickens's admirers behaved very much like the fans of a superstar.