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 7 February 1812.
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, but also read voraciously, with a particular fondness for the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding.
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.
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.
On 2 April 1836, he married Catherine Thompson Hogarth, 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 had ten children.
Novels
<tbody>- The Pickwick Papers (Monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837)<13>
- The Adventures of Oliver Twist (Monthly serial in Bentley's Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839)
- The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Monthly serial, April 1838 to October 1839)
- The Old Curiosity Shop (Weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, April 25, 1840, to February 6, 1841)
- Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty (Weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, February 13, 1841, to November 27, 1841)
- The Christmas books:
- A Christmas Carol (1843)
- The Chimes (1844)
- The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)
- The Battle of Life (1846)
- The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848)
- The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (Monthly serial, January 1843 to July 1844)
- Dombey and Son (Monthly serial, October 1846 to April 1848)
- David Copperfield (Monthly serial, May 1849 to November 1850)
| - Bleak House (Monthly serial, March 1852 to September 1853)
- Hard Times: For These Times (Weekly serial in Household Words, April 1, 1854, to August 12, 1854)
- Little Dorrit (Monthly serial, December 1855 to June 1857)
- A Tale of Two Cities (Weekly serial in All the Year Round, April 30, 1859, to November 26, 1859)
- Great Expectations (Weekly serial in All the Year Round, December 1, 1860 to August 3, 1861)
- Our Mutual Friend (Monthly serial, May 1864 to November 1865)
- No Thoroughfare (1867) (with Wilkie Collins)
- The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Monthly serial, April 1870 to September 1870. Only six of twelve planned numbers completed)
- The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices (1890)
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</tbody>
Short story collections
<tbody> | - The Haunted House (1862) (with Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Adelaide Proctor, George Sala and Hesba Setton)
- The Mudfog Papers (1880) aka Mudfog and Other Sketches
- To Be Read At Dusk (1898)
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</tbody>
Selected nonfiction, poetry, and plays
Charles John Huffam Dickens- 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. Dickens travelled throughout the world during his lifetime and experienced many things of which he could write. 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. 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." In 1903 Chesterton said, "It is not the death of Little Nell, but the life of Little Nell, that I object to." 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. 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 mask 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 resulted from Dickens's own experiences of the institution. Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop is thought to represent Dickens's sister-in-law, Nicholas Nickleby's father and Wilkins Micawber are certainly Dickens's own father, just as Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Micawber are similar to his motherThe 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 gathered 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. 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 probably demonstrated its greatest prowess 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 not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of this condition is in Hard Times (1854), Dickens's only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In this 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 As Karl Marx said, Dickens, and the other novelists of Victorian England, "…issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together. Four notable festivals in the United States are:The Riverside Dickens Festival in Riverside, California, includes literary studies as well as entertainments. The Great Dickens Christmas Fair (http://www.dickensfair.com/) has been held in San Francisco, California, since the 1970s. During the four or five weekends before Christmas, over 500 costumed performers mingle with and entertain thousands of visitors amidst the recreated full-scale blocks of Dickensian London in over 90,000 square feet (8,000 m⊃;) of public area. This is the oldest, largest, and most successful of the modern Dickens festivals outside England. Many (including the Martin Harris who acts in the Rochester festival and flies out from London to play Scrooge every year in SF) say it is the most impressive in the world.
Dickens on The Strand in Galveston, Texas, is a holiday festival held on the first weekend in December since 1974, where bobbies, Beefeaters and the "Queen" herself are on hand to recreate the Victorian London of Charles Dickens. Many festival volunteers and attendees dress in Victorian attire and bring the world of Dickens to life. The Greater Port Jefferson-Northern Brookhaven Arts Council (http://www.gpjac.org) holds a Dickens Festival in the Village of Port Jefferson, NY each year. In 2007, the Dickens Festival is Nov. 30th, Dec. 1st, and Dec. 2nd. It includes many events, along with a troupe of street performers who bring an authentic Dickensian atmosphere to the town.
A Christmas Carol was the subject of Dickens' first ever public reading, given in Birmingham Town Hall to the Industrial and Literary Institute on 27 December 1852. This was repeated three days later to an audience of 'working people', and was a great success by his own account and that of newspapers of the time. Over the years Dickens edited the piece down and adapted it for a listening, rather than reading, audience. Excerpts from A Christmas Carol remained part of Dickens' public readings until his death.
References
Ackroyd, Peter, Dickens, (2002), Vintage, ISBN 0-09-943709-0
Drabble, Margaret (ed.), The Oxford Companion to English Literature, (1997), London: Oxford University Press.
Michael Slater, "Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812 – 1870)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006 accessed 6 June 2006
Peter R Lewis, Disaster on the Dee: Robert Stephenson's Nemesis of 1847, Tempus (2007) for a discussion of the Staplehurst accident, and its influence on Dickens.
John Glavin (ed.) Dickens on Screen,(2003),New York: Cambridge University Press.
Robert L. Patten (ed.) The Pickwick Papers (Introduction), (1978), Penguin Books.
Sidney P. Moss: Charles Dickens' Quarrel with America (New York: Whitson, 1984).
Fred Kaplan: Dickens: A Biography (New York: William Morros, 1988).
Jerome Meckier: Innocent Abroad: Charles Dickens' American Engagements (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990).
Dickens, Charles (1854). Hard Times. Wordsworth: Printing Press. ISBN 1-85326-232-3.
House. M.; Storey. G. & Tillotson. K. (1993). The Pilgrim Edition of the letters of Charles Dickens, Vol VIII.. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-812617-4.
Leavis, F. R. (1970). The Great Tradition. Chatto and Windus.
Thorold, Dinny (1995). Introduction to Hard Times. Wordsworth: Printing Press.
1870 illustrations of Hard Times. Harry French's Twenty Plates for Dickens's "Hard Times for These Times " in the British Household Edition (1870s). Retrieved on May 23, 2005.
Basic summary of Hard Times. ClassicNotes: Hard Times Short Summary. Retrieved on May 23, 2005.
Hard Times. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens by G.K. Chesterton. Retrieved on July 31, 2007.
Hard Times: An Introduction. Hard Times: An Introduction by Walter Ellis. Retrieved on May 23, 2005.
