Generally regarded as the greatest English novelist, Charles Dickens
enjoyed a wider popularity than any previous author had done during his
lifetime. Much in his work could appeal to simple and sophisticated, to
the poor and to the Queen, and technological developments as well as
the qualities of his work enabled his fame to spread worldwide very
quickly. His long career saw fluctuations in the reception and sales of
individual novels, but none of them was negligible or uncharacteristic
or
disregarded, and, though he is now admired for aspects and phases of his
work that were given less weight by his contemporaries, his popularity
has never ceased and his present critical standing is higher than ever
before. The most abundantly comic of English authors, he was much
more than a great entertainer. The range, compassion, and intelligence
of
his apprehension of his society and its shortcomings enriched his novels
and made him both one of the great forces in 19th-century literature and
an influential spokesman of the conscience of his age.
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born February 7, 1812, in
Portsmouth, Hampshire, but left it in infancy. His happiest childhood
years were spent in Chatham (1817-22), an area to which he often
reverts in his fiction. From 1822 he lived in London, until, in 1860, he
moved permanently to a country house, Gad's Hill, near Chatham. His
origins were middle class, if of a newfound and precarious respectability;
one grandfather had been a domestic servant, and the other an
embezzler. His father, a clerk in the navy pay office, was well paid, but
his extravagance and ineptitude often brought the family to financial
embarrassment or disaster. (Some of his failings and his ebullience are
dramatized in Mr. Micawber in the partly autobiographical David
Copperfield.)
In 1824 the family reached bottom. Charles, the eldest
son, had been withdrawn from school and was now set to manual
work
in a factory, and his father went to prison for debt. These shocks
deeply
affected Charles. Though abhorring this brief descent into the working
class, he began to gain that sympathetic knowledge of their life and
privations that informed his writings. Also, the images of the
prison and of 
the lost, oppressed, or bewildered child recur in many novels.
Much else
in his character and art stems from this period, including, as the
20th-century novelist Angus Wilson has argued, his later difficulty, as
man and author, in understanding women: this may be traced to his bitter
resentment against his mother, who had, he felt, failed disastrously at
this
time to appreciate his sufferings. She had wanted him to stay at work
when his father's release from prison and an improvement in the family's
fortunes made the boy's return to school possible. Happily the father's
view prevailed.
His schooling, interrupted and unimpressive, ended at 15. He became a
clerk in a solicitor's office, then a shorthand reporter in the lawcourts
(thus gaining a knowledge of the legal world often used in the novels),
and finally, like other members of his family, a parliamentary and
newspaper reporter. These years left him with a lasting affection for
journalism and contempt both for the law and for Parliament. His coming
to manhood in the reformist 1830s, and particularly his working on the
Liberal Benthamite Morning Chronicle (1834-36), greatly affected his
political outlook. Another influential event now was his rejection as suitor
to Maria Beadnell because his family and prospects were unsatisfactory;
his hopes of gaining and chagrin at losing her sharpened his determination
to succeed. His feelings about Maria then and at her later brief and
disillusioning reentry into his life are reflected in David Copperfield's
adoration of Dora Spenlow and in the middle-aged Arthur Clennam's
discovery (in Little Dorrit) that Flora Finching, who had seemed
enchanting years ago, was "diffuse and silly," that Flora "whom he had
left
a lily, had become a peony."
Much drawn to the theatre, Dickens nearly became a professional actor
in 1832. In 1833 he began contributing stories and descriptive essays to
magazines and newspapers; these attracted attention and were reprinted
as Sketches by "Boz" (February 1836). The same month, he was invited
to provide a comic serial narrative to accompany engravings by a
well-known artist; seven weeks later the first installment of Pickwick
Papers appeared. Within a few months Pickwick was the rage and
Dickens the most popular author of the day. During 1836 he also wrote
two plays and a pamphlet on a topical issue (how the poor should be
allowed to enjoy the Sabbath) and, resigning from his newspaper job,
undertook to edit a monthly magazine, Bentley's Miscellany, in which he
serialized Oliver Twist (1837-39). Thus, he had two serial installments
to write every month. Already the first of his nine surviving children
had
been born; he had married (in April 1836) Catherine, eldest daughter of
a respected Scottish journalist and man of letters, George Hogarth.
For several years his life continued at this intensity. Finding serialization
congenial and profitable, he repeated the Pickwick pattern of 20 monthly
parts in Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39); then he experimented with
shorter weekly installments for The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) and
Barnaby Rudge (1841). Exhausted at last, he then took a five-month
vacation in America, touring strenuously and receiving quasi-royal
honours as a literary celebrity but offending national sensibilities by
protesting against the absence of copyright protection. A radical critic
of
British institutions, he had expected more from "the republic of my
imagination," but he found more vulgarity and sharp practice to detest
than social arrangements to admire. Some of these feelings appear in
American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44).
His writing during these prolific years was remarkably various and,
except for his plays, resourceful. Pickwick began as high-spirited farce
and contained many conventional comic butts and traditional jokes; like
other early works, it was manifestly indebted to the contemporary
theatre, the 18th-century English novelists, and a few foreign classics,
notably Don Quixote. But, besides giving new life to old stereotypes,
Pickwick displayed, if sometimes in embryo, many of the features that
were to be blended in varying proportions throughout his fiction: attacks,
satirical or denunciatory, on social evils and inadequate institutions;
topical references; an encyclopaedic knowledge of London (always his
predominant fictional locale); pathos; a vein of the macabre; a delight
in
the demotic joys of Christmas; a pervasive spirit of benevolence and
geniality; inexhaustible powers of character creation; a wonderful ear
for
characteristic speech, often imaginatively heightened; a strong narrative
impulse; and a prose style that, if here overdependent on a few comic
mannerisms, was highly individual and inventive. Rapidly improvised and
written only weeks or days ahead of its serial publication, Pickwick
contains weak and jejune passages and is an unsatisfactory whole--partly
because Dickens was rapidly developing his craft as a novelist while
writing and publishing it. What is remarkable is that a first novel, written
in such circumstances, not only established him overnight and created a
new tradition of popular literature but also survived, despite its crudities,
as one of the best known novels in the world.
Oliver Twist and others.
His self-assurance and artistic ambitiousness had appeared in Oliver
Twist, where he rejected the temptation to repeat the successful
Pickwick formula. Though containing much comedy still, Oliver Twist is
more centrally concerned with social and moral evil (the workhouse and
the criminal world); it culminates in Bill Sikes's murdering Nancy and
Fagin's last night in the condemned cell at Newgate. The latter episode
was memorably depicted in George Cruikshank's engraving; the
imaginative potency of Dickens' characters and settings owes much,
indeed, to his original illustrators (Cruikshank for Sketches by "Boz"
and
Oliver Twist, "Phiz" [Hablot K. Browne] for most of the other novels
until the 1860s). The currency of his fiction owed much, too, to its being
so easy to adapt into effective stage versions. Sometimes 20 London
theatres simultaneously were producing adaptations of his latest story;
so
even nonreaders became acquainted with simplified versions of his
works. The theatre was often a subject of his fiction, too, as in the
Crummles troupe in Nicholas Nickleby. This novel reverted to the
Pickwick shape and atmosphere, though the indictment of the brutal
Yorkshire schools (Dotheboys Hall) continued the important innovation
in English fiction seen in Oliver Twist--the spectacle of the lost or
oppressed child as an occasion for pathos and social criticism. This was
amplified in The Old Curiosity Shop, where the death of Little Nell was
found overwhelmingly powerful at the time, though a few decades later it
became a byword for "Victorian sentimentality." In Barnaby Rudge he
attempted another genre, the historical novel. Like his later attempt in
this
kind, A Tale of Two Cities, it was set in the late 18th century and
presented with great vigour and understanding (and some ambivalence of
attitude) the spectacle of large-scale mob violence.
To create an artistic unity out of the wide range of moods and materials
included in every novel, with often several complicated plots involving
scores of characters, was made even more difficult by Dickens' writing
and publishing them serially. In Martin Chuzzlewit he tried "to resist
the
temptation of the current Monthly Number, and to keep a steadier eye
upon the general purpose and design" (1844 Preface). Its American
episodes had, however, been unpremeditated (he suddenly decided to
boost the disappointing sales by some America-baiting and to revenge
himself against insults and injuries from the American press). A
concentration on "the general purpose and design" was more effective in
the next novel, Dombey and Son (1846-48), though the experience of
writing the shorter, and unserialized, Christmas books had helped him
obtain greater coherence.
Christmas books.
A Christmas Carol (1843), suddenly conceived and written in a few
weeks, was the first of these Christmas books (a new literary genre thus
created incidentally). Tossed off while he was amply engaged in writing
Chuzzlewit, it was an extraordinary achievement--the one great
Christmas myth of modern literature. His view of life was later to be
described or dismissed as "Christmas philosophy," and he himself spoke
of "Carol philosophy" as the basis of a projected work. His
"philosophy," never very elaborated, involved more than wanting the
Christmas spirit to prevail throughout the year, but his great attachment
to
Christmas (in his family life as well as his writings) is indeed significant
and has contributed to his popularity. "Dickens dead?" exclaimed a
London costermonger's girl in 1870. "Then will Father Christmas die
too?"--a tribute both to his association with Christmas and to the
mythological status of the man as well as of his work. The Carol
immediately entered the general consciousness; Thackeray, in a review,
called it "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it
a
personal kindness." Further Christmas books, essays, and stories
followed annually (except in 1847) through 1867. None equalled the
Carol in potency, though some achieved great immediate popularity.
Cumulatively they represent a celebration of Christmas attempted by no
other great author.
Renown.
How he struck his contemporaries in these early years appears in R.H.
Horne's New Spirit of the Age (1844). Dickens occupied the first and
longest chapter, as
. . . manifestly the product of his age . . . a genuine
emanation from its aggregate and entire spirit. . . . He mixes
extensively in society, and continually. Few public meetings
in a benevolent cause are without him. He speaks
effectively. . . . His influence upon his age is
extensive--pleasurable, instructive, healthy, reformatory. . . .
Mr. Dickens is, in private, very much what might be
expected from his works. . . . His conversation is genial . . .
[He] has singular personal activity, and is fond of games of
practical skill. He is also a great walker, and very much
given to dancing Sir Roger de Coverley. In private, the
general impression of him is that of a first-rate practical
intellect, with "no nonsense" about him.
He was indeed very much a public figure, actively and centrally involved
in his world, and a man of confident presence. He was reckoned the best
after-dinner speaker of the age; other superlatives he attracted included
his having been the best shorthand reporter on the London press and his
being the best amateur actor on the stage. Later he became one of the
most successful periodical editors and the finest dramatic recitalist of
the
day. He was splendidly endowed with many skills. "Even irrespective of
his literary genius," wrote an obituarist, "he was an able and
strong-minded man, who would have succeeded in almost any profession
to which he devoted himself " (Times, June 10, 1870). Few of his
extraliterary skills and interests were irrelevant to the range and mode
of
his fiction.
Privately in these early years, he was both domestic and social. He loved
home and family life and was a proud and efficient householder; he once
contemplated writing a cookbook. To his many children, he was a
devoted and delightful father, at least while they were young; relations
with them proved less happy during their adolescence. Apart from
periods in Italy (1844-45) and Switzerland and France (1846-47), he
still lived in London, moving from an apartment in Furnival's Inn to larger
houses as his income and family grew. Here he entertained his many
friends, most of them popular authors, journalists, actors, or artists,
though some came from the law and other professions or from commerce
and a few from the aristocracy. Some friendships dating from his youth
endured to the end, and, though often exasperated by the financial
demands of his parents and other relatives, he was very fond of some of
his family and loyal to most of the rest. Some literary squabbles came
later, but he was on friendly terms with most of his fellow authors, of
the
older generation as well as his own. Necessarily solitary while writing
and
during the long walks (especially through the streets at night) that became
essential to his creative processes, he was generally social at other times.
He enjoyed society that was unpretentious and conversation that was
genial and sensible but not too intellectualized or exclusively literary.
High
society he generally avoided, after a few early incursions into the great
houses; he hated to be lionized or patronized.
He had about him "a sort of swell and overflow as of a prodigality of life,"
an American journalist said. Everyone was struck by the brilliance of his
eyes and his smart, even dandyish, appearance ("I have the fondness of
a
savage for finery," he confessed). John Forster, his intimate friend and
future biographer, recalled him at the Pickwick period:
the quickness, keenness, and practical power, the eager,
restless, energetic outlook on each several feature [of his
face] seemed to tell so little of a student or writer of books,
and so much of a man of action and business in the world.
Light and motion flashed from every part of it.
He was proud of his art and devoted to improving it and using it to good
ends (his works would show, he wrote, that "Cheap Literature is not
behind-hand with the Age, but holds its place, and strives to do its duty"),
but his art never engaged all his formidable energies. He had no desire
to
be narrowly literary.
A notable, though unsuccessful, demonstration of this was his being
founder-editor in 1846 of the Daily News (soon to become the leading
Liberal newspaper). His journalistic origins, his political convictions
and
readiness to act as a leader of opinion, and his wish to secure a steady
income independent of his literary creativity and of any shifts in novel
readers' tastes made him attempt or plan several periodical ventures in
the 1840s. The return to daily journalism soon proved a mistake--the
biggest fiasco in a career that included few such misdirections or failures.
A more limited but happier exercise of his practical talents began soon
afterward: for more than a decade he directed, energetically and with
great insight and compassion, a reformatory home for young female
delinquents, financed by his wealthy friend Angela Burdett-Coutts. The
benevolent spirit apparent in his writings often found practical expression
in his public speeches, fund-raising activities, and private acts of charity.
Dombey and Son (1846-48) was a crucial novel in his development, a
product of more thorough planning and maturer thought and the first in
which "a pervasive uneasiness about contemporary society takes the
place of an intermittent concern with specific social wrongs" (Kathleen
Tillotson). Using railways prominently and effectively, it was very
up-to-date, though the questions posed included such perennial moral
and religious challenges as are suggested by the child Paul's first words
in
the story: "Papa, what's money?" Some of the corruptions of money and
pride of place and the limitations of "respectable" values are explored,
virtue and human decency being discovered most often (as elsewhere in
Dickens) among the poor, humble, and simple. In Paul's early death
Dickens offered another famous pathetic episode; in Mr. Dombey he
made a more ambitious attempt than before at serious and internal
characterization. David Copperfield (1849-50) has been described as a
"holiday" from these larger social concerns and most notable for its
childhood chapters, "an enchanting vein which he had never quite found
before and which he was never to find again" (Edmund Wilson). Largely
for this reason and for its autobiographical interest, it has always been
among his most popular novels and was Dickens' own "favourite child." It
incorporates material from the autobiography he had recently begun but
soon abandoned and is written in the first person, a new technique for
him. David differs from his creator in many ways, however, though
Dickens uses many early experiences that had meant much to him--his
period of work in the factory while his father was jailed, his schooling
and
reading, his passion for Maria Beadnell, and (more cursorily) his
emergence from parliamentary reporting into successful novel writing. In
Micawber the novel presents one of the "Dickens characters" whose
imaginative potency extends far beyond the narratives in which they
figure; Pickwick and Sam Weller, Mrs. Gamp and Mr. Pecksniff, and
Scrooge are some others.
