Charles Dickens

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Charles Dickens
CDickens.jpg
Charles Dickens was a prolific writer who was almost always working on a new installment for a story and rarely missed a deadline.
Born
7 February 1812
Portsmouth, Hampshire, England
Died
9 June 1870
England

Charles John Huffam Dickens (February 7 1812 – June 9 1870), was an English novelist of the Romantic and Victorian eras, one of the most popular writers of his time whose works have continued to endure in public memory for their vivid characters, elevated drama, and clear style. Life-long rival of the wealthy writer William Makepeace Thackery, Dickens rose up from destitute poverty to become a truly "self-made man" — one of the first writers, and certainly one of the most succesful, to support himself entirely by his art. He was remarkable not only for the clarity of his prose, but for the tremendous speed with which he was able to produce stories, journalism, novels, and writings of all kinds. The only writers of his age who can compete with him for sheer volume of published materials would be Balzac and Henry James.

Dickens was not merely prolific, however. He was, as many writers, philosophers, and even political leaders have pointed out, one of the most politically revolutionary figures of his times. Having been born into a middle-class family that, early in his childhood, went horribly bankrupt, Dickens experienced the underbelly of London society first-hand. His incredibly moving novels of child-workers who were effectively made into slaves in orphanages and factories were fueled by his own first-hand experiences as a twelve year-old on a factory floor. Dickens' was not only a master of realism, he was, perhaps moreso than any other English author, one of the most fundamentally important realists, because he brought to the foreground aspects of society which never before had ever been seen. His influence has extended, therefore, not only to other writers (with regards to whom his influence is still immeasurable) but also everyday folk and political activist who see, in his fiction, an illustration of the injustices and immoralities of a world corrupted by industrial power.

Life

Dickens was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire to John Dickens (1786–1851), a naval pay clerk, and his wife Elizabeth Dickens neé Barrow (–1863). When he was five, the family moved to Chatham, Kent. When he was ten, the family relocated to 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town in London. His early years were an idyllic time. He thought himself then as a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy". He spent his time outdoors, reading voraciously with a particular fondness for the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. He talked later in life of his extremely poignant memories of childhood and his continuing photographic memory of people and events that helped bring his fiction to life. His family was moderately well-off, and he received some education at a private school but all that changed when his father, after spending too much money entertaining and retaining his social position, was imprisoned for debt. At the age of twelve, Dickens was deemed old enough to work and began working for ten hours a day in Warren's boot-blacking factory, located near the present Charing Cross railway station. He spent his time pasting labels on the jars of thick Shoe polish and earned six shillings a week. With this money, he had to pay for his lodging and help to support his family, which was incarcerated in the nearby Marshalsea debtors' prison.

After a few years his family's financial situation improved, partly due to money inherited from his father's family. His family was able to leave the Marshalsea, but his mother did not immediately remove him from the boot-blacking factory, which was owned by a relation of hers. Dickens never forgave his mother for this and resentment of his situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes of his works. Dickens told his biographer John Forster, "No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God!" In May 1827, Dickens began work as a law clerk, a junior office position with potential to become a lawyer. He did not like the law as a profession and after a short time as a court stenographer he became a journalist, reporting parliamentary debate and traveling Britain by stagecoach to cover election campaigns. His journalism formed the basis of his first collection of pieces Sketches by Boz and he continued to contribute to and edit journals for much of his life. In his early twenties he made a name for himself with his first novel, The Pickwick Papers.

On 2 April 1836, he married Catherine Thompson Hogarth (–1879), with whom he was to have ten children, and set up home in Bloomsbury. In the same year, he accepted the job of editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a position he would hold until 1839 when he had a falling out with the owner. Dickens was also a major contributor for two other journals, Household Words and All the Year Round. In 1842, he travelled together with his wife to the United States; the trip is described in the short travelogue American Notes and forms the basis of some of the episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens' writings were extremely popular in their day and were read extensively. In 1856, his popularity allowed him to buy Gad's Hill Place. This large house in Higham, Kent was very special to the author as he had walked past it as a child and had dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare's Henry IV, part 1 and this literary connection pleased Dickens.

Dickens separated from his wife in 1858. In Victorian times, divorce was almost unthinkable, particularly for someone as famous as he was. He continued to maintain her in a house for the next twenty years until she died. Although they were initially happy together, Catherine did not seem to share quite the same boundless energy for life which Dickens had. Her job of looking after their ten children and the pressure of living with and keeping house for a world-famous novelist apparently wore on her. Catherine's sister Georgina moved in to help her, but there were rumors that Charles was romantically linked to his sister-in-law. An indication of his marital dissatisfaction was conveyed by his 1855 trip to meet his first love, Maria Beadnell. Maria was by this time married as well, and, in any event, she apparently fell short of Dickens' romantic memory of her.

On the 9 June 1865, while returning from France to see Ellen Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash in which the first six carriages of the train plunged off of a bridge that was being repaired. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was berthed. Dickens spent some time tending the wounded and the dying before rescuers arrived. Before finally leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it.

Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquiry into the crash, as it would have become known that he was travelling that day with Ellen Ternan and her mother, which could have caused a scandal. Though unharmed, Dickens never really recovered from the Staplehurst crash, and his previously prolific writing was reduced to completing Our Mutual Friend and starting the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Much of his time was taken up with public readings from his best-loved novels. Dickens was fascinated by the theater as an escape from the world. The traveling shows were extremely popular, and on December 2 1867, Dickens gave his first public reading in the United States at a New York City theater. The effort and passion he put into these readings with individual character voices is also thought to have contributed to his death.

Five years to the day after the Staplehurst crash, on 9 June 1870, Dickens died after suffering a stroke. Contrary to his wish to be buried in Rochester Cathedral, he was buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on his tomb reads: "He was a sympathiser to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world." Dickens' will stipulated that no memorial be erected to honor him.

Literary style

Dickens' writing style is florid and poetic, with a strong comic touch. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery — he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator" — were and remain popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens' acclaimed flights of fancy.

Characters

The characters are among the most memorable in English literature — certainly their names are. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Fagin, Mrs. Gamp, Charles Darnay, Oliver Twist, Wilkins Micawber, Pecksniff, Miss Havisham, Wackford Squeers and many others are so well known. and can be believed to be living a life outside the novels that their stories have been continued by other authors. Dickens loved the style of 18th Century gothic romance, though by his time it had already become an anachronism. Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey was a well known pastiche. Dickens admired the vivid emotions of gothic fiction, despite the grotesque presence of the supernatural in the storylines. One 'character' most vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital are described by someone who truly loved London and spent many hours walking its streets.

Episodic writing

Most of Dickens' major novels were first written in monthly or weekly installments in journals such as Master Humphrey's Clock and Household Words, later reprinted in book form. These instalments made the stories cheap, accessible and the series of regular cliff-hangers made each new episode widely anticipated. Legend has it that American fans even waited at the docks in New York, shouting out to the crew of an incoming ship, "Is Little Nell (of The Old Curiosity Shop) dead?" Part of Dickens' great talent was to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end. Among his best-known works—Great Expectations, David Copperfield, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, A Tale of Two Cities, and A Christmas Carol among them—were all written and originally published in this serialized style.

Social commentary

Dickens' novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. Throughout his works, Dickens retained an empathy for the common man and a scepticism for the fine folk. Dicken's second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), was responsible for the clearing of the actual London slum that was the basis of the story's Jacob's Island. In addition, with the character of the tragic prostitute, Nancy, Dickens "humanised" such women for the reading public — women who were regarded as "unfortunates," inherently immoral casualties of the Victorian class/economic system. Bleak House and Little Dorrit elaborated expansive critiques of the Victorian institutional apparatus: the interminable lawsuits of the Court of Chancery that destroyed people's lives in Bleak House and a dual attack in Little Dorrit on inefficient, corrupt patent offices and unregulated market speculation.

Criticisms

Dickens's fiction is often viewed as overly sentimental, as with the extended death scenes of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and young Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son (1848). In Oliver Twist, Dickens provides readers with an idealised portrait of a young boy so inherently and unrealistically "good" that his values are never subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a gang of young pickpockets. While later novels also centred on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit), this idealism serves only to highlight Dickens' goal of poignant social commentary. In actuality, each of his novels after Dombey and Son (1848) became increasingly less "sentimental" and more concerned with social realism, focusing on mechanisms of social control that direct people's lives (e.g., factory networks in Hard Times and hypocritical, exclusionary class codes in Our Mutual Friend). In contrast to popular myth, these novels were quite popular and sold very well.

These novels, as with most of his novels, also employ somewhat incredible coincidences (for example, Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper class family that randomly rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group). Such coincidences were a staple of the eighteenth-century picaresque novels (such as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones]) that Dickens enjoyed so much. So there is an intertextual aspect to this convention. However, to Dickens these were not just plot devices but an index of a Christian humanism that led him to believe that "good" wins out in the end, often in unexpected ways. Looking at this theme from a biographical context, Dickens's life, against many odds, led him from a disconsolate child forced to work long hours in a bottle factory at age 12 (his father was in the Marshalsea debtor's prison) to his status as the most popular novelist in England by the age of 27.

Autobiographical elements

All authors incorporate autobiographical elements in their fiction, but with Dickens this is very noticeable, even though he took pains to cover up what he considered his shameful, lowly past. David Copperfield is one of the most clearly autobiographical but the scenes from Bleak House of interminable court cases and legal arguments could only come from a journalist who has had to report them. Dickens' own family was sent to prison for poverty, a common theme in many of his books, in particular the Marshalsea in Little Dorrit. Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop is thought to represent Dickens' sister-in-law, Nicholas Nickleby's father and Wilkins Micawber are certainly Dickens' own father, and the snobbish nature of Pip from Great Expectations is similar to the author himself. Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he got his realistic accounts of squalor. A shameful past in Victorian times could taint reputations, just as it did for some of his characters, and this may have been Dickens' own fear.

Legacy

Charles Dickens was a well known personality and his novels were immensely popular during his lifetime. His first full novel, The Pickwick Papers (1837), brought him immediate fame and this continued right through his career. He maintained a high quality in all his writings and, although rarely departing greatly from his typical "Dickensian" method of always attempting to write a great "story" in a somewhat conventional manner (the dual narrators of Bleak House are a notable exception), he experimented with varied themes, characterisations and genres. Some of these experiments were more successful than others and the public's taste and appreciation of his many works have varied over time. He was usually keen to give his readers what they wanted, and the monthly or weekly publication of his works in episodes meant that the books could change as the story proceeded at the whim of the public. A good example of this are the American episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit which were put in by Dickens in response to lower than normal sales of the earlier chapters. In Our Mutual Friend the inclusion of the character of Riah was a positive portrayal of a Jewish character after he was criticised for the depiction of Fagin in Oliver Twist.

His popularity has waned little since his death and he is still one of the best known and most read of English authors. At least 180 movies and TV adaptations based on Dickens' works help confirm his success. Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime and as early as 1913 a silent film of The Pickwick Papers was made. His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. Gamp became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs Gamp and Pickwickian, Pecksniffian and Gradgrind all entered dictionaries due to Dickens' original portraits of such characters who were quixotic, hypocritical or emotionlessly logical. Sam Weller, the carefree and irreverent valet of The Pickwick Papers was an early superstar, perhaps better known than his author at first. It is likely that A Christmas Carol is his best-known story, with new adaptations almost every year. It is also the most-filmed of Dickens's stories, many versions dating from the early years of cinema. This simple morality tale with both pathos and its theme of redemption, for many, sums up the true meaning of Christmas and eclipses all other Yuletide stories in not only popularity, but in adding archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) to the Western cultural consciousness.

At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged at the heart of empire. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues — such as sanitation and the workhouse — but his fiction was probably all the more powerful in changing public opinion in regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and repression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that allowed such abuses to exist. His most strident indictment of this condition is in Hard Times (1854), Dickens's only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In that work, he uses both vitriol and satire to illustrate how this marginalised social stratum was termed "Hands" by the factory owners, that is, not really "people" but rather only appendages of the machines that they operated. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address such problems of class oppression. For example, the prison scenes in Little Dorrit and The Pickwick Papers were prime movers in having the Marshalsea and Fleet Prisons shut down. As Karl Marx said, Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicans, publicists and moralists put together" (qtd. in Ackroyd 720). The exceptional popularity of his novels, even those with socially oppositional themes (Bleak House, 1853; Little Dorrit, 1857; Our Mutual Friend, 1865) underscored not only his almost preternatural ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also insured that the Victorian public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored.

His fiction, with often vivid descriptions of life in nineteenth-century England, has inaccurately and anachronistically come to globally symbolise Victorian society (1837–1901) as uniformly "Dickensian," when in fact, his novels' time span is from the 1780s to the 1860s. In the decade following his death in 1870, a more intense degree of socially and philosophically pessimistic perspectives invested British fiction; such themes were in contrast to the religious faith that ultimately held together even the bleakest of Dickens's novels. Later Victorian novelists such as Thomas Hardy and George Gissing were influenced by Dickens, but their works display a lack or absence of religious belief and portray characters caught up by social forces (primarily via lower-class conditions) that steer them to tragic ends beyond their control. Samuel Butler (1835–1902), most notably in The Way of All Flesh (1885; pub. 1903), also questioned religious faith but in a more upper-class milieu.

Novelists continue to be influenced by his books; for example, such disparate current writers as Anne Rice and Tom Wolfe evidence direct Dickensian connections. Humorist James Finn Garner even wrote a tongue-in-cheek "politically correct" version of A Christmas Carol. Ultimately, Dickens stands today as a brilliant, innovative and sometimes flawed novelist whose stories and characters have become not only literary archetypes but also part of the public imagination.


Bibliography

Major novels

  • The Pickwick Papers (1836)
  • Oliver Twist (1837–1839)
  • Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839)
  • The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841)
  • Barnaby Rudge (1841)
  • The Christmas books:
    • A Christmas Carol (1843)
    • The Chimes (1844)
    • The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)
    • The Battle of Life (1846)
  • Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844)
  • Dombey and Son (1846–1848)
  • David Copperfield (1849–1850)
  • Bleak House (1852–1853)
  • Hard Times (1854)
  • Little Dorrit (1855–1857)
  • A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
  • Great Expectations (1860–1861)
  • Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865)
  • The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished) (1870)

Selected other books

  • Sketches by Boz (1836)
  • American Notes (1842)
  • Pictures from Italy (1846)
  • The Life of Our Lord (1846, published in 1934)
  • A Child's History of England (1851–1853)

Short stories

  • "A Child's Dream of a Star" (1850)
  • "Captain Murderer"
  • "The Child's Story"
  • The Christmas stories:
    • "The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain" (1848)
    • "A Christmas Tree"
    • "The Poor Relation's Story"
    • "The Child's Story"
    • "The Schoolboy's Story"
    • "Nobody's Story"
    • "The Seven Poor Travellers"
    • "What Christmas Is As We Grow Older"
  • "Doctor Marigold"
  • "George Silverman's Explanation"
  • "Going into Society"
  • "The Haunted House"
  • "Holiday Romance"
  • "The Holly-Tree"
  • "Hunted Down"
  • "The Lamplighter"
  • "A Message from the Sea"
  • "Mrs Lirriper's Legacy"
  • "Mrs Lirriper's Lodgings"
  • "Mugby Junction"
  • "Perils of Certain English Prisoners"
  • "The Signal-Man"
  • "Somebody's Luggage"
  • "Sunday Under Three Heads"
  • "Tom Tiddler's Ground"
  • "The Trial for Murder"
  • "Wreck of the Golden Mary"

Essays

  • In Memoriam W. M. Thackeray

Articles

  • A Coal Miner's Evidence

References
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External links

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