Early Life
Famed British author Charles Dickens was born Charles
John Huffam Dickens on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, on the southern coast
of England. He was the second of eight children. His father, John Dickens, was
a naval clerk who dreamed of striking it rich. Charles Dickens’ mother,
Elizabeth Barrow, aspired to be a teacher and school director. Despite his
parents’ best efforts, the family remained poor. Nevertheless, they were happy
in the early days. In 1816, they moved to Chatham, Kent, where young Charles
and his siblings were free to roam the countryside and explore the old castle
at Rochester.
In 1822, the Dickens family moved to Camden Town, a
poor neighborhood in London. By then the family’s financial situation had grown
dire, as John Dickens had a dangerous habit of living beyond the family’s means.
Eventually, John was sent to prison for debt in 1824, when Charles was just 12
years old.
Following his father’s imprisonment, Charles Dickens
was forced to leave school to work at a boot-blacking factory alongside the
River Thames. At the rundown, rodent-ridden factory, Dickens earned six
shillings a week labeling pots of “blacking,” a substance used to clean
fireplaces. It was the best he could do to help support his family. Looking
back on the experience, Dickens saw it as the moment he said goodbye to his
youthful innocence, stating that he wondered “how [he] could be so easily cast
away at such a young age.” He felt abandoned and betrayed by the adults who
were supposed to take care of him. These sentiments would later become a
recurring theme in his writing.
Much to his relief, Dickens was permitted to go back to
school when his father received a family inheritance and used it to pay off his
debts. But when Dickens was 15, his education was pulled out from under him
once again. In 1827, he had to drop out of school and work as an office boy to
contribute to his family’s income. As it turned out, the job became an early
launching point for his writing career.
Within a year of being hired, Dickens began freelance
reporting at the law courts of London. Just a few years later, he was reporting
for two major London newspapers. In 1833, he began submitting sketches to
various magazines and newspapers under the pseudonym “Boz.” In 1836, his
clippings were published in his first book, Sketches
by Boz. Dickens’ first
success caught the eye of Catherine Hogarth, whom he soon married. Catherine
would grace Charles with a brood of 10 children before the couple separated in
1858.
Early Writing
In the same year that Sketches
by Boz was released, Dickens
started publishing The
Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. His
series of sketches, originally written as captions for artist Robert Seymour’s
humorous sports-themed illustrations, took the form of monthly serial
installments. The Posthumous
Papers of the Pickwick Club was
wildly popular with readers. In fact, Dickens’ sketches were even more popular
than the illustrations they were meant to accompany.
Around this time, Dickens had also become publisher of
a magazine calledBentley’s Miscellany. In it he started publishing his
first novel, Oliver Twist,
which follows the life of an orphan living in the streets. The story was
inspired by how Dickens felt as an impoverished child forced to get by on his
wits and earn his own keep. Dickens continued showcasing Oliver Twist in the magazines he later
edited, including Household
Words and All the Year Round, the
latter of which he founded. The novel was extremely well received in both
England and America. Dedicated readers of Oliver
Twist eagerly
anticipated the next monthly installment.
Over the next few years, Dickens struggled to match the
level of Oliver Twist’s
success. From 1838 to 1841, he published The
Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby
Rudge.
In 1842, Dickens and his wife, Kate, embarked on a
five-month lecture tour of the United States. Upon their return, Dickens penned American Notes for General
Circulation, a sarcastic travelogue criticizing American culture and
materialism.
In 1843, Dickens wrote his novel The Life and Adventures of Martin
Chuzzlewit, a story about a man’s struggle to survive on the ruthless
American frontier. The book was published the following year.
Over the next couple of years, Dickens published two
Christmas stories. One was the classic A
Christmas Carol, which features the timeless protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge,
a curmudgeonly old miser, who, with the help of a ghost, finds the Christmas
spirit
Fame
During his first U.S. tour, in 1842, Dickens designated
himself as what many have deemed the first modern celebrity. He spoke of his
opposition to slavery and expressed his support for additional reform. His
lectures, which began in Virginia and ended in Missouri, were so widely
attended that ticket scalpers started gathering outside his events. Biographer
J.B. Priestly wrote that during the tour, Dickens “had the greatest welcome
that probably any visitor to America has ever had.”
“They flock around me as if I were an idol,” bragged
Dickens, a known show-off. Although he enjoyed the attention at first, he
eventually resented the invasion of privacy. He was also annoyed by what he
viewed as Americans’ gregariousness and crude habits, as he later expressed in American Notes.
In light of his criticism of the American people during
his first tour, Dickens launched a second U.S. tour, from 1867 to 1868, hoping
to set things right with the public.
On his second tour, he made a charismatic speech
promising to praise the United States in reprints of American Notes for General
Circulation and The Life and Adventures of Martin
Chuzzlewit.
His 76 readings earned him no less than $95,000, which,
in the Victoria era, amounted to approximately $1.5 million in current U.S.
dollars.
Back at home, Dickens had become so famous that people
recognized him all over London as he strolled around the city collecting the
observations that would serve as inspiration for his future work.
Later years
In 1845, after Dickens had toured the United States
once, he spent a year in Italy writing Pictures
from Italy. Over the next two years he published, in installments, his
next novel, Dealings with the
Firm of Dombey and Son. The novel’s main theme is how business tactics
affect a family’s personal finances. It takes a dark view of England and was
pivotal to Dickens’ body of work in that it set the tone for his other novels.
From 1849 to 1850, Dickens worked on David Copperfield, the first
work of its kind; no one had ever written a novel that simply followed a
character through his everyday life. In writing it, Dickens tapped into his own
personal experiences, from his difficult childhood to his work as a journalist.
AlthoughDavid Copperfield is
not considered Dickens’ best work, it was his personal favorite. It also helped
define the public’s expectations of a Dickensian novel.
During the 1850s, Dickens suffered two devastating
losses: the deaths of his daughter and father. He also separated from his wife
during that decade, with Dickens slandering Kate publicly. He had also met a
young actress named Ellen "Nelly" Ternan, with whom he had an
intimate relationship. Sources differ on whether the two started seeing each
other before or after Dickens' marital separation; it is also believed that he
went to great lengths to erase any documentation alluding to Ternan's presence
in his life.
His novels also began to express a darkened worldview.
In Bleak House,
published in installments from 1852 to 1853, he deals with the hypocrisy of
British society. It was considered his most complex novel to date. Hard Times(published in 1854)
takes place in an industrial town at the peak of economic expansion. In it,
Dickens focuses on the shortcomings of employers as well as those who seek
change. Also among Dickens’ darker novels is Little
Dorrit, a fictional study of how human values come in conflict with the
world’s brutality.
Coming out of his “dark novel” period, in 1859 Dickens
published A Tale of Two
Cities, a historical novel that takes place during the French Revolution.
He published it in a periodical he founded, All
the Year Round. His next novel,Great Expectations (1860-1861), focuses on the
protagonist’s lifelong journey of moral development. It is widely considered
his greatest literary accomplishment. A few years later, Dickens produced Our Mutual Friend, a novel
that analyzes the psychological impact of wealth on London society.
Death
In 1865, Dickens was in a train accident and
never fully recovered. Despite his fragile condition, he continued to tour
until 1870. On June 9, 1870, Dickens had a stroke and, at age 58, died at Gad’s
Hill Place, his country home in Kent, England. He was buried in Poet’s Corner
at Westminster Abbey, with thousands of mourners gathering at the beloved
author’s gravesite. Scottish satirical writer Thomas Carlyle described Dickens’
passing as “an event worldwide, a unique of talents suddenly extinct.” At the
time of Dickens’ death, his final novel, The
Mystery of Edwin Drood, was left unfinished.
Novels by Charles Dickens
Dickens's novels combine brutality with
fairy-tale fantasy; sharp, realistic, concrete detail with romance, farce, and
melodrama.; the ordinary with the strange. They range through the comic,
tender, dramatic, sentimental, grotesque, melodramatic, horrible, eccentric,
mysterious, violent, romantic, and morally earnest. Though Dickens was aware of
what his readers wanted and was determined to make as much money as he could
with his writing, he believed novels had a moral purpose–to arouse innate moral
sentiments and to encourage virtuous behavior in readers. It was his moral
purpose that led the London Times to call Dickens "the greatest instructor
of the Nineteenth Century" in his obituary.
During his lifetime, Charles Dickens was the most
famous writer in Europe and America. When he visited America to give a series
of lectures, his admirers followed him, waited outside his hotel, peered in
windows at him, and harassed him in railway cars. In their enthusiasm,
Dickens's admirers behaved very much like the fans of a superstar today. His famous writings during his life are:
·
The Pickwick Papers – 1836
·
Oliver Twist – 1837
·
Nicholas Nickleby – 1838
·
The Old Curiosity Shop – 1840
·
Barnaby Rudge – 1841
·
Martin Chuzzlewit – 1843
·
Dombey and Son – 1846
·
David Copperfield – 1849
·
Bleak House – 1852
·
Hard Times – 1854
·
Little Dorrit – 1855
·
A Tale of Two Cities – 1859
·
Great Expectations – 1860
·
Our Mutual Friend – 1864
·
The Mystery of Edwin Drood – 1870
Partial Listing of Short Stories and Other Works
by Charles Dickens in Alphabetical Order
·
American Notes
·
The Battle of Life
·
The Chimes: A Goblin Story
·
A Christmas Carol
·
A Christmas Tree
·
A Dinner at Poplar Walk
·
Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions
·
A Flight
·
Frozen Deep
·
George Silverman’s Explanation
·
Going into Society
·
The Haunted Man
·
Holiday Romance
·
The Holly-Tree
·
Hunted Down
·
The Long Voyage
·
Master Humphrey’s Clock
·
A Message from the Sea
·
Mrs. Lirriper’s Legacy
·
Public Life of Mr. Trumble, Once Mayor of Mudfog
·
Sketches by Boz
·
The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton
·
Sunday under Three Heads
·
Tom Tiddler’s Ground
·
Travelling Abroad – City of London Churches
·
The Uncommercial Traveller
·
Wreck of the Golden Mary
