s part. David Copperfield (1849-50) clearly paralleled his own. Within the story, readers found the same flawed world that Dickens had discovered as a young boy. Other novels were to follow. In the weekly periodicals he started, "Household Words" (1850) and "All the Year Round" (1859), he published such well-known novels as Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Dickens first thought of setting a novel in the time of the French Revolution when he read Thomas Carlyle's book The French Revolution, which was first published in 1839. He read this book faithfully every year, but used it sparingly in researching his novels. Dickens finally came up with a way to use it in 1857, when he acted in Wilkie Collins' play, The Frozen Deep. Dickens played a self-sacrificing lover in the play; this role inspired him so much that he wanted to use it in his own novels. He eventually decided to place his own sacrificing lover in the revolutionary period, a period of great social upheaval. A year later, Dickens went through his own form of social change as he wrote the novel; he separated from his wife, and revitalized his career by making plans for a new weekly literary journal called All the Year Round. In 1859, A Tale of Two Cities premiered in parts in this journal. It was popular, not only from the fame of its author, but also for its short length and radical (for Dickens) subject matter. Dickens' health started deteriorating in the 1860s. The fact that he had started doing public readings of his works in 1858 exacted even greater a physical toll on him. On June 9, 1870, Charles Dickens died and was buried in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. Though The Mystery of Edwin Drood was unfinished at the time of his death, he had written fifteen substantial novels and countless shorter pieces by then. His legacy is clear. While he pointed out problems within society blinding and mercenary greed for money, neglect of all sectors in society, and a wr...
