title: Google Play

text: In March 2015, Google disclosed that over the past few months, it had been begun using a combination of automated tools and human reviewers to check apps for malware and terms of service violations before they are published in the Google Play Store. At the same time, it began rolling out a new age-based ratings system for apps and games, based on a given region's official ratings authority (for example, ESRB in the US).


title: Google Play

text: In October 2016, Google announced a new detection and filtering system designed to provide "additional enhancements to protect the integrity of the store". The new system is aimed to detect and filter cases where developers have been attempting to "manipulate the placement of their apps through illegitimate means like fraudulent installs, fake reviews, and incentivized ratings".


title: Google Play

text: In April 2019, Google announced changes to the store's app review process, stating that it would take several days to review app submissions from new and less-established developers. The company later clarified that, in exceptional cases, certain apps may be subject to an expanded review process, delaying publication by seven days or longer.


title: Google Play

text: Some mobile carriers can block users from installing certain apps. In March 2009, reports surfaced that several tethering apps were banned from the store. However, the apps were later restored, with a new ban preventing only T-Mobile subscribers from downloading the apps. Google released a statement:


title: Google Play

text: In April 2011, Google removed the Grooveshark app from the store due to unspecified policy violations. "CNET" noted that the removal came "after some of the top music labels have accused the service of violating copyright law". "TechCrunch" wrote approximately two weeks later that Grooveshark had returned to Android, "albeit not through the official App Market", but rather "Playing on Android's ability to install third-party applications through the browser, Grooveshark has taken on the responsibility of distributing the application themselves".


title: Google Play

text: In May 2011, Google banned the account of the developer of several video game emulators. Neither Google nor the developer publicly revealed the reason for the ban.


title: Google Play

text: In March 2013, Google began to pull ad blocking apps from the Google Play Store, per section 4.4 of the developers' agreement, which prohibits apps that interfere with servers and services.


title: Google Play

text: Apps that exempt themselves from power management policies introduced on Android Marshmallow without being "adversely affected" by them, are banned.


title: Google Play

text: In July 2018, Google banned additional categories of apps, including those that perform cryptocurrency mining on-device, apps that "facilitate the sale of explosives, firearms, ammunition, or certain firearms accessories", are only used to present ads, contain adult content but are aimed towards children, "multiple apps with highly similar content and user experience," and "apps that are created by an automated tool, wizard service, or based on templates and submitted to Google Play by the operator of that service on behalf of other persons."


title: Google Play

text: Two Iranian state supported ridesharing app and three messenger apps were deleted Play protect for being as malware spyware in 2022.


title: Google Play

text: In February 2012, Google introduced a new automated antivirus system, called Google Bouncer, to scan both new and existing apps for malware (e. g. spyware or trojan horses). In 2017, the Bouncer feature and other safety measures within the Android platform were rebranded under the umbrella name Google Play Protect, a system that regularly scans apps for threats.


title: Google Play

text: Android apps can ask for or require certain permissions on the device, including access to body sensors, calendar, camera, contacts, location, microphone, phone, SMS, storage, WI-FI, and access to Google accounts.


title: Google Play

text: In July 2017, Google described a new security effort called "peer grouping", in which apps performing similar functionalities, such as calculator apps, are grouped together and attributes compared. If one app stands out, such as requesting more device permissions than others in the same group, Google's systems automatically flag the app and security engineers take a closer inspection. Peer grouping is based on app descriptions, metadata, and statistics such as download count.


title: Google Play

text: In early March 2011, DroidDream, a trojan rootkit exploit, was released to the then-named Android Market in the form of several free applications that were, in many cases, pirated versions of existing priced apps. This exploit allowed hackers to steal information such as IMEI and IMSI numbers, phone model, user ID, and service provider. The exploit also installed a backdoor that allowed the hackers to download more code to the infected device. The exploit only affected devices running Android versions earlier than 2.3 "Gingerbread". Google removed the apps from the Market immediately after being alerted, but the apps had already been downloaded more than 50,000 times, according to "Android Police"s estimate. "Android Police" wrote that the only method of removing the exploit from an infected device was to reset it to a factory state, although community-developed solutions for blocking some aspects of the exploit were created. A few days later, Google confirmed that 58 malicious apps had been uploaded to Android Market, and had been downloaded to 260,000 devices before being removed from the store. Google emailed affected users with information that "As far as we can determine, the only information obtained was device-specific (IMEI/IMSI, unique codes which are used to identify mobile devices, and the version of Android running on your device)" as opposed to personal data and account information. It also announced the then-new "remote kill" functionality, alongside a security update, that lets Google remotely remove malicious apps from users' devices. However, days later, a malicious version of the security update was found on the Internet, though it did not contain the specific DroidDream malware. New apps featuring the malware, renamed DroidDream Light, surfaced the following June, and were also removed from the store.


title: Google Play

text: At the Black Hat security conference in 2012, security firm Trustwave demonstrated their ability to upload an app that would circumvent the Bouncer blocker system. The application used a JavaScript exploit to steal contacts, SMS messages, and photos, and was also capable of making the phone open arbitrary web pages or launch denial-of-service attacks. Nicholas Percoco, senior vice president of Trustwave's SpiderLabs advanced security team, stated that "We wanted to test the bounds of what it's capable of". The app stayed on Google Play for more than two weeks, being repeatedly scanned by the Bouncer system without detection, with Percoco further saying that "As an attack, all a malware attacker has to do to get into Google Play is to bypass Bouncer". Trustwave reached out to Google to share their findings, but noted that more manual testing of apps might be necessary to detect apps using malware-masking techniques.


title: Google Play

text: According to a 2014 research study released by RiskIQ, a security services company, malicious apps introduced through Google Play increased 388% between 2011 and 2013, while the number of apps removed by Google dropped from 60% in 2011 to 23% in 2013. The study further revealed that "Apps for personalizing Android phones led all categories as most likely to be malicious". According to "PC World", "Google said it would need more information about RiskIQ's analysis to comment on the findings."


title: Google Play

text: In October 2016, "Engadget" reported about a blog post named "Password Storage in Sensitive Apps" from freelance Android hacker Jon Sawyer, who decided to test the top privacy apps on Google Play. Testing two applications, one named "Hide Pictures Keep Safe Vault" and the other named "Private Photo Vault", Sawyer found significant errors in password handling in both, and commented, "These companies are selling products that claim to securely store your most intimate pieces of data, yet are at most snake oil. You would have near equal protection just by changing the file extension and renaming the photos."


title: Google Play

text: In April 2017, security firm Check Point announced that a malware named "FalseGuide" had been hidden inside approximately 40 "game guide" apps in Google Play. The malware is capable of gaining administrator access to infected devices, where it then receives additional modules that let it show popup ads. The malware, a type of botnet, is also capable of launching DDoS attacks. After being alerted to the malware, Google removed all instances of it in the store, but by that time, approximately two million Android users had already downloaded the apps, the oldest of which had been around since November 2016.


title: Google Play

text: In June 2017, researchers from the Sophos security company announced their finding of 47 apps using a third-party development library that shows intrusive advertisements on users' phones. Even after such apps are force-closed by the user, advertisements remain. Google removed some of the apps after receiving reports from Sophos, but some apps remained. When asked for comment, Google didn't respond. In August 2017, 500 apps were removed from Google Play after security firm Lookout discovered that the apps contained an SDK that allowed for malicious advertising. The apps had been collectively downloaded over 100 million times, and consisted of a wide variety of use cases, including health, weather, photo-editing, Internet radio and emoji.


title: Google Play

text: In all of 2017, over 700,000 apps were banned from Google Play due to abusive contents; this is a 70% increase over the number of apps banned in 2016.


title: Google Play

text: In March 2020, Check Point discovered 56 apps containing a malware program that had infected a total of 1 million devices. The program, called Tekya, was designed to evade detection by Google Play Protect and VirusTotal and then fraudulently click on ads. Around the same time, Dr. Web discovered at least six apps with 700,000 total downloads containing at least 18 modifications program called Android.Circle.1. In addition to performing click fraud, Android.Circle.1 can also operate as adware and perform phishing attacks.


title: Google Play

text: On July 1, 2021, Dr. Web discovered malicious apps on Google Play that steal Facebook users' logins and passwords. Their specialists uncovered 9 trojans that were available on Google Play Store with over 5.8 million installs among them. The apps tricked victims into logging into their Facebook accounts and hijacked the credentials via JavaScript code. Google removed these apps later on.


title: Google Play

text: On September 29, 2021, Zimperium zLabs recently discovered a large-scale malware campaign has infected more than 10 million Android devices from over 70 countries and likely stole hundreds of millions from its victims by subscribing to paid services without their knowledge. GriftHorse, the trojan used in these attacks, was discovered by researchers who first spotted this illicit global premium services campaign. This campaign has been active for roughly five months, between November 2020 and April 2021, when their malicious apps were last updated. The malware was delivered using over 200 trojanized Android applications delivered through Google's official Play Store and third-party app stores. Google has removed the apps after being notified of their malicious nature but this malware are still available for download on third-party repositories.


title: Google Play

text: On November 30, 2021, ThreatFabric, researchers explain how they discovered four different malware dropper campaigns distributing banking trojans on the Google Play Store. This evolution includes creating small realistic-looking apps that focus on common themes such as fitness, cryptocurrency, QR codes, and PDF scanning to trick users into installing the app. Once these "dropper" apps are installed, they will silently communicate with the threat actor's server to receive commands. When ready to distribute the banking trojan, the threat actor's server will tell the installed app to perform a fake "update" that "drops" and launches the malware on the Android device.


title: Google Play

text: Some developers publishing on Google Play have been sued for patent infringement by "patent trolls", people who own broad or vaguely worded patents that they use to target small developers. If the developer manages to successfully challenge the initial assertion, the "patent troll" changes the claim of the violation in order to accuse the developer of having violated a different assertion in the patent. This situation continues until the case goes into the legal system, which can have substantial economic costs, prompting some developers to settle. In February 2013, Austin Meyer, a flight simulator game developer, was sued for having used a copy-protection system in his app, a system that he said "Google gave us! And, of course, this is what Google provides to everyone else that is making a game for Android!" Meyer claimed that Google would not assist in the lawsuit, and he stated that he would not settle the case. His battle with the troll continued for several years, uploading a video in June 2016 discussing that he was then being sued for uploading his app to Google Play, because "the patent troll apparently owns the of the Google Play Store itself". "Android Authority" wrote that "This scenario has played out against many other app developers for many years", and have prompted discussions over "a larger issue at stake", in which developers stop making apps out of fear of patent problems.


title: Google Play

text: Users outside the countries/regions listed below only have access to free apps and games through Google Play.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Jerome Allen Seinfeld ( ; born April 29, 1954) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and producer. He is best known for playing a semi-fictionalized version of himself in the sitcom "Seinfeld", which he created and wrote with Larry David. The show aired on NBC from 1989 until 1998, becoming one of the most acclaimed and popular sitcoms of all time. As a stand-up comedian, Seinfeld specializes in observational comedy. In 2004, Comedy Central named him the 12th-greatest stand-up comedian of all time.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Seinfeld produced, co-wrote, and starred in the 2007 film "Bee Movie", which was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film. In 2010, he premiered a reality series called "The Marriage Ref", which aired for two seasons on NBC. Seinfeld is the creator and host of the web series "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" (2012–2019). He is married to author and philanthropist Jessica Seinfeld, with whom he has three children. Seinfeld has received twenty Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his work on "Seinfeld" and "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" as well as four Grammy Award nominations for his comedy albums.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Seinfeld was born in Brooklyn, a borough of New York City. His father, sign painter Kálmán Seinfeld, was Jewish and collected jokes that he heard while serving in World War II. His mother, Betty (née Hosni;) and her parents, Selim and Salha Hosni, were Jews from Aleppo, Syria. Their nationality was stated as Turkish when they immigrated in 1917, as Syria was under the Ottoman Empire. Seinfeld has an older sister, Carolyn. Salha's mother Garez Dayan, Seinfeld's great-grandmother, was a member of the Dayan rabbinic family, who trace their paternal ancestry back to the Medieval Exilarchs, and from the Exilarchs back to the Biblical King David. Seinfeld's second cousin is musician and actor Evan Seinfeld. Seinfeld grew up in Massapequa, New York, and attended Massapequa High School on Long Island. At the age of 16, he spent time volunteering in Kibbutz Sa'ar in Israel. He attended the State University of New York at Oswego, and transferred after his second year to Queens College, City University of New York, where he graduated in 1976 with a degree in communications and theater.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Seinfeld developed an interest in stand-up comedy after brief stints in college productions. He appeared on open-mic nights at Budd Friedman's Improv Club while attending Queens College. After graduation in 1976, he tried out at an open-mic night at New York City's Catch a Rising Star, which led to an appearance in a Rodney Dangerfield HBO special. In 1980, he had a small recurring role on the sitcom "Benson", playing Frankie, a mail-delivery boy who had comedy routines that no one wanted to hear. Seinfeld was abruptly fired from the show due to creative differences. Seinfeld has said that he was not told he had been fired until he turned up for the read-through session for an episode and found that there was no script for him. In May 1981, Seinfeld made a successful appearance on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson", impressing Carson and the audience, leading to frequent appearances on that show and others, including "Late Night with David Letterman". On September 5, 1987, his first one-hour special "Stand-Up Confidential" aired live on HBO.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Seinfeld created "The Seinfeld Chronicles" with Larry David in 1988 for NBC. The show was later renamed "Seinfeld" to avoid confusion with the short-lived teen sitcom "The Marshall Chronicles". By its third season, it had become the most watched sitcom on American television. The final episode aired in 1998, and the show has been a popular syndicated re-run ever since. Along with Seinfeld, the show starred "Saturday Night Live" alumna Julia Louis-Dreyfus and established actors Michael Richards and Jason Alexander. Alexander played George, a caricature of Larry David. Seinfeld is the only actor to appear in every episode of the show.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Seinfeld has said that his show was influenced by the 1950s sitcom "The Abbott and Costello Show". In the "Seinfeld" season 6 DVD set, commenting on the episode "The Gymnast", Seinfeld cited Jean Shepherd as an influence, saying, "He really formed my entire comedic sensibility—I learned how to do comedy from Jean Shepherd." From 2004 to 2007, the former "Seinfeld" cast and crew recorded audio commentaries for episodes of the DVD releases of the show.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: After he ended his sitcom, Seinfeld moved back to New York City and returned to stand-up comedy instead of staying in Los Angeles and furthering his acting career. In 1998, he went on tour and recorded a comedy special, titled "I'm Telling You for the Last Time". The process of developing and performing new material at clubs around the world was chronicled in a 2002 documentary, "Comedian", which also featured fellow comic Orny Adams and was directed by Christian Charles. Seinfeld has written several books, mostly archives of past routines. In the late 1990s, Apple Computer came up with the advertising slogan "Think different" and produced a 60-second commercial to promote the slogan. This commercial showed people who were able to "think differently," such as Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and many others. It was later cut short to 30 seconds and altered such that Seinfeld was included at the end, although he had not been in the original cut. This shorter version of the commercial aired only once, during the series finale of "Seinfeld". In 2004, Seinfeld appeared in two commercial webisodes promoting American Express, titled "The Adventures of Seinfeld & Superman". In these, Seinfeld appeared with a cartoon rendering of Superman, to whom reference was made in numerous episodes of "Seinfeld" as Seinfeld's hero, voiced by Patrick Warburton (character David Puddy on "Seinfeld"). The webisodes were directed by Barry Levinson and aired briefly on television. Seinfeld and "Superman" were also interviewed by Matt Lauer in a specially recorded interview for the "Today" show. On November 18, 2004, Seinfeld appeared at the National Museum of American History to donate the "puffy shirt" he wore in the "Seinfeld" episode of the same name. He also gave a speech when presenting the "puffy shirt," saying humorously that "This is the most embarrassing moment of my life." On May 13, 2006, Seinfeld had a cameo appearance on "Saturday Night Live" as host Julia Louis-Dreyfus' assassin. Louis-Dreyfus in her opening monolog mentioned the "Seinfeld curse." While talking about how ridiculous the "curse" was, a stage light suddenly fell next to her. The camera moved to a catwalk above the stage where Seinfeld was standing, holding a large pair of bolt cutters. He angrily muttered, "Damn it!" upset that it did not hit her. Louis-Dreyfus continued to say that she is indeed not cursed.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: On February 25, 2007, Seinfeld appeared at the 79th Academy Awards as the presenter for "Best Documentary." Before announcing the nominations, he did a monologue about the unspoken agreement between movie theater owners and movie patrons. On October 4, 2007, Seinfeld made a guest appearance as himself in the "30 Rock" episode "SeinfeldVision." On February 24, 2008, at the 80th Academy Awards, Seinfeld appeared as the voice of his "Bee Movie" animated character Barry, presenting Best Animated Short Film. Before announcing the nominees, he showed a montage of film clips featuring bees, saying that they were some of his early work (as Barry).


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: On June 2, 2008, amidst his spring 2008 tour, Seinfeld performed in his hometown of New York City for a one-night-only show at the Hammerstein Ballroom to benefit "Stand Up for a Cure", a charity aiding lung cancer research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. In August 2008, the Associated Press reported that Jerry Seinfeld would be the pitchman for Windows Vista, as part of a $300-million advertising campaign by Microsoft. The ads, which were intended to create interest for Windows in support of the subsequent "I'm a PC" advertisements, began airing in mid-September 2008. They were cut from television after three installments; Microsoft opted to continue with the "I'm a PC" advertisements and run the Seinfeld ads on the Microsoft website as a series of longer advertisements. In March 2009, it was announced that Seinfeld and the entire cast of "Seinfeld" would be appearing for a reunion in Larry David's HBO series "Curb Your Enthusiasm". The fictional reunion took place in the seventh season's finale and starred most of the original cast, including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, Michael Richards, in a multiple-episode arc. Seinfeld appeared on an episode of the Starz original series "Head Case". As was the case in many of his previous guest appearances on sitcoms, he played himself.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: In Australia, Seinfeld appeared on a series of advertisements for the Greater Building Society, a building society based in New South Wales and southeastern Queensland. His appearance in these ads was highly publicized and considered a coup for the society, being the third time Seinfeld had appeared in a television commercial. The advertisements were filmed in Cedarhurst, Long Island, with the street designed to emulate Beaumont Street in Hamilton, where the Greater's head offices are located. Seinfeld also wrote the scripts for the 15 advertisements that were filmed. The ads largely aired in the Northern New South Wales television market, where the society has most of its branches. Seinfeld was the first guest on Jay Leno's talk show "The Jay Leno Show", which premiered on September 14, 2009. Seinfeld was featured on "Saturday Night Live"s Weekend Update sketch to do the "Really!?!" segment with Seth Meyers. He executive produced and regularly appeared as a panelist in "The Marriage Ref". On August 30, 2010, Seinfeld made a surprise guest appearance on "The Howard Stern Show", ending the feud the two had in the early 1990s.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Seinfeld toured the U.S. in 2011 and made his first stand-up appearance in the UK in 11 years. In July 2011, he was a surprise guest on "The Daily Show", helping Jon Stewart to suppress his urge to tell "cheap" "Michele Bachmann's husband acts gay" jokes. Seinfeld also launched a personal archives website at JerrySeinfeld.com and appeared in the HBO special "Talking Funny" with fellow comedians Chris Rock, Louis C.K., and Ricky Gervais in the same year.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: In 2012, Seinfeld started a web series titled "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee", in which he would pick up a fellow comedian in a different car each episode and take them out for coffee and conversation. The show originally aired on the Crackle streaming service and then was bought by Netflix. The initial series consisted of ten episodes lasting from 7 to 25 minutes each. The show has continued to get high-profile guests such as Tina Fey, Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, David Letterman, Chris Rock, John Mulaney, Mel Brooks, Don Rickles, Ellen DeGeneres, Howard Stern, and Jerry Lewis. The show has also hosted "Seinfeld" alums Larry David, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, and Michael Richards. Season seven featured its most high-profile guest, then-President Barack Obama. In a farewell tribute video for the Obamas before the President left office, Seinfeld stated, "That knocking on the Oval Office window. That probably was the peak of my entire existence."


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Seinfeld signed a deal with Netflix in January 2017. As part of the deal, all episodes of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" would be made available on the streaming service, in addition to a new 24-episode season.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: In June 2013, Seinfeld appeared on rapper Wale's album "The Gifted", on the song "Outro About Nothing." Seinfeld received coverage for his speech at the 2014 Clio Awards ceremony, where he received an honorary award, as media reporters said that he "mocked" and "ripped apart" the advertising industry; his statement that "I love advertising because I love lying" received particular attention.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: In 2014, Seinfeld hosted the special "Don Rickles: One Night Only" at the Apollo Theatre. The event celebrated Don Rickles and his career, but also served as a roast among friends. Those who participated in the event included Jon Stewart, David Letterman, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Nathan Lane, Regis Philbin, Robert De Niro, and Martin Scorsese.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: On February 15, 2015, Seinfeld made a guest appearance on the "Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special", where he hosted the "Questions from the Audience" segment, which included cameos from Michael Douglas, John Goodman, James Franco, Larry David, Ellen Cleghorne, Dakota Johnson, Tim Meadows, Bob Odenkirk, and Sarah Palin (who Seinfeld initially mistook for Tina Fey).


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: On May 20, 2015, Seinfeld made a guest appearance on David Letterman's final "Late Show" episode. Seinfeld joined other friends of the show to pay tribute to Letterman. The other guests included Alec Baldwin, Barbara Walters, Steve Martin, Jim Carrey, Chris Rock, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Peyton Manning, Tina Fey, and Bill Murray who all participated in The Top Ten List segment, "Things I've Always Wanted to Say to Dave."


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: In January 2017, Seinfeld went on "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon" and joined Dave Chappelle and Jimmy Fallon in honoring outgoing First Lady Michelle Obama, and played a game of "Catchphrase", which Obama and Fallon won to Seinfeld's dismay.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: In October 2020, Seinfeld joined Steve Martin in a discussion about comedy at "The New Yorker Festival". They discussed subjects ranging from the creative process, Netflix, and The Oscars, to their comedy backgrounds, and the future of comedy during the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Seinfeld made a deal with the streaming service "Netflix" that included placing "Seinfeld" and "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" on their streaming service as well as two new Seinfeld stand-up specials and the development of scripted and non-scripted comedy programming.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: On September 19, 2017, Netflix released the stand-up comedy special "Jerry Before Seinfeld". The special follows Seinfeld as he returns for a stand-up routine at the New York City comedy club, Comic Strip Live, which started his career. The special is intercut with documentary clips and his stand-up special. The special was later released as an LP, CD and download album, and was nominated for a 2018 Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: In 2020, it was announced that Netflix would be releasing Seinfeld's first original stand-up special in 22 years, "23 Hours to Kill". The special premiered on May 5.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Seinfeld wrote the book "SeinLanguage", released in 1993. Written as his television show was first rising in popularity, it is primarily an adaptation of his stand-up material. The title comes from an article in "Entertainment Weekly" listing the numerous catchphrases for which the show was responsible. In 2002, he wrote the children's book "Halloween". The book was illustrated by James Bennett. Seinfeld wrote the forewords to Ted L. Nancy's "Letters from a Nut" series of books and Ed Broth's "Stories from a Moron". Seinfeld also wrote the foreword to the "Peanut Butter & Co. Cookbook". In October 2020, Seinfeld released his new book "Is This Anything?". The book chronicles Seinfeld's 45 years working in comedy and contains many of his best bits that span from various decades.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Seinfeld has stated, "On the Mount Rushmore of stand-up comedy, there are four faces, in my opinion: Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Bill Cosby and Don Rickles." Seinfeld has also cited as his influences the humorist Jean Shepherd, "Mad Magazine", Jonathan Winters, Jerry Lewis, Robert Klein, and Abbott and Costello. He stated, "Monty Python was a gigantic influence on me. They were just about silly, funny things that meant nothing, and that’s the stuff I love. There’s a wonderful childlike freedom in those kinds of things."


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: In the Netflix comedy special, "Jerry Before Seinfeld", he displayed his personal comedy albums collection from when he was a teenager. These albums included:


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: In an interview with "Entertainment Weekly", Seinfeld stated his five favorite films are "The Heartbreak Kid" (1972), "The Graduate" (1967), "The In-Laws" (1979), "A Night at the Opera" (1935), and "Glengarry Glen Ross" (1992).


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Those influenced by Seinfeld include John Mulaney, Jim Gaffigan, Judd Apatow, Ellen DeGeneres, and Issa Rae.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Seinfeld is a fan of the New York Mets, and periodically calls Steve Somers' show on WFAN-AM, a sports talk radio station, as "Jerry from Queens." Seinfeld called four innings of a Mets game on SportsNet New York on June 23, 2010, reuniting with analyst Keith Hernandez, who appeared in the "Seinfeld" two-part episode entitled "The Boyfriend."


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: In a 2014 interview with NBC News, Seinfeld made statements suggesting that he believed he was on the autism spectrum. However, following criticism for his alleged self-diagnosis, he later clarified that he is not autistic and had been commenting on a play about the condition that he "related to [...] on some level."


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Seinfeld has made several political contributions, including to George W. Bush's and Al Gore's presidential campaigns in 2000, and subsequently to four Democratic Party primary candidates in 2000 and 2004.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Years before "Seinfeld" was created, Seinfeld dated Carol Leifer. She was a fellow comedian, and one of the inspirations for the "Seinfeld" character Elaine Benes. On national television with sex therapist and talk show host Dr. Ruth Westheimer, he explained how, in 1984, he was engaged but called it off.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: At age 39, Seinfeld started dating Shoshanna Lonstein, who was 18. Early in their relationship, "Spy Magazine" referred to her as "a legal voter", mocking her young age. They dated for approximately four years, from 1993 to 1997. She transferred from GW to UCLA, in part to be with Seinfeld, and cited missing New York City and constant press coverage as reasons for the relationship ending.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: In August 1998 while at a Reebok Sports Club, Seinfeld met Jessica Sklar, a public relations executive for Tommy Hilfiger who had just returned from a three-week honeymoon in Italy with then husband Eric Nederlander, a theatrical producer and scion of a theater-owning family. Unaware of Sklar's marital status, Seinfeld invited her out. When Sklar eventually told Seinfeld about her relationship situation, she said, “I told him I didn’t think this was the right time for me to be involved with anybody..." Two months later Sklar filed for divorce and continued dating Seinfeld. The pair married on December 25, 1999. Comedian George Wallace was the best man at the wedding. After the nuptials, Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld bought Billy Joel's house in Amagansett, Long Island, for US$32 million after news of the couple's interest in the property became public in 2000. The Seinfelds have one daughter and two sons.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Seinfeld stated that he took a Scientology course when he was in his 20s; he said that he found it interesting but that he didn't pursue it any further.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: In December 2012, Seinfeld said that he had been practicing Transcendental Meditation (TM) for 40 years. He promoted the use of the technique in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder with Bob Roth of the David Lynch Foundation in December 2012 on "Good Morning America", and also appeared at a 2009 David Lynch Foundation benefit for TM, at which Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr appeared. On November 5, 2015, the David Lynch Foundation organized a benefit concert at New York City's Carnegie Hall called "Change Begins Within" to promote transcendental meditation for stress control. "It's been the greatest companion technique of living that I've ever come across, and I'm thrilled to be part of this movement that seems to have really been reinvigorated by Bob [Roth] and David Lynch," Seinfeld said. "I would do anything that I could to promote it in the world, because I think it's the greatest thing as a life tool, as a work tool and just making things make sense."


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: In 1999, Seinfeld auctioned a Breitling Chronomat watch as part of the "Famous Faces, Watch Auction For Charity" event in New York City. This watch sold for $11,000.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: In 2001, Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld created the charity organization The Good+Foundation after their first child was born. Good+Foundation grants donations of products and services to programs that have demonstrated a capacity to address family poverty in three focus areas: supporting new mothers, investing in early childhood, and engaging fathers. GOOD+ Foundation has donated over $42M worth of items through its partner network across the United States.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: According to "Forbes" magazine, Seinfeld's cumulative earnings from "Seinfeld" as of 2004 was $267 million, placing him at the top of the celebrity earnings list that year. He turned down $5 million per episode, for 22 episodes, to continue the show for a 10th season. Seinfeld earned $100 million from syndication deals and stand-up performances in 2004, and $60 million in 2006. He also earned $10 million for appearing with Bill Gates in Microsoft's 2008 advertisements for Windows. Between June 2008 and June 2009, Seinfeld earned $85 million, making him the world's highest-paid comedian during those 12 months. In 2013, "Forbes" documented Seinfeld's annual income as $32 million. In mid-2013, Seinfeld disputed "Forbes" claims regarding his income and net worth on "The Howard Stern Show". Seinfeld was ranked by "Forbes" the highest-paid comedian for 2015, the second-highest paid in 2016, and the highest-paid again in 2017. Seinfeld's income between June 2016 and June 2017 was $69 million.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: Seinfeld is an automobile enthusiast and collector, and he owns a collection of about 150 cars, including a large Porsche collection. He rented a hangar at the Santa Monica Airport in Santa Monica, California, for an extended period during the 1990s for storage of some of the vehicles in the collection. In 2002, Seinfeld purchased property on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City where he built a $1.4 million two-story garage to store part of his Porsche collection on the East Coast. One tally has Seinfeld owning 43 Porsches. Paul Bannister has written that Seinfeld's collection includes Porsche 911s from various years, 10 Porsche Boxsters each painted a different color, and the 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder, the same model and pearl-grey color that actor James Dean was driving when he died after crashing the car.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: The Discovery Channel television show "Chasing Classic Cars" claimed that Seinfeld owns the first and last produced air-cooled Porsche 911s. The centerpiece is a $700,000 Porsche 959, one of only 337 built. He was originally not allowed to drive it, because the car was "not street legal." U.S. emissions and crash tests had not been performed for the model because Porsche refused to donate four Porsche 959s for destruction tests. Seinfeld imported the car "for exhibition purposes," on the stipulation that it may never be driven on U.S. roads. The car was made U.S. street legal in 1999 under the "Show or Display" federal law. Seinfeld wrote an article for the February 2004 issue of "Automobile", reviewing the Porsche Carrera GT.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: In 2008, Seinfeld was involved in a car accident when the brakes on his 1967 Fiat 500 failed and, to avoid an intersection, he pulled the emergency brake while turning sharply, ultimately causing the car to flip onto its side. No one was hurt.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: A coffee and espresso machine aficionado, Seinfeld owns multiple espresso machines, including the $17,000 Elektra Belle Epoque and two machines manufactured by Slayer and Breville, respectively. Seinfeld described his single-group Slayer machine, which costs upwards of $8,500, as a "beautiful machine." When NPR asked him about the influence of coffee culture in the U.S., Seinfeld responded in 2013:I never liked [coffee] and I didn't understand it and I used to do a lot of stuff in my stand-up set in the '80s and '90s about how I don't 'get' coffee. And then something happened about five years ago. I started touring a lot, and we would have these great big, fun breakfasts in the hotel and [coffee] just seemed to go really well [with breakfast]. [Now], I've just started this espresso thing.


title: Jerry Seinfeld

text: The list below only includes episodes mainly written by Seinfeld, as he (and Larry David in Seasons 1 through 7) rewrote the drafts for each episode.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school at the age of 12 to work in a boot-blacking factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. After three years he returned to school, before he began his literary career as a journalist. Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, for education, and for other social reforms.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of "The Pickwick Papers", a publishing phenomenon—thanks largely to the introduction of the character Sam Weller in the fourth episode—that sparked "Pickwick" merchandise and spin-offs. Within a few years Dickens had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire and keen observation of character and society. His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication. Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense. The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback. For example, when his wife's chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in "David Copperfield" seemed to reflect her own disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features. His plots were carefully constructed and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives. Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.


title: Charles Dickens

text: His 1843 novella "A Christmas Carol" remains especially popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. "Oliver Twist" and "Great Expectations" are also frequently adapted and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel "A Tale of Two Cities" (set in London and Paris) is his best-known work of historical fiction. The most famous celebrity of his era, he undertook, in response to public demand, a series of public reading tours in the later part of his career. The term "Dickensian" is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social or working conditions, or comically repulsive characters.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 at 1 Mile End Terrace (now 393 Commercial Road), Landport in Portsea Island (Portsmouth), Hampshire, the second of eight children of Elizabeth Dickens (née Barrow; 1789–1863) and John Dickens (1785–1851). His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office and was temporarily stationed in the district. He asked Christopher Huffam, rigger to His Majesty's Navy, gentleman, and head of an established firm, to act as godfather to Charles. Huffam is thought to be the inspiration for Paul Dombey, the owner of a shipping company in Dickens's novel "Dombey and Son" (1848).


title: Charles Dickens

text: In January 1815, John Dickens was called back to London and the family moved to Norfolk Street, Fitzrovia. When Charles was four, they relocated to Sheerness and thence to Chatham, Kent, where he spent his formative years until the age of 11. His early life seems to have been idyllic, though he thought himself a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy".


title: Charles Dickens

text: Charles spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, including the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding, as well as "Robinson Crusoe" and "Gil Blas". He read and reread "The Arabian Nights" and the Collected Farces of Elizabeth Inchbald. At age 7 he first saw Joseph Grimaldi—the father of modern clowning—perform at the Star Theatre, Rochester. He later imitated Grimaldi's clowning on several occasions, and would also edit the "Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi". He retained poignant memories of childhood, helped by an excellent memory of people and events, which he used in his writing. His father's brief work as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office afforded him a few years of private education, first at a dame school and then at a school run by William Giles, a dissenter, in Chatham.


title: Charles Dickens

text: This period came to an end in June 1822, when John Dickens was recalled to Navy Pay Office headquarters at Somerset House and the family (except for Charles, who stayed behind to finish his final term at school) moved to Camden Town in London. The family had left Kent amidst rapidly mounting debts and, living beyond his means, John Dickens was forced by his creditors into the Marshalsea debtors' prison in Southwark, London in 1824. His wife and youngest children joined him there, as was the practice at the time. Charles, then 12 years old, boarded with Elizabeth Roylance, a family friend, at 112 College Place, Camden Town. Mrs Roylance was "a reduced impoverished old lady, long known to our family", whom Dickens later immortalised, "with a few alterations and embellishments", as "Mrs Pipchin" in "Dombey and Son". Later, he lived in a back-attic in the house of an agent for the Insolvent Court, Archibald Russell, "a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman ... with a quiet old wife" and lame son, in Lant Street in Southwark. They provided the inspiration for the Garlands in "The Old Curiosity Shop".


title: Charles Dickens

text: On Sundays – with his sister Frances, free from her studies at the Royal Academy of Music – he spent the day at the Marshalsea. Dickens later used the prison as a setting in "Little Dorrit". To pay for his board and to help his family, Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station, where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. The strenuous and often harsh working conditions made a lasting impression on Dickens and later influenced his fiction and essays, becoming the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor. He later wrote that he wondered "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age". As he recalled to John Forster (from "Life of Charles Dickens"):


title: Charles Dickens

text: When the warehouse was moved to Chandos Street in the smart, busy district of Covent Garden, the boys worked in a room in which the window gave onto the street. Small audiences gathered and watched them at work – in Dickens's biographer Simon Callow's estimation, the public display was "a new refinement added to his misery".


title: Charles Dickens

text: A few months after his imprisonment, John Dickens's mother, Elizabeth Dickens, died and bequeathed him £450. On the expectation of this legacy, Dickens was released from prison. Under the Insolvent Debtors Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors and he and his family left the Marshalsea, for the home of Mrs Roylance.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Charles's mother, Elizabeth Dickens, did not immediately support his removal from the boot-blacking warehouse. This influenced Dickens's view that a father should rule the family and a mother find her proper sphere inside the home: "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back." His mother's failure to request his return was a factor in his dissatisfied attitude towards women.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Righteous indignation stemming from his own situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes of his works, and it was this unhappy period in his youth to which he alluded in his favourite, and most autobiographical, novel, "David Copperfield": "I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!"


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens was eventually sent to the Wellington House Academy in Camden Town, where he remained until March 1827, having spent about two years there. He did not consider it to be a good school: "Much of the haphazard, desultory teaching, poor discipline punctuated by the headmaster's sadistic brutality, the seedy ushers and general run-down atmosphere, are embodied in Mr Creakle's Establishment in "David Copperfield"."


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens worked at the law office of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn, as a junior clerk from May 1827 to November 1828. He was a gifted mimic and impersonated those around him: clients, lawyers and clerks. He went to theatres obsessively: he claimed that for at least three years he went to the theatre every day. His favourite actor was Charles Mathews and Dickens learnt his "monopolylogues" (farces in which Mathews played every character) by heart. Then, having learned Gurney's system of shorthand in his spare time, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant relative, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at Doctors' Commons and Dickens was able to share his box there to report the legal proceedings for nearly four years. This education was to inform works such as Nicholas Nickleby, "Dombey and Son" and especially "Bleak House", whose vivid portrayal of the machinations and bureaucracy of the legal system did much to enlighten the general public and served as a vehicle for dissemination of Dickens's own views regarding, particularly, the heavy burden on the poor who were forced by circumstances to "go to law".


title: Charles Dickens

text: In 1830, Dickens met his first love, Maria Beadnell, thought to have been the model for the character Dora in "David Copperfield". Maria's parents disapproved of the courtship and ended the relationship by sending her to school in Paris.


title: Charles Dickens

text: In 1832, at the age of 20, Dickens was energetic and increasingly self-confident. He enjoyed mimicry and popular entertainment, lacked a clear, specific sense of what he wanted to become, and yet knew he wanted fame. Drawn to the theatre – he became an early member of the Garrick Club – he landed an acting audition at Covent Garden, where the manager George Bartley and the actor Charles Kemble were to see him. Dickens prepared meticulously and decided to imitate the comedian Charles Mathews, but ultimately he missed the audition because of a cold. Before another opportunity arose, he had set out on his career as a writer.


title: Charles Dickens

text: In 1833, Dickens submitted his first story, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", to the London periodical "Monthly Magazine". William Barrow, Dickens's uncle on his mother's side, offered him a job on "The Mirror of Parliament" and he worked in the House of Commons for the first time early in 1832. He rented rooms at Furnival's Inn and worked as a political journalist, reporting on Parliamentary debates, and he travelled across Britain to cover election campaigns for the "Morning Chronicle". His journalism, in the form of sketches in periodicals, formed his first collection of pieces, published in 1836: "Sketches by Boz" – Boz being a family nickname he employed as a pseudonym for some years. Dickens apparently adopted it from the nickname 'Moses', which he had given to his youngest brother Augustus Dickens, after a character in Oliver Goldsmith's "The Vicar of Wakefield". When pronounced by anyone with a head cold, "Moses" became "Boses" – later shortened to "Boz". Dickens's own name was considered "queer" by a contemporary critic, who wrote in 1849: "Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations." Dickens contributed to and edited journals throughout his literary career. In January 1835, the "Morning Chronicle" launched an evening edition, under the editorship of the "Chronicle"s music critic, George Hogarth. Hogarth invited him to contribute "Street Sketches" and Dickens became a regular visitor to his Fulham house – excited by Hogarth's friendship with Walter Scott (whom Dickens greatly admired) and enjoying the company of Hogarth's three daughters: Georgina, Mary and 19-year-old Catherine.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens made rapid progress both professionally and socially. He began a friendship with William Harrison Ainsworth, the author of the highwayman novel "Rookwood" (1834), whose bachelor salon in Harrow Road had become the meeting place for a set that included Daniel Maclise, Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and George Cruikshank. All these became his friends and collaborators, with the exception of Disraeli, and he met his first publisher, John Macrone, at the house. The success of "Sketches by Boz" led to a proposal from publishers Chapman and Hall for Dickens to supply text to match Robert Seymour's engraved illustrations in a monthly letterpress. Seymour committed suicide after the second instalment and Dickens, who wanted to write a connected series of sketches, hired "Phiz" to provide the engravings (which were reduced from four to two per instalment) for the story. The resulting story became "The Pickwick Papers" and, although the first few episodes were not successful, the introduction of the Cockney character Sam Weller in the fourth episode (the first to be illustrated by Phiz) marked a sharp climb in its popularity. The final instalment sold 40,000 copies. On the impact of the character, "The Paris Review" stated, "arguably the most historic bump in English publishing is the Sam Weller Bump." A publishing phenomenon, John Sutherland called "The Pickwick Papers" "[t]he most important single novel of the Victorian era". The unprecedented success led to numerous spin-offs and merchandise ranging from "Pickwick" cigars, playing cards, china figurines, Sam Weller puzzles, Weller boot polish and joke books.


title: Charles Dickens

text: On the creation of modern mass culture, Nicholas Dames in "The Atlantic" writes, "Literature" is not a big enough category for "Pickwick". It defined its own, a new one that we have learned to call "entertainment." In November 1836, Dickens accepted the position of editor of "Bentley's Miscellany", a position he held for three years, until he fell out with the owner. In 1836, as he finished the last instalments of "The Pickwick Papers", he began writing the beginning instalments of "Oliver Twist" – writing as many as 90 pages a month – while continuing work on "Bentley's" and also writing four plays, the production of which he oversaw. "Oliver Twist", published in 1838, became one of Dickens's better known stories and was the first Victorian novel with a child protagonist.


title: Charles Dickens

text: On 2 April 1836, after a one-year engagement, and between episodes two and three of "The Pickwick Papers", Dickens married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1815–1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the "Evening Chronicle". They were married in St Luke's Church, Chelsea, London. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk in Kent, the couple returned to lodgings at Furnival's Inn. The first of their ten children, Charles, was born in January 1837 and a few months later the family set up home in Bloomsbury at 48 Doughty Street, London (on which Charles had a three-year lease at £80 a year) from 25 March 1837 until December 1839. Dickens's younger brother Frederick and Catherine's 17-year-old sister Mary Hogarth moved in with them. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. Unusually for Dickens, as a consequence of his shock, he stopped working, and he and Catherine stayed at a little farm on Hampstead Heath for a fortnight. Dickens idealised Mary; the character he fashioned after her, Rose Maylie, he found he could not now kill, as he had planned, in his fiction, and, according to Ackroyd, he drew on memories of her for his later descriptions of Little Nell and Florence Dombey. His grief was so great that he was unable to meet the deadline for the June instalment of "The Pickwick Papers" and had to cancel the "Oliver Twist" instalment that month as well. The time in Hampstead was the occasion for a growing bond between Dickens and John Forster to develop; Forster soon became his unofficial business manager and the first to read his work.


title: Charles Dickens

text: His success as a novelist continued. The young Queen Victoria read both "Oliver Twist" and "The Pickwick Papers", staying up until midnight to discuss them. "Nicholas Nickleby" (1838–39), "The Old Curiosity Shop" (1840–41) and, finally, his first historical novel, "Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty", as part of the "Master Humphrey's Clock" series (1840–41), were all published in monthly instalments before being made into books.


title: Charles Dickens

text: In the midst of all his activity during this period, there was discontent with his publishers and John Macrone was bought off, while Richard Bentley signed over all his rights in "Oliver Twist". Other signs of a certain restlessness and discontent emerged; in Broadstairs he flirted with Eleanor Picken, the young fiancée of his solicitor's best friend and one night grabbed her and ran with her down to the sea. He declared they were both to drown there in the "sad sea waves". She finally got free, and afterwards kept her distance. In June 1841, he precipitously set out on a two-month tour of Scotland and then, in September 1841, telegraphed Forster that he had decided to go to America. "Master Humphrey's Clock" was shut down, though Dickens was still keen on the idea of the weekly magazine, a form he liked, an appreciation that had begun with his childhood reading of the 18th-century magazines "Tatler" and "The Spectator".


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens was perturbed by the return to power of the Tories, whom he described as "people whom, politically, I despise and abhor." He had been tempted to stand for the Liberals in Reading, but decided against it due to financial straits. He wrote three anti-Tory verse satires ("The Fine Old English Gentleman", "The Quack Doctor's Proclamation", and "Subjects for Painters") which were published in "The Examiner".


title: Charles Dickens

text: On 22 January 1842, Dickens and his wife arrived in Boston, Massachusetts, aboard the RMS "Britannia" during their first trip to the United States and Canada. At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, joined the Dickens household, now living at Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone to care for the young family they had left behind. She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser and friend until Dickens's death in 1870. Dickens modelled the character of Agnes Wickfield after Georgina and Mary.


title: Charles Dickens

text: He described his impressions in a travelogue, "American Notes for General Circulation". In "Notes", Dickens includes a powerful condemnation of slavery which he had attacked as early as "The Pickwick Papers", correlating the emancipation of the poor in England with the abolition of slavery abroad citing newspaper accounts of runaway slaves disfigured by their masters. In spite of the abolitionist sentiments gleaned from his trip to America, some modern commentators have pointed out inconsistencies in Dickens's views on racial inequality. For instance, he has been criticized for his subsequent acquiescence in Governor Eyre's harsh crackdown during the 1860s Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and his failure to join other British progressives in condemning it. From Richmond, Virginia, Dickens returned to Washington, D.C., and started a trek westward, with brief pauses in Cincinnati and Louisville, to St. Louis, Missouri. While there, he expressed a desire to see an American prairie before returning east. A group of 13 men then set out with Dickens to visit Looking Glass Prairie, a trip 30 miles into Illinois.


title: Charles Dickens

text: During his American visit, Dickens spent a month in New York City, giving lectures, raising the question of international copyright laws and the pirating of his work in America. He persuaded a group of 25 writers, headed by Washington Irving, to sign a petition for him to take to Congress, but the press were generally hostile to this, saying that he should be grateful for his popularity and that it was mercenary to complain about his work being pirated.


title: Charles Dickens

text: The popularity he gained caused a shift in his self-perception according to critic Kate Flint, who writes that he "found himself a cultural commodity, and its circulation had passed out his control", causing him to become interested in and delve into themes of public and personal personas in the next novels. She writes that he assumed a role of "influential commentator", publicly and in his fiction, evident in his next few books. His trip to the U.S. ended with a trip to Canada – Niagara Falls, Toronto, Kingston and Montreal – where he appeared on stage in light comedies.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Soon after his return to England, Dickens began work on the first of his Christmas stories, "A Christmas Carol", written in 1843, which was followed by "The Chimes" in 1844 and "The Cricket on the Hearth" in 1845. Of these, "A Christmas Carol" was most popular and, tapping into an old tradition, did much to promote a renewed enthusiasm for the joys of Christmas in Britain and America. The seeds for the story became planted in Dickens's mind during a trip to Manchester to witness the conditions of the manufacturing workers there. This, along with scenes he had recently witnessed at the Field Lane Ragged School, caused Dickens to resolve to "strike a sledge hammer blow" for the poor. As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He later wrote that as the tale unfolded he "wept and laughed, and wept again" as he "walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed".


title: Charles Dickens

text: After living briefly in Italy (1844), Dickens travelled to Switzerland (1846), where he began work on "Dombey and Son" (1846–48). This and "David Copperfield" (1849–50) mark a significant artistic break in Dickens's career as his novels became more serious in theme and more carefully planned than his early works.


title: Charles Dickens

text: At about this time, he was made aware of a large embezzlement at the firm where his brother, Augustus, worked (John Chapman & Co). It had been carried out by Thomas Powell, a clerk, who was on friendly terms with Dickens and who had acted as mentor to Augustus when he started work. Powell was also an author and poet and knew many of the famous writers of the day. After further fraudulent activities, Powell fled to New York and published a book called "The Living Authors of England" with a chapter on Charles Dickens, who was not amused by what Powell had written. One item that seemed to have annoyed him was the assertion that he had based the character of Paul Dombey ("Dombey and Son") on Thomas Chapman, one of the principal partners at John Chapman & Co. Dickens immediately sent a letter to Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the New York literary magazine "The Knickerbocker", saying that Powell was a forger and thief. Clark published the letter in the "New-York Tribune" and several other papers picked up on the story. Powell began proceedings to sue these publications and Clark was arrested. Dickens, realising that he had acted in haste, contacted John Chapman & Co to seek written confirmation of Powell's guilt. Dickens did receive a reply confirming Powell's embezzlement, but once the directors realised this information might have to be produced in court, they refused to make further disclosures. Owing to the difficulties of providing evidence in America to support his accusations, Dickens eventually made a private settlement with Powell out of court.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens in May 1846 about setting up a home for the redemption of fallen women of the working class. Coutts envisioned a home that would replace the punitive regimes of existing institutions with a reformative environment conducive to education and proficiency in domestic household chores. After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named Urania Cottage, in the Lime Grove area of Shepherd's Bush, which he managed for ten years, setting the house rules, reviewing the accounts and interviewing prospective residents. Emigration and marriage were central to Dickens's agenda for the women on leaving Urania Cottage, from which it is estimated that about 100 women graduated between 1847 and 1859.


title: Charles Dickens

text: As a young man, Dickens expressed a distaste for certain aspects of organised religion. In 1836, in a pamphlet titled "Sunday Under Three Heads", he defended the people's right to pleasure, opposing a plan to prohibit games on Sundays. "Look into your churches – diminished congregations and scanty attendance. People have grown sullen and obstinate, and are becoming disgusted with the faith which condemns them to such a day as this, once in every seven. They display their feeling by staying away [from church]. Turn into the streets [on a Sunday] and mark the rigid gloom that reigns over everything around."


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens honoured the figure of Jesus Christ. He is regarded as a professing Christian. His son, Henry Fielding Dickens, described him as someone who "possessed deep religious convictions". In the early 1840s, he had shown an interest in Unitarian Christianity and Robert Browning remarked that "Mr Dickens is an enlightened Unitarian." Professor Gary Colledge has written that he "never strayed from his attachment to popular lay Anglicanism". Dickens authored a work called "The Life of Our Lord" (1846), a book about the life of Christ, written with the purpose of sharing his faith with his children and family. In a scene from "David Copperfield", Dickens echoed Geoffrey Chaucer's use of from "Troilus and Criseyde" (Dickens held a copy in his library), with G. K. Chesterton writing, "among the great canonical English authors, Chaucer and Dickens have the most in common."


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens disapproved of Roman Catholicism and 19th-century evangelicalism, seeing both as extremes of Christianity and likely to limit personal expression, and was critical of what he saw as the hypocrisy of religious institutions and philosophies like spiritualism, all of which he considered deviations from the true spirit of Christianity, as shown in the book he wrote for his family in 1846. While Dickens advocated equal rights for Catholics in England, he strongly disliked how individual civil liberties were often threatened in countries where Catholicism predominated and referred to the Catholic Church as "that curse upon the world." Dickens also rejected the Evangelical conviction that the Bible was the infallible word of God. His ideas on Biblical interpretation were similar to the Liberal Anglican Arthur Penrhyn Stanley's doctrine of "progressive revelation." Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky referred to Dickens as "that great Christian writer".


title: Charles Dickens

text: In December 1845, Dickens took up the editorship of the London-based "Daily News", a liberal paper through which Dickens hoped to advocate, in his own words, "the Principles of Progress and Improvement, of Education and Civil and Religious Liberty and Equal Legislation." Among the other contributors Dickens chose to write for the paper were the radical economist Thomas Hodgskin and the social reformer Douglas William Jerrold, who frequently attacked the Corn Laws. Dickens lasted only ten weeks on the job before resigning due to a combination of exhaustion and frustration with one of the paper's co-owners.


title: Charles Dickens

text: The Francophile Dickens often holidayed in France and, in a speech delivered in Paris in 1846 in French, called the French "the first people in the universe". During his visit to Paris, Dickens met the French literati Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Eugène Scribe, Théophile Gautier, François-René de Chateaubriand and Eugène Sue. In early 1849, Dickens started to write "David Copperfield". It was published between 1849 and 1850. In Dickens's biography, "Life of Charles Dickens" (1872), John Forster wrote of "David Copperfield", "underneath the fiction lay something of the author's life". It was Dickens's personal favourite among his own novels, as he wrote in the author's preface to the 1867 edition of the novel.


title: Charles Dickens

text: In late November 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he wrote "Bleak House" (1852–53), "Hard Times" (1854) and "Little Dorrit" (1856). It was here that he indulged in the amateur theatricals described in Forster's "Life of Charles Dickens". During this period, he worked closely with the novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins. In 1856, his income from writing allowed him to buy Gads Hill Place in Higham, Kent. As a child, Dickens had walked past the house and dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Part 1" and this literary connection pleased him.


title: Charles Dickens

text: During this time Dickens was also the publisher, editor and a major contributor to the journals "Household Words" (1850–1859) and "All the Year Round" (1858–1870). In 1855, when Dickens's good friend and Liberal MP Austen Henry Layard formed an Administrative Reform Association to demand significant reforms of Parliament, Dickens joined and volunteered his resources in support of Layard's cause. With the exception of Lord John Russell, who was the only leading politician in whom Dickens had any faith and to whom he later dedicated "A Tale of Two Cities", Dickens believed that the political aristocracy and their incompetence were the death of England. When he and Layard were accused of fomenting class conflict, Dickens replied that the classes were already in opposition and the fault was with the aristocratic class. Dickens used his pulpit in "Household Words" to champion the Reform Association. He also commented on foreign affairs, declaring his support for Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, helping raise funds for their campaigns and stating that "a united Italy would be of vast importance to the peace of the world, and would be a rock in Louis Napoleon's way," and that "I feel for Italy almost as if I were an Italian born."


title: Charles Dickens

text: Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857, Dickens joined in the widespread criticism of the East India Company for its role in the event, but reserved his fury for the rebels themselves, wishing that he was the commander-in-chief in India so that he would be able to, "do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested."


title: Charles Dickens

text: In 1857, Dickens hired professional actresses for the play "The Frozen Deep", written by him and his protégé, Wilkie Collins. Dickens fell in love with one of the actresses, Ellen Ternan, and this passion was to last the rest of his life. Dickens was 45 and Ternan 18 when he made the decision, which went strongly against Victorian convention, to separate from his wife, Catherine, in 1858; divorce was still unthinkable for someone as famous as he was. When Catherine left, never to see her husband again, she took with her one child, leaving the other children to be raised by her sister Georgina who chose to stay at Gads Hill.


title: Charles Dickens

text: During this period, whilst pondering a project to give public readings for his own profit, Dickens was approached through a charitable appeal by Great Ormond Street Hospital to help it survive its first major financial crisis. His "Drooping Buds" essay in "Household Words" earlier on 3 April 1852 was considered by the hospital's founders to have been the catalyst for the hospital's success. Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked by his friend, the hospital's founder Charles West, to preside over the appeal, and he threw himself into the task, heart and soul. Dickens's public readings secured sufficient funds for an endowment to put the hospital on a sound financial footing; one reading on 9 February 1858 alone raised £3,000.


title: Charles Dickens

text: After separating from Catherine, Dickens undertook a series of hugely popular and remunerative reading tours which, together with his journalism, were to absorb most of his creative energies for the next decade, in which he was to write only two more novels. His first reading tour, lasting from April 1858 to February 1859, consisted of 129 appearances in 49 towns throughout England, Scotland and Ireland. Dickens's continued fascination with the theatrical world was written into the theatre scenes in "Nicholas Nickleby", but more importantly he found an outlet in public readings. In 1866, he undertook a series of public readings in England and Scotland, with more the following year in England and Ireland.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Other works soon followed, including "A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) and "Great Expectations" (1861), which were resounding successes. Set in London and Paris, "A Tale of Two Cities" is his best-known work of historical fiction and includes the famous opening sentence which begins with "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." It is regularly cited as one of the best-selling novels of all time. Themes in "Great Expectations" include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil.


title: Charles Dickens

text: In early September 1860, in a field behind Gads Hill, Dickens made a bonfire of most of his correspondence; only those letters on business matters were spared. Since Ellen Ternan also destroyed all of his letters to her, the extent of the affair between the two remains speculative. In the 1930s, Thomas Wright recounted that Ternan had unburdened herself to a Canon Benham and gave currency to rumours they had been lovers. That the two had a son who died in infancy was alleged by Dickens's daughter, Kate Perugini, whom Gladys Storey had interviewed before her death in 1929. Storey published her account in "Dickens and Daughter", but no contemporary evidence exists. On his death, Dickens settled an annuity on Ternan which made her financially independent. Claire Tomalin's book, "The Invisible Woman", argues that Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life. The book was subsequently turned into a play, "Little Nell", by Simon Gray, and a 2013 film. In the same period, Dickens furthered his interest in the paranormal, becoming one of the early members of The Ghost Club.


title: Charles Dickens

text: In June 1862, he was offered £10,000 for a reading tour of Australia. He was enthusiastic, and even planned a travel book, "The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down", but ultimately decided against the tour. Two of his sons, Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, migrated to Australia, Edward becoming a member of the Parliament of New South Wales as Member for Wilcannia between 1889 and 1894.


title: Charles Dickens

text: On 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris with Ellen Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash in Kent. The train's first seven carriages plunged off a cast iron bridge that was under repair. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was travelling. Before rescuers arrived, Dickens tended and comforted the wounded and the dying with a flask of brandy and a hat refreshed with water, and saved some lives. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for "Our Mutual Friend", and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens later used the experience of the crash as material for his short ghost story, "The Signal-Man", in which the central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail crash. He also based the story on several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash in Sussex of 1861. Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquest to avoid disclosing that he had been travelling with Ternan and her mother, which would have caused a scandal. After the crash, Dickens was nervous when travelling by train and would use alternative means when available. In 1868 he wrote, "I have sudden vague rushes of terror, even when riding in a hansom cab, which are perfectly unreasonable but quite insurmountable." Dickens's son, Henry, recalled, "I have seen him sometimes in a railway carriage when there was a slight jolt. When this happened he was almost in a state of panic and gripped the seat with both hands."


title: Charles Dickens

text: While he contemplated a second visit to the United States, the outbreak of the Civil War in America in 1861 delayed his plans. On 9 November 1867, over two years after the war, Dickens set sail from Liverpool for his second American reading tour. Landing in Boston, he devoted the rest of the month to a round of dinners with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his American publisher, James T. Fields. In early December, the readings began. He performed 76 readings, netting £19,000, from December 1867 to April 1868. Dickens shuttled between Boston and New York, where he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall. Although he had started to suffer from what he called the "true American catarrh", he kept to a schedule that would have challenged a much younger man, even managing to squeeze in some sleighing in Central Park.


title: Charles Dickens

text: During his travels, he saw a change in the people and the circumstances of America. His final appearance was at a banquet the American Press held in his honour at Delmonico's on 18 April, when he promised never to denounce America again. By the end of the tour Dickens could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. On 23 April he boarded the Cunard liner to return to Britain, barely escaping a federal tax lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.


title: Charles Dickens

text: In 1868–69, Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" in England, Scotland and Ireland, beginning on 6 October. He managed, of a contracted 100 readings, to give 75 in the provinces, with a further 12 in London. As he pressed on he was affected by giddiness and fits of paralysis. He had a stroke on 18 April 1869 in Chester. He collapsed on 22 April 1869, at Preston, Lancashire; on doctor's advice, the tour was cancelled. After further provincial readings were cancelled, he began work on his final novel, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood". It was fashionable in the 1860s to 'do the slums' and, in company, Dickens visited opium dens in Shadwell, where he witnessed an elderly addict called "Laskar Sal", who formed the model for "Opium Sal" in "Edwin Drood".


title: Charles Dickens

text: After Dickens regained enough strength, he arranged, with medical approval, for a final series of readings to partly make up to his sponsors what they had lost due to his illness. There were 12 performances, on 11 January to 15 March 1870; the last at 8:00pm at St. James's Hall, London. Though in grave health by then, he read "A Christmas Carol" and "The Trial from Pickwick". On 2 May, he made his last public appearance at a Royal Academy banquet in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, paying a special tribute on the death of his friend, illustrator Daniel Maclise.


title: Charles Dickens

text: On 8 June 1870, Dickens had another stroke at his home after a full day's work on "Edwin Drood". He never regained consciousness and, the next day, he died at Gads Hill Place. Biographer Claire Tomalin has suggested Dickens was actually in Peckham when he had had the stroke and his mistress Ellen Ternan and her maids had him taken back to Gads Hill so that the public would not know the truth about their relationship. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner", he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads:


title: Charles Dickens

text: A letter from Dickens to the Clerk of the Privy Council in March indicates he'd been offered and had accepted a baronetcy, which was not gazetted before his death. His last words were "On the ground", in response to his sister-in-law Georgina's request that he lie down. On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens was buried in the Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley delivered a memorial elegy, lauding "the genial and loving humorist whom we now mourn", for showing by his own example "that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be innocent". Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the novelist's grave, Stanley assured those present that "the spot would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue."


title: Charles Dickens

text: In his will, drafted more than a year before his death, Dickens left the care of his £80,000 estate (£ in ) to his long-time colleague John Forster and his "best and truest friend" Georgina Hogarth who, along with Dickens's two sons, also received a tax-free sum of £8,000 (equivalent to £ in ). Although Dickens and his wife had been separated for several years at the time of his death, he provided her with an annual income of £600 (£ in ) and made her similar allowances in his will. He also bequeathed £19 19s (£ in ) to each servant in his employment at the time of his death.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens's approach to the novel is influenced by various things, including the picaresque novel tradition, melodrama and the novel of sensibility. According to Ackroyd, other than these, perhaps the most important literary influence on him was derived from the fables of "The Arabian Nights". Satire and irony are central to the picaresque novel. Comedy is also an aspect of the British picaresque novel tradition of Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett. Fielding's "Tom Jones" was a major influence on the 19th-century novelist including Dickens, who read it in his youth and named a son Henry Fielding Dickens after him. Influenced by Gothic fiction—a literary genre that began with "The Castle of Otranto" (1764) by Horace Walpole—Dickens incorporated Gothic imagery, settings and plot devices in his works. Victorian gothic moved from castles and abbeys into contemporary urban environments: in particular London, such as Dickens's "Oliver Twist" and "Bleak House". The jilted bride Miss Havisham from "Great Expectations" is one of Dickens' best-known gothic creations; living in a ruined mansion, her bridal gown effectively doubles as her funeral shroud.


title: Charles Dickens

text: On Dickens's veneration of Shakespeare, Alfred Harbage wrote "No one is better qualified to recognise literary genius than a literary genius"— "A Kind of Power: The Shakespeare-Dickens Analogy" (1975). Regarding Shakespeare as "the great master" whose plays "were an unspeakable source of delight", Dickens's lifelong affinity with the playwright included seeing theatrical productions of his plays in London and putting on amateur dramatics with friends in his early years. In 1838 Dickens travelled to Stratford-upon-Avon and visited the house in which Shakespeare was born, leaving his autograph in the visitors' book. Dickens would draw on this experience in his next work, "Nicholas Nickleby" (1838–39), expressing the strength of feeling experienced by visitors to Shakespeare's birthplace: the character Mrs Wititterly states, "I don't know how it is, but after you've seen the place and written your name in the little book, somehow or other you seem to be inspired; it kindles up quite a fire within one."


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens's writing style is marked by a profuse linguistic creativity. Satire, flourishing in his gift for caricature, is his forte. An early reviewer compared him to Hogarth for his keen practical sense of the ludicrous side of life, though his acclaimed mastery of varieties of class idiom may in fact mirror the conventions of contemporary popular theatre. Dickens worked intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that would reverberate with associations for his readers and assist the development of motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an "allegorical impetus" to the novels' meanings. To cite one of numerous examples, the name Mr Murdstone in "David Copperfield" conjures up twin allusions to murder and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery – he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator" – are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy.


title: Charles Dickens

text: The author worked closely with his illustrators, supplying them with a summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them. He briefed the illustrator on plans for each month's instalment so that work could begin before he wrote them. Marcus Stone, illustrator of "Our Mutual Friend", recalled that the author was always "ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ... life-history of the creations of his fancy". Dickens employs Cockney English in many of his works, denoting working-class Londoners. Cockney grammar appears in terms such as ain't, and consonants in words are frequently omitted, as in 'ere (here) and wot (what). An example of this usage is in "Oliver Twist". The Artful Dodger uses cockney slang which is juxtaposed with Oliver's 'proper' English, when the Dodger repeats Oliver saying "seven" with "sivin".


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens's biographer Claire Tomalin regards him as the greatest creator of character in English fiction after Shakespeare.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickensian characters are amongst the most memorable in English literature, especially so because of their typically whimsical names. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley and Bob Cratchit ("A Christmas Carol"); Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin and Bill Sikes ("Oliver Twist"); Pip, Miss Havisham and Abel Magwitch ("Great Expectations"); Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay and Madame Defarge ("A Tale of Two Cities"); David Copperfield, Uriah Heep and Mr Micawber ("David Copperfield"); Daniel Quilp and Nell Trent ("The Old Curiosity Shop"), Samuel Pickwick and Sam Weller ("The Pickwick Papers"); and Wackford Squeers ("Nicholas Nickleby") are so well known as to be part and parcel of popular culture, and in some cases have passed into ordinary language: a "scrooge", for example, is a miser or someone who dislikes Christmas festivity.


title: Charles Dickens

text: His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. "Gamp" became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs Gamp, and "Pickwickian", "Pecksniffian" and "Gradgrind" all entered dictionaries due to Dickens's original portraits of such characters who were, respectively, quixotic, hypocritical and vapidly factual. The character that made Dickens famous, Sam Weller became known for his Wellerisms—one-liners that turned proverbs on their heads. Many were drawn from real life: Mrs Nickleby is based on his mother, although she didn't recognise herself in the portrait, just as Mr Micawber is constructed from aspects of his father's 'rhetorical exuberance'; Harold Skimpole in "Bleak House" is based on James Henry Leigh Hunt; his wife's dwarfish chiropodist recognised herself in Miss Mowcher in "David Copperfield". Perhaps Dickens's impressions on his meeting with Hans Christian Andersen informed the delineation of Uriah Heep (a term synonymous with sycophant).


title: Charles Dickens

text: Virginia Woolf maintained that "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens" as he produces "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks". T. S. Eliot wrote that Dickens "excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings". One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. Dickens described London as a magic lantern, inspiring the places and people in many of his novels. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital – Dickens's London – are described over the course of his body of work. Walking the streets (particularly around London) formed an integral part of his writing life, stoking his creativity. Dickens was known to regularly walk at least a dozen miles (19 km) per day, and once wrote, "If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish."


title: Charles Dickens

text: Authors frequently draw their portraits of characters from people they have known in real life. "David Copperfield" is regarded by many as a veiled autobiography of Dickens. The scenes of interminable court cases and legal arguments in "Bleak House" reflect Dickens's experiences as a law clerk and court reporter, and in particular his direct experience of the law's procedural delay during 1844 when he sued publishers in Chancery for breach of copyright. Dickens's father was sent to prison for debt and this became a common theme in many of his books, with the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in "Little Dorrit" resulting from Dickens's own experiences of the institution. Lucy Stroughill, a childhood sweetheart, may have affected several of Dickens's portraits of girls such as Little Em'ly in "David Copperfield" and Lucie Manette in "A Tale of Two Cities."


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew the details of his early life until six years after his death, when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated. Though Skimpole brutally sends up Leigh Hunt, some critics have detected in his portrait features of Dickens's own character, which he sought to exorcise by self-parody.


title: Charles Dickens

text: A pioneer of the serial publication of narrative fiction, Dickens wrote most of his major novels in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as "Master Humphrey's Clock" and "Household Words", later reprinted in book form. These instalments made the stories affordable and accessible, with the audience more evenly distributed across income levels than previous. His instalment format inspired a narrative that he would explore and develop throughout his career, and the regular cliffhangers made each new episode widely anticipated. When "The Old Curiosity Shop" was being serialised, American fans waited at the docks in New York harbour, shouting out to the crew of an incoming British ship, "Is little Nell dead?" Dickens's talent was to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers and friends. His friend Forster had a significant hand in reviewing his drafts, an influence that went beyond matters of punctuation. He toned down melodramatic and sensationalist exaggerations, cut long passages (such as the episode of Quilp's drowning in "The Old Curiosity Shop"), and made suggestions about plot and character. It was he who suggested that Charley Bates should be redeemed in "Oliver Twist". Dickens had not thought of killing Little Nell and it was Forster who advised him to entertain this possibility as necessary to his conception of the heroine.


title: Charles Dickens

text: At the helm in popularising cliffhangers and serial publications in Victorian literature, Dickens's influence can also be seen in television soap operas and film series, with "The Guardian" stating "the DNA of Dickens's busy, episodic storytelling, delivered in instalments and rife with cliffhangers and diversions, is traceable in everything." His serialisation of his novels also drew comments from other writers. In Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson's novel "The Wrecker", Captain Nares, investigating an abandoned ship, remarked: "See! They were writing up the log," said Nares, pointing to the ink-bottle. "Caught napping, as usual. I wonder if there ever was a captain yet that lost a ship with his log-book up to date? He generally has about a month to fill up on a clean break, like Charles Dickens and his serial novels."


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. Simon Callow states, "From the moment he started to write, he spoke for the people, and the people loved him for it." He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. In a New York address, he expressed his belief that "Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen". Dickens's second novel, "Oliver Twist" (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime: it challenged middle class polemics about criminals, making impossible any pretence to ignorance about what poverty entailed.


title: Charles Dickens

text: At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged within society. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues – such as sanitation and the workhouse – but his fiction probably demonstrated its greatest prowess in changing public opinion in regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and oppression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of this condition is in "Hard Times" (1854), Dickens's only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In this work, he uses vitriol and satire to illustrate how this marginalised social stratum was termed "Hands" by the factory owners; that is, not really "people" but rather only appendages of the machines they operated. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address such problems of class oppression. For example, the prison scenes in "The Pickwick Papers" are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. Karl Marx asserted that Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together". George Bernard Shaw even remarked that "Great Expectations" was more seditious than Marx's "Das Kapital". The exceptional popularity of Dickens's novels, even those with socially oppositional themes ("Bleak House", 1853; "Little Dorrit", 1857; "Our Mutual Friend", 1865), not only underscored his ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also ensured that the Victorian public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored.


title: Charles Dickens

text: It has been argued that his technique of flooding his narratives with an 'unruly superfluity of material' that, in the gradual dénouement, yields up an unsuspected order, influenced the organisation of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species".


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens is often described as using idealised characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and the ugly social truths he reveals. The story of Nell Trent in "The Old Curiosity Shop" (1841) was received as extraordinarily moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde. "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell", he said in a famous remark, "without dissolving into tears ... of laughter." G. K. Chesterton stated, "It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell, that I object to", arguing that the maudlin effect of his description of her life owed much to the gregarious nature of Dickens's grief, his "despotic" use of people's feelings to move them to tears in works like this.


title: Charles Dickens

text: The question as to whether Dickens belongs to the tradition of the sentimental novel is debatable. Valerie Purton, in her book "Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition", sees him continuing aspects of this tradition, and argues that his "sentimental scenes and characters [are] as crucial to the overall power of the novels as his darker or comic figures and scenes", and that ""Dombey and Son" is [ ... ] Dickens's greatest triumph in the sentimentalist tradition". The "Encyclopædia Britannica" online comments that, despite "patches of emotional excess", such as the reported death of Tiny Tim in "A Christmas Carol" (1843), "Dickens cannot really be termed a sentimental novelist".


title: Charles Dickens

text: In "Oliver Twist" Dickens provides readers with an idealised portrait of a boy so inherently and unrealistically good that his values are never subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a gang of young pickpockets. While later novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in "Bleak House" and Amy Dorrit in "Little Dorrit"), this idealism serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant social commentary. Dickens's fiction, reflecting what he believed to be true of his own life, makes frequent use of coincidence, either for comic effect or to emphasise the idea of providence. For example, Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper-class family that rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group. Such coincidences are a staple of 18th-century picaresque novels, such as Henry Fielding's "Tom Jones," which Dickens enjoyed reading as a youth.