A retired librarian, Connie Paul co-founded the Central Jersey Chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) and is currently serving as treasurer. She has taken a group to England to study Austen, and she has been a frequent speaker and ElderHostel leader on the influence of Jane Austen, and her fellow era novelist, Patrick O’Brian.

Happy 200th, Charles – but if I can say it all in 160 characters, why did you write 800-page novels?

The short answer is that Dickens’s imagination was too rich and expansive to compress into a text message; at roughly 500 pages, one of his greatest novels, Great Expectations, was too short, he complained – it cramped his fancy. We have left behind Dickens’s world of gas-lit London, horse-drawn cabs and huffing steam engines, but we shouldn’t leave behind the endless variety and color of the world of his novels. He re-awakens us to life.

But there’s more to Dickens than thousands of vivid characters and the hundreds of plots and subplots in which they become involved. His novels also look inward – at himself. Restless, idealistic, sentimental, ambitious, sometimes ruthless, he was complex and ever-changing, and he responded to his experience with intensity.

He was especially susceptible to women, in particular; and a look at the three most intense romances of his life gives an insight not only into the female characters in his novels, but also into his own evolving sensibility. We can learn something from Dickens in love, too.

Robert Garnett, PhD, is an English Professor at Gettysburg College. His designated specialty is the literature of the early twentieth century, but he teaches courses in English and American literature from early to modern. He has published a book on the twentieth-century British novelist Evelyn Waugh, but now seems to be going backwards; his current scholarly project is Charles Dickens.