About the Author

Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most well-known fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period.
He was born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812, the second of eight children. Although he had little formal education, his works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his life, and by the twentieth century he was widely seen as a literary genius by critics and scholars. Dickens was regarded as the literary colossus of his age. His 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities, set in London and Paris, is his best known work of historical fiction.