Рассказ про чарльза диккенса на английском

Представлено сочинение на английском языке Биография Чарльза Диккенса/ The Biography of Charles Dickens с переводом на русский язык.

The Biography of Charles Dickens Биография Чарльза Диккенса
Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world’s most memorable fictional characters and is considered to be one of the greatest novelists. Чарльз Диккенс был английским писателем и общественным критиком. Он создал некоторые из самых запоминающихся в мире вымышленных персонажей и считается одним из величайших романистов.
He was born on February 7th, 1812 in Portsmouth, England. His father was an office man, who worked hard to provide for his family. Charles had many brother and sisters. When he was 10, his family moved to London, where his father got into debtor’s prison. After that, Charles left school to work in a factory. For two years he worked in a dirty room pasting labels on bottles. Then he went to school for three more years. He had little formal education but still succeeded in life. Он родился 7 февраля 1812 года в Портсмуте, в Англии. Его отец был офисным работником, который упорно трудился, чтобы обеспечить свою семью. У Чарльза было много братьев и сестер. Когда ему было 10, его семья переехала в Лондон, где его отец попал в долговую тюрьму. После этого, Чарльз оставил школу, чтобы работать на фабрике. В течение двух лет он работал в грязной комнате, наклеивая этикетки на бутылки. Затем он снова ходил в школу в течение трех лет. В действительности образования у него было мало, но ему все удавалось в жизни.
Over his career he wrote 15 novels, 5 novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles. He also worked for 20 years as an editor in a weekly journal. Dickens’ other merits include campaigns for children’s rights, education and other social reforms. He obtained international attention and fame in 1836 with a series of publications called “Pickwick Papers”. He used to be a young and poor reporter at that time, who immediately became a famous writer. За свою карьеру он написал 15 романов, 5 повестей , сотни рассказов и научно-популярных статей. Он также работал в течение 20 лет в качестве редактора в еженедельном журнале. Среди прочих достоинств Диккенса кампании в защиту прав детей и их образования, а также другие социальные реформы. Он получил международное внимание и славу в 1836 году с серией публикаций под названием «Записки Пиквикского клуба». В то время он был молодым и бедным репортером, который сразу же стал знаменитым писателем.
Dickens published many other novels later. Among them “Oliver Twist”, “Dombey and Son”, “David Copperfield” and many others. His books are rather interesting to read. He mostly wrote about the hard life of poor people in Victorian England. Позже Диккенс опубликовал много других романов. Среди них «Оливер Твист», «Домби и сын», «Дэвид Копперфильд» и многие другие. Его книги довольно интересно читать. В основном, он писал о тяжелой жизни бедных людей в викторианской Англии.
Even though he lived more than a hundred years ago, people still read his books with pleasure. One of his most influential works ever written was “A Christmas Carol” novella. His fellow writers of that time highly praised his literary genius. Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell, Chesterton were among them. Несмотря на то, что он жил более ста лет тому назад, люди все еще с удовольствием читают его книги. Одной из его самых влиятельных работ, когда-либо написанных им, была повесть «Рождественская песнь». Его собратья по перу того времени высоко ценили его гениальность в литературе. К ним относятся Лев Толстой, Джордж Оруэлл, Честертон.
Charles Dickens died on June 9th, 1870 and he was buried in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. Чарльз Диккенс умер 9 июня 1870 году и был похоронен в Уголке поэтов в Вестминстерском аббатстве.

Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world’s best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.[1] His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.[2][3]

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens

Dickens in New York, c. 1867–1868

Born Charles John Huffam Dickens
7 February 1812
Portsmouth, England
Died 9 June 1870 (aged 58)
Higham, Kent, England
Resting place Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, England
51°29′57″N 00°07′39″W / 51.49917°N 0.12750°W
Occupation Writer
Notable works
  • The Pickwick Papers
  • Oliver Twist
  • Nicholas Nickleby
  • A Christmas Carol
  • David Copperfield
  • Bleak House
  • Little Dorrit
  • A Tale of Two Cities
  • Great Expectations
Spouse

Catherine Thomson Hogarth

(m. 1836; sep. 1858)​

Partner Ellen Ternan (1857–1870, his death)
Children
  • Charles Dickens Jr.
  • Mary Dickens
  • Kate Perugini
  • Walter Landor Dickens
  • Francis Dickens
  • Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens
  • Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens
  • Henry Fielding Dickens
  • Dora Annie Dickens
  • Edward Dickens
Signature
Charles Dickens Signature.svg

Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school at the age of 12 to work in a boot-blacking factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison. After three years he returned to school, before he began his literary career as a journalist. Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children’s rights, for education, and for other social reforms.

Dickens’s literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers, a publishing phenomenon—thanks largely to the introduction of the character Sam Weller in the fourth episode—that sparked Pickwick merchandise and spin-offs. Within a few years Dickens had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire and keen observation of character and society. His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly installments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.[4][5] Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense.[6] The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience’s reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback.[5] For example, when his wife’s chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her own disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features.[7] His plots were carefully constructed and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives.[8] Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.[9]

His 1843 novella A Christmas Carol remains especially popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities (set in London and Paris) is his best-known work of historical fiction. The most famous celebrity of his era, he undertook, in response to public demand, a series of public reading tours in the later part of his career.[10] The term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social or working conditions, or comically repulsive characters.[11][12]

Early life

Charles Dickens’s birthplace, 393 Commercial Road, Portsmouth

2 Ordnance Terrace, Chatham, Dickens’s home 1817 – May 1821[13]

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 at 1 Mile End Terrace (now 393 Commercial Road), Landport in Portsea Island (Portsmouth), Hampshire, the second of eight children of Elizabeth Dickens (née Barrow; 1789–1863) and John Dickens (1785–1851). His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office and was temporarily stationed in the district. He asked Christopher Huffam,[14] rigger to His Majesty’s Navy, gentleman, and head of an established firm, to act as godfather to Charles. Huffam is thought to be the inspiration for Paul Dombey, the owner of a shipping company in Dickens’s novel Dombey and Son (1848).[14]

In January 1815, John Dickens was called back to London and the family moved to Norfolk Street, Fitzrovia.[15] When Charles was four, they relocated to Sheerness and thence to Chatham, Kent, where he spent his formative years until the age of 11. His early life seems to have been idyllic, though he thought himself a «very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy».[16]

Charles spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, including the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding, as well as Robinson Crusoe and Gil Blas. He read and reread The Arabian Nights and the Collected Farces of Elizabeth Inchbald.[17] At age 7 he first saw Joseph Grimaldi—the father of modern clowning—perform at the Star Theatre, Rochester.[18] He later imitated Grimaldi’s clowning on several occasions, and would also edit the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi.[19][nb 1] He retained poignant memories of childhood, helped by an excellent memory of people and events, which he used in his writing.[22] His father’s brief work as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office afforded him a few years of private education, first at a dame school and then at a school run by William Giles, a dissenter, in Chatham.[23]

Illustration by Fred Bernard of Dickens at work in a shoe-blacking factory after his father had been sent to the Marshalsea, published in the 1892 edition of Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens[24]

This period came to an end in June 1822, when John Dickens was recalled to Navy Pay Office headquarters at Somerset House and the family (except for Charles, who stayed behind to finish his final term at school) moved to Camden Town in London.[25] The family had left Kent amidst rapidly mounting debts and, living beyond his means,[26] John Dickens was forced by his creditors into the Marshalsea debtors’ prison in Southwark, London in 1824. His wife and youngest children joined him there, as was the practice at the time. Charles, then 12 years old, boarded with Elizabeth Roylance, a family friend, at 112 College Place, Camden Town.[27] Mrs Roylance was «a reduced impoverished old lady, long known to our family», whom Dickens later immortalised, «with a few alterations and embellishments», as «Mrs Pipchin» in Dombey and Son. Later, he lived in a back-attic in the house of an agent for the Insolvent Court, Archibald Russell, «a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman … with a quiet old wife» and lame son, in Lant Street in Southwark.[28] They provided the inspiration for the Garlands in The Old Curiosity Shop.[29]

On Sundays – with his sister Frances, free from her studies at the Royal Academy of Music – he spent the day at the Marshalsea.[30] Dickens later used the prison as a setting in Little Dorrit. To pay for his board and to help his family, Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station, where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. The strenuous and often harsh working conditions made a lasting impression on Dickens and later influenced his fiction and essays, becoming the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor. He later wrote that he wondered «how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age».[31] As he recalled to John Forster (from Life of Charles Dickens):

The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary’s shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.[31]

When the warehouse was moved to Chandos Street in the smart, busy district of Covent Garden, the boys worked in a room in which the window gave onto the street. Small audiences gathered and watched them at work – in Dickens’s biographer Simon Callow’s estimation, the public display was «a new refinement added to his misery».[32]

The Marshalsea around 1897, after it had closed. Dickens based several of his characters on the experience of seeing his father in the debtors’ prison, most notably Amy Dorrit from Little Dorrit.

A few months after his imprisonment, John Dickens’s mother, Elizabeth Dickens, died and bequeathed him £450. On the expectation of this legacy, Dickens was released from prison. Under the Insolvent Debtors Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors and he and his family left the Marshalsea,[33] for the home of Mrs Roylance.

Charles’s mother, Elizabeth Dickens, did not immediately support his removal from the boot-blacking warehouse. This influenced Dickens’s view that a father should rule the family and a mother find her proper sphere inside the home: «I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.» His mother’s failure to request his return was a factor in his dissatisfied attitude towards women.[34]

Righteous indignation stemming from his own situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes of his works, and it was this unhappy period in his youth to which he alluded in his favourite, and most autobiographical, novel, David Copperfield:[35] «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!»[36]

Dickens was eventually sent to the Wellington House Academy in Camden Town, where he remained until March 1827, having spent about two years there. He did not consider it to be a good school: «Much of the haphazard, desultory teaching, poor discipline punctuated by the headmaster’s sadistic brutality, the seedy ushers and general run-down atmosphere, are embodied in Mr Creakle’s Establishment in David Copperfield[36]

Dickens worked at the law office of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray’s Inn, as a junior clerk from May 1827 to November 1828. He was a gifted mimic and impersonated those around him: clients, lawyers and clerks. He went to theatres obsessively: he claimed that for at least three years he went to the theatre every day. His favourite actor was Charles Mathews and Dickens learnt his «monopolylogues» (farces in which Mathews played every character) by heart.[37] Then, having learned Gurney’s system of shorthand in his spare time, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant relative, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at Doctors’ Commons and Dickens was able to share his box there to report the legal proceedings for nearly four years.[38][39] This education was to inform works such as Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son and especially Bleak House, whose vivid portrayal of the machinations and bureaucracy of the legal system did much to enlighten the general public and served as a vehicle for dissemination of Dickens’s own views regarding, particularly, the heavy burden on the poor who were forced by circumstances to «go to law».


In 1830, Dickens met his first love, Maria Beadnell, thought to have been the model for the character Dora in David Copperfield. Maria’s parents disapproved of the courtship and ended the relationship by sending her to school in Paris.[40]

Career

Journalism and early novels

Catherine Hogarth Dickens by Samuel Lawrence (1838). She met the author in 1834, and they became engaged the following year before marrying in April 1836.

In 1832, at the age of 20, Dickens was energetic and increasingly self-confident.[41] He enjoyed mimicry and popular entertainment, lacked a clear, specific sense of what he wanted to become, and yet knew he wanted fame. Drawn to the theatre – he became an early member of the Garrick Club[42] – he landed an acting audition at Covent Garden, where the manager George Bartley and the actor Charles Kemble were to see him. Dickens prepared meticulously and decided to imitate the comedian Charles Mathews, but ultimately he missed the audition because of a cold. Before another opportunity arose, he had set out on his career as a writer.[43]

In 1833, Dickens submitted his first story, «A Dinner at Poplar Walk», to the London periodical Monthly Magazine.[44] William Barrow, Dickens’s uncle on his mother’s side, offered him a job on The Mirror of Parliament and he worked in the House of Commons for the first time early in 1832. He rented rooms at Furnival’s Inn and worked as a political journalist, reporting on Parliamentary debates, and he travelled across Britain to cover election campaigns for the Morning Chronicle. His journalism, in the form of sketches in periodicals, formed his first collection of pieces, published in 1836: Sketches by Boz – Boz being a family nickname he employed as a pseudonym for some years.[45][46] Dickens apparently adopted it from the nickname ‘Moses’, which he had given to his youngest brother Augustus Dickens, after a character in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield. When pronounced by anyone with a head cold, «Moses» became «Boses» – later shortened to Boz.[46][47] Dickens’s own name was considered «queer» by a contemporary critic, who wrote in 1849: «Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations.» Dickens contributed to and edited journals throughout his literary career.[44] In January 1835, the Morning Chronicle launched an evening edition, under the editorship of the Chronicles music critic, George Hogarth. Hogarth invited him to contribute Street Sketches and Dickens became a regular visitor to his Fulham house – excited by Hogarth’s friendship with Walter Scott (whom Dickens greatly admired) and enjoying the company of Hogarth’s three daughters: Georgina, Mary and 19-year-old Catherine.[48]

The wise-cracking, warm-hearted servant Sam Weller from The Pickwick Papers—a publishing phenomenon that sparked numerous spin-offs and Pickwick merchandise—made the 24-year-old Dickens famous.[49]

Dickens made rapid progress both professionally and socially. He began a friendship with William Harrison Ainsworth, the author of the highwayman novel Rookwood (1834), whose bachelor salon in Harrow Road had become the meeting place for a set that included Daniel Maclise, Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and George Cruikshank. All these became his friends and collaborators, with the exception of Disraeli, and he met his first publisher, John Macrone, at the house.[50] The success of Sketches by Boz led to a proposal from publishers Chapman and Hall for Dickens to supply text to match Robert Seymour’s engraved illustrations in a monthly letterpress. Seymour committed suicide after the second instalment and Dickens, who wanted to write a connected series of sketches, hired «Phiz» to provide the engravings (which were reduced from four to two per instalment) for the story. The resulting story became The Pickwick Papers and, although the first few episodes were not successful, the introduction of the Cockney character Sam Weller in the fourth episode (the first to be illustrated by Phiz) marked a sharp climb in its popularity.[51] The final instalment sold 40,000 copies.[44] On the impact of the character, The Paris Review stated, «arguably the most historic bump in English publishing is the Sam Weller Bump.»[49] A publishing phenomenon, John Sutherland called The Pickwick Papers «[t]he most important single novel of the Victorian era».[52] The unprecedented success led to numerous spin-offs and merchandise ranging from Pickwick cigars, playing cards, china figurines, Sam Weller puzzles, Weller boot polish and joke books.[49]

The Sam Weller Bump testifies not merely to Dickens’s comic genius but to his acumen as an «authorpreneur», a portmanteau he inhabited long before The Economist took it up. For a writer who made his reputation crusading against the squalor of the Industrial Revolution, Dickens was a creature of capitalism; he used everything from the powerful new printing presses to the enhanced advertising revenues to the expansion of railroads to sell more books. Dickens ensured that his books were available in cheap bindings for the lower orders as well as in morocco-and-gilt for people of quality; his ideal readership included everyone from the pickpockets who read Oliver Twist to Queen Victoria, who found it «exceedingly interesting».

— How The Pickwick Papers Launched Charles Dickens’s Career, The Paris Review.[49]

On the creation of modern mass culture, Nicholas Dames in The Atlantic writes, «Literature» is not a big enough category for Pickwick. It defined its own, a new one that we have learned to call «entertainment.»[53] In November 1836, Dickens accepted the position of editor of Bentley’s Miscellany, a position he held for three years, until he fell out with the owner.[54] In 1836, as he finished the last instalments of The Pickwick Papers, he began writing the beginning instalments of Oliver Twist – writing as many as 90 pages a month – while continuing work on Bentley’s and also writing four plays, the production of which he oversaw. Oliver Twist, published in 1838, became one of Dickens’s better known stories and was the first Victorian novel with a child protagonist.[55]

On 2 April 1836, after a one-year engagement, and between episodes two and three of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1815–1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle.[56] They were married in St Luke’s Church,[57] Chelsea, London. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk in Kent, the couple returned to lodgings at Furnival’s Inn.[58] The first of their ten children, Charles, was born in January 1837 and a few months later the family set up home in Bloomsbury at 48 Doughty Street, London (on which Charles had a three-year lease at £80 a year) from 25 March 1837 until December 1839.[56][59] Dickens’s younger brother Frederick and Catherine’s 17-year-old sister Mary Hogarth moved in with them. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. Unusually for Dickens, as a consequence of his shock, he stopped working, and he and Catherine stayed at a little farm on Hampstead Heath for a fortnight. Dickens idealised Mary; the character he fashioned after her, Rose Maylie, he found he could not now kill, as he had planned, in his fiction,[60] and, according to Ackroyd, he drew on memories of her for his later descriptions of Little Nell and Florence Dombey.[61] His grief was so great that he was unable to meet the deadline for the June instalment of The Pickwick Papers and had to cancel the Oliver Twist instalment that month as well.[55] The time in Hampstead was the occasion for a growing bond between Dickens and John Forster to develop; Forster soon became his unofficial business manager and the first to read his work.[62]

Barnaby Rudge was Dickens’s first popular failure but the character of Dolly Varden, «pretty, witty, sexy, became central to numerous theatrical adaptations»[63]

His success as a novelist continued. The young Queen Victoria read both Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers, staying up until midnight to discuss them.[64] Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and, finally, his first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty, as part of the Master Humphrey’s Clock series (1840–41), were all published in monthly instalments before being made into books.[65]

In the midst of all his activity during this period, there was discontent with his publishers and John Macrone was bought off, while Richard Bentley signed over all his rights in Oliver Twist. Other signs of a certain restlessness and discontent emerged; in Broadstairs he flirted with Eleanor Picken, the young fiancée of his solicitor’s best friend and one night grabbed her and ran with her down to the sea. He declared they were both to drown there in the «sad sea waves». She finally got free, and afterwards kept her distance. In June 1841, he precipitously set out on a two-month tour of Scotland and then, in September 1841, telegraphed Forster that he had decided to go to America.[66] Master Humphrey’s Clock was shut down, though Dickens was still keen on the idea of the weekly magazine, a form he liked, an appreciation that had begun with his childhood reading of the 18th-century magazines Tatler and The Spectator.

Dickens was perturbed by the return to power of the Tories, whom he described as «people whom, politically, I despise and abhor.»[67] He had been tempted to stand for the Liberals in Reading, but decided against it due to financial straits.[67] He wrote three anti-Tory verse satires («The Fine Old English Gentleman», «The Quack Doctor’s Proclamation», and «Subjects for Painters») which were published in The Examiner.[68]

First visit to the United States

On 22 January 1842, Dickens and his wife arrived in Boston, Massachusetts, aboard the RMS Britannia during their first trip to the United States and Canada.[69] At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, joined the Dickens household, now living at Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone to care for the young family they had left behind.[70] She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser and friend until Dickens’s death in 1870.[71] Dickens modelled the character of Agnes Wickfield after Georgina and Mary.[72]

Sketch of Dickens in 1842 during his first American tour. Sketch of Dickens’s sister Fanny, bottom left

He described his impressions in a travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation. In Notes, Dickens includes a powerful condemnation of slavery which he had attacked as early as The Pickwick Papers, correlating the emancipation of the poor in England with the abolition of slavery abroad[73] citing newspaper accounts of runaway slaves disfigured by their masters. In spite of the abolitionist sentiments gleaned from his trip to America, some modern commentators have pointed out inconsistencies in Dickens’s views on racial inequality. For instance, he has been criticized for his subsequent acquiescence in Governor Eyre’s harsh crackdown during the 1860s Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and his failure to join other British progressives in condemning it.[74] From Richmond, Virginia, Dickens returned to Washington, D.C., and started a trek westward, with brief pauses in Cincinnati and Louisville, to St. Louis, Missouri. While there, he expressed a desire to see an American prairie before returning east. A group of 13 men then set out with Dickens to visit Looking Glass Prairie, a trip 30 miles into Illinois.

During his American visit, Dickens spent a month in New York City, giving lectures, raising the question of international copyright laws and the pirating of his work in America.[75][76] He persuaded a group of 25 writers, headed by Washington Irving, to sign a petition for him to take to Congress, but the press were generally hostile to this, saying that he should be grateful for his popularity and that it was mercenary to complain about his work being pirated.[77]

The popularity he gained caused a shift in his self-perception according to critic Kate Flint, who writes that he «found himself a cultural commodity, and its circulation had passed out his control», causing him to become interested in and delve into themes of public and personal personas in the next novels.[78] She writes that he assumed a role of «influential commentator», publicly and in his fiction, evident in his next few books.[78] His trip to the U.S. ended with a trip to Canada – Niagara Falls, Toronto, Kingston and Montreal – where he appeared on stage in light comedies.[79]

Dickens’s portrait by Margaret Gillies, 1843. Painted during the period when he was writing A Christmas Carol, it was in the Royal Academy of Arts’ 1844 summer exhibition. After viewing it there, Elizabeth Barrett Browning said that it showed Dickens with «the dust and mud of humanity about him, notwithstanding those eagle eyes».[80]

Soon after his return to England, Dickens began work on the first of his Christmas stories, A Christmas Carol, written in 1843, which was followed by The Chimes in 1844 and The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845. Of these, A Christmas Carol was most popular and, tapping into an old tradition, did much to promote a renewed enthusiasm for the joys of Christmas in Britain and America.[81] The seeds for the story became planted in Dickens’s mind during a trip to Manchester to witness the conditions of the manufacturing workers there. This, along with scenes he had recently witnessed at the Field Lane Ragged School, caused Dickens to resolve to «strike a sledge hammer blow» for the poor. As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He later wrote that as the tale unfolded he «wept and laughed, and wept again» as he «walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed».[82]

After living briefly in Italy (1844), Dickens travelled to Switzerland (1846), where he began work on Dombey and Son (1846–48). This and David Copperfield (1849–50) mark a significant artistic break in Dickens’s career as his novels became more serious in theme and more carefully planned than his early works.

At about this time, he was made aware of a large embezzlement at the firm where his brother, Augustus, worked (John Chapman & Co). It had been carried out by Thomas Powell, a clerk, who was on friendly terms with Dickens and who had acted as mentor to Augustus when he started work. Powell was also an author and poet and knew many of the famous writers of the day. After further fraudulent activities, Powell fled to New York and published a book called The Living Authors of England with a chapter on Charles Dickens, who was not amused by what Powell had written. One item that seemed to have annoyed him was the assertion that he had based the character of Paul Dombey (Dombey and Son) on Thomas Chapman, one of the principal partners at John Chapman & Co. Dickens immediately sent a letter to Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the New York literary magazine The Knickerbocker, saying that Powell was a forger and thief. Clark published the letter in the New-York Tribune and several other papers picked up on the story. Powell began proceedings to sue these publications and Clark was arrested. Dickens, realising that he had acted in haste, contacted John Chapman & Co to seek written confirmation of Powell’s guilt. Dickens did receive a reply confirming Powell’s embezzlement, but once the directors realised this information might have to be produced in court, they refused to make further disclosures. Owing to the difficulties of providing evidence in America to support his accusations, Dickens eventually made a private settlement with Powell out of court.[83]

Philanthropy

Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens in May 1846 about setting up a home for the redemption of fallen women of the working class. Coutts envisioned a home that would replace the punitive regimes of existing institutions with a reformative environment conducive to education and proficiency in domestic household chores. After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named Urania Cottage, in the Lime Grove area of Shepherd’s Bush, which he managed for ten years,[84] setting the house rules, reviewing the accounts and interviewing prospective residents.[85] Emigration and marriage were central to Dickens’s agenda for the women on leaving Urania Cottage, from which it is estimated that about 100 women graduated between 1847 and 1859.[86]

Religious views

As a young man, Dickens expressed a distaste for certain aspects of organised religion. In 1836, in a pamphlet titled Sunday Under Three Heads, he defended the people’s right to pleasure, opposing a plan to prohibit games on Sundays. «Look into your churches – diminished congregations and scanty attendance. People have grown sullen and obstinate, and are becoming disgusted with the faith which condemns them to such a day as this, once in every seven. They display their feeling by staying away [from church]. Turn into the streets [on a Sunday] and mark the rigid gloom that reigns over everything around.»[87][88]

Dickens honoured the figure of Jesus Christ.[89] He is regarded as a professing Christian.[90] His son, Henry Fielding Dickens, described him as someone who «possessed deep religious convictions». In the early 1840s, he had shown an interest in Unitarian Christianity and Robert Browning remarked that «Mr Dickens is an enlightened Unitarian.»[91] Professor Gary Colledge has written that he «never strayed from his attachment to popular lay Anglicanism».[92] Dickens authored a work called The Life of Our Lord (1846), a book about the life of Christ, written with the purpose of sharing his faith with his children and family.[93][94] In a scene from David Copperfield, Dickens echoed Geoffrey Chaucer’s use of Luke 23:34 from Troilus and Criseyde (Dickens held a copy in his library), with G. K. Chesterton writing, «among the great canonical English authors, Chaucer and Dickens have the most in common.»[95]

Dickens disapproved of Roman Catholicism and 19th-century evangelicalism, seeing both as extremes of Christianity and likely to limit personal expression, and was critical of what he saw as the hypocrisy of religious institutions and philosophies like spiritualism, all of which he considered deviations from the true spirit of Christianity, as shown in the book he wrote for his family in 1846.[96][97] While Dickens advocated equal rights for Catholics in England, he strongly disliked how individual civil liberties were often threatened in countries where Catholicism predominated and referred to the Catholic Church as «that curse upon the world.»[96] Dickens also rejected the Evangelical conviction that the Bible was the infallible word of God. His ideas on Biblical interpretation were similar to the Liberal Anglican Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s doctrine of «progressive revelation.»[96] Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky referred to Dickens as «that great Christian writer».[98][99]

Middle years

In December 1845, Dickens took up the editorship of the London-based Daily News, a liberal paper through which Dickens hoped to advocate, in his own words, «the Principles of Progress and Improvement, of Education and Civil and Religious Liberty and Equal Legislation.»[100] Among the other contributors Dickens chose to write for the paper were the radical economist Thomas Hodgskin and the social reformer Douglas William Jerrold, who frequently attacked the Corn Laws.[100][101] Dickens lasted only ten weeks on the job before resigning due to a combination of exhaustion and frustration with one of the paper’s co-owners.[100]

David reaches Canterbury, from David Copperfield. The character incorporates many elements of Dickens’s own life. Artwork by Frank Reynolds.

The Francophile Dickens often holidayed in France and, in a speech delivered in Paris in 1846 in French, called the French «the first people in the universe».[102] During his visit to Paris, Dickens met the French literati Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Eugène Scribe, Théophile Gautier, François-René de Chateaubriand and Eugène Sue.[102] In early 1849, Dickens started to write David Copperfield. It was published between 1849 and 1850. In Dickens’s biography, Life of Charles Dickens (1872), John Forster wrote of David Copperfield, «underneath the fiction lay something of the author’s life».[103] It was Dickens’s personal favourite among his own novels, as he wrote in the author’s preface to the 1867 edition of the novel.[104]

In late November 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he wrote Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1856).[105] It was here that he indulged in the amateur theatricals described in Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens.[106] During this period, he worked closely with the novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins. In 1856, his income from writing allowed him to buy Gads Hill Place in Higham, Kent. As a child, Dickens had walked past the house and dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 and this literary connection pleased him.[107]

During this time Dickens was also the publisher, editor and a major contributor to the journals Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1858–1870).[108] In 1855, when Dickens’s good friend and Liberal MP Austen Henry Layard formed an Administrative Reform Association to demand significant reforms of Parliament, Dickens joined and volunteered his resources in support of Layard’s cause.[109] With the exception of Lord John Russell, who was the only leading politician in whom Dickens had any faith and to whom he later dedicated A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens believed that the political aristocracy and their incompetence were the death of England.[110][109] When he and Layard were accused of fomenting class conflict, Dickens replied that the classes were already in opposition and the fault was with the aristocratic class. Dickens used his pulpit in Household Words to champion the Reform Association.[110] He also commented on foreign affairs, declaring his support for Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, helping raise funds for their campaigns and stating that «a united Italy would be of vast importance to the peace of the world, and would be a rock in Louis Napoleon’s way,» and that «I feel for Italy almost as if I were an Italian born.»[111][112][113]

Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857, Dickens joined in the widespread criticism of the East India Company for its role in the event, but reserved his fury for the rebels themselves, wishing that he was the commander-in-chief in India so that he would be able to, «do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested.»[114]

Actress Ellen Ternan, 1858. Dickens referred to Ternan as his «magic circle of one.»

In 1857, Dickens hired professional actresses for the play The Frozen Deep, written by him and his protégé, Wilkie Collins. Dickens fell in love with one of the actresses, Ellen Ternan, and this passion was to last the rest of his life.[115] Dickens was 45 and Ternan 18 when he made the decision, which went strongly against Victorian convention, to separate from his wife, Catherine, in 1858; divorce was still unthinkable for someone as famous as he was. When Catherine left, never to see her husband again, she took with her one child, leaving the other children to be raised by her sister Georgina who chose to stay at Gads Hill.[71]

During this period, whilst pondering a project to give public readings for his own profit, Dickens was approached through a charitable appeal by Great Ormond Street Hospital to help it survive its first major financial crisis. His «Drooping Buds» essay in Household Words earlier on 3 April 1852 was considered by the hospital’s founders to have been the catalyst for the hospital’s success.[116] Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked by his friend, the hospital’s founder Charles West, to preside over the appeal, and he threw himself into the task, heart and soul.[117] Dickens’s public readings secured sufficient funds for an endowment to put the hospital on a sound financial footing; one reading on 9 February 1858 alone raised £3,000.[118][119][120]

Dickens at his desk, 1858

After separating from Catherine,[121] Dickens undertook a series of hugely popular and remunerative reading tours which, together with his journalism, were to absorb most of his creative energies for the next decade, in which he was to write only two more novels.[122] His first reading tour, lasting from April 1858 to February 1859, consisted of 129 appearances in 49 towns throughout England, Scotland and Ireland.[123] Dickens’s continued fascination with the theatrical world was written into the theatre scenes in Nicholas Nickleby, but more importantly he found an outlet in public readings. In 1866, he undertook a series of public readings in England and Scotland, with more the following year in England and Ireland.[124]

Dickens was a regular patron at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub in London. He included the venue in A Tale of Two Cities.

Other works soon followed, including A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861), which were resounding successes. Set in London and Paris, A Tale of Two Cities is his best-known work of historical fiction and includes the famous opening sentence which begins with «It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.» It is regularly cited as one of the best-selling novels of all time.[125][126] Themes in Great Expectations include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil.[127]

In early September 1860, in a field behind Gads Hill, Dickens made a bonfire of most of his correspondence; only those letters on business matters were spared. Since Ellen Ternan also destroyed all of his letters to her,[128] the extent of the affair between the two remains speculative.[129] In the 1930s, Thomas Wright recounted that Ternan had unburdened herself to a Canon Benham and gave currency to rumours they had been lovers.[130] That the two had a son who died in infancy was alleged by Dickens’s daughter, Kate Perugini, whom Gladys Storey had interviewed before her death in 1929. Storey published her account in Dickens and Daughter,[131][132] but no contemporary evidence exists. On his death, Dickens settled an annuity on Ternan which made her financially independent. Claire Tomalin’s book, The Invisible Woman, argues that Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life. The book was subsequently turned into a play, Little Nell, by Simon Gray, and a 2013 film. In the same period, Dickens furthered his interest in the paranormal, becoming one of the early members of The Ghost Club.[133]

In June 1862, he was offered £10,000 for a reading tour of Australia.[134] He was enthusiastic, and even planned a travel book, The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down, but ultimately decided against the tour.[135] Two of his sons, Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, migrated to Australia, Edward becoming a member of the Parliament of New South Wales as Member for Wilcannia between 1889 and 1894.[136][137]

Later life

On 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris with Ellen Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash in Kent. The train’s first seven carriages plunged off a cast iron bridge that was under repair. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was travelling. Before rescuers arrived, Dickens tended and comforted the wounded and the dying with a flask of brandy and a hat refreshed with water, and saved some lives. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it.[138]

Dickens later used the experience of the crash as material for his short ghost story, «The Signal-Man», in which the central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail crash. He also based the story on several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash in Sussex of 1861. Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquest to avoid disclosing that he had been travelling with Ternan and her mother, which would have caused a scandal.[139] After the crash, Dickens was nervous when travelling by train and would use alternative means when available.[140] In 1868 he wrote, «I have sudden vague rushes of terror, even when riding in a hansom cab, which are perfectly unreasonable but quite insurmountable.» Dickens’s son, Henry, recalled, «I have seen him sometimes in a railway carriage when there was a slight jolt. When this happened he was almost in a state of panic and gripped the seat with both hands.»[140]

Second visit to the United States

Crowd of spectators buying tickets for a Dickens reading at Steinway Hall, New York City in 1867

While he contemplated a second visit to the United States, the outbreak of the Civil War in America in 1861 delayed his plans. On 9 November 1867, over two years after the war, Dickens set sail from Liverpool for his second American reading tour. Landing in Boston, he devoted the rest of the month to a round of dinners with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his American publisher, James T. Fields. In early December, the readings began. He performed 76 readings, netting £19,000, from December 1867 to April 1868.[141] Dickens shuttled between Boston and New York, where he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall. Although he had started to suffer from what he called the «true American catarrh», he kept to a schedule that would have challenged a much younger man, even managing to squeeze in some sleighing in Central Park.[142]

During his travels, he saw a change in the people and the circumstances of America. His final appearance was at a banquet the American Press held in his honour at Delmonico’s on 18 April, when he promised never to denounce America again. By the end of the tour Dickens could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. On 23 April he boarded the Cunard liner Russia to return to Britain,[143] barely escaping a federal tax lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.[144]

Farewell readings

Poster promoting a reading by Dickens in Nottingham dated 4 February 1869, two months before he had a mild stroke

In 1868–69, Dickens gave a series of «farewell readings» in England, Scotland and Ireland, beginning on 6 October. He managed, of a contracted 100 readings, to give 75 in the provinces, with a further 12 in London.[141] As he pressed on he was affected by giddiness and fits of paralysis. He had a stroke on 18 April 1869 in Chester.[145] He collapsed on 22 April 1869, at Preston, Lancashire; on doctor’s advice, the tour was cancelled.[146] After further provincial readings were cancelled, he began work on his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It was fashionable in the 1860s to ‘do the slums’ and, in company, Dickens visited opium dens in Shadwell, where he witnessed an elderly addict called «Laskar Sal», who formed the model for «Opium Sal» in Edwin Drood.[147]

After Dickens regained enough strength, he arranged, with medical approval, for a final series of readings to partly make up to his sponsors what they had lost due to his illness. There were 12 performances, on 11 January to 15 March 1870; the last at 8:00pm at St. James’s Hall, London. Though in grave health by then, he read A Christmas Carol and The Trial from Pickwick. On 2 May, he made his last public appearance at a Royal Academy banquet in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, paying a special tribute on the death of his friend, illustrator Daniel Maclise.[148]

Death

Samuel Luke Fildes – The Empty Chair. Fildes was illustrating Edwin Drood at the time of Dickens’s death. The engraving shows Dickens’s empty chair in his study at Gads Hill Place. It appeared in the Christmas 1870 edition of The Graphic and thousands of prints of it were sold.[149]

A 1905 transcribed copy of the death certificate of Charles Dickens

On 8 June 1870, Dickens had another stroke at his home after a full day’s work on Edwin Drood. He never regained consciousness and, the next day, he died at Gads Hill Place. Biographer Claire Tomalin has suggested Dickens was actually in Peckham when he had had the stroke and his mistress Ellen Ternan and her maids had him taken back to Gads Hill so that the public would not know the truth about their relationship.[150] Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral «in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner»,[151] he was laid to rest in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads:

To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England’s most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. 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.[152]

A letter from Dickens to the Clerk of the Privy Council in March indicates he’d been offered and had accepted a baronetcy, which was not gazetted before his death.[153] His last words were «On the ground», in response to his sister-in-law Georgina’s request that he lie down.[154][nb 2] On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens was buried in the Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley delivered a memorial elegy, lauding «the genial and loving humorist whom we now mourn», for showing by his own example «that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be innocent». Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the novelist’s grave, Stanley assured those present that «the spot would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue.»[155]

In his will, drafted more than a year before his death, Dickens left the care of his £80,000 estate (£8,143,500 in 2021)[156] to his long-time colleague John Forster and his «best and truest friend» Georgina Hogarth who, along with Dickens’s two sons, also received a tax-free sum of £8,000 (equivalent to £814,000 in 2021).[156] Although Dickens and his wife had been separated for several years at the time of his death, he provided her with an annual income of £600 (£61,100 in 2021)[156] and made her similar allowances in his will. He also bequeathed £19 19s (£2,000 in 2021)[156] to each servant in his employment at the time of his death.[157]

Literary style

Dickens’s approach to the novel is influenced by various things, including the picaresque novel tradition,[158] melodrama[159] and the novel of sensibility.[160] According to Ackroyd, other than these, perhaps the most important literary influence on him was derived from the fables of The Arabian Nights.[161] Satire and irony are central to the picaresque novel.[162] Comedy is also an aspect of the British picaresque novel tradition of Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett. Fielding’s Tom Jones was a major influence on the 19th-century novelist including Dickens, who read it in his youth[163] and named a son Henry Fielding Dickens after him.[164][165] Influenced by Gothic fiction—a literary genre that began with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole—Dickens incorporated Gothic imagery, settings and plot devices in his works.[166] Victorian gothic moved from castles and abbeys into contemporary urban environments: in particular London, such as Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Bleak House. The jilted bride Miss Havisham from Great Expectations is one of Dickens’ best-known gothic creations; living in a ruined mansion, her bridal gown effectively doubles as her funeral shroud.[167]

No other writer had such a profound influence on Dickens as William Shakespeare.
On Dickens’s veneration of Shakespeare, Alfred Harbage wrote «No one is better qualified to recognise literary genius than a literary genius»— A Kind of Power: The Shakespeare-Dickens Analogy (1975).[168] Regarding Shakespeare as «the great master» whose plays «were an unspeakable source of delight», Dickens’s lifelong affinity with the playwright included seeing theatrical productions of his plays in London and putting on amateur dramatics with friends in his early years.[168] In 1838 Dickens travelled to Stratford-upon-Avon and visited the house in which Shakespeare was born, leaving his autograph in the visitors’ book. Dickens would draw on this experience in his next work, Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), expressing the strength of feeling experienced by visitors to Shakespeare’s birthplace: the character Mrs Wititterly states, «I don’t know how it is, but after you’ve seen the place and written your name in the little book, somehow or other you seem to be inspired; it kindles up quite a fire within one.»[169]

Dickens’s writing style is marked by a profuse linguistic creativity.[170] Satire, flourishing in his gift for caricature, is his forte. An early reviewer compared him to Hogarth for his keen practical sense of the ludicrous side of life, though his acclaimed mastery of varieties of class idiom may in fact mirror the conventions of contemporary popular theatre.[171] Dickens worked intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that would reverberate with associations for his readers and assist the development of motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an «allegorical impetus» to the novels’ meanings.[170] To cite one of numerous examples, the name Mr Murdstone in David Copperfield conjures up twin allusions to murder and stony coldness.[172] His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery – he calls one character the «Noble Refrigerator» – are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens’s acclaimed flights of fancy.

The author worked closely with his illustrators, supplying them with a summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them. He briefed the illustrator on plans for each month’s instalment so that work could begin before he wrote them. Marcus Stone, illustrator of Our Mutual Friend, recalled that the author was always «ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and … life-history of the creations of his fancy».[173] Dickens employs Cockney English in many of his works, denoting working-class Londoners. Cockney grammar appears in terms such as ain’t, and consonants in words are frequently omitted, as in ‘ere (here) and wot (what).[174] An example of this usage is in Oliver Twist. The Artful Dodger uses cockney slang which is juxtaposed with Oliver’s ‘proper’ English, when the Dodger repeats Oliver saying «seven» with «sivin».[175]

Characters

The Old Curiosity Shop in Holborn, London, which inspired The Old Curiosity Shop. Many of Dickens’s works do not just use London as a backdrop; they are also about the city and its character.

Dickens’s biographer Claire Tomalin regards him as the greatest creator of character in English fiction after Shakespeare.[176]
Dickensian characters are amongst the most memorable in English literature, especially so because of their typically whimsical names. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley and Bob Cratchit (A Christmas Carol); Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin and Bill Sikes (Oliver Twist); Pip, Miss Havisham and Abel Magwitch (Great Expectations); Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay and Madame Defarge (A Tale of Two Cities); David Copperfield, Uriah Heep and Mr Micawber (David Copperfield); Daniel Quilp and Nell Trent (The Old Curiosity Shop), Samuel Pickwick and Sam Weller (The Pickwick Papers); and Wackford Squeers (Nicholas Nickleby) are so well known as to be part and parcel of popular culture, and in some cases have passed into ordinary language: a scrooge, for example, is a miser or someone who dislikes Christmas festivity.[177]

His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. «Gamp» became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs Gamp, and «Pickwickian», «Pecksniffian» and «Gradgrind» all entered dictionaries due to Dickens’s original portraits of such characters who were, respectively, quixotic, hypocritical and vapidly factual. The character that made Dickens famous, Sam Weller became known for his Wellerisms—one-liners that turned proverbs on their heads.[49] Many were drawn from real life: Mrs Nickleby is based on his mother, although she didn’t recognise herself in the portrait,[178] just as Mr Micawber is constructed from aspects of his father’s ‘rhetorical exuberance’;[179] Harold Skimpole in Bleak House is based on James Henry Leigh Hunt; his wife’s dwarfish chiropodist recognised herself in Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield.[180][181] Perhaps Dickens’s impressions on his meeting with Hans Christian Andersen informed the delineation of Uriah Heep (a term synonymous with sycophant).[182]

Virginia Woolf maintained that «we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens» as he produces «characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks».[183] T. S. Eliot wrote that Dickens «excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings».[184] One «character» vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself.[185] Dickens described London as a magic lantern, inspiring the places and people in many of his novels.[186] From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital – Dickens’s London – are described over the course of his body of work.[186] Walking the streets (particularly around London) formed an integral part of his writing life, stoking his creativity. Dickens was known to regularly walk at least a dozen miles (19 km) per day, and once wrote, «If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.»[187]

Autobiographical elements

An original illustration by Phiz from the novel David Copperfield, which is widely regarded as Dickens’s most autobiographical work

Authors frequently draw their portraits of characters from people they have known in real life. David Copperfield is regarded by many as a veiled autobiography of Dickens. The scenes of interminable court cases and legal arguments in Bleak House reflect Dickens’s experiences as a law clerk and court reporter, and in particular his direct experience of the law’s procedural delay during 1844 when he sued publishers in Chancery for breach of copyright.[188] Dickens’s father was sent to prison for debt and this became a common theme in many of his books, with the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit resulting from Dickens’s own experiences of the institution.[189] Lucy Stroughill, a childhood sweetheart, may have affected several of Dickens’s portraits of girls such as Little Em’ly in David Copperfield and Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities.[190][nb 3]

Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew the details of his early life until six years after his death, when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated. Though Skimpole brutally sends up Leigh Hunt, some critics have detected in his portrait features of Dickens’s own character, which he sought to exorcise by self-parody.[191]

Episodic writing

Advertisement for Great Expectations, serialised in the weekly literary magazine All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861. The advert contains the plot device «to be continued».

A pioneer of the serial publication of narrative fiction, Dickens wrote most of his major novels in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as Master Humphrey’s Clock and Household Words, later reprinted in book form.[4][5] These instalments made the stories affordable and accessible, with the audience more evenly distributed across income levels than previous.[192] His instalment format inspired a narrative that he would explore and develop throughout his career, and the regular cliffhangers made each new episode widely anticipated.[6][192] When The Old Curiosity Shop was being serialised, American fans waited at the docks in New York harbour, shouting out to the crew of an incoming British ship, «Is little Nell dead?»[193] Dickens’s talent was to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end.

Another important impact of Dickens’s episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers and friends. His friend Forster had a significant hand in reviewing his drafts, an influence that went beyond matters of punctuation. He toned down melodramatic and sensationalist exaggerations, cut long passages (such as the episode of Quilp’s drowning in The Old Curiosity Shop), and made suggestions about plot and character. It was he who suggested that Charley Bates should be redeemed in Oliver Twist. Dickens had not thought of killing Little Nell and it was Forster who advised him to entertain this possibility as necessary to his conception of the heroine.[194]

At the helm in popularising cliffhangers and serial publications in Victorian literature,[195] Dickens’s influence can also be seen in television soap operas and film series, with The Guardian stating «the DNA of Dickens’s busy, episodic storytelling, delivered in instalments and rife with cliffhangers and diversions, is traceable in everything.»[196] His serialisation of his novels also drew comments from other writers. In Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Wrecker, Captain Nares, investigating an abandoned ship, remarked: «See! They were writing up the log,» said Nares, pointing to the ink-bottle. «Caught napping, as usual. I wonder if there ever was a captain yet that lost a ship with his log-book up to date? He generally has about a month to fill up on a clean break, like Charles Dickens and his serial novels.»[197]

Nurse Sarah Gamp (left) from Martin Chuzzlewit became a stereotype of untrained and incompetent nurses of the early Victorian era, before the reforms of Florence Nightingale.

Dickens’s novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. Simon Callow states, «From the moment he started to write, he spoke for the people, and the people loved him for it.»[198] He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. In a New York address, he expressed his belief that «Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen».[199] Dickens’s second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime: it challenged middle class polemics about criminals, making impossible any pretence to ignorance about what poverty entailed.[200][201]

At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged within society. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues – such as sanitation and the workhouse – but his fiction probably demonstrated its greatest prowess in changing public opinion in regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and oppression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of this condition is in Hard Times (1854), Dickens’s only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In this work, he uses vitriol and satire to illustrate how this marginalised social stratum was termed «Hands» by the factory owners; that is, not really «people» but rather only appendages of the machines they operated. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address such problems of class oppression. For example, the prison scenes in The Pickwick Papers are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. Karl Marx asserted that Dickens «issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together».[202] George Bernard Shaw even remarked that Great Expectations was more seditious than Marx’s Das Kapital.[202] The exceptional popularity of Dickens’s novels, even those with socially oppositional themes (Bleak House, 1853; Little Dorrit, 1857; Our Mutual Friend, 1865), not only underscored his ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also ensured that the Victorian public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored.

It has been argued that his technique of flooding his narratives with an ‘unruly superfluity of material’ that, in the gradual dénouement, yields up an unsuspected order, influenced the organisation of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.[203]

Literary techniques

Dickens chalet in Rochester, Kent where he was writing the last chapters of Edwin Drood the day before he died

Dickens is often described as using idealised characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and the ugly social truths he reveals. The story of Nell Trent in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was received as extraordinarily moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde. «One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell», he said in a famous remark, «without dissolving into tears … of laughter.»[204][205] G. K. Chesterton stated, «It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell, that I object to», arguing that the maudlin effect of his description of her life owed much to the gregarious nature of Dickens’s grief, his «despotic» use of people’s feelings to move them to tears in works like this.[206]

The question as to whether Dickens belongs to the tradition of the sentimental novel is debatable. Valerie Purton, in her book Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition, sees him continuing aspects of this tradition, and argues that his «sentimental scenes and characters [are] as crucial to the overall power of the novels as his darker or comic figures and scenes», and that «Dombey and Son is [ … ] Dickens’s greatest triumph in the sentimentalist tradition».[207] The Encyclopædia Britannica online comments that, despite «patches of emotional excess», such as the reported death of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843), «Dickens cannot really be termed a sentimental novelist».[208]

In Oliver Twist Dickens provides readers with an idealised portrait of a boy so inherently and unrealistically good that his values are never subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a gang of young pickpockets. While later novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit), this idealism serves only to highlight Dickens’s goal of poignant social commentary. Dickens’s fiction, reflecting what he believed to be true of his own life, makes frequent use of coincidence, either for comic effect or to emphasise the idea of providence.[209] For example, Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper-class family that rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group. Such coincidences are a staple of 18th-century picaresque novels, such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, which Dickens enjoyed reading as a youth.[210]

Reputation

Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time,[211] and remains one of the best-known and most-read of English authors. His works have never gone out of print,[212] and have been adapted continually for the screen since the invention of cinema,[213] with at least 200 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens’s works documented.[214] Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime – early productions included The Haunted Man which was performed in the West End’s Adelphi Theatre in 1848 – and, as early as 1901, the British silent film Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost was made by Walter R. Booth.[215] Contemporaries such as publisher Edward Lloyd cashed in on Dickens’s popularity with cheap imitations of his novels, resulting in his own popular ‘penny dreadfuls’.[216]

From the beginning of his career in the 1830s, Dickens’s achievements in English literature were compared to those of Shakespeare.[168] Dickens created some of the world’s best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest British novelist of the Victorian era.[1] His literary reputation, however began to decline with the publication of Bleak House in 1852–53. Philip Collins calls Bleak House ‘a crucial item in the history of Dickens’s reputation. Reviewers and literary figures during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, saw a «drear decline» in Dickens, from a writer of «bright sunny comedy … to dark and serious social» commentary.[217] The Spectator called Bleak House «a heavy book to read through at once … dull and wearisome as a serial»; Richard Simpson, in The Rambler, characterised Hard Times as «this dreary framework»; Fraser’s Magazine thought Little Dorrit «decidedly the worst of his novels».[218] All the same, despite these «increasing reservations amongst reviewers and the chattering classes, ‘the public never deserted its favourite'». Dickens’s popular reputation remained unchanged, sales continued to rise, and Household Words and later All the Year Round were highly successful.[218]

«Charles Dickens as he appears when reading.» Wood engraving from Harper’s Weekly, 7 December 1867. Author David Lodge called Dickens the «first writer to be an object of unrelenting public interest and adulation».[219]

As his career progressed, Dickens’s fame and the demand for his public readings were unparalleled. In 1868 The Times wrote, «Amid all the variety of ‘readings’, those of Mr Charles Dickens stand alone.»[10] A Dickens biographer, Edgar Johnson, wrote in the 1950s: «It was [always] more than a reading; it was an extraordinary exhibition of acting that seized upon its auditors with a mesmeric possession.»[10] Juliet John backed the claim for Dickens «to be called the first self-made global media star of the age of mass culture.»[219] Comparing his reception at public readings to those of a contemporary pop star, The Guardian states, «People sometimes fainted at his shows. His performances even saw the rise of that modern phenomenon, the ‘speculator’ or ticket tout (scalpers) – the ones in New York City escaped detection by borrowing respectable-looking hats from the waiters in nearby restaurants.»[220]

«Dickens’s vocal impersonations of his own characters gave this truth a theatrical form: the public reading tour. No other Victorian could match him for celebrity, earnings, and sheer vocal artistry. The Victorians craved the author’s multiple voices: between 1853 and his death in 1870, Dickens performed about 470 times.»

—Peter Garratt in The Guardian on Dickens’s fame and the demand for his public readings[10]

Among fellow writers, there was a range of opinions on Dickens. Poet laureate, William Wordsworth (1770–1850), thought him a «very talkative, vulgar young person», adding he had not read a line of his work, while novelist George Meredith (1828–1909), found Dickens «intellectually lacking».[221] In 1888 Leslie Stephen commented in the Dictionary of National Biography that «if literary fame could be safely measured by popularity with the half-educated, Dickens must claim the highest position among English novelists».[222] Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography famously declared Thackeray, not Dickens, to be the greatest novelist of the age. However, both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were admirers. Dostoyevsky commented: «We understand Dickens in Russia, I am convinced, almost as well as the English, perhaps even with all the nuances. It may well be that we love him no less than his compatriots do. And yet how original is Dickens, and how very English!»[223] Tolstoy referred to David Copperfield as his favourite book, and he later adopted the novel as «a model for his own autobiographical reflections».[224] French writer Jules Verne called Dickens his favourite writer, writing his novels «stand alone, dwarfing all others by their amazing power and felicity of expression».[225] Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was inspired by Dickens’s novels in several of his paintings like Vincent’s Chair and in an 1889 letter to his sister stated that reading Dickens, especially A Christmas Carol, was one of the things that was keeping him from committing suicide.[226] Oscar Wilde generally disparaged his depiction of character, while admiring his gift for caricature.[227] Henry James denied him a premier position, calling him «the greatest of superficial novelists»: Dickens failed to endow his characters with psychological depth, and the novels, «loose baggy monsters»,[228] betrayed a «cavalier organisation».[229] Joseph Conrad described his own childhood in bleak Dickensian terms, noting he had «an intense and unreasoning affection» for Bleak House dating back to his boyhood. The novel influenced his own gloomy portrait of London in The Secret Agent (1907).[224] Virginia Woolf had a love-hate relationship with Dickens, finding his novels «mesmerizing» while reproving him for his sentimentalism and a commonplace style.[230]

Around 1940–41, the attitude of the literary critics began to warm towards Dickens – led by George Orwell in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (March 1940), Edmund Wilson in The Wound and the Bow (1941) and Humphry House in Dickens and his World.[231] However, even in 1948, F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition, asserted that «the adult mind doesn’t as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness»; Dickens was indeed a great genius, «but the genius was that of a great entertainer»,[232] though he later changed his opinion with Dickens the Novelist (1970, with Q. D. (Queenie) Leavis): «Our purpose», they wrote, «is to enforce as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers».[233] In 1944, Soviet film director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein wrote an essay on Dickens’s influence on cinema, such as cross-cutting – where two stories run alongside each other, as seen in novels such as Oliver Twist.[234]

In the 1950s, «a substantial reassessment and re-editing of the works began, and critics found his finest artistry and greatest depth to be in the later novels: Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations – and (less unanimously) in Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend«.[235] Dickens was a favourite author of Roald Dahl; the best-selling children’s author would include three of Dickens’s novels among those read by the title character in his 1988 novel Matilda.[236] An avid reader of Dickens, in 2005, Paul McCartney named Nicholas Nickleby his favourite novel. On Dickens he states, «I like the world that he takes me to. I like his words; I like the language», adding, «A lot of my stuff – it’s kind of Dickensian.»[237] Screenwriter Jonathan Nolan’s screenplay for The Dark Knight Rises (2012) was inspired by A Tale of Two Cities, with Nolan calling the depiction of Paris in the novel «one of the most harrowing portraits of a relatable, recognisable civilisation that completely folded to pieces».[238] On 7 February 2012, the 200th anniversary of Dickens’s birth, Philip Womack wrote in The Telegraph: «Today there is no escaping Charles Dickens. Not that there has ever been much chance of that before. He has a deep, peculiar hold upon us».[239]

Legacy

Museums and festivals celebrating Dickens’s life and works exist in many places with which Dickens was associated. These include the Charles Dickens Museum in London, the historic home where he wrote Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby; and the Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth, the house in which he was born. The original manuscripts of many of his novels, as well as printers’ proofs, first editions, and illustrations from the collection of Dickens’s friend John Forster are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum.[240] Dickens’s will stipulated that no memorial be erected in his honour; nonetheless, a life-size bronze statue of Dickens entitled Dickens and Little Nell, cast in 1890 by Francis Edwin Elwell, stands in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Another life-size statue of Dickens is located at Centennial Park in Sydney, Australia.[241] In 1960 a bas-relief sculpture of Dickens, notably featuring characters from his books, was commissioned from sculptor Estcourt J Clack to adorn the office building built on the site of his former home at 1 Devonshire Terrace, London.[242][243] In 2014, a life-size statue was unveiled near his birthplace in Portsmouth on the 202nd anniversary of his birth; this was supported by his great-great-grandsons, Ian and Gerald Dickens.[244][245]

A Christmas Carol significantly influenced the modern celebration of Christmas in many countries

A Christmas Carol is most probably his best-known story, with frequent new adaptations. It is also the most-filmed of Dickens’s stories, with many versions dating from the early years of cinema.[246] According to the historian Ronald Hutton, the current state of the observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by A Christmas Carol. Dickens catalysed the emerging Christmas as a family-centred festival of generosity, in contrast to the dwindling community-based and church-centred observations, as new middle-class expectations arose.[247] Its archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) entered into Western cultural consciousness. «Merry Christmas», a prominent phrase from the tale, was popularised following the appearance of the story.[248] The term Scrooge became a synonym for miser, and his exclamation «Bah! Humbug!'», a dismissal of the festive spirit, likewise gained currency as an idiom.[249] The Victorian era novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called the book «a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness».[246]

Dickens was commemorated on the Series E £10 note issued by the Bank of England that circulated between 1992 and 2003. His portrait appeared on the reverse of the note accompanied by a scene from The Pickwick Papers. The Charles Dickens School is a high school in Broadstairs, Kent. A theme park, Dickens World, standing in part on the site of the former naval dockyard where Dickens’s father once worked in the Navy Pay Office, opened in Chatham in 2007. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens in 2012, the Museum of London held the UK’s first major exhibition on the author in 40 years.[250] In 2002, Dickens was number 41 in the BBC’s poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.[251] American literary critic Harold Bloom placed Dickens among the greatest Western writers of all time.[252] In the 2003 UK survey The Big Read carried out by the BBC, five of Dickens’s books were named in the Top 100.[253]

Actors who have portrayed Dickens on screen include Anthony Hopkins, Derek Jacobi, Simon Callow, Dan Stevens and Ralph Fiennes, the latter playing the author in The Invisible Woman (2013) which depicts Dickens’s secret love affair with Ellen Ternan which lasted for thirteen years until his death in 1870.[254]

Dickens and his publications have appeared on a number of postage stamps in countries including: the United Kingdom (1970, 1993, 2011 and 2012 issued by the Royal Mail—their 2012 collection marked the bicentenary of Dickens’ birth),[255] the Soviet Union (1962), Antigua, Barbuda, Botswana, Cameroon, Dubai, Fujairah, St Lucia and Turks and Caicos Islands (1970), St Vincent (1987), Nevis (2007), Alderney, Gibraltar, Jersey and Pitcairn Islands (2012), Austria (2013), and Mozambique (2014).[256] In 1976, a crater on the planet Mercury was named in his honour.[257]

In November 2018 it was reported that a previously lost portrait of a 31-year-old Dickens, by Margaret Gillies, had been found in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Gillies was an early supporter of women’s suffrage and had painted the portrait in late 1843 when Dickens, aged 31, wrote A Christmas Carol. It was exhibited, to acclaim, at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1844.[80] The Charles Dickens Museum is reported to have paid £180,000 for the portrait.[258]

Works

Novels

Dickens published well over a dozen major novels and novellas, a large number of short stories, including a number of Christmas-themed stories, a handful of plays, and several non-fiction books. Dickens’s novels were initially serialised in weekly and monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats.

  • The Pickwick Papers (The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club; monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837)[259]
  • Oliver Twist (The Adventures of Oliver Twist; monthly serial in Bentley’s Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839)
  • Nicholas Nickleby (The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby; monthly serial, April 1838 to October 1839)
  • The Old Curiosity Shop (weekly serial in Master Humphrey’s Clock, April 1840 to November 1841)
  • Barnaby Rudge (Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty; weekly serial in Master Humphrey’s Clock, February to November 1841)
  • A Christmas Carol (A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost-story of Christmas; 1843)
  • Martin Chuzzlewit (The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit; monthly serial, January 1843 to July 1844)
  • The Chimes (The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In; 1844)
  • The Cricket on the Hearth (The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home; 1845)
  • The Battle of Life (The Battle of Life: A Love Story; 1846)
  • Dombey and Son (Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation; monthly serial, October 1846 to April 1848)
  • The Haunted Man (The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain: A Fancy for Christmas-time; 1848)
  • David Copperfield (The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery [Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account]; monthly serial, May 1849 to November 1850)
  • Bleak House (monthly serial, March 1852 to September 1853)
  • Hard Times (Hard Times: For These Times; weekly serial in Household Words, 1 April 1854, to 12 August 1854)
  • Little Dorrit (monthly serial, December 1855 to June 1857)
  • A Tale of Two Cities (weekly serial in All the Year Round, 30 April 1859, to 26 November 1859)
  • Great Expectations (weekly serial in All the Year Round, 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861)
  • Our Mutual Friend (monthly serial, May 1864 to November 1865)
  • The Signal-Man (1866), first published as part of the Mugby Junction collection in the 1866 Christmas edition of All the Year Round.
  • The Mystery of Edwin Drood (monthly serial, April 1870 to September 1870), left unfinished due to Dickens’s death

See also

  • List of Dickensian characters
  • Racism in the work of Charles Dickens
  • Charles Dickens bibliography

Notes

  1. ^ John Forster quotes an unpublished letter in which Dickens responds to the accusation that he must not have seen Grimaldi in person: «Now, Sir, although I was brought up from remote country parts in the dark ages of 1819 and 1820 to behold the splendour of Christmas pantomimes and the humour of Joe, in whose honour I am informed I clapped my hands with great precocity, and although I even saw him act in the remote times of 1823 … I am willing … to concede that I had not arrived at man’s estate when Grimaldi left the stage».[19] When Dickens arrived in America for the first time in 1842, he stayed at the Tremont House, America’s «pioneer first-class hotel». Dickens «bounded into the Tremont’s foyer shouting out ‘Here we are!’, Grimaldi’s famous catch-phrase and as such entirely appropriate for a great and cherished entertainer making his entrance upon a new stage.»[20] Later, Dickens was known to imitate Grimaldi’s clowning on several occasions.[21]
  2. ^ A contemporary obituary in The Times, alleged that Dickens’s last words were: «Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of Art.» Reprinted from The Times, London, August 1870 in Bidwell 1870, p. 223.
  3. ^ Slater also detects Ellen Ternan in the portrayal of Lucie Manette.

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Further reading

  • «Dickens, Charles» . Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
  • Bowen, John (2003). Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (2 ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-926140-6. Archived from the original on 19 November 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2016.
  • Bradbury, Nicola, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (St. Martin’s Press, 1990) ISBN 978-0312056582
  • Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert, «Becoming Dickens ‘The Invention of a Novelist'», London: Harvard University Press, 2011
  • Gold, David L (2009). González, Félix Rodríquez; Buades, Antonio Lillo (eds.). Studies in Etymology and Etiology: With Emphasis on Germanic, Jewish, Romance and Slavic Languages. Universidad de Alicante. ISBN 978-84-7908-517-9. Archived from the original on 19 November 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2016.
  • Hart, Christopher (20 May 2007). «What, the Dickens World?». The Sunday Times. UK. Archived from the original on 5 July 2008. Retrieved 21 April 2012.
  • Heller, Deborah (1990). «The Outcast as Villain and Victim: Jews in Dickens Oliver Twist and Our Mutual Friend«. In Cohen, Derek; Heller, Deborah (eds.). Jewish Presences in English Literature. McGill-Queen’s Press. pp. 40–60. ISBN 978-0-7735-0781-4. Archived from the original on 26 September 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
  • Jarvie, Paul A (2005). Ready to Trample on All Human Law: Finance Capitalism in the Fiction of Charles Dickens. Studies in Major Literary Authors. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-97524-7.
  • Johnson, Edgar, Charles Dickens: his tragedy and triumph, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952. In two volumes.
  • Joshi, Prithi (2011). «Race». In Ledger, Sally; Furneaux, Holly (eds.). Dickens in Context. Cambridge University Press. pp. 292–300. ISBN 978-0-521-88700-7. Archived from the original on 19 November 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2016.
  • Kaplan, Fred (1988). Dickens: A Biography. William Morrow & Company. ISBN 978-0-688-04341-4.
  • Levine, Gary Martin (2003). The merchant of modernism: the economic Jew in Anglo-American Literature, 1864–1939. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-94109-9. Archived from the original on 23 September 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
  • Mackenzie, Robery Shelton (1870). Life of Charles Dickens. by R. Shelton Mackenzie. With Personal Recollections and Anecdotes; – Letters by ‘Boz’, Never Before Published; – And … Prose and Verse. With Portrait and Autograph. Philadelphia: T B Peterson & Brothers. ISBN 978-1-4255-5680-8. Retrieved 10 June 2012.
  • Manning, Mick & Granström, Brita, Charles Dickens: Scenes From An Extraordinary Life, Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 2011.
  • Mendelsohn, Ezra (1996). Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts. Studies in Contemporary Jewry. Vol. 12. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-511203-0. Archived from the original on 23 September 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
  • Meckier, Jerome (2002). Dickens’s Great Expectations: Misnar’s Pavilion Versus Cinderella. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-813-12228-1.
  • Moore, Grace (2002). «Reappraising Dickens’s ‘Noble Savage’«. The Dickensian. 98 (458): 236–243.
  • Nayder, Lillian (2002). Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship. Cornell University Press. p. 96. ISBN 978-0-8014-3925-4.
  • Dickens, Charles (1978). «Introduction». In Patten, Robert L. (ed.). The Pickwick Papers. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-415-22233-4. Archived from the original on 30 October 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
  • Pointer, Michael (1996). Charles Dickens on the screen: the film, television, and video adaptations. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-2960-2. Archived from the original on 26 September 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
  • Pope-Hennessy, Una (2007). Charles Dickens. Hennessy Press. ISBN 978-1-4067-5783-5.
  • Slater, Michael (2011) [2004]. «Dickens, Charles John Huffam». Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/7599. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  • Waller, John O. (July 1960). «Charles Dickens and the American Civil War». Studies in Philology. 57 (3): 535–548. JSTOR 4173318.
  • Waller, Philip J (2006). Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain, 1870–1918. Oxford University Press. p. 194. ISBN 978-0-19-820677-4.

External links

Works

  • Charles Dickens’s works on Bookwise
  • Works by Charles Dickens in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
  • Works by Charles Dickens at Project Gutenberg
  • Works by Charles Dickens at Faded Page (Canada)
  • Works by or about Charles Dickens at Internet Archive
  • Works by Charles Dickens at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)  
  • Online books, and library resources in your library and in other libraries by Charles Dickens
  • Charles Dickens at the British Library

Organisations and portals

  • «Archival material relating to Charles Dickens». UK National Archives.
  • Portraits of Charles Dickens at the National Portrait Gallery, London
  • Charles Dickens on the Archives Hub
  • Archival material at Leeds University Library
  • The Dickens Fellowship, an international society dedicated to the study of Dickens and his Writings
  • Correspondence of Charles Dickens, with related papers, ca. 1834–1955
  • Finding aid to Charles Dickens papers at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Museums

  • Dickens Museum Situated in a former Dickens House, 48 Doughty Street, London, WC1
  • Dickens Birthplace Museum Archived 9 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine Old Commercial Road, Portsmouth
  • Victoria and Albert Museum The V&A’s collections relating to Dickens

Other

  • Dickens on In Our Time at the BBC
  • Charles Dickens’s Traveling Kit From the John Davis Batchelder Collection at the Library of Congress
  • Charles Dickens’s Walking Stick From the John Davis Batchelder Collection at the Library of Congress
  • Charles Dickens Collection: First editions of Charles Dickens’s works included in the Leonard Kebler gift (dispersed in the Division’s collection). From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress
Media offices
Preceded by

New position

Editor of the Daily News
1846
Succeeded by

John Forster

Charles Dickens was a very popular and talented English novelist of the Victorian Era. He was born in 1812 in a poor English family. Charles had many brothers and sisters but he preferred reading to playing with children. His father had many books so young Dickens learned to read very early and spent most of his time reading them.

When Charles was 10 years old, his family moved to London where his father got into debt. Soon his father was put into prison that’s why Charles had to start working. He worked at a small factory in London, pasting labels on bottles. The boy had to work in dreadful conditions for 2 years.

Then Dickens managed to go to school for some time, however he didn’t learn much there. He liked studying at home by his own or with the help of his father. Later Charles worked as a clerk in a lawyer’s office and at the age of 25 he wrote his first sketch which was soon published by a magazine. Then the magazine published nine other sketches all of which had a great success. The sketches became Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.

Since then Charles Dickens devoted himself entirely to literature. He wrote such famous novels as Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield and Great Expectations. All of his books are interesting and humourous even if they often describe the hard life of poor people.

Charles Dickens died in 1870. He was one of the greatest English novelists whose books are still read all over the world.

Перевод:

Чарльз Диккенс был известным и талантливым английским романистом Викторианской Эпохи. Он родился в 1812 году в бедной английской семье. У Чарльза было много братьев и сестер, но он предпочитал чтение играм с детьми. У его отца было много книг, поэтому юный Диккенс рано научился читать и проводил большую часть своего времени за книгами.

Когда Чарльзу было 10 лет, его семья переехала в Лондон, где его отец вскоре влез в долги и был посажен в тюрьму. Поэтому Чарльзу пришлось работать. Он работал на маленькой фабрике в Лондоне, где приклеивал этикетки на бутылки. Мальчик был вынужден работать в ужасных условиях на протяжении двух лет.

Затем Диккенсу удалось попасть в школу на некоторое время, однако многому он там не выучился. Ему нравилось учиться дома, самостоятельно или с помощью отца. Позднее Чарльз стал работать служащим в адвокатской конторе, а в 25 лет написал свой первый отрывок, вскоре опубликованный одним из журналов. Затем журнал выпустил и 9 других отрывков, которые имели большой успех. Эти заметки стали позже называться «Заметками Пиквикского клуба».

С тех пор Чарльз Диккенс всецело посвятил себя литературе. Он написал такие известные романы, как «Оливер Твист», «Домби и его сын», «Дэвид Копперфильд» и «Большие Надежды». Все его книги интересны и комичны, хотя часто в них описывается тяжелая жизнь бедных людей.

Чарльз Диккенс умер в 1870 году. Он является одним из величайших английских писателей, чьи книги по сей день читаются по всему миру.


Полезные выражения и слова:

Novelist – романист

to get into debt – влезать в долги

to put into prison – посадить в тюрьму

to paste labels – приклеивать этикетки

dreadful – ужасный

clerk – секретарь, конторский служащий

sketch – отрывок, набросок

to devote oneself to – посвятить себя чему-либо

The Biography of Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens, an English classical writer, lived in the 19th century, the era of the Queen Victoria (1819-1901). He is loved by many people all over the world for his unforgettable stories full of kindness and sympathy for the poor. His contribution to the English literature is great. The biography of Charles Dickens is presented here.

Get to know more about Charles Dickens and his books his most famous books.

Charles Dickens (1812 — 1870)

“People of England knew he was their sight”

The Contents:

  1. The short biography of Charles Dickens (in English)
  2. The film about the life of Charles Dickens (in English)
  3. The best books by Charles Dickens
  4. The film about the life of Charles Dickens (in Russian)

* * *

The Short Biography of Charles Dickens (in English)

Charles (John Huffam) Dickens was born in Portsmouth in England on the7th of  February in 1812, in the family of a poor clerk John Dickens. He was the second child. Altogether there were 8 children in the family and six of them survived till adulthood.

The family was not always poor. On the contrary, they used to be well-to-do but couldn’t manage the money properly. Their carelessness led to debts. Soon after the birth of Charles the family left for London (1822). Against all expectations John Dickens couldn’t find any work there and was finally taken to prison for debts. So, Charles was forced to leave school. He was nine at that time.  Charles was sent to work in a factory to help his family.  Those years full of loneliness and despair were never forgotten, he described that sad period of his life in the novel «David Copperfield».

His father came out of prison soon but mother made Charles continue working in the factory — for which he never forgave her. Fortunately, he was able to continue his education some time later. After that (in 1827) he started working as a clerk. Being bored with this monotonous work, he left it and began his career as a journalist in 1831. Since then writing became his passion. He worked for the newspaper by day and wrote his own stories by night.

His first book was a series of sketches (short stories) from London`s life which he published under the pseudonym ‘Boz’ (1835). The book «The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club» was a success.

Catherine Hogarth. The biography of Charles DickensThe same year Charles met Catherine Hogarth (the daughter of the editor). They fell in love and soon got married (1836). The next few years of passionate activity resulted in much writing and many children. His books became more and more popular.

In 1842 he with his family travelled to America and then wrote “American Notes” (1842) where he described American bourgeois society, false American democracy and the corruption of American press.

His travels to Italy inspired him to write his unfinished last novel  «The Mystery of Edwin Drood» (1870).

In his novels «Oliver Twist”, “Nicholas Nickeleby”, «David Copperfield» Charles Dickens described the hard life of homeless children at school and workhouses.

To find inspiration for his writing, Dickens was said to have visited such unusual places like prisons and asylums for insane people.

Theatre was one of Dickens`s passions. Since his childhood he loved reading stories to the family and their guests. He had a special talent for performing. His own stories read by him impressed the audience greatly. He could make people laugh, he could make people cry. Once he performed before Queen Victoria (1851).

In the year of 1958 he broke up with his wife and his family of ten children. His inexhaustible energy and passionate life led him to a stroke in 1870. Charles Dickens is buried at Westminster Abbey.

* * *

The Film about the Life of Charles Dickens (in English)

The Text of the Film (for subscribers)
Закрытый контент сайта, доступен по подписке в БОКОВОМ МЕНЮ.

The most Famous Books By Charles Dickens

Books of Charles Dickens

  1. “Oliver Twist” (1838)
  2. “Nicholas Nickeleby”(1839)
  3.  «David Copperfield» (1850)
  4. “The Bleak House” (1853)
  5. “Hard Times” (1854)
  6. «A Tale of Two Cities» (1859)
  7.   Great Expectations (1861, read online)
  8. «Our Mutual Friend» (1865)
  9. «Little Dorrit» (1857) and some others.

He wrote 15 novels in all.

Чарльз Диккенс. Биография (фильм на русском языке)

Charles Dickens: biography

The works of the English writer, the comic characters’ creator Charles Dickens are considered to be the classics of the world’s literature. The bright social critic’s art pertains to the genre of realism, but magic and sentimental features are also traced in his books.

The writer Charles Dickens

The writer Charles Dickens

Dickens’s parents could not provide their 8 children with careless life. Terrible poverty and endless debts that the young writer encountered were later portrayed in his works.

On February 7, 1812, in Lendport, the second child was born into the family of John and Elizabeth Dickens. At this period, the father worked in the Royal Navy (naval station) as a civil servant. Three years later, John was redirected to the capital and then the city Chatham where Charles received his school education.

Charles Dickens in his childhood

Charles Dickens in his childhood

In 1824, the novelist’s father got in debt distress, and money was insufficient. According to the British law of that time, creditors would send debtors to the special prison – this was where John Dickens was put. Each weekend, his wife and children were also kept there as debt slaves.

Due to these life circumstances, the future writer had to start working early. The polish production factory paid scanty money – 6 shillings per week, but finally, the poor Dickens’s family got lucky.

Young Charles Dickens

Young Charles Dickens

John inherited his distant relative’s property which gave the opportunity to pay his debt. He received the admiralty pension and worked as a local newspaper reporter.

After his father was set free, Charles continued to work at the factory and studied. In 1827, he finished the Wellington Academy; later on, he was hired as a junior clerk (13 shillings per week) in a law firm. The young man worked there for a year. As he learned shorthand, he chose the job of a free reporter.

In 1830, the young writer’s career improved: he was offered a position in “Morning Chronical.”

Literature

The beginning reporter attracted the public attention. The audience highly evaluated his notes which inspired Dickens to write more. Literature became Charles’s meaning of life.

In 1836, his first descriptive and moral works entitled “Sketches by Boz” were published. Its content turned out to be relevant for the reporter’s social position and the majority of London citizens.

The psychological portraits of the lower middle-class members were printed in newspapers and brought their author glory and acknowledgment.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian writer, called Dickens the master of writing capable of reflecting the modern reality. The novelists’ debut was the book “The Pickwick Papers” (1837). In this work, the genre sketches describing the characteristic features of English people and their amiable disposition were collected. Optimism and easiness of reading Charles’s texts attracted more and more readers.

Best books

The further short stories, novellas, and novels by Charles Dickens were successful. With short time intervals, the masterpieces of the world’s literature appeared. Here are some of them:

  • “Oliver Twist” (1838). In this book, the writer acted as a humanist demonstrating the power of kindness and honesty that contradicts all life ordeals. The main character of the novel is an orphan boy who meets various people, virtuous and criminal, but eventually follows his own good principles. After this book was published, Dickens was involved in many scandals and proceedings with London houses managers who used children’s labor.

The illustration to Charles Dickens’s novel “Oliver Twist”

The illustration to Charles Dickens’s novel “Oliver Twist”
  • “The Old Curiosity Shop” (1840-1841). The novel is among the most popular works of the writer. The story of little Nell, the book’s character, is relevant even today for those who would like to enhance their ability to see the world. The storyline is marked with the eternal fight between good and evil, and the former always wins. The material is presented with humor which is easy to perceive.
  • “Christmas Books” (1843). It is a fascinating story that inspired the director Robert Zemeckis to create the children’s video – the tale based on the English classic’s work that amazes the audience with animation, 3-D format, and vivid episodes. The movie makes every person reflect on their life. In this Christmas stories, Dickens unmasks the modern society’s flaws related to people’s attitude toward the poor.
  • “David Copperfield (1849-1850). In this work, there is less humor. The book can be called the autobiography of the English society where the citizens’ spirit opposing capitalism is registered, and ethics and family values are praised. Many critics and reputable literary figures considered this novel to be Dickens’s greatest work.
  • “Bleak House” (1853). The book is the ninth novel by Charles. The classic’s artistic talent had already become ripe. According to the writer’s biography, all his characters have much in common with him. In this book, the characteristics typical of the early works are found: injustice, lack of rights, complicated social relationships, and the characters’ strength to resist all problems.

Charles Dickens in the zenith of his fame

Charles Dickens in the zenith of his fame
  • “A Tale of Two Cities” (1859). The historical novel was written by Dickens in the period he had emotional love drama. Simultaneously, the writer began to think about a revolution. All these aspects are wonderfully intertwined so that readers perceive the images of interesting religious, dramatic, and forgiveness moments.
  • “Great Expectations” (1860). The book has been adapted to screen and theater in many countries which means the work it popular and successful. Harshly and sarcastically, the author described the gentlemen’s life in contrast to the generous existence of ordinary workers.

Personal life

Charles Dickens’s first love was the daughter of the bank administrator Maria Beadnell. At that moment (1830), the young man was an ordinary reporter which the rich family did not appreciate. The spoiled reputation of Charles’s father (the former debt prisoner) reinforced the negative attitude to the potential fiancé. Maria went to Paris to study and, as she returned, she was cold and strange.

Charles Dickens and his wife

Charles Dickens and his wife

In 1836, the novelist married the daughter of his colleague. The young woman’s name was Catherine Thomson Hogarth. She made a faithful wife who gave birth to 10 children. However, the couple often quarreled. The family became a burden and a source of worries and constant tormenting for the writer.

Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan

Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan

In 1857, Dickens fell in love again – it was the young 18-year-old actress Ellen Ternan. The inspired novelist rented the apartment where they could see each other. This love affair lasted until Charles’s death. The movie “The Invisible Woman” created in 2013 is about the beautiful relationship between the art persons. It was Ellen Ternan who later became the main Dickens’s legatee.

Death

Because Dickens combined his stormy personal life and intensive writing, his health condition was getting mediocre. The writer did not pay attention to diseases and continued his hard work.

After the journey through the American cities (the literary tour), Dickens had even more health problems. In 1869, his legs and arms were numb for some periods. On June 8, 1870, Charles had a stroke. Next morning, the great classic passed away.

The monument to Charles Dickens

The monument to Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens, the greatest writer, is buried in Westminster Abbey. After his death, his popularity was growing, and people turned him into the idol of the English literature.

Today, Dickens’s famous quotes and books reach his readers’ souls and make them ponder about the life elements of surprise.

Interesting facts

  • Dickens was a very superstitious person. He believed Friday was his lucky day, often went into trance, and had déjà vu.
  • Having written 50 lines of each of his novel, the writer would sip hot water several times.
  • To his wife Catherine, he was strict and cruel; he pointed out the woman’s “true mission” was to give birth to children and do not disagree with her husband. In the course of time, Dickens began to despise his wife.
  • Visiting the Parisian morgue was one of the writer’s favorite entertainment.
  • The novelist did not recognize the tradition of erecting monuments; during his life, he forbade to set up monuments in his honor.

Quotes

“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.”

“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.”

“No one is useless in this world <…> who lightens the burdens of another.”

“…lies is lies. However they come, they didn’t ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, work round to the same.”

Bibliography

  • “The Pickwick Papers”
  • “Oliver Twist”
  • “Nicholas Nickleby”
  • “The Old Curiosity Shop”
  • “Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty”
  • “Christmas Books”
  • “Martin Chuzzlewit”
  • “Dombey and Son”
  • “David Copperfield”
  • “Bleak House”
  • “Hard Times”
  • “Little Dorrit”
  • “A Tale of Two Cities”
  • “Great Expectations”
  • “Our Mutual Friend”
  • “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”

Photo

Charles Dickens was a British author who penned beloved classics such as ‘Hard Times,’ ‘A Christmas Carol,’ ‘David Copperfield’ and ‘Great Expectations.’

Who Was Charles Dickens?

Charles Dickens was a British novelist, journalist, editor, illustrator and social commentator who wrote such beloved classic novels as Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations

Dickens is remembered as one of the most important and influential writers of the 19th century. Among his accomplishments, he has been lauded for providing a stark portrait of the Victorian-era underclass, helping to bring about social change.

Early life and Education

Dickens was born Charles John Huffam Dickens on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, on the southern coast of England.

The famed British author was the second of eight children. His father, John Dickens, was a naval clerk who dreamed of striking it rich. Charles’ mother, Elizabeth Barrow, aspired to be a teacher and school director.

Despite his parents’ best efforts, the family remained poor. Nevertheless, they were happy in the early days. In 1816, they moved to Chatham, Kent, where young Dickens and his siblings were free to roam the countryside and explore the old castle at Rochester.

In 1822, the Dickens family moved to Camden Town, a poor neighborhood in London. By then the family’s financial situation had grown dire, as John Dickens had a dangerous habit of living beyond the family’s means. Eventually, John was sent to prison for debt in 1824, when Charles was just 12 years old.

Following his father’s imprisonment, Dickens was forced to leave school to work at a boot-blacking factory alongside the River Thames. At the run-down, rodent-ridden factory, Dickens earned six shillings a week labeling pots of “blacking,” a substance used to clean fireplaces. It was the best he could do to help support his family.

Looking back on the experience, Dickens saw it as the moment he said goodbye to his youthful innocence, stating that he wondered “how [he] could be so easily cast away at such a young age.”

He felt abandoned and betrayed by the adults who were supposed to take care of him. These sentiments would later become a recurring theme in his writing.

Much to his relief, Dickens was permitted to go back to school when his father received a family inheritance and used it to pay off his debts.

But when Dickens was 15, his education was pulled out from under him once again. In 1827, he had to drop out of school and work as an office boy to contribute to his family’s income. As it turned out, the job became a launching point for his writing career.

Journalist, Editor and Illustrator

Within a year of being hired, Dickens began freelance reporting at the law courts of London. Just a few years later, he was reporting for two major London newspapers.

In 1833, he began submitting sketches to various magazines and newspapers under the pseudonym “Boz.” In 1836, his clippings were published in his first book, Sketches by Boz.

In the same year, Dickens started publishing The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. His series, originally written as captions for artist Robert Seymour’s humorous sports-themed illustrations, took the form of monthly serial installments.

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was wildly popular with readers. In fact, Dickens’ captions were even more popular than the illustrations they were meant to accompany.

He later edited magazines including Household Words and All the Year Round, the latter of which he founded.

Children

Dickens married Catherine Hogarth soon after his first book, Sketches by Boz, was published. The couple had a brood of 10 children.

During the 1850s, Dickens suffered two devastating losses: the deaths of his daughter and father. He also separated from his wife in 1858. Dickens slandered Catherine publicly, and struck up an intimate relationship with a young actress named Ellen «Nelly» Ternan.

Sources differ on whether the two started seeing each other before or after Dickens’ marital separation; it is also believed that he went to great lengths to erase any documentation alluding to Ternan’s presence in his life.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY’S CHARLES DICKENS FACT CARD

Charles Dickens Fact Card

Throughout his career, Dickens published a total of 15 novels. His most well-known works include:

‘Oliver Twist’ (1837-1838)

Oliver Twist, Dickens first novel, follows the life of an orphan living in the streets. The book was inspired by how Dickens felt as an impoverished child forced to get by on his wits and earn his own keep. 

As publisher of a magazine called Bentley’s Miscellany, Dickens began publishing Oliver Twist in installments between February 1837 and April 1838, with the full book edition published in November 1838. 

Dickens continued showcasing Oliver Twist in the magazines he later edited, including Household Words and All the Year Round. The novel was extremely well-received in both England and America. Dedicated readers of Oliver Twist eagerly anticipated the next monthly installment.

‘A Christmas Carol’ (1843)

On December 19, 1843, Dickens published A Christmas Carol. The book features the timeless protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge, a curmudgeonly old miser, who, with the help of ghosts, finds the Christmas spirit. 

Dickens penned the book in just six weeks, beginning in October and finishing just in time for the holiday celebrations. The novel was intended as a social criticism, to bring attention to the hardships faced by England’s poorer classes. 

The book was a roaring success, selling more than 6,000 copies upon publication. Readers in England and America were touched by the book’s empathetic emotional depth; one American entrepreneur reportedly gave his employees an extra day’s holiday after reading it. Despite literary criticism, the book remains one of Dickens’ most well-known and beloved works.

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‘Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son’ (1846 to 1848)

From October 1846 to April 1848, Dickens published, in monthly installments, Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son. The novel, which was published in book form in 1848, centers on the theme of how business tactics affect a family’s personal finances. 

Taking a dark view of England, it is considered pivotal to Dickens’ body of work in that it set the tone for his other novels.

‘David Copperfield’ (1849 to 1850)

David Copperfield was the first work of its kind: No one had ever written a novel that simply followed a character through his everyday life. From May 1849 to November 1850, Dickens published the book in monthly installations, with the full novel form published in November 1850. 

In writing it, Dickens tapped into his own personal experiences, from his difficult childhood to his work as a journalist. Although David Copperfield is not considered Dickens’ best work, it was his personal favorite. It also helped define the public’s expectations of a Dickensian novel.

‘Bleak House’ (1852 to 1853)

Following the death of his father and daughter and separation from his wife, Dickens’ novels began to express a darkened worldview. 

In Bleak House, published in installments from 1852 to 1853, he deals with the hypocrisy of British society. It was considered his most complex novel to date.

‘Hard Times’ (1854)

Hard Times takes place in an industrial town at the peak of economic expansion. Published in 1854, the book focuses on the shortcomings of employers as well as those who seek change.

‘A Tale of Two Cities’ (1859)

Coming out of his “dark novel” period, in 1859 Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities, a historical novel that takes place during the French Revolution in Paris and London. He published it in a periodical he founded, All the Year Round

The story focuses on themes of the need for sacrifice, the struggle between the evils inherent in oppression and revolution, and the possibility of resurrection and rebirth.

‘Great Expectations’ (1861)

Great Expectations, published in serial form between December 1860 to August 1861 and in novel form in October 1861, is widely considered Dickens’ greatest literary accomplishment. 

The story, Dickens’ second to be narrated in the first person, focuses on the lifelong journey of moral development for the novel’s protagonist, an orphan named Pip. With extreme imagery and colorful characters, the well-received novel’s themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and good versus evil.

Other Novels

After the publication of Oliver Twist, Dickens struggled to match the level of its success. From 1838 to 1841, he published The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge

Another novel from Dickens’ darker period is Little Dorrit (1857), a fictional study of how human values come in conflict with the world’s brutality. Dickens’ novel Our Mutual Friend, published in serial form between 1864 to 1865 before being published as a book in 1865, analyzes the psychological impact of wealth on London society.

Travels to the United States and Italy

In 1842, Dickens and his wife, Catherine, embarked on a five-month lecture tour of the United States. Upon their return, Dickens penned American Notes for General Circulation, a sarcastic travelogue criticizing American culture and materialism.

Around this time he also wrote The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, a story about a man’s struggle to survive on the ruthless American frontier.

During his first U.S. tour, in 1842, Dickens spoke of his opposition to slavery and expressed his support for additional reform. His lectures, which began in Virginia and ended in Missouri, were so widely attended that ticket scalpers gathered outside his events. Biographer J.B. Priestley wrote that during the tour, Dickens enjoyed «the greatest welcome that probably any visitor to America has ever had.”

“They flock around me as if I were an idol,” bragged Dickens, a known show-off. Although he enjoyed the attention at first, he eventually resented the invasion of privacy. He was also annoyed by what he viewed as Americans’ gregariousness and crude habits, as he later expressed in American Notes.

After his criticism of the American people during his first tour, Dickens launched a second U.S. tour, from 1867 to 1868, hoping to set things right with the public. 

This time, he made a charismatic speech promising to praise the United States in reprints of American Notes for General Circulation and The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. His 75 readings netted an estimated $95,000, which, in the Victorian era, amounted to approximately $1.5 million in current U.S. dollars.

Back at home, Dickens had become so famous that people recognized him all over London as he strolled around the city, collecting the observations that would serve as inspiration for his future work.

Dickens also spent significant time in Italy, resulting in his 1846 travelogue Pictures from Italy.

Death

After suffering a stroke, Dickens died at age 58 on June 9, 1870, at Gad’s Hill Place, his country home in Kent, England. 

Five years earlier, Dickens had been in a train accident and never fully recovered. Despite his fragile condition, he continued to tour until shortly before his death.

Dickens was buried in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey, with thousands of mourners gathering at the beloved author’s gravesite. 

Scottish satirical writer Thomas Carlyle described Dickens’ passing as “an event worldwide, a unique of talents suddenly extinct.” At the time of his death, his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was unfinished.

Movies

Many of Dickens’ major works have been adapted for movies and stage plays, with some, like A Christmas Carol, repackaged in various forms over the years.

Hollywood introduced another twist to the author’s celebrated holiday work with the November 2017 release of The Man Who Invented Christmas, starring Dan Stevens as Dickens and Christopher Plummer as his famed fictional character of Ebenezer Scrooge.

Watch «Charles Dickens: A Tale of Ambition and Genius» on HISTORY Vault

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Charles Dickens (February 7, 1812–June 9, 1870) was a popular English novelist of the Victorian era, and to this day he remains a giant in British literature. Dickens wrote numerous books that are now considered classics, including «David Copperfield,» «Oliver Twist,» «A Tale of Two Cities,» and «Great Expectations.» Much of his work was inspired by the difficulties he faced in childhood as well as social and economic problems in Victorian Britain.

Fast Facts: Charles Dickens

  • Known For: Dickens was the popular author of «Oliver Twist,» «A Christmas Carol,» and other classics.
  • Born: February 7, 1812 in Portsea, England
  • Parents: Elizabeth and John Dickens
  • Died: June 9, 1870 in Higham, England
  • Published Works: Oliver Twist (1839), A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1850), Hard Times (1854), Great Expectations (1861)
  • Spouse: Catherine Hogarth (m. 1836–1870)
  • Children: 10

Early Life

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsea, England. His father had a job working as a pay clerk for the British Navy, and the Dickens family, by the standards of the day, should have enjoyed a comfortable life. But his father’s spending habits got them into constant financial difficulties. When Charles was 12, his father was sent to debtors’ prison, and Charles was forced to take a job in a factory that made shoe polish known as blacking.

Life in the blacking factory for the bright 12-year-old was an ordeal. He felt humiliated and ashamed, and the year or so he spent sticking labels on jars would be a profound influence on his life. When his father managed to get out of debtors’ prison, Charles was able to resume his sporadic schooling. However, he was forced to take a job as an office boy at the age of 15.

By his late teens, he had learned stenography and landed a job as a reporter in the London courts. By the early 1830s, he was reporting for two London newspapers.

Early Career

Dickens aspired to break away from newspapers and become an independent writer, and he began writing sketches of life in London. In 1833 he began submitting them to a magazine, The Monthly. He would later recall how he submitted his first manuscript, which he said was «dropped stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street.»

When the sketch he’d written, titled «A Dinner at Poplar Walk,» appeared in print, Dickens was overjoyed. The sketch appeared with no byline, but soon he began publishing items under the pen name «Boz.»

The witty and insightful articles Dickens wrote became popular, and he was eventually given the chance to collect them in a book. «Sketches by Boz» first appeared in early 1836, when Dickens had just turned 24. Buoyed by the success of his first book, he married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a newspaper editor. He settled into a new life as a family man and an author.

Rise to Fame

«Sketches by Boz» was so popular that the publisher commissioned a sequel, which appeared in 1837. Dickens was also approached to write the text to accompany a set of illustrations, and that project turned into his first novel, «The Pickwick Papers,» which was published in installments from 1836 to 1837. This book was followed by «Oliver Twist,» which appeared in 1839.

Dickens became amazingly productive. «Nicholas Nickleby» was written in 1839, and «The Old Curiosity Shop» in 1841. In addition to these novels, Dickens was turning out a steady stream of articles for magazines. His work was incredibly popular. Dickens was able to create remarkable characters, and his writing often combined comic touches with tragic elements. His empathy for working people and for those caught in unfortunate circumstances made readers feel a bond with him.

As his novels appeared in serial form, the reading public was often gripped with anticipation. The popularity of Dickens spread to America, and there were stories told about how Americans would greet British ships at the docks in New York to find out what had happened next in Dickens’ latest novel.

Visit to America

Capitalizing on his international fame, Dickens visited the United States in 1842 when he was 30 years old. The American public was eager to greet him, and he was treated to banquets and celebrations during his travels.

In New England, Dickens visited the factories of Lowell, Massachusetts, and in New York City he was taken to the see the Five Points, the notorious and dangerous slum on the Lower East Side. There was talk of him visiting the South, but as he was horrified by the idea of enslavement he never went south of Virginia.

Upon returning to England, Dickens wrote an account of his American travels which offended many Americans.

‘A Christmas Carol’

In 1842, Dickens wrote another novel, «Barnaby Rudge.» The following year, while writing the novel «Martin Chuzzlewit,» Dickens visited the industrial city of Manchester, England. He addressed a gathering of workers, and later he took a long walk and began to think about writing a Christmas book that would be a protest against the profound economic inequality he saw in Victorian England. Dickens published «A Christmas Carol» in December 1843, and it became one of his most enduring works.

Dickens traveled around Europe during the mid-1840s. After returning to England, he published five new novels: «Dombey and Son,» «David Copperfield,» «Bleak House,» «Hard Times,» and «Little Dorrit.»

By the late 1850s, Dickens was spending more time giving public readings. His income was enormous, but so were his expenses, and he often feared he would be plunged back into the sort of poverty he had known as a child.

Later Life

Engraved illustration of Charlies Dickens at his desk.

Epics/Getty Images

Charles Dickens, in middle age, appeared to be on top of the world. He was able to travel as he wished, and he spent summers in Italy. In the late 1850s, he purchased a mansion, Gad’s Hill, which he had first seen and admired as a child.

Despite his worldly success, though, Dickens was beset by problems. He and his wife had a large family of 10 children, but the marriage was often troubled. In 1858, a personal crisis turned into a public scandal when Dickens left his wife and apparently began a secretive affair with actress Ellen «Nelly» Ternan, who was only 19 years old. Rumors about his private life spread. Against the advice of friends, Dickens wrote a letter defending himself, which was printed in newspapers in New York and London.

For the last 10 years of his life, Dickens was often estranged from his children, and his relationships with old friends suffered.

Though he hadn’t enjoyed his tour of America in 1842, Dickens returned in late 1867. He was again welcomed warmly, and large crowds flocked to his public appearances. He toured the East Coast of the United States for five months.

He returned to England exhausted, yet continued to embark on more reading tours. Though his health was failing, the tours were lucrative, and he pushed himself to keep appearing onstage.

Death

Dickens planned a new novel for publication in serial form. «The Mystery of Edwin Drood» began appearing in April 1870. On June 8, 1870, Dickens spent the afternoon working on the novel before suffering a stroke at dinner. He died the next day.

The funeral for Dickens was modest, and praised, according to a New York Times article, as being in keeping with the «democratic spirit of the age.» Dickens was accorded a high honor, however, as he was buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, near other literary figures such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, and Dr. Samuel Johnson.

Legacy

The importance of Charles Dickens in English literature remains enormous. His books have never gone out of print, and they are widely read to this day. As the works lend themselves to dramatic interpretation, numerous plays, television programs, and feature films based on them continue to appear.

Sources

  • Kaplan, Fred. «Dickens: a Biography.» Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
  • Tomalin, Claire. «Charles Dickens: a Life.» Penguin Press, 2012.

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The famous English writer Charles Dickens lived more than one hundred years ago. Many of the stories he created were about how hard life could be for children. 

Some of Dickens’ stories tell about children being treated terribly in schools, at work or home. At his school, his teacher beat him with a cane because little Charles laughed too loudly. Dickens was barely a teenager when he had to leave school and take a job away from home. His father had spent too much money and couldn’t give it back. He used many of his own experiences when he wrote his novel, «David Copperfield». 

When Dickens’ stories were first published, many people were angry. Some were ashamed. Such stories as «Oliver Twist» made them think seriously. They understood that children should be treated kindly and have fun as well as study hard. They shouldn’t be made to leave home and go to work when they are too young. 

One of Dickens’ best-known novella is called «A Christmas Carol». It tells about a very rich man named Scrooge, who hated Christmas. He didn’t like much of anything except making money. But Scrooge understood that his life is better when he helps others and spends time enjoying their company. 

People still like to read Dickens’ books, not just to learn what life was like in the 19th century but for the incredible stories that they tell. Some are funny, like his «Pickwick Papers». Some are family stories, such as «David Copperfield» and «Great Expectations». Some of his books are historical, like «A Tale of Two  Cities».

Перевод

Знаменитый английский писатель Чарльз Диккенс жил более ста лет назад. Многие из созданных им историй были о том, какой тяжелой может быть жизнь для детей.

Некоторые из историй Диккенса рассказывают о том, что с детьми ужасно обращались в школах, на работе или дома. В его школе учитель бил его тростью, потому что маленький Чарльз смеялся слишком громко. Диккенс был всего лишь подростком, когда ему пришлось покинуть школу и устроиться на работу вдали от дома. Его отец потратил слишком много денег и не мог их вернуть. Он использовал свой собственный опыт, когда писал свой роман «Дэвид Копперфильд».

Когда рассказы Диккенса были впервые опубликованы, многие люди злились. Некоторым было стыдно. Такие истории, как «Оливер Твист», заставили их серьезно задуматься. Они поняли, что к детям нужно относиться с добротой, необходимо позволить им веселиться и учиться. Их нельзя заставлять покидать дом и ходить на работу, когда они еще слишком малы.

Одна из самых известных новелл Диккенса называется «Рождественская песнь в прозе». В ней рассказывается об очень богатом человеке по имени Скрудж, который ненавидел Рождество. Ему ничего не нравилось, кроме как зарабатывать деньги. Но Скрудж понял, что его жизнь лучше, когда он помогает другим, и проводит время, наслаждаясь их компанией.

Людям по-прежнему нравится читать книги Диккенса не только для того, чтобы узнать, какой была жизнь в 19 веке, но и для невероятных историй, которые они рассказывают. Некоторые из них забавные, например, его «Посмертные записки Пиквикского клуба». Некоторые из них — семейные истории, такие как «Дэвид Копперфильд» и «Большие надежды». Некоторые из его книг являются историческими, например, «Повесть о двух городах».

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