Passage 2 (2018浙江6月,A)词数: 320 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 reader-ship and whose characters—from Oliver Twist to Tiny Tim—were held up as moral touchstones. Today Dickens' greatness is unchallenged. Removing him from the pantheon(名人堂)of English literature would make about as much sense as the Louvre selling off the Mona Lisa. How did Dickens get to the top?For all the feelings readers attach to stories, literature is a numbers game, and the test of time is extremely difficult to pass. Some 60,000 novels were published during