But struggling with these better feelings was pride,--the vice of the lowest and most debased creatures no less than of the high and self-assured. The miserable companion of thieves and ruffians, the fallen outcast of low haunts, the associate of the scourings of the jails and hulks, living within the shadow of the gallows itself,--even this degraded being felt too proud to betray a feeble gleam of the womanly feeling which she thought a weakness, but which alone conneced her with that humanity, of which her wasting life had obliterated so many, many traces when a very child.

Dickens was 45 and Ternan 18 when he made the decision which went strongly against Victorian convention to separate from his wife Catherine in 1858—divorce was still unthinkable for someone as famous as he was. The resulting story was the The Pickwick Papers with the final instalment selling 40000 copies. Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquest to avoid disclosing that he had been travelling with Ternan and her mother which would have caused a scandal.

He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. His creative genius has been praised by fellow writers—from Leo Tolstoy to G. Born in Portsmouth England Dickens left school to work in a factory after his father was thrown into debtors' prison.