Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was a famous 19th century British author. Even relatively uneducated servants like Gwyneth referred to him as a "the great man". In the last years of his life he entered a period of melancholy, seemingly brought on by emotional estrangement from his family, as well as probable writer's block.

Biography
By 1845, Dickens was married to a woman named Kate, with whom he had several children. An earlier work, The Pickwick Papers, was notorious for the accusation that he had stolen the idea for a character from his illustrator. He believed in the reality of spontaneous human combustion (NA: The Death of Art) and would incorporate it into his novel Bleak House. (NA: All-Consuming Fire)

In December of 1845, after numerous delays, he was close to publishing the first edition of his newspaper, the Daily News, from its London offices, but events on the 18th would unsettle him and drive him to leave the city. His writing after that point became colder and bleaker.

Montague, an irate toymaker, confronted Charles Dickens about his recent Christmas book The Cricket on the Hearth, in the belief that Dickens was prying into his history. Intending to visit the man later to explain that the book's character was not based on him, Dickens turned to the proofs for his paper, only to be shocked by an unnerving poem about living dolls that wasn't there when he looked a second time. He later travelled toward the Billingsgate address of Montague's shop, only to flee in terror from dolls crawling towards him. Twenty years later, he told his friend Wilkie Collins part of the story and the two went to see Montague's shop, only to find it had burned down years ago. (NA: The Death of Art)

When the the Doctor and Rose Tyler met Dickens on Christmas 1869 in Cardiff, he was on a gruelling tour of public performances of A Christmas Carol, a work he had written many years earlier. During this period, he despaired of his life being merely a series of recitations of his past successes.

He initially mistook the Doctor as the person who had ruined his performance with an impromptu "lantern show", something that was in fact the manifestation of a Gelth. He found it improbable that the Doctor was a Doctor because of his clothing which, according to Dickens, suggested the Doctor was a navvy. Meanwhile, the Doctor revealed himself as major fan of Dickens' work, although he had issues with "the American bit" in Martin Chuzzlewit. The Doctor also remarked that the death of Dickens' character, Little Nell, "cracked [him] up".

Dickens clashed with the Doctor, as he firmly believed in the rational world. Dickens was not prepared to entertain the more fantastical elements of life. The Doctor, however, saw that things humans considered "supernatural" were in fact just extra-terrestrial reality. Thus the Doctor was open to participating in a séance as a way of communicating with the Gelth, while Dickens viewed such things as the antithesis of rationality. By the end of the ordeal, Dickens emerged with a belief that he had only just begun to learn about the universe. With his re-invigourated sense of wonder, he resolved to tell the tale of the Gelth affair in the form of a the ending to his novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

The Doctor knew he would not live long enough to do so, but knew that when he did die, he did so a happier man. He died the following year. (DW: The Unquiet Dead)

Alternative timeline
In a world where all of history occurred at once because River Song prevented herself from killing the Doctor, Dickens was seen on BBC Breakfast being interviewed about his "new Christmas special". (DW: The Wedding of River Song)

Works
Dickens was known to be the author of several works: "The Signal-Man", A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and The Old Curosity Shop, which contained the character Little Nell. (DW: The Unquiet Dead)