NYPL Point | Charles Dickens: A Key to His Characters

Charles Dickens: A Key to His Characters, the fifth edition of NYPL's Point series, contains descriptions of selected characters in Dickens’s novels—along with explanations of related terms and phrases as well as photographs, artwork, and other imagery drawn from NYPL’s collections. By no means a comprehensive guide to all of Dickens’s characters, this book instead aims to illustrate his art of characterization, his self-transformation into a cultural icon, and the connections between his personal life and literary figures. The text was written by Wm. Moeck, who teaches British Literature at Nassau Community College, SUNY, as a companion to the exhibition Charles Dickens: A Key to Character, which ran at NYPL’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.