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Charles John Huffam Dickens rivals Shakespeare as one of the most frequently quoted authors in the English language.
The characters he fashioned in Victorian London, from Ebenezer Scrooge and Miss Havisham to David Copperfield and Little Nell, are instantly recognizable even to those who've never read one of his novels, or even seen one of the countless TV and film adaptations his works have inspired.
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But it is Dickens' words, and the way he twisted them to poke fun at, uphold or deplore all humanity's most basic tendencies, that elevates him to such an iconic status on his 200th birthday.
Below, relive some of Charles Dickens' best quotes, and read a letter by his biographer, Claire Tomalin, about his impact on English literature and culture.
Oliver Twist (1838):
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"Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine."
"Although Oliver had been brought up by philosophers, he was not theoretically acquainted with the beautiful axiom that self-preservation is the first law of nature."
"There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread."
A Christmas Carol (1843):
"Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail."
"External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty."
"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
"Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them... His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him."
A Tale of Two Cities (1859):
