This blog post comes to us courtesy Raymond Heard, literary reader and Dickens fan.

February 7 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, possibly the greatest novelist in the English language. He sought to make the world a better place by amusing, angering and challenging his readers. His characters will ring through the ages - can we ever forget Mr. Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Miss Havisham and the Artful Dodger? His legacy is the modern Christmas, which he defined as a time of family joy, love and compassion -a time when even a Scrooge can mend his ways and Tiny Tim can live happily ever after.

Yet, as Claire Tomalin recounts in her epic, Charles Dickens: a Life, his own life was as dramatic as any of his 15 novels, many of which were serialized in his magazines. His life was a cliffhanger. The 527-page book literally takes you into the heart and mind of Dickens and his peers. It has a cast list of 16 pages. If you wish to trace his footsteps, there are detailed maps of the parts of London and Kent where Dickens lived, wrote and walked, sometimes for 40 miles a day. It may, indeed, be time for the BBC to make a series on his life and times to rival Downton Abbey. If they do this, Tomalin should write the script: She is the master of clear, declarative prose who lets the facts - not adjectives - tell the tale.

Claire Tomalin's hero is a brilliant, funny, flawed man - a man for all seasons, a working journalist, editor and novelist, famous from 25 until he died at 58. He his lived life to the fullest, realizing impossible dreams. Dickens, who dressed like a dandy, loved acting, dancing, games and practical jokes; and predated our rock stars to become quite the most popular Englishman in the mid-Victorian era. You might even call him the first modern man. His public readings from his novels drew crowds of thousands on both sides of the Atlantic and the perfectionist effort he put into them may have killed him. It is recorded that when clipper ships arrived in Boston or Halifax bearing his latest work, fans on the dock would yell, Is Little Nell dead? (She was.) Many working people learned to read to enjoy his novels exposing the greed, brutality, hypocrisy of the Victorian era. If individuals could not afford to buy them, they clubbed together to share them. Though his views were socially progressive, Dickens had no political philosophy. He was, indeed, the voice of the poor and oppressed, which is why on his first American tour, going into slave states so disgusted him that he left the South after a brief visit to Richmond, Virginia.

Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Great Expectations owed a lot to Dickens's grim memories of being rejected and forced to work in a blacking factory on the banks of the Thames at age 12, after his father's imprisonment for debt plunged the family into poverty. Tomalin's account of this low point in his life brings the reader close to tears, but one is inspired by her account of how he fought back. By the time he was 20, he was a self-taught court and parliamentary reporter, developing a loathing for judges, politicians and bureaucrats that was reflected in his fiction, especially Hard Times, which could be a manual for the Occupy Wall Street folk.

In his novels, Dickens could be sentimental to the point of being syrupy about what we call family values. But, in a mid-life crisis at the height of his fame and fortune, he abandoned his wife, Catherine, mother of their ten children, to enter a murky relationship with an 18-year-old actress, Nelly Ternan, whom he supported until he died. To the ire of some of his friends, Dickens demonized Catherine to rationalize taking up with Nelly. This melodrama is told in detail by Tomalin in an earlier bestseller, The Invisible Woman: the Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens.

Because Dickens had felt empathy for the young prostitutes he had seen on the streets, he partnered with Angela Coutts, the richest woman in England, to launch a home for wayward girls in London where they were clothed, fed and educated. Some returned to their trade, but most were launched into respectable new lives, some of them in Canada. Though Dickens had been very close to Miss Coutts, and they could have done other great things together, she dropped him when he abandoned Catherine.

Dickens was an inveterate traveler. Initially, he loved America (where his books were pirated) but grew to hate it. He loathed France at first, but grew to love it and to learn French. He did not like Toronto because "the wild and rabid toryism is appalling." He enjoyed Montreal, where he and the long-suffering Catherine acted in a theatrical with British officers and their wives, with Dickens, always the micro-manager, stage-managing the performance. Their third son, Frank, immigrated to Canada in 1871 to become an officer in the Northwest Mounted Police.

Tomalin is at her best chronicling Dickens's death. He insisted he would have no grand funeral, saying his books were his only memorial, but The Times, which had seldom been kind to his novels, suggested he should be buried in Westminster Abbey. His family acquiesced, so he was buried there privately at dawn, with no singing or eulogy. When word spread that he had been laid to rest in Poet's Corner, thousands of people rushed to the Abbey to pile bouquets on his coffin. Those who could not afford them brought wild flowers they had plucked in the fields.

To George Bernard Shaw, Dickens (like Shakespeare) was a perplexed and amused observer of the human condition. Most of Dickens's books, especially his favourite, Great Expectations, based on his boyhood dreams and nightmares, are classics in the sense that a classic is a book that never finishes what it has to say.