The Dickens family lives in Switzerland for six months. At the end of the year, they move to Paris, where they will remain for several months.

1847   A Factory Act, restricting working hours for women and chil- dren, is passed. Back in London, Dickens helps Angela Burdett- Coutts found Urania Cottage, a reformatory for prostitutes, which he runs for many years. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights are published. William Make- peace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair  (1847-1848) begins to appear in monthly parts.
1848   Revolutions break out throughout much of Europe. 
1849   Dickens begins the monthly serialization of David Copperfield  (1849-1850), his autobiographical novel and “favorite child.”
1850   He establishes Household Words,  a weekly journal over which he scrupulously presides and to which he contributes extensively during its ten years of publication. William Wordsworth dies. Al- fred, Lord Tennyson becomes the next Poet Laureate.
1851   The Great Exhibition opens in London in May and closes in Oc- tober. Dickens’s Amateur Players perform before Queen Victoria. Wilkie Collins, who will become an important collaborator of Dickens and a novelist in his own right, has a role in the pro- duction. Dickens’s father dies, as does an infant daughter. The family moves to Tavistock House in London. 
1852   Dickens begins the monthly serialization of Bleak House  (1852-1853).Thenovel initiates his more mature, darker phase of social criticism.
1853   Dickens gives his first public reading of A Christmas Carol  to help raise money for an educational institution in Birmingham. His popular readings will continue to bring in considerable sums to benefit a variety of organizations and causes over the next five years.
1854   The Crimean War (1854—1856) breaks out. Dickens serializes Hard Times in his weekly journal, partly in order to boost flagging sales of Household Words. 
1855   Dickens and his family winter in Paris. He begins the monthly serialization of Little Dorrit  (1855-1857), his most extensively critical novel to date.
1856   Dickens purchases Gad’s Hill Place, a large house near Rochester that he had dreamed of owning as a child. Settling there perma- nently in 1860, Dickens will make Gad’s Hill his home for his remaining years. 
1857  The Frozen Deep,  a melodramatic play written by Collins and Dick- ens, stars Dickens and Ellen Ternan, a young actress with whom he becomes infatuated.
1858   Dickens begins performing public readings for his own benefit in London and then begins a series of reading tours that extend to Scotland and Ireland. After some years of strain in their mar- riage, he separates from his wife and makes a public statement of the fact in Household Words. 
1859  All the Year Round succeeds Household Words as Dickens’s weekly. He serializes A Tale of Two Cities in the journal. He also embarks on an- other extensive public-reading tour. Darwin publishes The Origin of Species. 
1860   Dickens begins the weekly serialization of Great Expectations (1860-1861). George Eliot publishes The Mill on the Floss. 
1861   The American Civil War (1861-1865) breaks out. Dickens be- 
   gins another series of public readings, which again will last for several months. 
1863   Work begins on London’s first Underground Railway Dickens’s mother dies. His fourth child, Walter, dies in India. Thackeray dies. 
1864   Dickens begins the monthly serialization of Our Mutual Friend  (1864—1865), his last completed novel.
1865   Ellen Ternan, who is traveling from France with Dickens, is in- jured in a serious train wreck. Unhurt, Dickens is severely shaken by the accident. 
1866   Dickens begins another series of exhausting readings. 
1867   Concluding one reading tour in England and Ireland, Dickens begins a series of Farewell Readings in America, which continue into 1868 in spite of his poor health. 
1869   Dickens initiates another series of Farewell Readings in England, which he is forced to suspend because of ill health. 
1870   He performs twelve more Farewell Readings. He publishes the first installment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  Only six of the twelve intended numbers are written when Dickens dies of a cerebral hemorrhage on June 9. He is buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.

INTRODUCTION

“ ‘What do you think of Bleak House?’ is a question which everybody has heard propounded within the last few weeks, when this serial was drawing towards its conclusion; and which, when the work was actually closed, formed, for its own season, as regular a portion of miscellaneous chitchat as ‘How are you?’ ”1 So began a review of Dickens’s ninth novel, commenting on the commentary Bleak House was generating and attesting, in this way, not just to the popularity of the writer but, even more, to the supra-literary status of his works. “His current story was really a topic of the day,” a reviewer later reminisced; “it seemed something almost akin to politics and news—as if it belonged not so much to literature as to events.” There was a difference, though: in the serial form in which Dickens’s novels were originally published, the topic of the day stretched on for many, many weeks and months, and with most of them being published in nineteen monthly numbers, these works were before the public for over a year and a half

By the time the serialization of Bleak House concluded, in September of 1853,Dickens had been publishing prodigiously for seventeen years, and his continuous, unprecedented popularity was itself a “regular ... portion” of contemporary criticism. From the day that “ ‘Boz’ first carried away the prize of popular applause... by the publication of the unrivaled Pickwick ...