Charles John Huffam Dickens, English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity. This is Dickens' authoritative and seminal early biography by his close friend John Forster who knew everything about him and knew him extremely well in person.