Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English writer. He created some of the world’s best-known fictional characters and is widely regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. He has been termed a literary genius and his novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity. Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was put in a debtors’ prison. Despite lacking a formal education, Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles. Over the course of his writing career, classics like Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations were published. In his early years, Dickens started publishing The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. His series of sketches, originally written as captions for artist Robert Seymour’s humorous sports-themed illustrations, were wildly popular with readers, and Dickens decided to write a novel on the subject. Charles Dickens died of a stroke on June 9, 1870, leaving his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished.