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After a year abroad in Italy, in response to which he wrote PICTURES FROM ITALY (1846), Dickens began to publish DOMBEY AND SON, which continued till 1848. This novel established a new standard in the Dickensian novel and may be said to mark the turning point in his career. If Dickens had remained the author of PICKWICK, OLIVER TWIST, and THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP, he might have deserved a lasting reputation only as an author of cheerful comedy and bathetic sentiment. But DOMBEY, while it includes these elements, is a realistic novel of human life in a society which had assumed more or less its modern form. As its full title indicates, DEALINGS WITH THE FIRM OF DOMBEY AND SON is a study of the influence of the values of a business society on the personal fortunes of the members of the Dombey family and those with whom they come in contact. It takes a somber view of England at mid-century, and its elegiac tone becomes characteristic of Dickens's novels for the rest of his life.
Dickens's next novel, DAVID COPPERFIELD (1849-1850), combined broad social perspective with a very strenuous effort to take stock of himself at the midpoint of his literary career. This autobiographical novel fictionalized elements of Dickens's childhood degradation, pursuit of a journalistic and literary vocation, and love life. Its achievement is to offer the first comprehensive record of the typical course of a young man's life in Victorian England. COPPERFIELD is not Dickens's greatest novel, but it was his own favorite among his works, probably because of his personal engagement with the subject matter.
In 1850 Dickens began to "conduct" (his word for edit) a new periodical, HOUSEHOLD WORDS. His editorials and articles for this magazine, running to two volumes, cover the entire span of English politics, social institutions, and family life and are an invaluable complement to the fictional treatment of these subjects in Dickens's novels. The weekly magazine was a great success and ran to 1859, when Dickens began to conduct a new weekly, ALL THE YEAR ROUND. In both these periodicals he published some of his major novels.
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Source:
From ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLD BIOGRAPHY (17 VOLS), Gale Group, © 1998 Gale. Reprinted by permission of The Gale Group.
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