Charles Dickens

I

Introduction

Charles Dickens (1812-1870), English novelist and one of the most popular writers in the history of literature. His ability to combine comedy, pathos, and social satire in his serialized novels won him thousands of contemporary readers, and many of his characters, such as Mr Micawber, Mrs Gamp, Mr Pickwick, Quilp, and Uriah Heep, have entered the British national consciousness.

II

Early Life

Dickens was born near Portsmouth: his father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. The happiest period of Dickens's troubled childhood was spent in Chatham, although the family moved around a great deal. By early 1824, the family was in financial trouble and the 12-year old Dickens was sent to work for a few months at a shoe-polish warehouse on the banks of the Thames. A few days later, his father was arrested for debt. Dickens recalled this painful experience in the early chapters of David Copperfield (1849-1850), and it seemed to haunt him all his life: he called it “the secret agony of my soul”. His father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea Prison and, except for Charles, who had lodgings in Camden, and his sister, who was studying music, all the family lived in the prison with him like the Dorrit family in the first part of Little Dorrit (1855-1857). In the summer of 1824, after Dickens's father's case was heard by the Insolvency Court, the family was allowed to leave the prison but Dickens continued to work in the warehouse until 1825, when his father sent him to school at Wellington House Academy.

In 1827, Dickens worked as a junior clerk for a firm of solicitors in Holborn, but he hated the law, and was drawn instead to journalism. He learnt shorthand and began freelance reporting at the Doctors' Commons Courts, and in 1831-1832 he was making shorthand reports of Parliamentary debates for the London papers. He met and wanted to marry Maria Beadnell, but she seems to have rejected him; the comic portrait of Flora Casby in Little Dorrit is said to have been inspired by Dickens's meeting with Maria again later in life. By 1832 he was writing for his uncle's publication, the Mirror of Parliament, and the liberal paper, the Morning Chronicle.

III

Literary Career

At this time, Dickens was toying with the idea of an acting career, and he remained fascinated by the theatre throughout his life, often directing and acting in shows to raise money for charitable causes and friends in distress. However, when the Monthly Magazine accepted his story, “A Dinner at Poplar Walk” (1833), Dickens was diverted into his subsequent literary career. He published a series of sketches of daily life in London in the Evening Chronicle, using the pseudonym “Boz”, his younger brother's childhood nickname. Through this work, he met his wife, Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of the Evening Chronicle's co-editor; they married in 1836. Meanwhile, a London publisher had suggested reprinting a volume of similar sketches to accompany illustrations by the celebrated artist George Cruikshank. The result was the popularly acclaimed Sketches by Boz (1836). It was followed by The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, which was serialized in monthly instalments, beginning in April 1836; although not immediately successful, it gradually became popular and by its last instalment in November 1837, Pickwick was selling 40,000 copies. It came out in volume form immediately. Dickens was only 25 years old, but he was already famous.

In November 1836, Dickens had accepted the editorship of the new periodical Bentley's Miscellany, and he started to serialize Oliver Twist in the magazine, with illustrations by Cruikshank. The now-famous story of the workhouse boy who asks for more gruel introduced a new genre of “social problem fiction” which was much imitated throughout the 1840s. Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), was also serialized in monthly episodes, but Dickens was feeling the strain of his extraordinary productivity, and he broke off his editorship of Bentley's Miscellany acrimoniously in 1839. In 1840, Dickens established his own weekly miscellany called Master Humphrey's Clock, in which he serialized his novel The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841); the story's child-heroine, Little Nell, captured the hearts of both the British and American public. His first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge (1841), was also serialized in the magazine, but this story proved less popular and sales of the Clock declined. Dickens's health was not strong, and at the end of 1841, Master Humphrey's Clock was wound up.

Early in 1842, Dickens and his wife visited America, where he was received as a literary hero. While in America, Dickens spoke for the abolition of slavery and against the piracy of foreign books in America, the latter being a practice which had adversely affected his own earnings. His popularity in America, however, was damaged by his sharp and critical American Notes (1842), and was further eroded by his use of American stereotypes in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844), a novel which also failed to catch the imagination of the British public, despite its considerable moral depth.

A Christmas Carol (1843) was much more successful, and became the first of a series of Christmas books (The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man). In 1844 Dickens and his family spent some time in Italy, which inspired “Pictures from Italy”, published in the Daily News. In 1846 he visited Switzerland with his family to concentrate on his writing, and there he began Dombey and Son. This is usually cited as the point where Dickens's fiction matured; the largely episodic structure of his earlier work gives way to more complex, ambitious, and multi-plotted narratives. It could be argued, though, that his early work displays similar imaginative connection and complexity. Dombey and Son was immediately successful, the first number selling 25,000 copies. The death of Paul Dombey apparently “flung the nation into mourning”. The novel combines elements of realism and comedy with elements of fairy tale; Florence Dombey and Captain Cuttle are described, for instance, as like “a wandering princess and a good monster in a story book”.

Dickens was also becoming more active as a social reformer. In 1847 he collaborated with the wealthy Angela Burdett-Coutts to open Urania Cottage, a rehabilitation centre for London prostitutes, an association which lasted until 1858. Dickens took a very active interest in the project, interviewing new admissions himself and keeping a journal of the women's progress. He was also very active in the growing campaign to establish writing as a profession, and he set up the short-lived Charitable Guild of Literature and Art in 1851 with Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

In 1849-1850 Dickens earned around £7,000 from the serialization of David Copperfield, which he had always considered to be his best novel. In 1850 Dickens had once again started his own weekly paper, this time called Household Words. This venture was more successful, largely due to the serialization of his own work. Bleak House ran from 1852 to 1853, and was the product of a difficult time for Dickens, who described himself as “confoundedly miserable”. His wife was ill, and after a terrible operation without anaesthetic, his father died. His infant daughter, Dora, also died suddenly from convulsions at this time.

Bleak House is a wild and disturbed book; even the river Thames, “had a fearful look, so overcast and secret, sweeping away so fast between the low flat lines of shore: so heavy with indistinct and awful shapes, both of substances and shadow: so deathlike and mysterious”. Famous for its withering social satire, Bleak House allowed Dickens to demonstrate how society is interconnected, by linking within his narrative such characters as the illiterate and abused Jo, the crossing sweeper, with the supercilious Lady Dedlock. To reinforce this, Dickens uses sustained, connecting metaphors in the novel, of infectious disease, for example, and of the London fog: “Fog everywhere...Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all around them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.” This description of the fog echoes the obscurity and concealment that surrounds the Chancery case that forms the mainspring of the plot. Bleak House can fairly be called one of the earliest detective novels, with Inspector Bucket featuring as one of the first detectives in literature. The structure of the novel is sophisticated, with two narrative voices, that of the narrator, and that of Esther Summerson, which sometimes seem to be contradicting one another, thus adding to the pervasive sense of suspense and mystery.

Dickens's industrial novel, Hard Times, followed in 1854, alongside North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. In Hard Times, Dickens satirizes the theories of political economists through such exaggerated characters as Mr Bounderby, the self-made man, and Mr Gradgrind, the Utilitarian schoolmaster. Little Dorrit was serialized monthly between 1855 and 1857, and earned Dickens almost £12,000, more money than any of his other novels. Little Dorrit is a complex exploration of the symbolism of imprisonment, a suspenseful mystery story, and a wide-ranging satire on contemporary society. Perhaps it is most famous for Dickens's invention of the Circumlocution Office, the archetype of all bureaucracies, where “whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—How NOT TO DO IT”.

Even during this highly productive period, Dickens continued to organize and appear in amateur theatricals, and in 1857 he went to Manchester to perform in The Frozen Deep by Wilkie Collins, where he met the young actress, Ellen Ternan, who appears to have become his mistress. His marriage had not been happy for some years, and in 1858 Dickens formally separated from his wife, printing announcements in The Times and Household Words denying that any third party was involved in the separation. Punch refused to carry this announcement, and Dickens subsequently broke with its publishers, Bradbury and Evans, who had previously published his novels. He wound up Household Words which they also published and in April 1859 began All the Year Round in its place. The first novel to appear in All the Year Round was his historical novel of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), which stands out in his work as a story of incident and event rather than of character.

This success was soon followed by Great Expectations (1860-1861), which marked a return to the more familiar Dickensian style of narrative. Its main character, Pip, remarks, “I can as clearly see with my own eyes any scene which I am describing as I see you now”, which could be read as a comment on Dickens's own highly visual imagination. He often said that he seemed to see his characters as he wrote about them. In 1858, Dickens had begun the lucrative practice of reading publicly from his own work, and this and the editorship of the new paper consumed a great deal of his energy in the 1860s. His last finished novel is the dark and powerful Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865), which opens with a “a strong man with grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty” dredging a dead body out of the Thames; the whole novel revolves around an ill-lit and dirty London that perhaps bears a closer resemblance to the city of Dickens's childhood rather than the metropolis of the 1860s.

IV

Final Years

The Mystery of Edwin Drood was unfinished when Dickens died. In 1864 his health was beginning to show signs of severe strain and he collapsed while giving a public reading of his work. He was advised by doctors that he must rest but, in defiance of this advice, he embarked on a gruelling schedule of readings, including a tour of America in 1867-1868, which made him £19,000, but probably hastened his death. He was also feeling the increasing strain of keeping his liaison with Ellen Ternan secret. He seems to have established her in a series of houses on the outskirts of London and to have fitted frequent trips to see her around his other many and pressing engagements. He finally exhausted himself to the point of death, and died of a stroke in 1870, apparently in the dining room of his house in Gad's Hill, although it has been suggested that he in fact died at Ellen Ternan's house and was taken back to Gad's Hill already dead. He was buried at Westminster Abbey.

Dickens was undoubtedly one of the most important literary figures of the 19th-century. He revived and transformed the serialized, illustrated novel, and captured the public imagination with his emotive and exciting fiction. As a novelist, he can perhaps be accused of sentimentality, sensationalism, and an inability to portray female characters as other than angels or monsters, but nevertheless, he was an unashamedly popular writer who gave a new plausibility to the profession of authorship. His espousal of campaigns for social reform has also been criticized as capricious and unsystematic, but through his fiction he did much to highlight the worst abuses of 19th-century society and to prick the public conscience.