Who they were
Dickens published his novels in monthly instalments that made him a mass phenomenon, from The Pickwick Papers onward. Drawing on his own childhood, when his father’s debts sent the boy to work in a blacking factory, he filled his fiction with vivid characters and social criticism of workhouses, courts, and slums, and gave public readings on both sides of the Atlantic.
What they did
He combined broad popularity with sharp reforming purpose, shaping how Victorians saw their own society.
Legacy
Dickens’s characters and phrases entered common speech, A Christmas Carol reshaped the modern idea of Christmas, and his novels have never gone out of print or off the screen.