Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was the most popular novelist of the nineteenth century and is still the most famous English novelist in the world. In fifteen novels — from The Pickwick Papers (1836) to the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) — and in A Christmas Carol, he created a crowded, comic, grotesque, sentimental, angry vision of Victorian England, above all of London, peopled by hundreds of characters whose names have entered the language: Oliver Twist and Fagin, Scrooge and Tiny Tim, Mr Micawber and Uriah Heep, Mrs Gamp, Mr Pecksniff, Miss Havisham. He was a social reformer who attacked the workhouses, the debtors’ prisons, the brutal schools, the endless law courts and the dehumanising factories; a master of comedy and melodrama; a journalist, editor, actor and public performer of his own work. As a boy he had been poor and abandoned; the memory of that humiliation drives everything he wrote.

Life

The blacking factory

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 in Portsmouth, the second of eight children of John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office — genial, generous, improvident and always in debt (he became the model for Mr Micawber) — and Elizabeth Barrow. The family moved to Chatham in Kent, where Charles had his happiest years, reading his father’s novels — Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights — and dreaming of becoming a gentleman.

In 1822 the family moved to London, and debts mounted. In February 1824, two days after Charles’s twelfth birthday, he was sent to work at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse near Charing Cross, pasting labels on pots of boot polish for six shillings a week, in a rotten, rat-infested building on the river. Weeks later his father was arrested for debt and imprisoned in the Marshalsea; the rest of the family joined him in prison, as was the custom, while Charles lodged alone and visited on Sundays. “No words can express the secret agony of my soul,” he later wrote, at being cast down among “common men and boys” and seeing his hopes “of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast.” After a few months a legacy freed his father, and Charles was sent back to school — but his mother wanted him to stay at the factory, and he never forgot it. He told no one of this episode except his friend and biographer John Forster; the world learned of it only after his death. It is the hidden heart of David Copperfield, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations.

Reporter and Boz

At fifteen he became an office boy in a law firm, then taught himself shorthand and became a court reporter and then a parliamentary reporter, one of the fastest in the gallery. He fell hopelessly in love with Maria Beadnell, a banker’s daughter whose parents thought him beneath her. Under the pen name “Boz” he wrote lively sketches of London life for magazines, collected as Sketches by Boz (1836).

In 1836 a publisher asked him to write comic text to accompany sporting illustrations. The result was The Pickwick Papers, published in twenty monthly parts, the adventures of the benevolent, innocent Mr Pickwick and his companions travelling through England. Sales were slow until the appearance, in the fourth number, of Pickwick’s servant Sam Weller, a Cockney wit; within months the circulation rose to 40,000, and “Boz” was the most famous writer in England. He was twenty-four. In the same year he married Catherine Hogarth, daughter of a music critic; they had ten children.

Fame

Dickens’s productivity was astonishing. Oliver Twist (1837–39), written while Pickwick was still appearing, told of a workhouse orphan who asks for more gruel (“Please, sir, I want some more”), runs away to London and falls among thieves — the receiver Fagin, the Artful Dodger, the brutal Bill Sikes, who murders his lover Nancy — attacking the New Poor Law of 1834. Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39) exposed the Yorkshire boarding schools where unwanted children were starved and beaten (Dotheboys Hall, run by the one-eyed Wackford Squeers). The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) followed Little Nell and her grandfather in flight across England; her death drew tears from a nation (Oscar Wilde later said “one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”).

In 1842 he toured America, where he was mobbed as a celebrity, and was disgusted by slavery, spitting and the pirating of his books; his American Notes and the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit offended Americans. In 1843 he wrote, in six weeks, A Christmas Carol, in which the miser Ebenezer Scrooge (“Bah! Humbug!”) is visited by the ghost of his partner Marley and by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, and is transformed into a generous man who keeps Christmas “as well as any man alive”. It did more than any book to shape the modern Christmas.

The great novels

The novels of his maturity were more ambitious and darker. Dombey and Son (1846–48) concerns a proud merchant who cares only for his son and firm and neglects his loving daughter. David Copperfield (1849–50), his “favourite child”, is a semi-autobiographical first-person novel: David’s happy childhood, his cruel stepfather Mr Murdstone, his time in a bottle warehouse (the blacking factory transposed), the generous, bankrupt Mr Micawber (“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”), the ‘umble, scheming Uriah Heep, his child-wife Dora, and his growth into a novelist.

Bleak House (1852–53), which many consider his masterpiece, opens with London smothered in fog — “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river… fog down the river” — and the fog thickest at the heart of the Court of Chancery, where the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has dragged on for generations until legal costs consume the entire estate. It interweaves a satirical third-person narrative in the present tense with the first-person story of Esther Summerson, an illegitimate orphan, and contains the first detective in English fiction, Inspector Bucket; the death of the crossing-sweeper Jo is a furious indictment of social neglect. Hard Times (1854), set in the industrial “Coketown”, attacks utilitarianism and its educational doctrine of “Facts”: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.” Little Dorrit (1855–57) is built around the Marshalsea prison, where Amy Dorrit was born, and the “Circumlocution Office”, a satire of bureaucracy whose principle is “How Not to Do It”. A Tale of Two Cities (1859), set in London and Paris during the French Revolution, begins “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” and ends with Sydney Carton going to the guillotine in another man’s place: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.” Great Expectations (1860–61) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), a vast, dark novel of money and dust-heaps (piles of refuse worth fortunes) and bodies fished from the Thames, complete his career.

Private life and the readings

Dickens edited magazines — Household Words and All the Year Round — that serialised his novels and those of Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins. He ran a home for “fallen women” with the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, campaigned for sanitary reform, and wrote against public executions. He loved amateur theatricals.

In 1857, acting in Collins’s play The Frozen Deep, he met the eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan. In 1858 he separated from Catherine, publicly and cruelly, and for the rest of his life maintained a secret relationship with Ternan. In the same year he began paid public readings of his works, performing all the voices; they were immensely popular and lucrative, and he toured Britain and America (1867–68). His violent performance of “Sikes and Nancy” exhausted him. On 9 June 1870, after a day’s work on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he suffered a stroke at his house, Gad’s Hill Place in Kent — the house he had admired as a boy — and died. He was buried in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.

Dickens’s art

Serial form. Nearly all his novels were published in monthly or weekly parts, with illustrations (by “Phiz”, George Cruikshank and others). He wrote to deadlines, adjusting to readers’ responses, building suspense at the end of each number. The method produced vast, many-stranded plots knit together by coincidence and secret relationships, and an intense relationship with his public.

Character. E. M. Forster called Dickens’s characters “flat” — built around a single trait, a catchphrase, a physical tic — and admitted that they produce “a wonderful feeling of human depth”. Mr Micawber is always “waiting for something to turn up”; Uriah Heep is always “‘umble”, writhing; Mrs Gamp, the drunken nurse, quotes an imaginary friend, Mrs Harris. Dickens’s people are theatrical and grotesque, yet they live with extraordinary vitality.

Language. His prose is exuberant, metaphorical, rhythmic, comic, rhetorical, full of repetitions and vivid detail — the fog of Bleak House, the description of Coketown’s “interminable serpents of smoke”. He animates objects and turns people into things, as in a dream.

Comedy and melodrama. Dickens mixes laughter and tears, farce and horror, caricature and pathos. His sentimentality — the deaths of children, the tearful reunions — was beloved by his age and embarrassed later readers; but his comedy has never dated.

Themes

Social injustice. Dickens attacked particular abuses — the Poor Law, debtors’ prisons, Chancery, bad schools, child labour, slum sanitation — and more broadly a society that sacrificed people to money, procedure and system. He was a reformer, not a revolutionary; his remedy was usually a change of heart (Scrooge’s) rather than of institutions, which George Orwell, in his great essay on Dickens (1940), saw as both a limitation and the source of his moral power: “a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened… generously angry.”

Childhood. No writer has portrayed the sufferings of children more powerfully: neglected, exploited, orphaned, beaten, bewildered by the adult world — Oliver, Smike, Little Nell, Paul Dombey, David, Jo, Pip.

Money and identity. His later novels are obsessed with money — inheritances, debts, legacies, speculation, frauds — and with the way it shapes and deforms character and class.

London. Dickens is the great poet of the city: its streets, river, slums, prisons, offices, fogs and crowds, and the hidden connections between the highest and the lowest.

Influence

Dickens was admired by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who saw in him a Christian novelist of compassion; by Kafka, whose Amerika he influenced; and by the cinema — Sergei Eisenstein argued that D. W. Griffith learned parallel montage from Dickens. The word “Dickensian” means squalid poverty and also the teeming, comic life of his books. His novels have been adapted endlessly — David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), the musical Oliver!, The Muppet Christmas Carol, the BBC’s Bleak House (2005).

In conversation

• Dickensian — squalid, grim conditions of poverty; or a world full of grotesque, vivid characters.
• A Scrooge — a miser; a Micawber — an incurable optimist who lives beyond his means waiting for “something to turn up”.
• “Please, sir, I want some more” — Oliver’s plea; any modest request bravely made.