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1837 Victoria is crowned queen. Dickens becomes the editor of Bentley’s Miscellany and begins publishing installments of his novel Oliver Twist in the journal.

1838 Oliver Twist is published in three volumes, while the serial publication in Bentley’s continues. The novel was extremely popular, and three dramatic versions were produced in London theaters in the winter of 1838-1839.

1839 Nicholas Nickleby is published. Because of tension with Richard Bentley, Dickens resigns his editorship and devotes himself fully to writing. The Dickens family moves to Devonshire Terrace.

1840 Dickens establishes his own weekly miscellany, Master Humphrey’s Clock, and writes all the content himself. After eighteen months, sales fall off, and he is forced to abandon the periodical. To generate capital, he quickly begins serial publication of The Old Curiosity Shop.

1841 Dickens publishes Barnaby Rudge. He publicly denounces the child-labor laws and abysmal factory conditions of the times; he lambastes the Tories, who oppose humane labor laws.

1842 Accompanied by Catherine, an exhausted Dickens travels to America, where he is lionized. His popularity there falters upon the publication of American Notes, a chronicle that records his negative reactions to the United States.

1843 Dickens publishes the most famous and best-loved of his annual Christmas books, A Christmas Carol, which had taken him only a matter of weeks to write.

1844 The Dickens family relocates to Genoa, Italy, where they remain for a year.

1846 Dickens signs on as the first editor of the Daily News but soon leaves because of disagreements with the publishers. The family moves to Switzerland, then Paris, and remains abroad for six months.

1847 Upon his return to London, Dickens helps Miss Burdett Coutts start a home for reformed prostitutes, which he later runs. William Makepeace Thackeray begins publishing Vanity Fair in monthly parts.

1848 Dombey and Son, published in one volume, heralds Dickens’s more mature and decidedly dark period, which over the next two decades yields such major works as David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. Dickens begins to run a private theater, in which he acts and performs for charity. His company of amateurs includes painter Augustus Egg, who depicts scenes from novels by Sir Walter Scott, Thackeray, and other writers.

1850 Realism becomes a conscious agenda among artists working in media such as painting, literature, and theater. Dickens establishes his magazine Household Words, which is succeeded by the end of the decade by his publication All the Year Round.

1851 Dickens’s father dies. The author meets landscape painter Wilkie Collins, who has a gift for mystery writing and whom Dickens admires greatly. Dickens’s theater troupe performs before Queen Victoria.

1857 Dickens’s marriage becomes increasingly strained. The Frozen Deep, a melodrama written jointly by Dickens and Collins, stars Dickens and the enchanting actress Ellen Ternan, with whom he falls in love. Ternan, twenty-seven years Dickens’s junior, haunts the author’s fiction from this time on. Dickens tours Switzerland and Italy with Collins and Egg.

1858 Dickens embarks on an exhausting series of public readings, which earn him money but take a toll on his physical health. He and Catherine separate.

1860 Dickens settles in rural Gadshill, his residence for the rest of his life.

1861 Great Expectations is published in three volumes. Dickens begins a second series of public readings that lasts two years.

1863 Dickens’s mother dies, followed by his son Walter’s death in India. After quarreling with Thackeray, Dickens reconciles with him just before Thackeray’s death. The world’s first subway, the Metropolitan Railway, opens in London.

1865 A shaken Dickens survives a disastrous train accident after he returns from France with Ellen Ternan, who is rumored to be his mistress.

1867 Dickens journeys again to America, where