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My Favourite English Writer.
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Charles, the eldest son, had been withdrawn from school and was now set to manual work in a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.
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.
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.
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.
