Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812 and rose from early employment in journalism to become one of the most widely read novelists of the nineteenth century. Works including The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House and Great Expectations combined comic invention, melodrama and social criticism with an extraordinary command of character and urban setting.

Dickens edited periodicals, campaigned on social questions and became an international celebrity through public readings. His final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was left unfinished when he died at Gad’s Hill Place in Kent in June 1870, creating a literary puzzle that has generated speculation ever since.

M. J. Trow’s The Angel begins with Dickens’s death and turns the circumstances surrounding his unfinished final novel into the starting point for a fictional investigation by Matthew Grand and James Batchelor. Dickens is therefore part of the historical premise rather than a merely decorative cameo.