![]() ![]() Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar. TimeSearch |
|
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) |
English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Charles Dickens's works are characterized by attacks on social evils, injustice, and hypocrisy. He had also experienced in his youth oppression, when he was forced to end school in early teens and work in a factory. Dickens's good, bad, and comic characters, such as the cruel miser Scrooge, the aspiring novelist David Copperfield, or the trusting and innocent Mr. Pickwick, have fascinated generations of readers. In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. (from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, with introduction and notes by Andrew Lang, with illustrations by Charles Green, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899, p. 70; first published in serialized form in 1860-61) Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Landport, Portsmouth. Like
David Copperfield, Dickens was born on Friday. In the opening of the
novel he wrote: "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own
life, or whether that situation will be held by anybody else, these
pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I
record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a
Friday, at twelve o'clok at night." (David Copperfield, with an introduction and notes by Jeremy Tambling, revised edition, London: Penguin Books, 2004, p. 13; first published 1850) Dickens was a small, sicly child. An illness left him lame in left foot. Elizabeth, Dickens's mother, was twenty-three. Her maiden name was Barrow. John Dickens, his father, was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. He was well paid but often ended in financial troubles. In 1814 the family moved to London, and then to Chatham, where Dickens received some education. The schoolmaster William Giles gave special attention to his talented student, who made rapid progress. In 1824, at the age of 12, Dickens was sent to work for some months at a blacking factory, Hungerford Market, London, while his father was in Marshalea debtor's prison. "My father and mother were quite satisfied," Dickens later recalled bitterly. "They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge." (The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, edited and annotated with an introduction by J. W. T. Ley, London: Cecil Palmer, 1928, p. 25) Later this period found its way to the novel Little Dorritt (1855-57). John Dickens paid his £40 debt with the money he inherited from his mother; she died at the age of seventy-nine when he was still in prison. In 1824-27 Dickens studied at Wellington House
Academy, London, and at Mr. Dawson's school in 1827. From 1827 to 1828
he was a law office clerk, and then a shorthand reporter
at Doctor's Commons. After learning shorthand, he could take down
speeches word for word. At the age of eighteen, Dickens applied for a
reader's ticket at the British Museum, where he read with eager
industry the works of Shakespeare, Goldsmith's History of England,
and Berger's Short Account of the Roman Senate. He wrote for True
Sun (1830-32), Mirror of Parliament (1832-34), and the
Morning
Chronicle (1834-36). Dickens gained soon the reputation as
"the fastest and
most accurate man in the Gallery," and he could celebrate his
prosperity with "a new hat and a very handsome blue cloak, with velvet
facings," as one of his friend described his somewhat dandyish outlook. (The Life of Charles Dickens, p. 67) In the 1830s Dickens contributed to Monthly Magazine,
and The Evening Chronicle and edited Bentley's Miscellany.
These years left Dickens with lasting affection for journalism and suspicious attitude towards unjust laws. His career as a writer of fiction started in 1833 when his short stories and essays to appeared in periodicals. 'A Dinner at Poplar Walk' was Dickens's first published sketch. It appeared in the Monthly Magazine in December 1833. Its publication had a deep and profound effect on him. "I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there." (Charles Dickens: The Story of His Life by [John Camden Hotten], New York: Harper & Brothers, 1870, p. 17) Sketches by Boz, illustrated by George Cruikshank, was published in book form in 1836-37. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was published in monthly parts from April 1836 to November 1837. Dickens's relationship with Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a
banker, whom he had courted for four years, ended in 1833. Three years
later Dickens married Catherine Hogart, the daughter of his friend
George Hogarth,
who edited the newly established Evening Chronicle.
With
Catherine he had 10 children; she had dozen or so pregnancies in
fifteen years. As she grew more exhausted, Dickens's attention to other
women grew more active. Catherine's younger sister Mary began living
with the Dickenses soon after the birth of Charley in 1837. Her sudden
death by a fatal heart attack devastated Dickens so" much that he break
of his work on Pickwick Papers
and Oliver Twist. Trying to cure
Catherine of her headaches and insomnia, Dickens regularly mesmerised
his wife. H.B.
Fantham has suggested in 'Charles Dickens: A biological study of his
personality' (1934) that she suffered from thyroid
dysfunction. At one point Dickens schemed to have his wife consigned to a mental asylum. They
separated in 1858; Dickens left their house without informing her in
advance, and he never saw her again. Catherine received a substantian
annual income. None of Dickens's children inherited their father's
overwhelming energy
or literary talent. The Dickens boys were on the whole
ordinary. Two of them died young, Walter in the army in India, Sydney
at sea. Henry Fielding Dickens – "The Jolly Postboy" and "The Comic
Countryman" – studied at Cambridge and enjoyed a successful
career as a barrister. Mamie, rumoured to have lesbian tendencies,
never found happiness in her personal life. Some biographers have suspected that Dickens was more fond of Catherine's sister, Mary, who moved into their house and died in 1837 at the age of 17 in Dickens's arms. Eventually she became the model for Dora Copperfield. Dickens also wanted to be buried next to her and wore Mary's ring all his life. Another of Catherine's sisters, Georgiana, moved in with the Dickenses, and the novelist fell in love with her. Dickens also had a long liaison with the actress Ellen Ternan, whom he had met by the late 1850s. Dickens's sharp ear for conversation helped him to create colorful characters through their own words. In his daily writing Dickens followed certain rules: "He rose at a certain time, he retired at another, and, though no precisian, it was not often that arrangements varied. His hours for writing were between breakfast and luncheon, and when there was any work to be done, no temptation was sufficiently strong to cause it to be neglected. The order and regularity followed him through the day. His mind was essentially methodical, and in his long walks, in his recreations, in his labour, he was governed by rules laid down for himself—rules well studied beforehand, and rarely departed from. " (anonymous friend, in The Dickens Companion: A Book of Anecdote and Reference by J. A. Hamilton, Educational Book Company, 1910, p. 40) The Pickwick Papers were stories about a group of
rather odd
individuals and their travels to Ipswich, Rochester, Bath, and
elsewhere. It was sold at 1 shilling the installment (1836-37), and
opened up a market for similar inexpensive books. Many of Dickens's
following novels first appeared in monthly installments, including Oliver Twist (1837-39). It
depicts the London underworld and hard years of the foundling Oliver
Twist, whose right to his inheritance is kept secret by the villainous
Mr. Monks. Oliver suffers in a poorfarm and workhouse. He outrages
authorities by asking a second bowl of porridge. From a solitary
confinement he is apprenticed to a casket maker, and becomes a member
of a gang of young thieves, led by Mr. Fagin. Finally Fagin is hanged
at Newgate and Mr. Barnlow adopts Oliver. Fagin, drawn from theatrical villains and the medieval Jew-devil, is
one of the most notorious anti-Jewish literary stereotypes of the
nineteen century. A Jewish reader, Eliza Davis, wrote to Dickens, saying that he had
"encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew!" (Charles Dickens and His Jewish Characters, with an introduction by Cumberland Clark, London: Chiswick Press, 1918, p. 7) Following the author's portrayal of the
horrible living conditions of the urban poor, attention was drawn to
the
slums of the city. Dickens's account of Jacob's Island on the banks of
the
Thames stirred a heated public controversy – its reality came as a
shock to his middle-class and upper-class readers. Sir Peter Laurie, a
politician and former Lord Mayor of London, even declared that there
was no such place as Jacob's Island in London. By 1867, the whole slum
was
cleared and Dickens could note in a new preface to the book, that the
place was now "improved and much changed." Karl Marx said that Dickens
has "issued to the world more political and social truths than have
been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and
moralists put together." (quoted in Dickens: A Memoir of Middle Age by Peter Ackroyd, London: Vintage Books, 2012, p. 380) David Lean's dark, atmospheric version of Oliver Twist from 1948 is among the best films made from Dickens's novels. Lean's young thieves are as hard and professional as the brutal gang members of Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados (1950). Alec Guinness played the old, big-nosed Fagin. The caricature upset some Jews in England, as Dickens's novel had done one hundred and ten years earlier. The Zionists protested that the character was presented in the same way that Jews were vilified in the Nazi paper Der Sturmer. American critics attacked the film's alleged anti-Semitism, and cuts were made before it was shown, with twelve minutes missing, in the American theatres. Lean's stylised Great Expectations (1946), based on Dickens's novel, had been a great success in the U.S. "Grandfather would have loved it," said Monica Dickens, the great-granddaughter of the author, of the film. With these works Lean has been considered an authority on Dickens. John Forster, Dickens's
friend and biographer, recalled that the author "had something of a
hankering" after ghosts, and "such was his interest generally in things
supernatural that, but for the strong restraining power of his common
sense, he might have fallen into the follies of Spiritualism". (Investigations and fictions: Charles Dickens and ghosts' by Louise Henson, in The Victorian Supernatural, edited by Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell, 2004, p. 44) With A Christmas Carol
(1843) Dickens brought back the tradition of telling ghost stories at
Christmas time. The character of Ebenezer Scrooge, the "squeezing,
wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching" miser, has attracted such
actors as Seymour Hicks, Albert Finney, Michael Caine, George C. Scott
and Alastair Sim. In a pornography version from 1975 Mary Stewart was
"Carol Screwge". One of Dickens's cats, Bob, was named after Bob
Cratchit, Stooge's assistant. Bob used to walk all over his writings.
When the cat died Dickens's sister-in-law had his pawn made into the
handle of a letter opener. Nicholas Nickelby (1838-39), which again took up the theme of child abuse, was a loosely structured tale of young Nickleby's struggles to seek his fortune. Historical subjects did not much interest Dickens. Barnaby Rudge (1841), set at the time of the 'No Popery' riots of 1780, and A Tale of Two Cities (1859) are exceptions. The latter was set in the years of the French Revolution. The plot circles around the look-alikes Charles Darnay, a nephews of a marquis, and Sydney Carton, a lawyer, who both love the same woman, Lucy. Among Dickens's later works is David Copperfield (1849-50), where he used his own personal experiences of work in a factory. David's widowed mother marries the tyrannical Mr. Murdstone. David becomes friends with Mr. Micawber and his family. "I went in, and found there a stoutish, middle-aged person, in a brown surtout and black tights and shoes, with no more hair upon his head (which was a large one, and very shining) than there is upon an egg, and with a very extensive face, which he turned full upon me. His clothes were shabby, but he had an imposing short-collar on." (David Copperfield, introduction and notes bt Adrienne E. Gavin, illustrations by H. K. Browne (Phiz), Wordsworth Classics, 1999, p. 136) Dora, David's first wife, dies and he marries Agnes. He pursues his career as a journalist and later as a novelist. Bleak House (1853) belongs to Dickens's greatest works of social social criticism. The novel is built around a lawsuit, the classic case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which affects all who come into contact with it. Much of the story is narrated in the first person by a young woman, Esther Summerson, the illegitimate daughter of the proud Lady Dedlock and Captain Hawdon. The character of Harold Skimpole, an irresponsinbe and lecherous idler, is said to be based on the poet and journalist Leigh Hunt. Great Expectations
(1860-61) began as a serialized publication in Dickens's periodical All
the Year Round
on December 1, 1860. The story of Pip (Philip Pirrip) was among
Tolstoy's and Dostoyevsky's favorite novels. G.K. Chesterton wrote that
it has "a quality of serene irony and even sadness," which according to
Chesterton separates it from Dickens's other works. "Ours was the marsh
country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of
the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of
things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon
towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this
bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip
Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were
dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and
Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and
that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with
dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was
the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and
that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the
sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and
beginning to cry, was Pip."(from Great Expectations, p. 2) Pip, an orphan, lives with his old sister and her husband. He meets an escaped convict named Abel Magwitch and helps him against his will. Magwitch is recaptured and Pip is taken care of Miss Havisham. He falls in love with the cold-hearted Estella, Miss Havisham's ward. With the help of an anonymous benefactor, Pip is properly educated, and he becomes a snob. Magwitch turns out to be the benefactor; he dies and Pip's "great expectations" are ruined. He works as a clerk in a trading firm, and marries Estella, Magwitch's daughter. Dickens participated energetically in all forms of the social
life
of the time, "light and motion flashed from every part of it," wrote
his friend and future biographer John Forster. In the 1840s Dickens
founded Master Humphrey's Cloak and
edited the London Daily News. He spent much time travelling and
campaigning against many of the social evils with his pamphlets and
other writings. When he toured in America in 1842 and saw slavery at
first hand, he wrote angry articles against it. In the 1850s Dickens was founding editor of Household World and its successor All the Year Round (1859-70). Although Dickens's works as a novelist are now best remembered, he produced hundreds of essays and edited and rewrote hundreds of others submitted to the various periodicals he edited. Dickens distinguished himself as an essayist in 1834 under the pseudonym Boz. 'A Visit to Newgate' (1836) reflects his own memories of visiting his own family in the Marshalea Prison. 'A Small Star in the East' reveals the working conditions on mills and 'Mr. Barlow' (1869) draws a portrait of an insensitive tutor. The
landscape and architecture of London influenced Dickens's work
throughout his literary career.
Most of his life he lived in London and had an obsession with walking
through the busy, noisy city streets, "which would act on him like a
tonic and enable him to take up with new vigour the flagging interest
of his story and breathe new life into its pages." (Mrs. Kate Perugini [Catherine Dickens] in Dickens
and Daughter by Gladys Storey, New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1971, p. 92; first published 1939) Occasionally, he walked with Wilkie Collins.
Dickens spoke quickly with a slight lisp. He always dressed very
carefully. To protect his weak kidney, Dickens wore a broad flannel
belt around his waist. Westminster Abbey and St Paul's Cathedral evoked thoughts of
time and place. ". . . let it night or nood, to-morrow or to-day, this
year or next-it still performed its functions with the same dull
constancy, and regulated the progress of the life around, the fancy
came upon me that this was London's Heart, and that when it should
cease
to beat, the City would be no more," he wrote of St Paul's clock. (Master Humphrey's
Clock: Vol. I., London: Chapman and Hall, MDCCCXL, p. 226) Paul Dombey, Jr. associates the Thames with darkness
in Dombey and Son:
"His fancy had a strange tendency to wander to the river, which he knew
was flowing through the great city; and now he thought how black it
was, and how deep it would look, reflecting the hosts of stars — and
more than all, how steadily it rolled away to meet the sea." (Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation, with 40 illustrations by Phiz, London: Chapman & Hall, 1913, p. 189) After visiting Newgate
Prison
Pip feels himself contaminated in Great
Expectations and beats the prison dust of his feet.
Oliver Twist accompanies his guardian to Newgate
to see Fagin hanged. Ralph Nickleby lived in Golden Square – "Its
boarding-houses are musical, and the notes of pianos and harps float in
the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the guardian
genius of a little wilderness of schrubs, in the centre of the
square." (The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, edited by Boz," with illustrations by "Phiz, London: Chapman and Hall, MDCCCXXXIX, pp. 5-6) Dickens resided in 1844-45 in Italy, Switzerland and Paris,
and from 1860 one his
address was at Gadshill Place,
near Rochester, Kent, where he lived with his two daughters and
sister-in-law. He had also other establishments – Gad's Hill, and
Windsor Lodge, Peckham, which he had rented for Ellen Ternan. His wife
Catherine lived at the London house. In 1858-68 Dickens gave lecturing
tours in Britain and
the United States. By the end of his last American tour, Dickens could
hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in
sherry. In an opium den in Shadwell, Dickens saw an elderly pusher
known as Opium Sal, who then featured in his mystery novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
He collapsed at Preston, in April 1869, after which his doctors put a
stop to his public performances. Dickens died at Gadshill on suddenly
of a stroke on June 8, 1870. "I made it my business," his daughter
Mamie wrote in her little memoir,
"to guard the beloved body as long as it was left us. The room in which
my dear father reposed for the last time was bright with the beautiful
fresh flowers which were so abundant at this time of the year, and
which our good neighbours sent to us so frequently. The birds were
singing all about and the summer sun shone brilliantly." (My Father as I Recall Him by Mamie Dickens, London: Roxburghe Press, 1896, p. 124) Some of
Dickens's friends later thought the
readings killed him. Dickens had asked that he should be buried in an
inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner. His body was
brought from Gad's Hill to London and transported to Westminster Abbey
for burial. A death mask was made although it was known that he hated masks. Our Mutual Friend
(1865),
the second last novel Dickens wrote, started with a murder mystery. A drowned man is found floating on Thames. The
Italian writer Italo Calvino called the novel "an unqualified
masterpiece". ". . . in the black humour of Dickens' late works we can discern a definitive foretaste of Beckett." (Why Read the Classics?, translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin, New York: Pantheon Books, 1999, p. 146) The
Mystery of Edwin Drood was
published in 1870, but Dickens did not manage to finish it. He
planned to produce it in 12 monthly parts, but completed only six
numbers. In March 1870 Dickens had given a private reading to Queen
Victoria and offered her the opportunity to know in advance, how the
story would conclude. The Queen declined. The novel is chiefly set in the cathedral city of Cloisterham. The story opens in an opium den. "Through the ragged window-curtain, the light of early day steals in from a miserable court. He lies, dressed, across a large unseemly bed, upon a bedstead that has indeed given way under the weight upon it. Lying, also dressed and also across the bed, not longwise, are a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman. The two first are in a sleep or stupor; the last is blowing at a kind of pipe, to kindle it. And as she blows, and shading it with her lean hand, concentrates its red sj)ark of light, it serves in the dim morning as a lamp to show him what he sees of her." (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, with twelve illustrtations by S. L. Fildes, and a portrait, London: Chapman and Hall, 1870, p. 1) The choirmaster of the cathedral, John Jaspers, lives a double life, as an opium addict and a respected member of society. His ward, Edwin Drood, disappears on Christmas Eve, after a quarrel with Neville Landless. However, there is no trace of Edwin's body. Dick Datchery, a disguised detective arrives to investigate the case. "It is the complex nature of Dickens's evil men, not their merited fate, that makes them the peers of Dostoyevsky's lost souls. For this reason, I have always been irked by the critical treatment of his last novel as a pure whodunit. ''Endings'' were not his strong suit." (Angus Wilson in The New York Times, March 1, 1981) For further reading: Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination: The Inimitable and Victorian Body Language by Peter J. Capuano (2023); Dickensland: The Curious History of Dickens's London by Lee Jackson (2023); Reading Dickens Differently, edited by Leon Litvack and Nathalie Vanfasse (2020); The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens' Unfinished Novel and Our Endless Attempts to End It by Pete Orford (2018); The Great Charles Dickens Scandal by Michael Slater (2012); A Guide to Dickens' London by Daniel Tyler (2012); Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens by Robert Gottlieb (2012); Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (2011); Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin (2011); Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley (2002); Dickens and the 1830s by Kathryn Chittick (1991); Dickens by Peter Acroyd (1990); The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin (1990); Dickens on America and the Americans, edited by Michael Slater (1979); Dickens and Charity by Norris Pope (1979); Charles Dickens as Familiar Essayist by Gordon Spence (1977); The World of Charles Dickens by Angus Wilson (1970); Dickens the Craftsman: Strategies of Presentation, edited by Robert B. Partlow, Jr. (1970); The Inimitable Dickens by A.E. Dyson (1970); Dickens at Work by Kathleen Tillotson and John Butt (1957); Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph by Edgar Johnson (1953); The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster (1872-74). Selected works:
|