THE AUTHOR
The life of Charles Dickens makes the characters and stories that sprang from his pen appear tame by comparison. From poverty and disgrace, imprisonment and servitude, sickness and depravity--all the dramatic elements were there. The drama of a Dickens novel replicated the real-life travails of the author as a young man.
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born February 7, 1812, in a house in the Mile End Terrace, Commercial Road, Landport (Portsea)—a house that converted to a Dickens Museum in 1904. When Dickens turned five, the family moved to Chatham, and young Dickens considered his years there the happiest of his childhood. He grew up in a series of picturesque fishing villages on the southern coast of England, where his father worked as a naval clerk.
Not surprisingly, Dickens loved the sea. He wrote, "The sun, away at sea, just breaking through the heavy mist, and showing us the ships, like their own shadows ... I have never beheld such sky, such water, such glorified ships sailing away into golden air."
His mother, Elizabeth (Barrow), taught him to read from the books his father, John, kept in a small attic library. Charles became a voracious devourer of books of all types. "[Reading] was my constant comfort," he wrote. "When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life."
The works that sustained him most were Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphry Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, and Robinson Crusoe. Dickens often injected himself into the stories, playing the characters in the books for weeks at a time. He told in his masterwork, David Copperfield, how he sustained his concept of Roderick Random for a month.
When Dickens turned ten, his life took a turn with him. His father accepted a position on the outskirts of London, one of the world's first sprawling cities and the capital of the industrial revolution. Overflowing with poverty and pollution, crime and mystery, London was the last place to which Dickens hoped to move, but he had no choice. He remembered leaving the small coastal town where he'd grown up with apprehension and fear.
In contrast, London was "The great city ... like a dark shadow on the ground, reddening the sluggish air with a deep dull light, that told of labyrinths of public ways and shops, and swarms of busy people ... Sounds arose—the striking of church clocks, the distant bark of dogs, the hum of traffic in the streets ... tall steeples looming in the air, and piles of unequal roofs oppressed by chimneys."
On the day his family left for London, Charles was overwhelmed by sadness. "I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it."
The new house the family moved into was uncomfortably small. Dickens said of the neighborhood, "It was as shabby, dingy, damp and mean a neighborhood as one would desire not to see." Instead of standing on the shore of his old home town and looking out to sea, he now found himself gazing out across the black clouds of soot and smoke rising from the stacks of London's industrial carnage.
Although the family had been relatively well-to-do, Dickens' father, who enjoyed living beyond his meager means, had been slowly sinking into debt for years. When Charles turned twelve, his parents decided he was old enough to help the family financially by taking a job at Warren's Blacking Company, a boot-blacking manufacturer run by a friend of his mother's family.
His parents saw it both as a solid economic move and an opportunity for their son to work his way into the business world. Dickens saw it as a prison sentence. He described the building where he worked as "A crazy, tumbledown old house ... its wainscoted rooms and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs all the time." The boy worked ten-hours days pasting labels on the jars of boot polish and doing odd jobs.
A few days after he began work, Dickens’ father was arrested and thrown into debtor's prison. Young Dickens was devastated. He went to visit his father, and it was there that the man told his son to take this as a warning. If a man had twenty pounds a year and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy. But a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched.
His mother sold off or pawned most of the family's possessions and moved into the debtor's prison with her husband and the younger Dickens children, a common practice. Charles took residence with a family friend. The family survived on a diet of black tea and pudding. Each morning, Dickens walked the crowded streets to the prison, where he had breakfast with his family before going to the blacking factory. On his way home, he stopped at the prison to join them for dinner before returning to the tiny house he called home.
Feeling the iron fist of shame, Charles vowed to do whatever necessary to ensure he would never be poor again or wind up like his father.
And he wasn’t.
In 1824, Dickens received relief from his personal hell when his parents inherited some money from his father's family. Dickens quit his job at the factory and spent the next two years at Wellington House, an academy at the corner of Granby Street and Hampstead Road, where his neighbors remembered him as a “merry and rather mischievous” boy. After his release from prison, Dickens’ father worked as a parliamentary reporter while his son accepted a position with a Gray's Inn attorney who had been attracted to the bright, clever look of the boy. The attorney took him into his office at a salary of thirteen and sixpence, increasing to fifteen shillings a week. He worked there from May 1827 to November 1828, but he had lost none of his eagerness to excel and spent most of his spare time mastering Gurney's shorthand and reading before and after work at the British Museum.
His diligence paid off. He had an opportunity to become a reporter for the True Sun, and he jumped at the chance. He spent his days traveling around the country, covering parliamentary proceedings and election campaigns. At night, he worked at writing his first novel, creating elaborate scenes involving complex, full characters rich in attributes--both good and bad.
But Dickens couldn't wait for payment until he finished his book, so he struck upon an ingenious plan for serializing the chapters in local magazines. The scheme proved successful, and his reading public waited anxiously for each new edition.
Once, when he had run out of writing paper and gone down to the local stationary store to purchase some, he overheard a woman asking when the next Charles Dickens serial would be out--the very story that had been interrupted when his paper ran out!
Dickens' literary career soared. He serialized Oliver Twist in Bentley's Miscellany beginning in 1837. The following year, with the book only half completed, he began publishing monthly installments of Nicholas Nickleby. Because he had so many projects in the works, he could barely stay ahead of his monthly deadlines. But he was driven toward success. After completing Twist and Nickleby, he produced weekly installments of The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge.
Following a short working vacation in the United States in 1841, Dickens continued his breakneck literary pace. He began publishing annual Christmas stories, beginning with A Christmas Carol in 1843.
In 1850, he established a weekly journal, Household Words, to which he contributed the serialized works, Child's History of England (1851-53), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1860-61). At the same time, he continued work on his novels, including David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), Little Dorrit (1855-57), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65).
As his popularity grew, Dickens became increasingly sullen toward life. His works had always reflected the pain suffered by the ordinary person, with novels such as Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend portraying the author’s growing disillusionment with society.
In 1858, Dickens began holding a series of paid readings that became instantly popular. Through them, he combined his love of the stage with an accurate rendition of his works. He performed more than four hundred times in all. The readings often left him exhausted and ill, but they allowed him to increase his income, receive creative satisfaction, and travel the world.
Then, on June 9, 1865, Dickens' life took another curious turn. While returning from a trip to France, the train on which he was traveling crashed horribly at Staplehurst. The first six carriages plunged off a bridge under repair. The only first-class carriage to remain on the tracks was the one in which the author rode.
The event left him shaken, and his writing suffered. His health gradually deteriorated, and his literary output declined.
Exactly five years after the Staplehurst crash, Charles Dickens died, his body interred in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. His reputation among critics declined dramatically following his death. With the popularism of literary realism sweeping Europe, his work was deemed too melodramatic and moralistic, saturated with shallow cartoon characters, wicked villains, and innocent children.
But with the passage of time, critics such as G.K. Chesterton began to reassess the author’s work in light of its universal appeal. Since 1950, more people have written about Dickens each year than about any other author in the English language besides Shakespeare.
Today, in that part of London where Dickens once walked between the prison and the factory, streets are named after his literary characters: Pickwick Street and Little Dorrit Court, and young children laugh and play at the Charles Dickens Primary School.
Charles Dickens wrote, "Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day."
THE ETHICIST
With his father imprisoned at Marshalsea, Dickens and his sister Frances, home from her studies at the Royal Academy of Music, spent their Sundays visiting the family. Dickens later used the prison as a setting in Little Dorrit. The strenuous and often harsh working conditions at the prison made a lasting impression on him. He later used the experiences in his fiction and essays, becoming the foundation of his interest in reforming socio-economic and labor conditions that took advantage of the poor. He wondered "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age."
His resentment of harsh working conditions for the poor became popular themes in his stories. The author recounted that painful period in his life in a scene from his favorite autobiographical novel, David Copperfield: "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!"
In1846, Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to a family banking fortune, asked Dickens to help set up a home for fallen working-class women. She wanted to replace those existing institutions' harsh punishments with a reformative environment of education and rehabilitation. Dickens dove into the task, and the result was a home called Urania Cottage in the Lime Grove area of Shepherd's Bush. He managed the facility for a decade, defining house rules, reviewing accounts, and interviewing prospective residents. Nearly one hundred women graduated from Urania Cottage during its lifespan.
After retiring from those administrative duties, Dickens gravitated back to the theater where he interviewed several professional actresses for the play The Frozen Deep, which he co-wrote with protégé, Wilkie Collins. Casting for the play went better than Dickens could have imagined. The author fell in love with one of the actresses, Ellen Ternan, and the two began a passionate affair that lasted the rest of his life. He was forty-five and she, eighteen when they consummated their love, even though the affair went against all Victorian convention. Dickens separated from his wife, Catherine, in 1858 because divorce would have meant professional suicide. When Catherine moved out of their home, she took one child with her, leaving the others to be raised by her sister Georgina. She never saw her husband again.
Around the same time, Dickens tinkered with a plan offering a series of public readings when he was approached by the Great Ormond Street Hospital to help it survive its first looming financial crisis. The author's "Drooping Buds" essay in Household Words on April 3, 1852, set things back on track. The hospital's founders acknowledged that Dickens' work had been the catalyst that began turning the hospital's finances around. The author, whose philanthropy was widely known, went on to launch a series of public readings to secure sufficient funds for an endowment to put the hospital on a permanently sound financial footing. One reading on February 9, 1858, raised £3,000 on its own!
In 1868-69, Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" in England, Scotland, and Ireland. He made eighty-seven of a hundred proposed appearances before falling victim to his first stroke. He canceled the remainder of his tour on his doctor's advice, after which he recuperated while working on his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. When he recovered, his doctor approved plans for a final series of readings to help make up for what his sponsors had lost during the hospitalization. Dickens gave twelve more performances, the last at St. James' Hall in London. Although gravely ill, he managed to read A Christmas Carol and The Trial from Pickwick. On May 2, he made his last public appearance at a Royal Academy banquet in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, paying special tribute to his recently deceased friend and illustrator Daniel Maclise.
On June 8, 1870, Dickens suffered his second stroke at home after a full day's work on Edwin Drood. He never regained consciousness, dying the next day at Gads Hill Place. Biographer Claire Tomalin suggested Dickens was actually in Peckham when he suffered the stroke. His mistress removed his remains back to Gads Hill so the public would never know the truth about their relationship. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner," he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral read:
"To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, June 9 1870 ... He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world."
Humanist, moralist, and ethicist Charles Dickens died at age fifty-eight.
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