It has been exactly 200 years since the birth of Charles Dickens, the Victorian novelist who wrote a bookshelf of classics, including Great Expectations, Oliver Twist,and A Christmas Carol. For the past 100 years, Dickens has been terrifying schoolchildren across the United States—at least as much for the sheer girth of his books as for the hair-raising adventures of Pip and his other hardscrabble characters.

Few Americans graduate from high school without some exposure to Dickens. Count Danny Siegel, Ph.D., UAB associate professor of English, among them, however. “I never read Dickens in high school,” he says. After he graduated, however, Siegel picked up a copy of Great Expectations, and he hasn’t been able to put Dickens down since.

“What sets Dickens apart for me is his love for idiosyncrasy, for oddness,” Siegel says. “A lot of writers try to create some kind of universal story with characters and incidents everyone can relate to. With Dickens, it’s often the opposite; he loves quirks, gestures, voices—the things that make people different from one another.