“In 1812, the year Charles Dickens was born, there were 66 novels published in Britain. People had been writing novels for a century—most critics date the genre to Robinson Crusoe in 1719—but nobody aspired to do it professionally. Many works of fiction appeared anonymously, with attributions like ‘By a Lady.’ The steam-powered printing press was still in its infancy; the literacy rate in England was under 50%. And novels, for the most part, were looked upon as silly, immoral, toxic or just plain bad. …

“In 1870, when Dickens died, the world mourned him as its first literary celebrity: a career writer and publisher, famous and beloved, who had led an explosion in both the publication of novels and their readership.”

—from Radhika Jones’ ”Charles in Charge: The Secret of Dickens’ Enduring Success” in the Jan 30th issue of TIME [reg. required]