Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens was born on Friday, February 7, 1812. At commercial road, Landport, Portsmouth. His name was entered in the baptismal register of Port sea Paris Church as Charles John Huffman Dickens. His father, John Dickens, was a clerk in the Navy’s Pay Office with a salary of 80 pounds a year. The family moved to London about two years after the birth of Charles and to Chatham, when he was four. Here they remained till Charles was nine years old. Chatham is a river port and naval arsenal in Kent, situated on the right bank of the Medway. It forms almost one continuous town with Rochester, an ancient cathedral city. In these town places the most lasting of Dickens early impressions were received and at Gad’s hill, three miles away, he spent the last thirteen years of his life. Little Charles was a delicate boy. He did not take part in the rougher boy’s games, but preferred to spend the time in reading. In a attic of his father’s house at Chatham he found the books mentioned in David Lopper field. He read them again en again and this, together with the taste for the drama which he development at an early age, no doubt helped to mould the views of the future novelist. In 1821 the family left Chatham for London. The pecuniary difficulties in which John Dickens had frequently been involved become pressing. They lived in a very small house in Camden town, then the poorest part of London suburbs, an young Charles could not even go to school. The boy also became familiar with the inside of a pawnbroker’s shop. But neither this , nor his mother heroic effort to start a school, were of any avail. Charles left “at a great many doors a great many circulars” calling the attention to the advantages of the new establishment, yet no pupils came. At last Dickens Senior was arrested for debt and imprisoned in the Marshalsea Prison. Charles was sent to a blacking factory, where for eighteen months he covered and labelled pots of blacking. His Sundays were spent at home in the prison, where the family had settled itself. After some time the elder Dickens received a legacy which enabled him to satisfy his creditors. Charles now had two years of continuous schooling at the Willington House Academy, Hamstead. At the age of fifteen young Dickens joined en the battle of life. He entered a solicitor’s office and picked up sufficient knowledge of the law and lawyers to be able to use it many times as material for his works. In his spare time Dickens used to study shorthand or read in the British Museum. He became one of the best shorthand writers of his time and left the office to become a reporter in police-courts. At the age of nineteen he was made parliamentary reporter of a London paper. The political life of the country was at the time marked by a series of reforms. The Reform act of 1832 instituted a new parliamentary constitution ; the abolition of slavery, the improvement of life in factories, the amendment of the poor law and other measures provided better opportunities and conditions of life for various classes. To these political results may be traced no small part of Dickens’ political creed. At the age of twenty-one Dickens began his career as an author. In December 1833 he dropped a sketch “ A dinner at Poplan Walk” into the letter-box of the Monthly Magazine and a few days afterwards the young author with eyes “dimmed with joy and pride” beheld his first-born in print. He sent further contributions, signing them “Boz” a nickname given by him in his boyhood to a favourite brother who was called ‘Moses’ after Moses in the Vicar of the ‘sketches by Boz’. The complete series of the ‘Sketches by Boz’ was published in volume form in 1836. In the same year Dickens got the opportunity of his life. Messrs. Chapman & Hall, publishers, asked him to write the letterpress for a series of sporting plates, to be published monthly. Dickens proposed to modify the plan, so that the plates were, “to arise naturally out of the text”. Only a single number of the serial had appeared when Seyman, the draughtsman, committed suicide. Among the applicants for the now vacant office of illustrator was William Makepeace Thackery. Hablot K. Browne (‘Phiz) was chosen and he became the illustrator of most of Dickens’ Novels. The etchings in this abridged edition of David Copperfield are by him. This the immortal Pickwick Papers appeared. The sale of the first monthly parts was small but the success of the work was accused as soon as Sam Weller was introduced. The creation of this fresh and original character was the turning-point in Dickens’ career. The later parts took the world by storm and placed Dickens in the front rank of English novelists, when the identity of the author was disclosed by the following ‘impromptu’ in Bentley’s miscellany. “Who the Dickens ‘Boz’ could be puzzled many a learned elf, till time revealed the mystery. And ‘Boz’ appeared as Dickens’ self. Dickens’ life now became exceedingly busy and varies. He travelled much, performed in amateur theatricals and even became the leader of a company of amateur ctors who performed before Queen Victoria bij special request. Meantime he wrote book after book. In 1842 he went to America, a visit which was renewed in 1867. From 1844 to 1846 he lived in Italy and Switzerland. He was the first editor of the “Daily News”, but he soon resigned in favour of his friend Forster. He start a magazine Household Words (1849-1859) and replaced it by All the year Round(1859). He made public speeches and gave long series of public readings from his own books. The profits of the readings during his second American tour alone amounted to 20,000 pound. The mental tension caused by these readings, supplemented by the strain of his literary and editorial work, broke his health. He died suddenly in 1870, in his fifty-ninth year, and was buried in the poets’ corner of Westminster Abbey. The novels of Charles Dickens
If we neglect the unfinished Edwin Drood, we may say that Dickens’ career as a novelist lasted twenty-nine years, i.e. from 1836, the year of the Sketches by Boz to 1865, when Our Mutual Friend was published. This period falls naturally into two nearly equal portions. The first includes in chronological order Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Nicholas, Nickleby, Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, the Christmas Carol Books, Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey abs Son, i.e. seven novels and the Sketches and Tales. On the whole these represent a progressive advance in workmanship. The climax of his career was reached in the publication of David Copperfield, when Dickens was thirty-eight. It was Dickens’ own favourite and, all things considered, it must be allowed to be his masterpiece. After David Copperfield Dickens’ work more or less fell off. Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and our Muttual Friend, written between 1850 and 1865, though great novels, show a decline from the greatness of David Copperfield. The strength of a novel lies in its construction, character, humour and pathos and in the truth of its general picture of life. The construction of Dickens’ novels is frequently defective, his early novels are sometimes highly improbable in the action and loosely constructed, a series of adventures of sketches serves to exhibit the characters. The many novels were published in serial form may partly account for this. In the later novels the plots are more coherent though they are not usually thing of definite shape , growing along their own lines, but are explained by the author as he goes along. In respect of plot David Copperfield shows unity and compactness, it is one of the few novels of Dickens in which the element of plot constitutes part of the fascination of the work. In his delineation of character is Dickens above all the creator of types. His personages are mostly rather caricatures than human beings. Yet, though may verge on the grotesque or the absurd, their vitality is unquestionable and their humour always saves them from being impossible. In most of his novels the number of distinct characters rises above fifty, in David Copperfield there are about two hundred separate personages, some of them described by a few lines only, but all throbbing with life and individuality. It is as a humourist that Dickens is greatest. Dickens loved the humour of eccentricity, his humour is of the broad and boisterous kind, it bubbles over with hilarity and has a ludicrous extravagance peculiar to him alone. A person who can not be amused by Dickens must be hopelessly, deficient of humour himself. Dickens’ works constantly provoke a laugh, but often they call for a tear also. No other writer ever made his readers laugh and cry as Dickens does. It is true his pathos descends often to sentimentalism, yet the real charm of Dickens in the mixture of true humour and deep pathos, which is exactly what happens in everyday life. Nearly all the novels are “ Novels with a purpose”. The purpose may be either social, as in Nicholas Nickleby and Hard Times or moral, as in Martin Chuzzlewit and the Old Curiosity Shop, or the purpose maybe a combination of both, as in Oliver Twist and in David Copperfield. In his attacks upon the abuses of his day Dickens was frequently successful. He did more than any one else to bring about reforms trough the medium of his novel, yet he never sinks the artist in the reformer. Thus Dickens was to his contemporaries not only the greatest humourist, but also the fighter of abuses and individual shortcomings and the champion of the poor and miserable. The background of the novels is formed by Dickens’ own experience. His earliest associations were with the humbler side of life in or near London and he unfolds before us a panorama of this life in early Victorian England. Lower middle class life had never, before Dickens, been explored for literary purposes to such an extent. He discovered in it an inexhaustible fund of character, humour and pathos. He wrote to please his readers and he wrote of things and people they could understand. No novelist was ever so popular in his own country and in his own time.