Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an English writer and social critic. During his lifetime, his works enjoyed unprecedented popularity. He is now considered a literary genius because he created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. The Life of Our Lord is a book about the life of Jesus written for his young children, between 1846 and 1849, at about the time that he was writing David Copperfield. The Life of Our Lord was published in 1934, 64 years after Dickens's death.