Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens is acclaimed as one of history's greatest novelists |
| Born: |
7 February 1812(1812--)
Portsmouth, England
|
| Died: |
9 June 1870 (aged 58)
Gad's Hill Place, Higham, Kent, England
|
| Occupation: |
Novelist |
| Influences: |
Miguel de Cervantes, Victor Hugo,
William Shakespeare |
| Influenced: |
T. Coraghessan Boyle, Fyodor
Dostoevsky, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy,
John Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Tom Wolfe, G.K. Chesterton |
"Dickens" redirects here. For other uses, see Dickens
(disambiguation).
Charles John Huffam Dickens, FRSA (IPA:
[ˈtʃɑːlz ˈdɪkɪnz]; 7 February
1812 – 9 June 1870), pen-name "Boz", was the foremost English novelist of the Victorian era, as well as a vigorous social campaigner.
Considered one of the English language's greatest writers, he was acclaimed for his rich storytelling and memorable characters,
and achieved massive worldwide popularity in his lifetime.
Later critics, beginning with George Gissing and G.
K. Chesterton, championed his mastery of prose, his endless invention of memorable characters and his powerful social
sensibilities, but fellow writers such as George Henry Lewes, Henry James and Virginia Woolf fault his work for
sentimentality, implausible occurrence and grotesque characters.[1]
The popularity of Dickens' novels and short stories has meant that not one has ever gone out of print. Dickens wrote serialised novels, the usual
format for fiction at the time, and each new part of his stories was eagerly anticipated by the reading public.
Life
Early years
Ordnance Terrace, Chatham in Oct 2007
Charles Dickens was born in Landport, Portsmouth in
Hampshire, the second of eight children to John Dickens (1786–1851), a clerk in the Navy Pay
Office at Portsmouth, and his wife Elizabeth Dickens (née Barrow, 1789–1863) on February 7
1812. When he was five, the family moved to Chatham, Kent.
In 1822, when he was ten, the family relocated to 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town in
London.
Although his early years seem to have been an idyllic time, he thought himself then as a "very small and
not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy".[2] 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 the people and events that helped to bring his fiction to life. His family was moderately wealthy, and he
received some education at the private William Giles' school in Chatham. This time of prosperity came to an abrupt end, however,
when his father, after spending far too much money entertaining and retaining his social position, was imprisoned at
Marshalsea debtors' prison.
The 12-year-old Dickens began working ten hour days in a Warren's boot-blacking factory,
located near the present Charing Cross railway station. He earned six
shillings a week pasting labels on the jars of thick polish. This money paid for his lodgings in Camden Town and helped him
to support his family. The shocking conditions of the factory made an ingrained impression on Dickens.
After a few months, his family was able to leave Marshalsea, but their financial situation did not improve until later, partly
due to money inherited from his father's family. Dickens's mother did not immediately remove him from the boot-blacking factory,
owned by a relation of hers, and he never forgave her for this. Resentment of his situation and the conditions under which
working-class people lived became major themes of his works, championing the causes of the poor and oppressed. As Dickens wrote
in David Copperfield, judged to be his most patently autobiographical
novel, "I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that
I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!" He eventually attended the Wellington House Academy in North London.
In May 1827, Dickens began work in the office of Ellis and Blackmore as a law clerk. This
was a junior office position, but it came with the potential of helping him up to the Bar. It was here that he gained his
detailed knowledge of the law and the poor's suffering at the hands of its many injustices, together with a loathing of
inefficient bureaucracy which stayed with him for the rest his life. He showed his contempt for the lawyer's profession in his
many literary works.
At the age of seventeen, he became a court stenographer and, in 1830, met his first love,
Maria Beadnell. It is believed that she was the model for the character Dora in David Copperfield. Maria's parents disapproved of the courtship and effectively ended the
relationship when they sent her to school in Paris.
Journalism and early novels
In 1834, Dickens became a political journalist, reporting on parliamentary debate and travelling across Britain by stagecoach to cover election campaigns for the Morning
Chronicle. His journalism, in the form of sketches which appeared in periodicals from 1833, formed his first
collection of pieces Sketches by Boz which were published in 1836 and led to the
serialisation of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in March 1836. He
continued to contribute to and edit journals throughout much of his subsequent literary career. Dickens's keen perceptiveness,
intimate knowledge and understanding of the people and tale-spinning genius was quickly to gain him world renown and wealth.
On 2 April 1836, he married Catherine Thompson Hogarth
(1816–1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle.
After a brief honeymoon in Chalk, Kent, they set up home in Bloomsbury, where they produced ten children:
Catherine's sister Mary entered Dickens's Doughty Street household to offer support to her newly married sister and
brother-in-law. It was not unusual for the unwedded sister of a new wife to either live with and help a newly married couple.
Dickens became very attached to Mary and she died after a brief illness in his arms in 1837. She became a character in many of
his books, and her death is fictionalized as the death of Little Nell.[3]
Also in 1836, Dickens accepted the job of editor of Bentley's Miscellany,
a position that he would hold until 1839, when he fell out with the owner. His success as a novelist continued, however,
producing Oliver Twist (1837-39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), The Old Curiosity Shop and, finally, Barnaby Rudge as part of the Master Humphrey's Clock series (1840-41) -- all published in monthly instalments before
being made into books. Dickens had a pet raven named Grip; it died in 1841 and Dickens had it stuffed (it is now at
The Free Library of Philadelphia).[1]
In 1842, Dickens travelled with his wife to the United States and Canada, a journey which was successful in spite of his
support for the abolition of slavery. The trip is described in the short travelogue
American Notes for General Circulation and is also the basis of some of the
episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit. Shortly thereafter, he began to show interest in
Unitarian Christianity, although he remained an Anglican, at least nominally, for the rest of his life. [2] Dickens's work
continued to be popular, especially A Christmas Carol written in 1843, the
first of his Christmas books, which was reputedly written in a matter of weeks.
After living briefly abroad in Italy (1844) and Switzerland (1846), Dickens continued his success with Dombey and Son (1848); David Copperfield
(1849-50); Bleak House (1852-53); Hard
Times (1854); Little Dorrit (1857); A Tale of Two Cities (1859); and Great
Expectations (1861). Dickens was also the publisher and editor of, and a major contributor to, the journals
Household Words (1850–1859) and All the
Year Round (1858-1870).
Middle years
In 1856, his popularity had allowed him to buy Gad's Hill Place. This large house in
Higham, Kent, had a particular meaning to Dickens 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 him.
In 1857, in preparation for public performances of The Frozen Deep, a play on
which he and his protégé Wilkie Collins had collaborated, Dickens hired professional
actresses to play the female parts. With one of these, Ellen Ternan, Dickens formed a bond
which was to last the rest of his life. The exact nature of their relationship is unclear, as both Dickens and Ternan burned each
other's letters, but it was clearly central to Dickens's personal and professional life. On his death, he settled an annuity on
her which made her a financially independent woman. Claire Tomalin's book, The Invisible Woman, set out to prove that
Ellen Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life, and has subsequently been turned into a play by Simon
Gray called Little Nell.
When Dickens separated from his wife in 1858, divorce was almost unthinkable, particularly for someone as famous as he was,
and so he continued to maintain her in a house for the next 20 years until she died. Although they appeared to be initially happy
together, Catherine did not seem to share quite the same boundless energy for life which Dickens had. Nevertheless, her job of
looking after their ten children, and the pressure of living with a world-famous novelist and keeping house for him, certainly
did not help.
An indication of his marital dissatisfaction was when, in 1855, he went to meet his first love, Maria Beadnell. Maria was by
this time married as well, but seemed to have fallen short of Dickens's romantic memory of her.
Rail accident and last years
On 9 June 1865, while returning from France with Ternan, Dickens
was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash in which the first seven carriages of
the train plunged off a bridge that was being repaired. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which
Dickens was travelling. Dickens spent some time tending the wounded and the dying before rescuers arrived. Before leaving, he
remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to
his carriage to retrieve it. Typically, Dickens later used this experience as material for his short ghost story
The Signal-Man in which the central character has a premonition of his own death
in a rail crash. He based the story around several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash of 1861.
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. Ellen had been Dickens's companion since the
breakdown of his marriage, and, as he had met her in 1857, she was most likely the ultimate reason for that breakdown. She
continued to be his companion, and likely mistress, until his death. The dimensions of the affair were unknown until the
publication of Dickens and Daughter, a book about Dickens's relationship with his daughter Kate, in 1939. Kate Dickens
worked with author Gladys Storey on the book prior to her death in 1929, and alleged that Dickens and Ternan had a son who died
in infancy, though no contemporary evidence exists.
Statue of Dickens in Philadelphia
Dickens, though unharmed, never really recovered from the Staplehurst crash, and his normally prolific writing shrank to
completing Our Mutual Friend and starting the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood after a long interval. Much of his time was taken up with
public readings from his best-loved novels. Dickens was fascinated by the theatre as an escape from the world, and theatres and
theatrical people appear in Nicholas Nickleby. The
travelling shows were extremely popular and, after three tours of British
Isles, Dickens gave his first public reading in the United States at a
New York City theatre on 2 December 1867.
The effort and passion he put into these readings with individual character voices is also thought to have contributed to his
death. When he undertook another English tour of readings (1869–1870), he became ill and five years to the day after the
Staplehurst crash, on 9 June 1870, he died at home at Gad's Hill
Place after suffering a stroke, after a full, interesting and varied life. He was mourned by all
his readers.
Contrary to his wish to be buried in Rochester Cathedral, he was laid to rest 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's will stipulated that no memorial be erected to honour him. The only life-size bronze statue of Dickens, cast in
1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell, is located in Clark Park in the
Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States.
Literary style
Dickens's writing style is florid and poetic, with a strong comic touch. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery — he
calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator" — are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or
dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy. Many of his character's names provide the
reader with a hint as to the roles played in advancing the storyline, such as Miss Murdstone in the novel David Copperfield,
which is clearly a combination of "murder" and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism.
Characters
Charles Dickens used his rich imagination, sense of humour and detailed memories, particularly of his childhood, to enliven his
fiction.
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, Micawber, Abel Magwitch, Samuel Pickwick, 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 it had already become a
target for parody — Jane Austen's Northanger
Abbey being a well known example — and while some of his characters are grotesques, their eccentricities do not
usually overshadow the stories. 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 over the course of his corpus.
Episodic writing
As noted above, most of Dickens's major novels were first written in monthly or weekly instalments 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. American fans even waited at the docks in New
York, shouting out to the crew of an incoming ship, "Is Little Nell dead?" Part of Dickens's great talent was to incorporate this
episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end. The monthly numbers were illustrated by, amongst
others, "Phiz" (a pseudonym for Hablot
Browne). Among his best-known works are Great Expectations,
David Copperfield, Oliver
Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, Nicholas
Nickleby, The Pickwick Papers, and A Christmas Carol.
Dickens's technique of writing in monthly or weekly instalments (depending on the work) can be understood by analysing his
relationship with his illustrators. The several artists who filled this role were privy to the contents and intentions of
Dickens's instalments before the general public. Thus, by reading these correspondences between author and illustrator, the
intentions behind Dickens's work can be better understood. What was hidden in his art is made plain in these letters. These also
reveal how the interests of the reader and author do not coincide. A great example of that appears in the monthly novel Oliver
Twist. At one point in this work, Dickens had Oliver become embroiled in a robbery. That particular monthly instalment
concludes with young Oliver being shot. Readers expected that they would be forced to wait only a month to find out the outcome
of that gunshot. In fact, Dickens did not reveal what became of young Oliver in the succeeding number. Rather, the reading public
was forced to wait two months to discover if the boy lived.
Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style was his exposure to the opinions of his readers. Since Dickens
did not write the chapters very far ahead of their publication, he was allowed to witness the public reaction and alter the story
depending on those public reactions. A fine example of this process can be seen in his weekly serial The Old Curiosity Shop, which is a chase story. In this novel, Little Nell and her
Grandfather are fleeing the villain Quilp. The progress of the novel follows the gradual success of that pursuit. As Dickens
wrote and published the weekly instalments, his friend John Forster pointed out: "You know you're going to have to kill her,
don't you." Why this end was necessary can be explained by a brief analysis of the difference between the structure of a comedy
versus a tragedy. In a comedy, the action covers a sequence "You think they're going to lose, you think they're going to lose,
they win." In tragedy, it's: "You think they're going to win, you think they're going to win, they lose". The dramatic conclusion
of the story is implicit throughout the novel. So, as Dickens wrote the novel in the form of a tragedy, the sad outcome of the
novel was a foregone conclusion. If he had not caused his heroine to lose, he would not have completed his dramatic structure.
Dickens admitted that his friend Forster was right and, in the end, Little Nell died. [4]
Social commentary
Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. He was a
fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. Dickens's second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime and 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.
Literary techniques
Dickens is often described as using 'idealised' characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and
the ugly social truths he reveals. The extended death scene of Little Nell in The Old
Curiosity Shop (1841) was received as incredibly moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental
by Oscar Wilde:"You would need to have a heart of stone," he declared in one of his famous
witticisms, "not to laugh at the death of Little Nell."[5]
In 1903 Chesterton said, "It is not the death of Little Nell, but the life of Little Nell, that I object to." [6]
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 (similar to Tiny Tim in A Christmas
Carol). While later novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit) this idealism
serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant social commentary. Many of his novels are concerned with social realism,
focusing on mechanisms of social control that direct people's lives (for instance, factory networks in Hard Times and hypocritical exclusionary class codes in Our Mutual
Friend).
Dickens also employs incredible coincidences (e.g. 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 are a staple of eighteenth century
picaresque novels such as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones that Dickens enjoyed so much. But to Dickens these were not just
plot devices but an index of the humanism that led him to believe that good wins out in the end and often in unexpected ways.
Autobiographical elements
All authors might be said to 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 are drawn from the
author's brief career as a court reporter. Dickens's own family was sent to prison for poverty, a common theme in many of his
books, and the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit
is due to Dickens's own experiences of the institution. Little Nell in The Old
Curiosity Shop is thought to represent Dickens's sister-in-law,[citation needed] Nicholas Nickleby's father and Wilkins
Micawber are certainly Dickens's own father, just as Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Micawber are similar to his mother.[citation needed] The snobbish nature of
Pip from Great Expectations also
has some affinity to the author himself. The character of Fagin is believed to be based
upon Ikey Solomon, a 19th century Jewish criminal of London and later Australia. It
is reported that Dickens, during his time as a journalist, interviewed Solomon after a court appearance and that he was the
inspiration for the gang leader in Oliver Twist. 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. Very few knew the details of his early life until six years after his death when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated. A shameful past in Victorian times
could taint reputations, just as it did for some of his characters, and this may have been Dickens's own fear.
Legacy
A scene from
Oliver Twist, from an early 20th century edition.
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. 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 have proved more popular 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 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens's works help confirm his success.[citation needed] 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, Pe
