Charles Dickens (died 1870) was a famous 19th century British author. Gwyneth referred to him as "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.
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 (PROSE: The Death of Art) and incorporated it into his novel Bleak House. (PROSE: 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. (PROSE: The Death of Art)
In 1869, 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.
In the Taliesin Lodge in Cardiff, on 24 December, his reading of A Christmas Carol was interrupted when the Gelth-inhabited corpse of Mrs Peace had blue smoke coming from her. He accused the Ninth Doctor of creating a light show. The Doctor, seeing his companion, Rose Tyler, being taken by the Sneed and Company hearse after the hearse had reclaimed Mrs Peace's body, followed after them with Dickens' in Dickens' coach.
Even after seeing more reanimated corpses in the funeral parlour upon saving Rose, 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 sƩance as a way of communicating with the Gelth, while Dickens viewed such things as the antithesis of rationality.
The Gelth began breaching through, thanks to the servant girl, Gwyneth, but instead of finding temporary bodies until the Doctor could find something permanent, "a few billion" came through, and cornered the Doctor and Rose. Dickens opened the gas throughout the funeral parlour, sucking the Gelth out of the corpses and back into the gas. He told the Doctor to do the same. Though not able to send them back where they came from, Gwyneth was able to hold the Gelth on the building by setting the parlour alight, saving the world.
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-invigorated sense of wonder, he resolved to tell the tale of the Gelth affair in the form of 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. (TV: The Unquiet Dead)
Later references
In the 2010s, at Coal Hill School, a lesson about Dickens and his work David Copperfield was taken. (TV: Kill the Moon)
Alternative timeline
In a world where all of history occurred at once because River Song didn't kill the Doctor, Dickens appeared on BBC Breakfast being interviewed about his "new Christmas special." (TV: The Wedding of River Song)
Works
Dickens was the author of several works: David Copperfield, (TV: Kill the Moon) The Signal-Man, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and The Old Curiosity Shop, which contained the character Little Nell. (TV: The Unquiet Dead)
Behind the scenes
The Sixth Doctor and Melanie Bush referred to the character of Sydney Carton, implicitly taken from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, in TV: The Ultimate Foe.
Dickens' real-life great-great-great-grandson Harry Lloyd is an actor who starred in Doctor Who, in the 2007 two-part story Human Nature and The Family of Blood.
