Happy birthday, Charles Dickens! Today marks the bicentennial of the writer's birth, and celebrations around the world are showcasing his life's work.

Dickens joked that "various idle speculations and absurdities" were "industriously propagated" about him. Let's rectify a few half-truths that threaten to distort his accomplishments.

• Dickens' novels are so long because he was paid by the word.

The claim is untrue. Contracts for "Bleak House" and "Little Dorrit," for example, pegged Dickens' earnings to sales, not the number of words. This legend comes from the fact that Dickens committed to his novels' length in advance, often promising a story in 20 parts, of 32 pages each. Dickens' stories popularized serial publication; it became the way to publish a novel in the 19th century.

Dickens writes long sentences• Yes, but every circumlocution has a literary purpose. He imitates long-winded bureaucratic, professional or ceremonious jargon to satirize the institutions that use such language.

• His stories are moralistic.

Readers shouldn't spend too much time looking for a moral in Dickens' novels. "A Christmas Carol" aside, he is not writing fables or tracts. Don't be fooled into underestimating or trying to draw lessons from the characters' comic names or the phrases they sometimes compulsively repeat. Dickens' characters are never simple or simpletons -- not even Maggy in "Little Dorrit," who has brain damage. Dickens' characters are complex -- and so, too, are their struggles to behave decently.

• "Great Expectations" is a good book to teach high school students.

It has always seemed odd to me that teachers think "Great Expectations" is a good novel for young adults. Just when they are embarking on their adult lives, we give them this story that says: You will never fully comprehend the most important events in your life while they are happening. Any plans you make will not work out -- and you may grow up to be a jerk. If you are lucky, a series of traumatic events will wake you up and show you how insufferable you have become.

Let's stop bewildering our students. Give them "Dombey and Son" instead. It has a page-turning plot and lively characters, and it will show them that it is adults, with their careers and their corporations, who are messed up. That they will understand.

• "David Copperfield" is autobiographical.

The temptation is great to read "David Copperfield" as a mirror for Dickens' life. After all, the novel is a first-person story of a boy who grows up to be a famous author. His description of young Copperfield at work at Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse draws directly on his childhood: At age 12 he labored at a shoe-blacking warehouse. "A very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction," Dickens declared, boasting that "I really think I have done it ingeniously."

And he has. But readers need to keep in mind that this story is indeed fiction.

• He is a novelist of London.

It seems a truism to say that Dickens' city was London and that London found itself in Dickens. The density, the hurried energy, the dirt and chaos, the clashing of classes: Dickens' novels spoke to 19th-century life in London.

And yet whenever Dickens is yoked to London, an aspect of the city and the author gets diminished. Not one of Dickens' novels unfolds solely in London. Dickens never forgets that London draws its meaning -- and much of its traffic -- from being a national and global crossing place.

Jonathan H. Grossman, the author of "Charles Dickens's Networks: Public Transport and the Novel," is an English professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

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