Chicago

Welcome to the Chicago Dickens Fellowship, which is branch #33 of the worldwide Dickens Fellowship and is the second oldest branch in the United States, having been officially established on May 24, 1905. We received our charter, signed by Kate Perugini, Charles Dickens’s second daughter, on June 16, 1923.

Our branch celebrates the historical life and timeless works of Charles Dickens, who was a man of his time and a man for all time. A renowned storyteller with a gift for creating memorable and “man in the street” characters, he also exhibited the powers of an extraordinary dramatist and orator. With a zeal for social justice and reform, his books relentlessly attacked his society’s preoccupation with materialism, its abuses in the school system and the work force, its exploitation of women and children and its basic hypocrisy. These satirical and moralistic books of Dickens became the voice of the poor and the downtrodden.

In his books Charles Dickens created a large and most varied world, often spiced with humor, absurdities, farce and laughable adventures. Our branch reads, appreciates and discusses these books that Dickens wrote well over one hundred years ago. All of them are still in print because they are as timely today as when he first wrote them.