When is the IZOD series held?

The IZOD IndyCar World Championship Presented by Honda was an IndyCar Series race on the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, held from 1996–2000, and again in 2011. It was first known as the Las Vegas 500k. The Champ Car World Series held a race at the track during the 2004 and 2005 seasons as doubleheaders with the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series and a street race was held in Las Vegas at the Fremont Street Experience in 2007.

IZOD IndyCar World Championships

The Silver State Century was a 100-lap/100-mile race at Las Vegas Park, a dirt track in Las Vegas. Jimmy Bryan was the winner of the race's lone running.

The USAC Championship Car series held a race on the short-lived Stardust International Raceway in 1968. Bobby Unser won the Stardust 150 ahead of Mario Andretti and Joe Leonard.

Starting in 1981, Formula One scheduled a race on laid out in the parking lot of the Caesars Palace hotel. Following mediocre crowds, Formula One left after only two years. In 1983, CART picked up where Formula One left off, and started holding a race on the same course. After two editions, the race ended.

In 1996, Las Vegas Motor Speedway was announced as a venue for the newly formed Indy Racing League. The facility was still under construction when it was added to the 1996-97 season.

For the first four runnings, the race was advertised as a 500 km race. Starting in 1997, the race was moved to a night race. In 2000, it was moved from the fall to the spring, and returned to a day race. After 2000, the race was removed from the IndyCar Series for a decade.

In 2004–2005, the Champ Car series held a race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Both editions were held under the lights on a Saturday night as part of the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series weekend in the fall. After only two years, however, the race was considered unpopular and was removed from the schedule.

For 2005, the name of the race was changed to the Hurricane Relief 400, and it served as a fundraiser for Hurricane Katrina recovery.

In July 2006, the Las Vegas City Council approved a, 14-turn, counterclockwise street circuit in Downtown Las Vegas area near the Fremont Street Experience. Champ Car held their first event on Easter Sunday, April 8, 2007. The race was titled the Vegas Grand Prix. The course was generally liked by competitors and fans. With the dissolution of the Champ Car World Series in 2008, the event was cancelled after only one running.

On February 22, 2011, IndyCar CEO Randy Bernard announced the IZOD IndyCar World Championships to be held at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, reviving the 200-lap, 300-mile race format on the new variable banking. The race was adopted as a tripleheader, with the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series Smith's 350 on Saturday and for the first time, a 100.5-mile Firestone Indy Lights race on Sunday morning.

The first INDYCAR race since 2000 started with a hard-charging Indy Lights race where Sam Schmidt Motorsports teammates Josef Newgarden, Esteban Guerrieri, and Victor Carbone battled each other on the final lap, but Carbone cut the new Indy Lights champion Newgarden's tire on the Nellis Straightaway, leading Guerrieri and Carbone to fight for the win in a side-by-side finish, with Carbone willing by.0229 seconds.

The 200-lap IndyCar feature ended on lap 12 after a 15-car crash that claimed the life of fellow Sam Schmidt Motorsports driver Dan Wheldon. IndyCar decided that the race would not continue, and spectators were offered refunds of all Sunday tickets that were used, and partial refunds of multiple-day tickets (Qualifying and NASCAR tickets could not be refunded, as Friday qualifying and Saturday NASCAR events finished without incident, so only the portion relating with the Sunday race could be processed).

As a result of the incident, on December 8, 2011, Bernard announced that the IndyCar World Championships would not return to Las Vegas in 2012. The Smith's 350, which had been set for the IndyCar weekend, was moved up two weeks.

In 2011, the Firestone Indy Lights support race was added to the World Championships.

The 2011 IZOD IndyCar World Championship was the final race of the 2011 IZOD IndyCar series schedule. The event took place at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in Clark County, Nevada on October 16, 2011. The race was stopped following a major accident triggered by drivers trying to avoid light contact between Wade Cunningham and James Hinchcliffe. 15 cars were involved in the wreck, which resulted in the death of two-time Indianapolis 500 winner and 2005 series champion Dan Wheldon. After a delay of over two hours, IndyCar decided to abandon the remaining 188 laps after word of Wheldon's death was relayed to the drivers, though the drivers did complete a five-lap salute in honor of Wheldon.

2011 IZOD IndyCar World Championship

It also marked the last race for the Dallara IR03 and later IR05 chassis which had been used since 2003, as it would be replaced by the DW12 for 2012.

The Las Vegas race was added to the schedule for the 2011 season, replacing the event at Homestead-Miami Speedway as the final race of the IndyCar season. The races at Homestead and the International Speedway Corporation tracks were removed from the schedule following the previous year's season. Las Vegas Motor Speedway was returning to the IndyCar schedule for the first time since 2000, and the event marked the first open-wheel race at the circuit since the Hurricane Relief 400 Champ Car event in 2005. The circuit since was reconfigured in 2006, which saw a greater degree of banking added to the circuit to encourage side-by-side racing. The race was scheduled for 200 laps around the oval, totaling.

On May 3, 2011, IndyCar CEO Randy Bernard announced that a $5,000,000 (USD) purse would be awarded to any driver not on the IndyCar circuit to enter the race at Las Vegas and win while starting from the back of the field. Bernard's original offer was exclusively to "any race car driver in the world outside of the IZOD IndyCar Series," hoping to attract interest from Formula 1 or NASCAR. Bernard received offers that he deemed viable from motocross racer Travis Pastrana, former IndyCar champion Alex Zanardi, and NASCAR's Kasey Kahne. Pastrana, however, suffered an ankle injury earlier in the year at the X Games while Zanardi and Kahne wanted to drive only for Chip Ganassi Racing and Team Penske respectively, who both had drivers (Dario Franchitti and Will Power) competing against each other for the championship. (Zanardi also would have required a special setup for his car if he were to run, as he is a double amputee who lost both of his legs below the knees in a crash at the 2001 American Memorial CART race.)

Bernard later revised the challenge to include a driver who had only competed in IndyCar part-time during the 2011 season; the challenge was accepted by 2011 Indianapolis 500 winner Dan Wheldon, who had run only one additional race that season: the Kentucky Indy 300, in which Wheldon also started at the back of the field in the Sam Schmidt #77, and finished 14th. Wheldon agreed to split the purse with a fan if he went on to win.

Entering the race, the only two drivers still in contention for the IndyCar Championship were Ganassi's Franchitti and Penske's Power. Franchitti was 18 points ahead of Power, retaking the championship points lead from him with a second-place finish at the 2011 Kentucky Indy 300 two weeks prior. Power was still mathematically in the points race despite an awful finish at Kentucky, but needed to finish far ahead of Franchitti in order to win the championship title.

The race's honorary grand marshal was skateboarder Tony Hawk, who gave the command to start the engines.

A total of thirty-four cars qualified for the race. Tony Kanaan, driving the 82 Dallara for KV Racing Technology, qualified on the pole for the race and shared the front row with Oriol Servià, driving the No. 2 Dallara for Newman/Haas Racing. Danica Patrick, driving the No. 7 Dallara for Andretti Autosport, started 9th in what was her final IndyCar start before joining NASCAR. The two remaining championship contenders qualified on row 9, with Power 17th in the No. 12 Dallara and Franchitti 18th in the No. 10 Dallara. In addition to Wheldon's No. 77 Dallara, which he piloted for Sam Schmidt Motorsports, Buddy Rice was forced to start from the rear of the field when he received a penalty in qualifying for driving the No. 44 Dallara below the track's white line.

The accident began on the front straightaway as the field headed into turn one. Wade Cunningham, Wheldon's teammate in the No. 17 Dallara, clipped James Hinchcliffe, driving the No. 06 Dallara, and then made contact with J. R. Hildebrand in the No. 4 Dallara. Then Cunningham swerved and Hildebrand drove over the rear of his car, causing his to go airborne. Cunningham collected Jay Howard in the No. 15 Dallara on the inside and then Townsend Bell in the No. 22 Dallara on the outside before colliding with the retaining wall. Attempting to avoid the crash ahead, Vitor Meira lost control of his No. 14 Dallara and spun inward, collecting both Charlie Kimball's No. 83 Dallara and E. J. Viso's No. 59 Dallara. Tomas Scheckter, in the No. 57 Dallara, was also attempting to avoid the crash by rapidly slowing down on the outside. Following that, Paul Tracy ran into the back of his car with his No. 8 Dallara and Pippa Mann, rapidly approaching in the No. 30 Dallara, went over the top of him after jerking to the outside to avoid crashing into Alex Lloyd in the No. 19 Dallara.

As cars continued to drive through the accident scene, the No. 77 car driven by Wheldon and the No. 12 driven by Power left the racing surface. Wheldon was racing at when he came upon the scene, frantically trying to avoid the collision. Although he was able to considerably slow it down, Wheldon's car went airborne about after running into the back of Kimball's and went barrel-rolling into the catch fence cockpit-first, causing his head to hit one of the poles. The No. 77 landed back on the racing surface having been sliced apart by the fence and slid to a stop next to the S.A.F.E.R. barrier. Power, meanwhile, went airborne when he ran over the back of Lloyd's car and struck the S.A.F.E.R. barrier. The car landed sideways on the track and rolled over, which caused the front wheel assembly to break; one of the front tires flew over Power's head and barely missed hitting him.

A total of 15 cars were involved, with the most severe injuries suffered by Wheldon, Power, Hildebrand, and Mann. Wheldon was extricated from his car and was airlifted to the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada. He was officially pronounced dead on arrival two hours later at 1:54 PM Pacific Daylight Time. The official cause of Wheldon's death was given by the Clark County Coroner as blunt force trauma to his head due to the incident. Mann and Hildebrand were later taken to the hospital for overnight observation, while Power was evaluated and released that day.

After one additional lap had been run, IndyCar officials red-flagged the race as the track was not suitable for racing. In addition to the debris left by the fifteen cars involved in the wreck, the asphalt surface was damaged and the catch fencing needed repair. As the teams waited to see if they would resume racing, they also were waiting for word on Wheldon's condition as word had not been relayed to the track.

Sometime around 3:00 PM local time, an emergency drivers' meeting was called by series director Brian Barnhart. After the meeting ended, Randy Bernard met with the media. In his brief statement, Bernard told reporters about Wheldon's death and that, out of respect, the drivers and teams agreed not to continue the race and instead decided to pay tribute to their fallen colleague with a five-lap salute.

The 19 drivers who survived the crash scene returned to their cars, and every crew member stood silently in their pit boxes. The scoring pylon was blanked except for the top position, where the No. 77 was displayed. The remaining cars lined up three abreast on pit road, as in the Indy 500 starting formation, with Kanaan, Ed Carpenter in the No. 67 Dallara, and Ryan Briscoe in the Dallara leading. Out of respect for Wheldon's death, the No. 98 Dallara fielded by Bryan Herta Autosport was parked. The car was driven to victory in Indianapolis by Wheldon and its driver on this day, Alex Tagliani, normally drove the No. 77 car that Wheldon had taken over.

The pace car then led the cars back onto the track while every crew member and person behind the wall moved to the grass separating pit road from the track to watch. The track loudspeakers blared renditions of "Danny Boy" and "Amazing Grace" played on bagpipes while the cars went around the track at pace lap speed, and each time the cars passed the start/finish line the fans remaining in the front-stretch grandstand offered applause. At the end of the five tribute laps, the starter waved two checkered flags to signify the end while the cars proceeded around the track one more time before exiting for the pits in turn four.

Wheldon's death was the first suffered by an IndyCar driver since Paul Dana was killed in a race-morning practice crash at Homestead-Miami in 2006.

Since the race was abandoned after twelve total laps, it did not reach official status; IndyCar does not consider a race official unless it reaches the halfway mark. As such, no points were awarded and the series championship went to Franchitti by default. If the race had continued and reached official status, Franchitti would have been the series champion anyway as he had avoided the accident. Power's car, meanwhile, was heavily damaged in the lap 11 crash to the point where he would not have been able to continue racing.

This was Franchitti's third consecutive and fourth overall championship. Indy Racing League, LLC delayed all official prizegiving, choosing instead to conduct it during the annual State of INDYCAR speech in February 2012; Franchitti also delayed his own celebration of his championship victory.

At the time of his death, Wheldon had been working with IndyCar officials to develop the ICONIC chassis with the intention of improving safety in the sport. Planned changes to the chassis include larger cockpits for driver protection and bodywork over the rear wheels to prevent cars from launching off one another in the event of a collision, long a problem in open-wheel racing, regardless of oval or road course, but troublesome on high-speed ovals and tight street circuits with a long straight and a tight turn, similar to the style of many modern road courses.

Prominent figures within the IndyCar fraternity and the wider international motorsport community expressed their condolences to Wheldon and his family. Wheldon had been scheduled to take part in the Gold Coast 600, a round of the V8 Supercars championship, on October 22, racing alongside his friend James Courtney. Upon hearing of Wheldon's death, Courtney described the accident as a sobering reminder of the dangers faced by racing drivers. As the first major international motorsport event after Wheldon's death, organizers of the V8 Supercars series planned a series of tributes to him at the Gold Coast 600. Wheldon's place was taken by another British driver, Darren Turner, an FIA GT1 World Championship competitor. Wheldon's name was left on the car as a mark of respect, while British drivers at the event paid tribute to him with helmet decals, and several other drivers planned individual tributes to Wheldon. Kanaan, who had also been scheduled to race in Australia, announced his withdrawal from the event out of respect for Wheldon. However, Briscoe, Tagliani, and Hélio Castroneves, all of whom raced at Las Vegas, along with other part-time IndyCar drivers Sébastien Bourdais and Simon Pagenaud, who were not at Las Vegas, did race. Bourdais, the best performing "International" driver, received the Dan Wheldon Memorial Trophy. Sam Schmidt, for whom Wheldon had been racing at the time of his accident, admitted that the events at Las Vegas Motor Speedway had prompted him to re-evaluate his involvement in motorsports. Similarly, veteran drivers Davey Hamilton and Paul Tracy said they were considering retiring from racing on the back of the accident.

In the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, several drivers at the 2011 Good Sam Club 500 at Talladega on the weekend after Wheldon's death put special tributes on their cars, like NASCAR issuing the "Lionheart Knight" decal Wheldon wore on his helmet, which were placed on the cars' b-pillars, along with T. J. Bell putting Wheldon's name on the namerail.

Driver Marco Andretti withdrew from "The Celebrity Apprentice," which started taping days after the incident, and was replaced by his father Michael, team principal of Andretti Autosport.

On December 9, 2011, IndyCar decided that they were not going to return to Las Vegas for the 2012 season. Randy Bernard expressed reluctance to return to the speedway following Wheldon's death, despite the insistence of Speedway Motorsports, Inc. president Bruton Smith (who owns the track in Las Vegas as well as three other tracks used by the IndyCar series) for the series to honor its three-year contract with the track. As of that date, the investigation into the accident was still ongoing. IndyCar was holding back on the release of its 2012 schedule until the investigation concluded. The IndyCar series also conducted an investigation into whether or not the series should continue racing on high-banked ovals such as Las Vegas and Texas Motor Speedway in Denton, Texas. Texas had been one of the staples of the IndyCar series since 1997 and had yet to be confirmed for 2012 prior to the Las Vegas race in 2011. Indycar's future at high-banked ovals was in jeopardy pending the results of the investigation. Texas was eventually placed on the 2012 schedule.

The series went to new restrictions on restarts. IndyCar announced that restarts would only be single-file in 2012, rather than double-file as they had been the previous season.

In the build-up to the event, several drivers expressed unease at the race – with Franchitti, Oriol Servià and Alex Lloyd the most vocal opponents – particularly given the high degree of banking around the circuit, with between 18 and 20 degrees of banking in the corners. Franchitti was quoted as saying that the track was "not suitable" for IndyCar racing, while championship rival Will Power – himself a staunch critic of short-track oval racing – described the race as "an accident waiting to happen".

The field of 34 drivers was the biggest in an IndyCar series race in 14 years. A typical oval track race has six to eight fewer drivers, except for the Indianapolis 500, which normally has a 33-car field. ESPN.com senior motorsports writer Terry Blount wrote: "Obviously more cars presents more danger. They wanted a whole lot of cars cause obviously this is their season finale and they wanted it to be a big deal. Some of the people that were driving in this event yesterday had no business being in it. Some of them had never driven on a track like this. That was a mistake". Chris Powell, president of Las Vegas Motor Speedway, defended the race, saying that the circuit had passed all of the IndyCar Series' accreditation procedures and was deemed suitable for racing. He also went on the record to say that despite the media reporting the concerns of several drivers over the safety of the event, none of those concerns had been raised with him.

The five million dollar prize was also the subject of criticism in that a driver inexperienced in driving IndyCars would have a higher risk of causing a crash, though Formula One driver Anthony Davidson downplayed the influence of the prize in causing the accident, stating that racing drivers by their nature try to win every race, whether they start from first or last. Many short track races in the United States offer a cash or points bonus where a driver who wins the pole and starts last can collect a cash bonus for winning; this was used at Lucas Oil Raceway at Indianapolis in the "Night Before F1" midget car race where the winner of the first feature race started last for the second in a reverse-grid race, and a driver who starts last by winning the first feature, starting last, and winning the second feature wins a cash bonus. Some series offer a point bonus for the driver who makes up the most positions in a race.

In the days following the incident, it was learned that at least three additional drivers had been approached to try for the $5 million challenge prize. One was Scott Speed, who previously ran open-wheel Formula One cars for Scuderia Toro Rosso and who had raced on the reconfigured LVMS track in the Craftsman Truck Series for Morgan-Dollar Motorsports in 2008 and for Team Red Bull in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series in 2009 and 2010. Speed, in an interview he gave to "Inside Edition" on October 18, 2011, said that he declined to take the offer saying that the track conditions were too dangerous for Indy-type cars. Likewise, A. J. Allmendinger, who also had previous open-wheel experience, had expressed early interest, though he later declined, recalling, "[When] we raced CART at Vegas...it scared the living hell out of me." Finnish media reported that Formula One World Champion Kimi Räikkönen, who was splitting time between the World Rally Championship and NASCAR in 2011, had also been approached to take part in the race, but Räikkönen rejected the offer as he was not confident of having a competitive car, rather than having concerns over safety.

Three days after the accident, series organizers announced that the race would be the subject of a full investigation. The other members of the Automobile Competition Committee for the United States (ACCUS), the national governing body of automobile racing in the United States, and a member of the FIA made their resources available for the investigation, which IndyCar officials expected to take several weeks. As all ACCUS/FIA members participated in the investigation, IndyCar would have full use of the NASCAR R&D Center in Concord, North Carolina. In the meantime, all testing at Las Vegas Motor Speedway was cancelled indefinitely; Franchitti and Chip Ganassi Racing had been planning to test the 2012-spec Dallara chassis at the circuit in the week following the race.

The results of the investigation into Wheldon's death were released on December 15, 2011. In a report prepared by crash investigators, it was found that Wheldon's death was caused by an impact with the catch fencing around the circuit. Brian Barnhart further rejected claims that the banking had also contributed to the accident, stating that it created two ideal racing lines, and that these lines made the location of cars more predictable for other drivers; at the time of the accident, all 34 cars had been behaving as expected. The report also revealed that the right front pull rod of the suspension assembly penetrated Wheldon's survival cell, though it did not cause him any injury. The report recommended further investigation of this phenomenon, as it was the first recorded incident of its kind in nine years of the use of the IR03 and later IR05 model chassis, which was being retired at the end of the race. The pull-rod suspension chassis is not being utilised in the DW12.

Since Wheldon's death at the Las Vegas oval, much emphasis has been put into the elimination of "pack racing" through changes to the tires and downforce levels on high-banked ovals (particularly at Texas Motor Speedway, for its annual IndyCar event). Such racing has been seen on occasion since the Vegas race, most notably at the 2015 MAVTV 500 at Auto Club Speedway, and the 2017 Rainguard Water Sealers 600 at Texas, where "pack racing" again reappeared and only a handful of drivers finished the race, although none were seriously injured. However, for the most part the league has avoided pack races in the years since the 2011 Finale.

Talk of a canopy or halo to protect the driver was accelerated by the fatal Formula One accident that killed Jules Bianchi in October 2014 and an incident where Justin Wilson was fatally struck in the head by debris at the August 2015 ABC Supply 500 at Pocono Raceway. In particular, following Wilson's death, Allmendinger stated that he would "never again" run open-wheel cars, adding "The only way I would do it is if they put in a closed cockpit over the car and tested it and they thought that was a good direction in safety then I might think about doing it again." As a result, several major open-wheel series have implemented cockpit protection systems, with Formula One, Formula Two, Formula Three and Formula E all introducing the halo in 2018.

The rear wheel pods introduced to IndyCar in 2012 intended to prevent cars from becoming airborne when hitting another in the rear proved to be ineffective as there were major crashes resulting from such contact during the 2013 race in Houston involving Dario Franchitti, as well as the 2017 Indianapolis 500 involving Scott Dixon. In addition the pods were often ripped from cars from light contact, placing hazardous debris on the track. As a result the rear pods were eliminated for 2018.

Notes:

The 2012 IZOD IndyCar Series was the 17th season of the IndyCar Series, and the 101st season of American open wheel racing. Its premier event was the 96th Indianapolis 500, held on Sunday, May 27. The series was sanctioned by IndyCar, and took place in three countries on two continents. Chevrolet returned to the series for the first time since 2005 while Lotus debuted, with the latter leaving the IndyCar Series after the 2012 season due to poor performance.

2012 IndyCar Series

Three-time defending IndyCar champion Dario Franchitti entered the season seeking his fourth consecutive championship and fifth overall. Meanwhile, two-time championship runner up Will Power sought his first title. Heading into the final race of the season, Power led Ryan Hunter-Reay by 17 points in a two driver fight for the championship. After Power wrecked on lap 55, Hunter-Reay was able to finish 4th, and claimed the championship by 3 points.

Among the numerous stories going into the season was the departure of Danica Patrick, who left IndyCar to compete in the NASCAR Nationwide Series. Joining the series was former Formula One driver Rubens Barrichello. A highlight of the season was the introduction of a new chassis and engine package.

After losing Las Vegas as a venue in the aftermath of the death of Dan Wheldon, the series welcomed the return of such venues as Detroit and Fontana. In addition, midway through the season, the inaugural Indy Qingdao 600 scheduled to take place in China was cancelled by the promoter.

It was a triumphant return for Chevrolet after returning from 6 years absence, and an average year for Honda topped by an unexpectedly good performance at the 500 after poor qualifying.

The 2012 season saw the implementation of IndyCar's new ICONIC Plan (Innovative, Competitive, Open-wheel, New, Industry-relevant, Cost-effective), the biggest change to the sport in recent history. The car used through 2011, a 2003/2007-model Dallara IR-05, and naturally aspirated V8 engines (required since 1997) were permanently retired. The ICONIC committee was composed of experts and executives from racing and technical fields: Randy Bernard, William R. Looney III, Brian Barnhart, Gil de Ferran, Tony Purnell, Eddie Gossage, Neil Ressler, Tony Cotman and Rick Long. IndyCar accepted proposals from BAT Engineering, Dallara, DeltaWing, Lola and Swift for chassis design. On July 14, 2010, the final decision was made public, with organisers accepting the Dallara proposal.

Under the new ICONIC regulations, all teams will compete with a core rolling chassis, called the "IndyCar Safety Cell", developed by Italian designer Dallara. Teams will then outfit the chassis with separate body work, referred to as "Aero Kits", which consist of front and rear wings, sidepods, and engine cowlings. Development of Aero Kits is open to any manufacturer, with all packages to be made available to all teams for a maximum price. ICONIC committee member Tony Purnell gave an open invitation to car manufacturers and companies such as Lockheed Martin and GE to develop kits.

The IndyCar Safety cell will be capped at a price of $349,000 and will be assembled at a new Dallara facility in Speedway, Indiana. Aero Kits will be capped at $70,000. Teams have the option of buying a complete Dallara safety cell/aero kit for a discounted price.

On May 12, 2011, Dallara unveiled the first concept cars, one apiece in oval and road course Aero Kit configuration.

On April 30, 2011, IndyCar owners voted 15–0 to reject the introduction of multiple Aero Kits for the 2012 season, citing costs. Owners expressed their desire to introduce the new chassis/engines for 2012, but have all participants use the Dallara aerodynamic package in 2012, and delay the introduction of multiple aero kits until 2013. On August 14, 2011, IndyCar confirmed that the introduction of multiple Aero Kits would be delayed until 2013 for "economic reasons," and furthermore, it was put off for 2013 as well. Chevrolet and Lotus had already announced their intention to build aero kits.

2011 Indianapolis 500 winner Dan Wheldon carried out the first official test of the Dallara chassis at Mid-Ohio in August 2011. Following Wheldon's death at the season-ending race in Las Vegas, Dallara announced that the 2012 chassis would be named the DW12 in his honor.

Turbochargers returned to the IndyCar Series for the first time since the 1996 season. The engines are 2.2 L V6 turbocharged engines, tuned to produce a range of with a 12,000 RPM limit. All engines will run E85 fuel; from 2007–2011, the series utilized 100% fuel grade ethanol.
The turbochargers are provided by BorgWarner.

On November 12, 2010, Chevrolet was confirmed as an engine supplier for 2012 with a twin turbo V6. The initial list of potential suppliers included Ford, Cosworth, and Mazda. Honda announced a 2.2-liter turbo V6 developed by Honda Performance Development. On May 27, 2011, Ganassi and Honda announced their partnership renewal for 2012. On August 19, 2010, Cosworth announced their interest in providing an inline-four engine, however, the plan was eventually scrapped. The Chevrolet engine is built in a joint effort with Ilmor who last time partnered Chevrolet in 1997-2002 (1997-2001 as Oldsmobile) and Honda in 2003-2011, and was introduced in partnership with Penske Racing.

The third engine supplier was announced November 18, 2010 at the LA Auto Show, just prior to the league deadline. Lotus announced a twin turbo V6 engine and an Aero Kit. built in a partnership with John Judd and Jack Brabham (Engine Developments Ltd.) Judd engines were used in the CART series and at the Indy 500 from 1987–1992, as well as in sports car racing and F1. Lotus has suffered difficulty in both power and delivery of engines and has since pulled out of the sport.

The arrival of Chevrolet and Lotus as IndyCar Series engine suppliers were marked the return of multiple engine suppliers since 2005 season when Chevrolet and Toyota were Honda engine competitors.The 2012 schedule included the following 15 races:
(O) Oval/Speedway

(S) Road Course/Street Circuit
All chassis are composed of a Dallara DW-12 "IndyCar Safety Cell" base and aerokit in 2012. All teams will run Firestone tires.
(R) – RookieThe first official test of the Dallara DW12 chassis was carried out by Dan Wheldon at Mid-Ohio on August 8, 2011. Phase I of testing involved Wheldon, and was planned to involve three road courses and three ovals, over a total of about twelve days. The second test was held August 18 at Barber, and the third was held on the USGP road course at Indianapolis on September 1. Oval tests took place in September at Iowa and Indianapolis.

Honda (Scott Dixon) and Chevrolet (Will Power) began Phase II of on-track testing at Mid-Ohio in early October. A scheduled test at Las Vegas was cancelled after the fatal crash of Dan Wheldon. Testing resumed in late October and continued through February at several venues including Sebring, Fontana, Homestead, Phoenix, and Sonoma. Lotus first took to the track on January 12 at Palm Beach, and testing by individual teams began on January 16.

A full-field official open test took place on March 5–6 & 8–9, 2012 at Sebring International Raceway.

Full-field oval open tests are scheduled for April 4, 2012 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and for May 7, 2012 at Texas Motor Speedway.
For 2012, as in recent years, the IndyCar Series schedule split its television coverage between ESPN on ABC and NBC Sports Network (formerly Versus). The season finale returned to NBC Sports Network after airing on ABC in 2011.

As a result of logistics, NBC Sports Network aired 2012 Summer Olympics coverage during the time and ESPN's broadcast and production crew were working the NASCAR Nationwide Series U.S. Cellular 250 during a split race weekend for the two NASCAR national series), the August 5 race at Mid Ohio that aired on ABC used the NBC Sports Network crew.

In addition to qualifying and race broadcasts, NBC Sports Network aired "IndyCar 36", a documentary series based on NBC's "36" format. Each 30-minute episode features a driver's race weekend. The drivers selected were:
No shows were produced at São Paulo, Detroit, Milwaukee or Edmonton, whereas frontrunners Ryan Briscoe, Dario Franchitti and Scott Dixon were not featured.

On October 16, 2011, the final race of the 2011 IndyCar season, the IZOD IndyCar World Championship, was held at Las Vegas. However, the race was halted by a horrific crash on lap 11 that involved 15 cars, some of which became airborne, and some of which burst into flames. The crash began when Wade Cunningham made light contact with James Hinchcliffe, but the situation turned into a big pile-up of cars. The crash allowed a red flag to be waved almost instantly, due to the remains of the damaged cars and the amount of debris on the track.

Las Vegas Motor Speedway

Las Vegas Motor Speedway, located in Clark County, Nevada in Las Vegas, Nevada about 15 miles northeast of the Las Vegas Strip, is a complex of multiple tracks for motorsports racing. The complex is owned by Speedway Motorsports, Inc., which is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Following the final closure of Stardust International Raceway in 1971, plans were developed for a new racing facility in Las Vegas: the Las Vegas Speedrome. Located in the far northeast corner of the Las Vegas Valley, the Speedrome consisted of a road course and drag strip, opening in 1972. Alex Rodriquez leased the facility from the City of Las Vegas, and added the 3/8-mile short track in 1985. Ralph Engelstad of the Imperial Palace purchased the track in 1989, renaming the facility Las Vegas Speedway Park. Engelstad partnered with William Bennett of the Sahara Hotel and opened a new $72 million superspeedway on the site in September 1996. The first race at the speedway was on September 15 with an IndyCar event, which was won by Richie Hearn. A NASCAR Truck Series race followed in November. In December 1998, Speedway Motorsports purchased Las Vegas Motor Speedway from Engelstad and Bennett for $215 million. Veteran motorsports publicist Chris Powell was named the speedway's president and general manager and still holds that position today.

The Winston No Bull 5 Million Dollar Bonus was held at the track from 1999 to 2002. Jeff Burton won a million dollars in 2000 and Jeff Gordon won the bonus in 2001. Burton and Sterling Marlin were not eligible in 1999 or 2002. The drag strip was relocated into the current The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, while the old drag strip and road course was rebuilt to the current outer 2.4 mile road course in use today. The 3/8-mile oval was rebuilt with a new pit lane and start-finish changed to the opposite side. During the 2004 and 2005 seasons, Champ Car also held races at the speedway, which were both won by Sébastien Bourdais.

In 2006, plans were announced to reconfigure the track after the Nextel Cup Series race held in March, increasing the banking from the original 12 degrees to 20 degrees. This reconfiguration entailed "progressive banking" which increases the degree of banking on a gradient towards the outside of the track. This increased side-by-side racing. The speedway also constructed a fan zone called the "Neon Garage". This area has live entertainment, unprecedented access to the drivers and teams, such as viewing areas for fans to watch their favorite driver's car get worked on and talk to the drivers, and is home to the Winner's Circle. The speedway moved pit road closer to the grandstands, built a new media center and added a quarter-mile oval for Legends Cars, Bandoleros, and Thunder Roadsters, in the tri-oval area.

On August 8, 2006, the newly reconfigured track reopened to stock cars. Kurt Busch, the 2004 NASCAR Cup Series Champion and Las Vegas native, became the first NASCAR Cup Series driver to test a stock car on the newly reconfigured track in his No. 2 Penske Dodge. Burton won the first Nationwide Series race on the new surface, taking a Monte Carlo SS to Victory Lane. The following day, Jimmie Johnson drove a Chevrolet to Victory Lane, capturing the first NASCAR Cup Series win on the new pavement.

In March 2011, Insomniac Events announced that their largest rave festival in North America, Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), would take place at Las Vegas Motor Speedway for the first time on June 24–26. More than 235,000 people attended the three-day event. The 2012 event was held June 8–10 with an attendance of 315,000 people. The 2013 event was held June 21–23 with an attendance of approximately 345,000 people. The 2014 event was held on June 20–22, and the 2015 event took place June 19–21. The twentieth anniversary EDC Las Vegas 2016 took place June 17–19, 2016; the 2018 version of the festival will run on 15-17 June 2018. Insomniac signed a ten-year contract with LVMS to host EDC through 2022.

A third road course designed by Romain Thievin was added in 2012. The course is long with 11 turns and an straight.

Starting in 2018, A second race weekend will take place at the track, taking the New Hampshire Motor Speedway's Cup Series and Truck Series fall weekend races. Also, both weekends will now be triple headers (Cup, Truck, and Xfinity Series), moving the October stand alone race for the Truck Series at LVMS to the spring weekend, and moving the stand-alone Xfinity race from the Kentucky Speedway to the fall weekend. The Cup race would be the first race for the playoffs (replacing Chicagoland Speedway), The regular season finale for Xfinity Series, and the second playoff race for the Truck Series.

Four of the 15 drivers were seriously injured and taken to the nearby University Medical Center for treatment, one of which was two-time Indianapolis 500 winner and 2005 series champion Dan Wheldon, who suffered severe blunt force trauma to the head after his car flew into the catch fence. He was pronounced dead on arrival two hours later and IndyCar's officials formally decided to abandon the race. Instead of completing the race with 188 laps to go, the 19 drivers who were not involved went back out on the track and did a five-lap salute in Wheldon's honor.

In December 2011, IndyCar announced that they would not return to Las Vegas Motor Speedway and that the future of IndyCar depended on what they would learn from the ongoing investigation of the crash that claimed Wheldon's life.

The crash happened during the filming of an episode about IndyCar for the TV documentary series Nerve Center. The crash was shown in the episode.* The NASCAR timing and scoring use a length of. This length was also used by IRL between 1996 and 2000. In their last race in 2011 Indycar remeasured track length to. This is the result of the reconfiguration of the track. Between 2005 (old layout) and 2011 (new layout), no indycar race was held there. NASCAR still use the old length of exactly 1.5 miles for the reconfigured oval.


How many novels did Charles Dickens write?

Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the 20th century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are still widely read today.

Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of "The Pickwick Papers". Within a few years he had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire, and keen observation of character and society. His novels, most published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication. Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense. The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback. For example, when his wife's chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in "David Copperfield" seemed to reflect her disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features. His plots were carefully constructed, and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives. Masses of the illiterate poor chipped in ha'pennies to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.

Dickens was regarded as the literary colossus of his age. His 1843 novella, "A Christmas Carol", remains popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. "Oliver Twist" and "Great Expectations" are also frequently adapted, and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel, "A Tale of Two Cities", set in London and Paris, is his best-known work of historical fiction. Dickens has been praised by fellow writers—from Leo Tolstoy to George Orwell, G. K. Chesterton and Tom Wolfe—for his realism, comedy, prose style, unique characterisations, and social criticism. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf complained of a lack of psychological depth, loose writing, and a vein of saccharine sentimentalism. The term "Dickensian" is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social conditions or comically repulsive characters.

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, at 1 Mile End Terrace (now 393 Commercial Road), Landport in Portsea Island (Portsmouth), the second of eight children of Elizabeth Dickens (née Barrow; 1789–1863) and John Dickens (1785–1851). His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office and was temporarily stationed in the district. He asked Christopher Huffam, rigger to His Majesty's Navy, gentleman, and head of an established firm, to act as godfather to Charles. Huffam is thought to be the inspiration for Paul Dombey, the owner of a shipping company in Dickens's novel "Dombey and Son" (1848).

In January 1815, John Dickens was called back to London, and the family moved to Norfolk Street, Fitzrovia. When Charles was four, they relocated to Sheerness, and thence to Chatham, Kent, where he spent his formative years until the age of 11. His early life seems to have been idyllic, though he thought himself a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy".

Charles spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, including the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding, as well as "Robinson Crusoe" and "Gil Blas". He read and reread "The Arabian Nights" and the Collected Farces of Elizabeth Inchbald. He retained poignant memories of childhood, helped by an excellent memory of people and events, which he used in his writing. His father's brief work as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office afforded him a few years of private education, first at a dame school, and then at a school run by William Giles, a dissenter, in Chatham.
This period came to an end in June 1822, when John Dickens was recalled to Navy Pay Office headquarters at Somerset House, and the family (except for Charles, who stayed behind to finish his final term of work) moved to Camden Town in London. The family had left Kent amidst rapidly mounting debts, and, living beyond his means, John Dickens was forced by his creditors into the Marshalsea debtors' prison in Southwark, London in 1824. His wife and youngest children joined him there, as was the practice at the time. Charles, then 12 years old, boarded with Elizabeth Roylance, a family friend, at 112 College Place, Camden Town. Roylance was "a reduced [impoverished] old lady, long known to our family", whom Dickens later immortalised, "with a few alterations and embellishments", as "Mrs. Pipchin" in "Dombey and Son". Later, he lived in a back-attic in the house of an agent for the Insolvent Court, Archibald Russell, "a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman... with a quiet old wife" and lame son, in Lant Street in Southwark. They provided the inspiration for the Garlands in "The Old Curiosity Shop".

On Sundays—with his sister Frances, free from her studies at the Royal Academy of Music—he spent the day at the Marshalsea. Dickens later used the prison as a setting in "Little Dorrit". To pay for his board and to help his family, Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station, where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. The strenuous and often harsh working conditions made a lasting impression on Dickens and later influenced his fiction and essays, becoming the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor. He later wrote that he wondered "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age". As he recalled to John Forster (from "The Life of Charles Dickens"):

The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.

When the warehouse was moved to Chandos Street in the smart, busy district of Covent Garden the boys worked in a room in which the window gave onto the street and little audiences gathered and watched them at work—in Dickens biographer Simon Callow's estimation, the public display was "a new refinement added to his misery".
A few months after his imprisonment, John Dickens's mother, Elizabeth Dickens, died and bequeathed him £450. On the expectation of this legacy, Dickens was released from prison. Under the Insolvent Debtors Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors, and he and his family left Marshalsea, for the home of Mrs Roylance.

Charles's mother, Elizabeth Dickens, did not immediately support his removal from the boot-blacking warehouse. This influenced Dickens's view that a father should rule the family, and a mother find her proper sphere inside the home: "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back". His mother's failure to request his return was a factor in his dissatisfied attitude towards women.

Righteous indignation stemming from his own situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes of his works, and it was this unhappy period in his youth to which he alluded in his favourite, and most autobiographical, novel, "David Copperfield": "I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!"

Dickens was eventually sent to the Wellington House Academy in Camden Town, where he remained until March 1827, having spent about two years there. He did not consider it to be a good school: "Much of the haphazard, desultory teaching, poor discipline punctuated by the headmaster's sadistic brutality, the seedy ushers and general run-down atmosphere, are embodied in Mr. Creakle's Establishment in "David Copperfield"."

Dickens worked at the law office of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn, as a junior clerk from May 1827 to November 1828. He was a gifted mimic and impersonated those around him: clients, lawyers, and clerks. He went to theatres obsessively—he claimed that for at least three years he went to the theatre every single day. His favourite actor was Charles Mathews, and Dickens learnt his "monopolylogues", (farces in which Mathews played every character), by heart. Then, having learned Gurney's system of shorthand in his spare time, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant relative, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at Doctors' Commons, and Dickens was able to share his box there to report the legal proceedings for nearly four years. This education was to inform works such as "Nicholas Nickleby", "Dombey and Son", and especially "Bleak House"—whose vivid portrayal of the machinations and bureaucracy of the legal system did much to enlighten the general public and served as a vehicle for dissemination of Dickens's own views regarding, particularly, the heavy burden on the poor who were forced by circumstances to "go to law".

In 1830, Dickens met his first love, Maria Beadnell, thought to have been the model for the character Dora in "David Copperfield". Maria's parents disapproved of the courtship and ended the relationship by sending her to school in Paris.

In 1832, at age 20, Dickens was energetic and increasingly self-confident. He enjoyed mimicry and popular entertainment, lacked a clear, specific sense of what he wanted to become, and yet knew he wanted fame. Drawn to the theatre—he became an early member of the Garrick—he landed an acting audition at Covent Garden, where the manager George Bartley and the actor Charles Kemble were to see him. Dickens prepared meticulously and decided to imitate the comedian Charles Mathews, but ultimately he missed the audition because of a cold. Before another opportunity arose, he had set out on his career as a writer. In 1833, he submitted his first story, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", to the London periodical "Monthly Magazine". William Barrow, a brother of his mother, offered him a job on "The Mirror of Parliament" and he worked in the House of Commons for the first time early in 1832. He rented rooms at Furnival's Inn and worked as a political journalist, reporting on Parliamentary debates, and he travelled across Britain to cover election campaigns for the "Morning Chronicle". His journalism, in the form of sketches in periodicals, formed his first collection of pieces, published in 1836: "Sketches by Boz"—Boz being a family nickname he employed as a pseudonym for some years. Dickens apparently adopted it from the nickname "Moses", which he had given to his youngest brother Augustus Dickens, after a character in Oliver Goldsmith's "The Vicar of Wakefield". When pronounced by anyone with a head cold, "Moses" became "Boses"—later shortened to "Boz". Dickens's own name was considered "queer" by a contemporary critic, who wrote in 1849: "Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations." He contributed to and edited journals throughout his literary career. In January 1835, the "Morning Chronicle" launched an evening edition, under the editorship of the "Chronicle"s music critic, George Hogarth. Hogarth invited Dickens to contribute "Street Sketches" and Dickens became a regular visitor to his Fulham house, excited by Hogarth's friendship with a hero of his, Walter Scott, and enjoying the company of Hogarth's three daughters—Georgina, Mary, and nineteen-year-old Catherine.

Dickens made rapid progress both professionally and socially. He began a friendship with William Harrison Ainsworth, the author of the highwayman novel "Rookwood" (1834), whose bachelor salon in Harrow Road had become the meeting place for a set that included Daniel Maclise, Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and George Cruikshank. All these became his friends and collaborators, with the exception of Disraeli, and he met his first publisher, John Macrone, at the house. The success of "Sketches by Boz" led to a proposal from publishers Chapman and Hall for Dickens to supply text to match Robert Seymour's engraved illustrations in a monthly letterpress. Seymour committed suicide after the second instalment, and Dickens, who wanted to write a connected series of sketches, hired "Phiz" to provide the engravings (which were reduced from four to two per instalment) for the story. The resulting story became "The Pickwick Papers", and though the first few episodes were not successful, the introduction of the Cockney character Sam Weller in the fourth episode (the first to be illustrated by Phiz) marked a sharp climb in its popularity. The final instalment sold 40,000 copies.

In November 1836, Dickens accepted the position of editor of "Bentley's Miscellany", a position he held for three years, until he fell out with the owner. In 1836 as he finished the last instalments of "The Pickwick Papers", he began writing the beginning instalments of "Oliver Twist"—writing as many as 90 pages a month—while continuing work on "Bentley's" and also writing four plays, the production of which he oversaw. "Oliver Twist", published in 1838, became one of Dickens's better known stories, and was the first Victorian novel with a child protagonist.

On 2 April 1836, after a one-year engagement, and between episodes two and three of "The Pickwick Papers", Dickens married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1816–1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the "Evening Chronicle". They were married in St. Luke's Church, Chelsea, London. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk in Kent, the couple returned to lodgings at Furnival's Inn. The first of their ten children, Charley, was born in January 1837, and a few months later the family set up home in Bloomsbury at 48 Doughty Street, London, (on which Charles had a three-year lease at £80 a year) from 25 March 1837 until December 1839. Dickens's younger brother Frederick and Catherine's 17-year-old sister Mary, moved in with them. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. Unusually for Dickens, as a consequence of his shock, he stopped working, and he and Kate stayed at a little farm on Hampstead Heath for a fortnight. Dickens idealised Mary—the character he fashioned after her, Rose Maylie, he found he could not now kill, as he had planned, in his fiction, and, according to Ackroyd, he drew on memories of her for his later descriptions of Little Nell and Florence Dombey. His grief was so great that he was unable to meet the deadline for the June instalment of "Pickwick Papers" and had to cancel the "Oliver Twist" instalment that month as well. The time in Hampstead was the occasion for a growing bond between Dickens and John Forster to develop and Forster soon became his unofficial business manager, and the first to read his work.

His success as a novelist continued. The young Queen Victoria read both "Oliver Twist" and "Pickwick", staying up until midnight to discuss them. "Nicholas Nickleby" (1838–39), "The Old Curiosity Shop" (184041) and, finally, his first historical novel, "Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty", as part of the "Master Humphrey's Clock" series (1840–41), were all published in monthly instalments before being made into books.

In the midst of all his activity during this period, there was discontent with his publishers and John Macrone was bought off, while Richard Bentley signed over all his rights in "Oliver Twist". Other signs of a certain restlessness and discontent emerge—in Broadstairs he flirted with Eleanor Picken, the young fiancée of his solicitor's best friend, and one night grabbed her and ran with her down to the sea. He declared they were both to drown there in the "sad sea waves". She finally got free but afterwards kept her distance. In June 1841 he precipitously set out on a two-month tour of Scotland and then, in September 1841, telegraphed Forster that he had decided to go to America. "Master Humphrey's Clock" was shut down, though Dickens was still keen on the idea of the weekly magazine, a form he liked, a liking that had begun with his childhood reading of the eighteenth-century magazines "Tatler" and "The Spectator".

Dickens was perturbed by the return to power of the Tories, whom Dickens described as "people whom, politically, I despise and abhor." He had been tempted to stand for the Liberals in Reading, but decided against it due to financial straits. He wrote three anti-Tory verse satires ("The Fine Old English Gentleman", "The Quack Doctor's Proclamation", and "Subjects for Painters") which were published in "The Examiner".

On 22 January 1842, Dickens and his wife arrived in Boston, Massachusetts aboard the RMS "Britannia" during their first trip to the United States and Canada. At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, joined the Dickens household, now living at Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone, to care for the young family they had left behind. She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser, and friend until Dickens's death in 1870. Dickens modeled the character of Agnes Wickfield after Georgina and Mary.
He described his impressions in a travelogue, "American Notes for General Circulation". Dickens includes in "Notes" a powerful condemnation of slavery, which he had attacked as early as "The Pickwick Papers", correlating the emancipation of the poor in England with the abolition of slavery abroad citing newspaper accounts of runaway slaves disfigured by their masters. In spite of the abolitionist sentiments gleaned from his trip to America, some modern commentators have pointed out inconsistencies in Dickens's views on racial inequality, for instance, he has been criticized for his subsequent acquiescence in Governor Eyre's harsh crackdown during the 1860s Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and his failure to join other British progressives in condemning it. From Richmond, Virginia, Dickens returned to Washington, D.C., and started a trek westward to St. Louis, Missouri. While there, he expressed a desire to see an American prairie before returning east. A group of 13 men then set out with Dickens to visit Looking Glass Prairie, a trip 30 miles into Illinois.

During his American visit, Dickens spent a month in New York City, giving lectures, raising the question of international copyright laws and the pirating of his work in America. He persuaded a group of twenty-five writers, headed by Washington Irving, to sign a petition for him to take to Congress, but the press were generally hostile to this, saying that he should be grateful for his popularity and that it was mercenary to complain about his work being pirated.

The popularity he gained caused a shift in his self-perception according to critic Kate Flint, who writes that he "found himself a cultural commodity, and its circulation had passed out his control", causing him to become interested in and delve into themes of public and personal personas in the next novels. She writes that he assumed a role of "influential commentator", publicly and in his fiction, evident in his next few books. His trip to the U.S. ended with a trip to Canada: Niagara Falls, Toronto, Kingston and Montreal where he appeared on stage in light comedies.
Soon after his return to England, Dickens began work on the first of his Christmas stories, "A Christmas Carol", written in 1843, which was followed by "The Chimes" in 1844 and "The Cricket on the Hearth" in 1845. Of these, "A Christmas Carol" was most popular and, tapping into an old tradition, did much to promote a renewed enthusiasm for the joys of Christmas in Britain and America. The seeds for the story became planted in Dickens's mind during a trip to Manchester to witness the conditions of the manufacturing workers there. This, along with scenes he had recently witnessed at the Field Lane Ragged School, caused Dickens to resolve to "strike a sledge hammer blow" for the poor. As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He later wrote that as the tale unfolded he "wept and laughed, and wept again" as he "walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed."

After living briefly in Italy (1844), Dickens travelled to Switzerland (1846), where he began work on "Dombey and Son" (1846–48). This and "David Copperfield" (1849–50) mark a significant artistic break in Dickens's career as his novels became more serious in theme and more carefully planned than his early works.

At about this time, he was made aware of a large embezzlement at the firm where his brother, Augustus, worked (John Chapman & Co.). It had been carried out by Thomas Powell, a clerk, who was on friendly terms with Dickens and who had acted as mentor to Augustus when he started work. Powell was also an author and poet and knew many of the famous writers of the day. After further fraudulent activities, Powell fled to New York and published a book called "The Living Authors of England" with a chapter on Charles Dickens, who was not amused by what Powell had written. One item that seemed to have annoyed him was the assertion that he had based the character of Paul Dombey ("Dombey and Son") on Thomas Chapman, one of the principal partners at John Chapman & Co. Dickens immediately sent a letter to Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the New York literary magazine "The Knickerbocker", saying that Powell was a forger and thief. Clark published the letter in the "New-York Tribune", and several other papers picked up on the story. Powell began proceedings to sue these publications, and Clark was arrested. Dickens, realising that he had acted in haste, contacted John Chapman & Co. to seek written confirmation of Powell's guilt. Dickens did receive a reply confirming Powell's embezzlement, but once the directors realised this information might have to be produced in court, they refused to make further disclosures. Owing to the difficulties of providing evidence in America to support his accusations, Dickens eventually made a private settlement with Powell out of court.

Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens in May 1846 about setting up a home for the redemption of fallen women of the working class. Coutts envisioned a home that would replace the punitive regimes of existing institutions with a reformative environment conducive to education and proficiency in domestic household chores. After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named "Urania Cottage", in the Lime Grove section of Shepherds Bush, which he managed for ten years, setting the house rules, reviewing the accounts and interviewing prospective residents. Emigration and marriage were central to Dickens's agenda for the women on leaving Urania Cottage, from which it is estimated that about 100 women graduated between 1847 and 1859.

As a young man Dickens expressed a distaste for certain aspects of organized religion. In 1836, in a pamphlet titled "Sunday Under Three Heads", he defended the people's right to pleasure, opposing a plan to prohibit games on Sundays. "Look into your churches- diminished congregations and scanty attendance. People have grown sullen and obstinate, and are becoming disgusted with the faith which condemns them to such a day as this, once in every seven. They display their feeling by staying away [from church]. Turn into the streets [on a Sunday] and mark the rigid gloom that reigns over everything around."

Dickens honoured the figure of though some claim he may have denied his divinity. Notwithstanding, Dickens has been characterized as a professing Christian. His son, Henry Fielding Dickens, described Dickens as someone who "possessed deep religious convictions". In the early 1840s, Dickens had shown an interest in Unitarian Christianity, and Robert Browning remarked that “Mr. Dickens is an enlightened Unitarian.” Writer Gary Colledge, however, asserted that he "never strayed from his attachment to popular lay Anglicanism". He also wrote a religious work called "The Life of Our Lord" (1849), which was a short book about the life of Jesus Christ, written with the purpose of inculcating his faith to his children and family.

Dickens disapproved of Roman Catholicism and 19th-century evangelicalism, and was critical of what he saw as the hypocrisy of religious institutions and philosophies like spiritualism, all of which he considered deviations from the true spirit of Christianity. Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky referred to Dickens as "that great Christian writer".

In December 1845, Dickens took up the editorship of the London-based "Daily News", a liberal paper through which Dickens hoped to advocate, in his own words, "the Principles of Progress and Improvement, of Education and Civil and Religious Liberty and Equal Legislation." Among the other contributors Dickens chose to write for the paper were the radical economist Thomas Hodgskin and social reformer Douglas William Jerrold, who frequently attacked the Corn Laws. Dickens lasted only ten weeks on the job before resigning due to a combination of exhaustion and frustration with one of the paper's co-owners.

The Francophile Dickens often holidayed in France, and in a speech delivered in Paris in 1846 in French called the French "the first people in the universe". During his visit to Paris, Dickens met the French literati Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Eugène Scribe, Théophile Gautier, François-René de Chateaubriand and Eugène Sue. Dickens started to write "David Copperfield" in 1848. It was published between 1849 and 1850. Scholars consider it as Dickens's veiled autobiography with the title character modeled after the author himself. It was Dickens's personal favourite among his own novels.

In late November 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he wrote "Bleak House" (1852–53), "Hard Times" (1854), and "Little Dorrit" (1856). It was here that he indulged in the amateur theatricals described in Forster's "Life". During this period he worked closely with the novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins. In 1856, his income from writing allowed him to buy Gad's Hill Place in Higham, Kent. As a child, Dickens had walked past the house and dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Part 1", and this literary connection pleased him.

In 1857, Dickens hired professional actresses for the play "The Frozen Deep", written by him and his protégé, Wilkie Collins. Dickens fell in love with one of the actresses, Ellen Ternan, and this passion was to last the rest of his life. 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. When Catherine left, never to see her husband again, she took with her one child, leaving the other children to be raised by her sister Georgina who chose to stay at Gad's Hill.

During this period, whilst pondering a project to give public readings for his own profit, Dickens was approached through a charitable appeal by Great Ormond Street Hospital, to help it survive its first major financial crisis. His 'Drooping Buds' essay in "Household Words" earlier on 3 April 1852 was considered by the hospital's founders to have been the catalyst for the hospital's success. Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked by his friend, the hospital's founder Charles West, to preside over the appeal, and he threw himself into the task, heart and soul. Dickens's public readings secured sufficient funds for an endowment to put the hospital on a sound financial footing—one reading on 9 February 1858 alone raised £3,000.

After separating from Catherine, Dickens undertook a series of hugely popular and remunerative reading tours which, together with his journalism, were to absorb most of his creative energies for the next decade, in which he was to write only two more novels. His first reading tour, lasting from April 1858 to February 1859, consisted of 129 appearances in 49 different towns throughout England, Scotland and Ireland. Dickens's continued fascination with the theatrical world was written into the theatre scenes in "Nicholas Nickleby", but more importantly he found an outlet in public readings. In 1866, he undertook a series of public readings in England and Scotland, with more the following year in England and Ireland.
Major works soon followed, including "A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) and "Great Expectations" (1861), which were resounding successes. During this time he was also the publisher, editor, and a major contributor to the journals "Household Words" (1850–1859) and "All the Year Round" (1858–1870).

In early September 1860, in a field behind Gad's Hill, Dickens made a bonfire of most of his correspondence—only those letters on business matters were spared. Since Ellen Ternan also destroyed all of his letters to her, the extent of the affair between the two remains speculative. In the 1930s, Thomas Wright recounted that Ternan had unburdened herself to a Canon Benham, and gave currency to rumours they had been lovers. That the two had a son who died in infancy was alleged by Dickens's daughter, Kate Perugini, whom Gladys Storey had interviewed before her death in 1929. Storey published her account in "Dickens and Daughter", but no contemporary evidence exists. On his death, Dickens settled an annuity on Ternan which made her a financially independent woman. Claire Tomalin's book, "The Invisible Woman", argues that Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life. The book was subsequently turned into a play, "Little Nell", by Simon Gray, and a 2013 film. In the same period, Dickens furthered his interest in the paranormal, becoming one of the early members of The Ghost Club.

In June 1862, he was offered £10,000 for a reading tour of Australia. He was enthusiastic, and even planned a travel book, "The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down", but ultimately decided against the tour. Two of his sons, Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, migrated to Australia, Edward becoming a member of the Parliament of New South Wales as Member for Wilcannia between 1889 and 1894.

On 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris with Ellen Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. The train's first seven carriages plunged off a cast iron bridge that was under repair. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was travelling. Before rescuers arrived, Dickens tended and comforted the wounded and the dying with a flask of brandy and a hat refreshed with water, and saved some lives. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for "Our Mutual Friend", and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it. Dickens later used this experience as material for his short ghost story, "The Signal-Man", in which the central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail crash. He also based the story on several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash of 1861. 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.

While he contemplated a second visit to the United States, the outbreak of the Civil War in America in 1861 delayed his plans. On 9 November 1867, over two years after the war, Dickens set sail from Liverpool for his second American reading tour. Landing at Boston, he devoted the rest of the month to a round of dinners with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and his American publisher, James Thomas Fields. In early December, the readings began. He performed 76 readings, netting £19,000, from December 1867 to April 1868. Dickens shuttled between Boston and New York, where he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall. Although he had started to suffer from what he called the "true American catarrh", he kept to a schedule that would have challenged a much younger man, even managing to squeeze in some sleighing in Central Park.
During his travels, he saw a change in the people and the circumstances of America. His final appearance was at a banquet the American Press held in his honour at Delmonico's on 18 April, when he promised never to denounce America again. By the end of the tour Dickens could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. On 23 April he boarded the Cunard liner to return to Britain, barely escaping a Federal Tax Lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.

Between 1868 and 1869, Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" in England, Scotland, and Ireland, beginning on 6 October. He managed, of a contracted 100 readings, to deliver 75 in the provinces, with a further 12 in London. As he pressed on he was affected by giddiness and fits of paralysis. He suffered a stroke on 18 April 1869 in Chester. He collapsed on 22 April 1869, at Preston in Lancashire, and on doctor's advice, the tour was cancelled. After further provincial readings were cancelled, he began work on his final novel, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood". It was fashionable in the 1860s to 'do the slums' and, in company, Dickens visited opium dens in Shadwell, where he witnessed an elderly addict known as "Laskar Sal", who formed the model for the "Opium Sal" subsequently featured in his mystery novel, "Edwin Drood".

After Dickens had regained sufficient strength, he arranged, with medical approval, for a final series of readings to partially make up to his sponsors what they had lost due to his illness. There were to be 12 performances, running between 11 January and 15 March 1870, the last at 8:00 pm at St. James's Hall in London. Although in grave health by this time, he read "A Christmas Carol" and "The Trial from Pickwick". On 2 May, he made his last public appearance at a Royal Academy Banquet in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, paying a special tribute on the death of his friend, the illustrator Daniel Maclise.

On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home after a full day's work on "Edwin Drood". He never regained consciousness, and the next day, five years to the day after the Staplehurst rail crash, he died at Gads Hill Place. Biographer Claire Tomalin has suggested Dickens was actually in Peckham when he suffered the stroke, and his mistress Ellen Ternan and her maids had him taken back to Gad's Hill so the public would not know the truth about their relationship. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner", he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads:
His last words were: "On the ground", in response to his sister-in-law Georgina's request that he lie down. On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens was buried in the Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley delivered a memorial elegy, lauding "the genial and loving humorist whom we now mourn", for showing by his own example "that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be innocent". Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the novelist's grave, Stanley assured those present that "the spot would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue."

In his will, drafted more than a year before his death, Dickens left the care of his £80,000 estate to his longtime colleague John Forster and his "best and truest friend" Georgina Hogarth who, along with Dickens's two sons, also received a tax-free sum of £8,000 (about £800,000 in present terms). Although Dickens and his wife had been separated for several years at the time of his death, he provided her with an annual income of £600 and made her similar allowances in his will. He also bequeathed £19 19s to each servant in his employment at the time of his death.

Dickens favoured the style of the 18th-century picaresque novels that he found in abundance on his father's shelves. According to Ackroyd, other than these, perhaps the most important literary influence on him was derived from the fables of "The Arabian Nights".
His writing style is marked by a profuse linguistic creativity. Satire, flourishing in his gift for caricature, is his forte. An early reviewer compared him to Hogarth for his keen practical sense of the ludicrous side of life, though his acclaimed mastery of varieties of class idiom may in fact mirror the conventions of contemporary popular theatre. Dickens worked intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that would reverberate with associations for his readers, and assist the development of motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an "allegorical impetus" to the novels' meanings. To cite one of numerous examples, the name Mr. Murdstone in "David Copperfield" conjures up twin allusions to "murder" and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery—he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator"—are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy.

The author worked closely with his illustrators, supplying them with a summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them. He briefed the illustrator on plans for each month's instalment so that work could begin before he wrote them. Marcus Stone, illustrator of "Our Mutual Friend", recalled that the author was always "ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ... life-history of the creations of his fancy".

Dickens's biographer Claire Tomalin regards him as the greatest creator of character in English fiction after Shakespeare.
Dickensian characters are amongst the most memorable in English literature, especially so because of their typically whimsical names. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Bill Sikes, Pip, Miss Havisham, Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay, David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber, Abel Magwitch, Daniel Quilp, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers, and Uriah Heep are so well known as to be part and parcel of British culture, and in some cases have passed into ordinary language: a "scrooge", for example, is a miser – or someone who dislikes Christmas festivity.

His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. "Gamp" became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs Gamp, and "Pickwickian", "Pecksniffian", and "Gradgrind" all entered dictionaries due to Dickens's original portraits of such characters who were, respectively, quixotic, hypocritical, and vapidly factual. Many were drawn from real life: Mrs Nickleby is based on his mother, though she didn't recognise herself in the portrait, just as Mr Micawber is constructed from aspects of his father's 'rhetorical exuberance': Harold Skimpole in "Bleak House" is based on James Henry Leigh Hunt: his wife's dwarfish chiropodist recognised herself in Miss Mowcher in "David Copperfield". Perhaps Dickens's impressions on his meeting with Hans Christian Andersen informed the delineation of Uriah Heep.

Virginia Woolf maintained that "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens" as he produces "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks". One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. Dickens described London as a magic lantern, inspiring the places and people in many of his novels. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital – Dickens' London – are described over the course of his body of work.

Authors frequently draw their portraits of characters from people they have known in real life. "David Copperfield" is regarded by many as a veiled autobiography of Dickens. The scenes of interminable court cases and legal arguments in "Bleak House" reflect Dickens's experiences as a law clerk and court reporter, and in particular his direct experience of the law's procedural delay during 1844 when he sued publishers in Chancery for breach of copyright. Dickens's father was sent to prison for debt, and this became a common theme in many of his books, with the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in "Little Dorrit" resulting from Dickens's own experiences of the institution. Lucy Stroughill, a childhood sweetheart, may have affected several of Dickens's portraits of girls such as Little Em'ly in "David Copperfield" and Lucie Manette in "A Tale of Two Cities."

Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew the details of his early life until six years after his death, when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated. Though Skimpole brutally sends up Leigh Hunt, some critics have detected in his portrait features of Dickens's own character, which he sought to exorcise by self-parody.

A pioneer of serialised fiction, most of Dickens's major novels were first written in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as "Master Humphrey's Clock" and "Household Words", later reprinted in book form. These instalments made the stories affordable and accessible, and the series of regular cliffhangers made each new episode widely anticipated. When "The Old Curiosity Shop" was being serialised, American fans waited at the docks in New York harbor, shouting out to the crew of an incoming British ship, "Is little Nell dead?" Dickens's talent was to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end.

Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers and friends. His friend Forster had a significant hand in reviewing his drafts, an influence that went beyond matters of punctuation. He toned down melodramatic and sensationalist exaggerations, cut long passages (such as the episode of Quilp's drowning in "The Old Curiosity Shop"), and made suggestions about plot and character. It was he who suggested that Charley Bates should be redeemed in "Oliver Twist". Dickens had not thought of killing Little Nell, and it was Forster who advised him to entertain this possibility as necessary to his conception of the heroine.

Dickens's serialisation of his novels was not uncriticised by other authors. In Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson's novel "The Wrecker", there is a comment by Captain Nares, investigating an abandoned ship: "See! They were writing up the log," said Nares, pointing to the ink-bottle. "Caught napping, as usual. I wonder if there ever was a captain yet that lost a ship with his log-book up to date? He generally has about a month to fill up on a clean break, like Charles Dickens and his serial novels."

Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. In a New York address, he expressed his belief that "Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen". Dickens's second novel, "Oliver Twist" (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime: it challenged middle class polemics about criminals, making impossible any pretence to ignorance about what poverty entailed.

Dickens is often described as using idealised characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and the ugly social truths he reveals. The story of Nell Trent in "The Old Curiosity Shop" (1841) was received as extraordinarily moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde. "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell", he said in a famous remark, "without dissolving into tears...of laughter." G. K. Chesterton stated, "It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell, that I object to", arguing that the maudlin effect of his description of her life owed much to the gregarious nature of Dickens's grief, his "despotic" use of people's feelings to move them to tears in works like this.

The question as to whether Dickens belongs to the tradition of the sentimental novel is debatable. Valerie Purton, in her recent "Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition", sees him continuing aspects of this tradition, and argues that his "sentimental scenes and characters [are] as crucial to the overall power of the novels as his darker or comic figures and scenes", and that ""Dombey and Son" is [... ] Dickens's greatest triumph in the sentimentalist tradition". The "Encyclopædia Britannica" online comments that, despite "patches of emotional excess", such as the reported death of Tiny Tim in "A Christmas Carol" (1843), "Dickens cannot really be termed a sentimental novelist".

In "Oliver Twist" Dickens provides readers with an idealised portrait of a boy so inherently and unrealistically good that his values are never subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a gang of young pickpockets. While later novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in "Bleak House" and Amy Dorrit in "Little Dorrit"), this idealism serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant social commentary. Dickens's fiction, reflecting what he believed to be true of his own life, makes frequent use of coincidence, either for comic effect or to emphasise the idea of providence. For example, Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper-class family that rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group. Such coincidences are a staple of 18th-century picaresque novels, such as Henry Fielding's "Tom Jones," which Dickens enjoyed reading as a youth.

Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time, and remains one of the best-known and most-read of English authors. His works have never gone out of print, and have been adapted continually for the screen since the invention of cinema, with at least 200 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens's works documented. Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime, and as early as 1913, a silent film of "The Pickwick Papers" was made. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.

Among fellow writers, Dickens has been both lionised and mocked. Leo Tolstoy, G. K. Chesterton, and George Orwell praised his realism, comic voice, prose fluency, and satiric caricature, as well as his passionate advocacy on behalf of children and the poor. French writer Jules Verne called Dickens his favourite writer, writing his novels "stand alone, dwarfing all others by their amazing power and felicity of expression." Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was inspired by Dickens's novels in several of his paintings like "Vincent's Chair" and in an 1889 letter to his sister stated that reading Dickens, especially "A Christmas Carol", was one of the things that was keeping him from committing suicide. Oscar Wilde generally disparaged his depiction of character, while admiring his gift for caricature. His late contemporary William Wordsworth, by then Poet laureate, thought him a "very talkative, vulgar young person", adding he had not read a line of his work; Dickens in return thought Wordsworth "a dreadful Old Ass". Henry James denied him a premier position, calling him "the greatest of superficial novelists": Dickens failed to endow his characters with psychological depth and the novels, "loose baggy monsters", betrayed a "cavalier organisation". Virginia Woolf had a love-hate relationship with his works, finding his novels "mesmerizing" while reproving him for his sentimentalism and a commonplace style. Fyodor Dostoyevsky expressed his admiration for the author, "We understand Dickens in Russia, I am convinced, almost as well as the English, perhaps even with all the nuances. It may well be that we love him no less than his compatriots do. And yet how original is Dickens, and how very English!".

"A Christmas Carol" is most probably his best-known story, with frequent new adaptations. It is also the most-filmed of Dickens's stories, with many versions dating from the early years of cinema. According to the historian Ronald Hutton, the current state of the observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by "A Christmas Carol". Dickens catalysed the emerging Christmas as a family-centred festival of generosity, in contrast to the dwindling community-based and church-centred observations, as new middle-class expectations arose. Its archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) entered into Western cultural consciousness. A prominent phrase from the tale, "Merry Christmas", was popularised following the appearance of the story. The term Scrooge became a synonym for miser, and his dismissive exclamation 'Bah! Humbug!' likewise gained currency as an idiom. Novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called the book "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness".
At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged within society. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues—such as sanitation and the workhouse—but his fiction probably demonstrated its greatest prowess in changing public opinion in regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and oppression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of this condition is in "Hard Times" (1854), Dickens's only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In this work, he uses vitriol and satire to illustrate how this marginalised social stratum was termed "Hands" by the factory owners; that is, not really "people" but rather only appendages of the machines they operated. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address such problems of class oppression. For example, the prison scenes in "The Pickwick Papers" are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. Karl Marx asserted that Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together". George Bernard Shaw even remarked that "Great Expectations" was more seditious than Marx's "Das Kapital". The exceptional popularity of Dickens's novels, even those with socially oppositional themes ("Bleak House", 1853; "Little Dorrit", 1857; "Our Mutual Friend", 1865), not only underscored his almost preternatural ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also ensured that the Victorian public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored. It has been argued that his technique of flooding his narratives with an 'unruly superfluity of material' that, in the gradual dénouement, yields up an unsuspected order, influenced the organisation of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species".

Museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and works exist in many places with which Dickens was associated. These include the Charles Dickens Museum in London, the historic home where he wrote "Oliver Twist", "The Pickwick Papers" and "Nicholas Nickleby"; and the Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth, the house in which he was born. The original manuscripts of many of his novels, as well as printers' proofs, first editions, and illustrations from the collection of Dickens's friend John Forster are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dickens's will stipulated that no memorial be erected in his honour; nonetheless, a life-size bronze statue of Dickens entitled "Dickens and Little Nell", cast in 1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell, stands in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Another life-size statue of Dickens is located at Centennial Park, Sydney, Australia. In 2014, a life-size statue was unveiled near his birthplace in Portsmouth on the 202nd anniversary of his birth; this was supported by the author's great-great grandsons, Ian and Gerald Dickens.
Dickens was commemorated on the Series E £10 note issued by the Bank of England that circulated between 1992 and 2003. His portrait appeared on the reverse of the note accompanied by a scene from "The Pickwick Papers". The Charles Dickens School is a high school in Broadstairs, Kent. A theme park, Dickens World, standing in part on the site of the former naval dockyard where Dickens's father once worked in the Navy Pay Office, opened in Chatham in 2007. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens in 2012, the Museum of London held the UK's first major exhibition on the author in 40 years. In 2002, Dickens was number 41 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. American literary critic Harold Bloom placed Dickens among the. In the UK survey The Big Read, carried out by the BBC in 2003, five of Dickens's books were named in the Top 100.

Dickens and his publications have appeared on a number of postage stamps including: UK (1970, 1993, 2011 and 2012), Soviet Union (1962), Antigua, Barbuda, Botswana, Cameroon, Dubai, Fujairah, St Christopher, Nevis and Anguilla, St Helena, St Lucia and Turks and Caicos Islands (1970), St Vincent (1987), Nevis (2007), Alderney, Gibraltar, Jersey and Pitcairn Islands (2012), Austria (2013), Mozambique (2014).

In November 2018 it was reported that a previously lost portrait of a 31-year-old Dickens, by Margaret Gillies, had been found in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Billies was an early supporter of women's suffrage and had painted the portrait in late 1843 when Dickens, aged 31, writing" A Christmas Carol". It was exhibited, to acclaim, at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1844.

Dickens published well over a dozen major novels and novellas, a large number of short stories, including a number of Christmas-themed stories, a handful of plays, and several non-fiction books. Dickens's novels were initially serialised in weekly and monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats.

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