专题 13 人物传记、故事类2018 年高考题A【2018·浙江卷】 In 1812, the year Charles Dickens was born, there were 66 novels published in Britain
People had been writing novels for a century—most experts date the first novel to Robinson Crusoe in 1719—but nobody wanted to do it professionally
The steam-powered printing press was still in its early stages; the literacy(识字) rate in England was under 50%
Many works of fiction appeared without the names of the authors, often with something like “By a lady
”Novels, for the most part, were looked upon as silly, immoral, or just plain bad
In 1870, when Dickens died, the world mourned him as its first professional writer and publisher, famous and beloved, who had led an explosion in both the publication of novels and their readership and whose characters — from Oliver