News articles for teaching: How important is Charles Dickens?

We've created a new feature on The Day called Connections, where we’re exploring some of the main themes of Charles Dickens’s novels: legacy, poverty, characters, children and Victorian Britain. We've selected 6 articles which are connected to these themes using news stories from the wider world, with activities, debate questions and further reading links included.

During his lifetime, Charles Dickens wrote 14 and a half novels, four million words, and 14,000 letters. His stories were some of the most popular Britain had ever seen, and their characters burst into life from every corner of society. Miss Havisham is a fading, broken echo of the upper classes; Scrooge an indictment of the selfish, self-made man; and Oliver Twist an orphan whose fortunes are transformed. More than 200 years after Dickens was born, why does the author still captivate us?

Keywords: English, Literature, Britain, Charles Dickens, Economy and Welfare, Novels, Social History, Television, Writers, Royal Family, The Queen, Health

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