Móric Jókay de Ásva (, known as Mór Jókai; 18 February 1825 – 5 May 1904), outside Hungary also known as Maurus Jokai or Mauritius Jókai, was a Hungarian nobleman, novelist, dramatist and revolutionary. He was an active participant and a leading personality in the outbreak of Hungarian Liberal Revolution of 1848 in Pest. Jókai's romantic novels became very popular among the elite of Victorian-era England; he was often compared to Dickens in the 19th-century British press. One of his most famous fans and admirers was Queen Victoria herself. Early life He was born in Komárom, in the Kingdom of Hungary (present-day Komárno in Slovakia). His father, József Jókai de Ásva (1781–1837), was a member of the Ásva branch of the ancient Jókay noble family; his mother was noblewoman Mária Pulay (1790–1856). As a boy, he was timid and delicate, and was therefore educated at home until the age of ten, at which time he was sent to Pozsony (today: Bratislava in Slovakia). He then completed his education at the Calvinist college at Pápa, where he first met Sándor Petőfi, Sándor Kozma and several other young men who subsequently became famous. After his father's death when Jókai was 12, his family intended for him to pursue a career in law like his father. The young Jókai, always singularly assiduous, plodded conscientiously through the usual curriculum at Kecskemét and Pest (part of what is now Budapest), and succeeded in winning his first case as a full-fledged lawyer. Career The drudgery of a lawyer's office was uncongenial to the ardently poetical Jókai. Encouraged by the encomia pronounced by the Hungarian Academy on his first play, Zsidó fiú (The Jewish Boy), he moved to Pest in 1845 with a manuscript novel in his pocket. There, he was introduced by Petőfi to the literary society of the Hungarian capital, and the same year his first notable novel Hétköznapok (Working Days), appeared, first in the columns of the , and subsequently, in 1846, in book form. Hétköznapok was instantly recognized by all the leading critics as a work of original genius, and in the following year Jókai was appointed the editor of Életképek, then the leading Hungarian literary journal, and gathered round himself a circle of young Hungarian writers. He married the great tragic actress, Róza Laborfalvi, on 29 August 1848. On the outbreak of the revolution of 1848, the young editor enthusiastically adopted the