The suspense: the fearful, acute suspense: of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly love, is trembling in the balance; the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and make the heart beat violently, and the breath come thick, by the force of the images they conjure up before it; the desperate anxiety to be doing something to relieve the pain, or lessen the danger, which we have no power to alleviate; the sinking of soul and spirit, which the sad remembrance of our helplessness produces; what tortures can equal these; what reflections of endeavours can, in the full tide and fever of the time, allay them!

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.