Charles Dickens 1812-1870

His Life: Childhood

Dickens had a brief schooling in Chatham before the navy moved the family to London. When Dickens was twelve years old, his family fell on hard times and he was put to work in a blacking warehouse, pasting labels on bottles of shoe-blacking. In London, he experienced poverty. Although this employment lasted only a short while, it was a hard time for the young boy.

His father was sent to the Marshalsea debtors' prison and, Dickens was forced to live alone in a rented room nearby, continuing to work to help support the family. He was often lonesome and hungry, but he did meet many boys who later served as models for his fictional characters.

In a short autobiography Dickens wrote, 'It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. . . . My father and mother were quite satisfied. . . . My whole nature was so penetrated with grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.'"

However, the experience gave him a determination to succeed. A biographer wrote that "it was the feeling of being thrust, uncared for, in a dark blind alley that wounded him so deeply," and "much of the darkness in Dickens comes from this time."

School

Dickens next became an office boy for a firm of solicitors, absorbing much atmosphere and background. There he developed his shorthand skills so well that he became a freelance reporter, excelling at reporting court proceedings and parliamentary debates.

When he was twenty-one

In 1834 Dickens had become friendly with a fellow journalist, George Hogarth. On the strength of his literary success, Dickens married Hogarth's daughter, Kate, in 1836. Their marriage produced ten children, but eventually ended in a separation in 1858.

When he was twenty-four

This series was probably the favorite of the Victorian audience, and was beloved in America and Russia. Actually, according to the Encyclopedia of World Biography, "The entire form of serial publication became a standard method of writing and producing fiction in the Victorian period and affected the literary methods of Dickens and other novelists. So great was Dickens' success with the procedure--summed up in the formula, 'Make them laugh; make them cry; make them wait'--that Pickwick became one of the most popular works of the time. In 1837, he published the first of twenty-four monthly installments of Oliver Twist. Fascinated with crime even as a youngster, Dickens would have his nurse read him bedtime stories of murderers and criminals, and he based many fictional characters on real-life law-breakers. He wrote Oliver to attack the "poor laws" and city slums that bred criminals and crime.

From that time all of Dickens' novels were first published in monthly installments. Readers could hardly wait for the next issue to appear--and the author had to stick to the job to have it ready in time.

His Books:

Nicholas Nickleby, a gentleman's son fallen upon hard times, must set out to make his way in the world. Along the way various older, money-grubbing villains attempt to injure him. Eventually, with the assistance of kind patrons, he and his family achieve economic security and a happy home. Throughout, comic events are interspersed with Dickens' moving indictment of society's ill treatment of children and the cruelty of the educational system.

Oliver Twist's famous cry of the heart--"Please, sir, I want some more"--has resounded with generations of readers of all ages. The author poured his own youthful experience of Victorian London's squalor into this realistic depiction of a spirited youngboy's unwilling but inevitable recruitment into a gang of thieves. Masterminded by the loathsome Fagin, the underworld crew features some of Dickens' most memorable characters, including the vicious Bill Sikes, gentle Nancy, and the juvenile pickpocket known as the Artful Dodger.

The emotional tale of Little Nell and her doting grandfather was an immediate popular success in 1840-41. Played out against the backdrop of a brutal London, they abandon their home to escape debt and become beggars. "Relentlessly pursued by a malicious moneylender and encountering ne'er-do-wells, con artists, and the persevering poor, they also find goodness and generosity, love and loyalty. Dickens' proficiency in creating richly diverse characters are evident in this tale that brims with pathos and villainy."

Set partly in the United States, this novel includes a searing satire on mid-nineteenth-century America. This is the story of two Chuzzlewits, Martin and Jonas, who have inherited the characteristic Chuzzlewit selfishness. It contrasts their diverse fates: moral redemption and worldly success for one and increasingly desperate crime for the other.

Scrooge was a miser. His money was his life. Then, one Christmas Eve, Scrooge received a trio of visitors who showed him not only the true meaning of Christmas, but the true meaning of his life as well... Probably one of the most beloved Christmas stories in history, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol has it all: heroes, villains, ghosts, time travel, long-lost love, and a happy ending. With worldwide appeal, this story continues to captivate generation after generation.

Short tale written by Charles Dickens as a Christmas book for 1845 but published in 1846. The title creature is a sort of barometer of life at the home of John Peerybingle and his much younger wife Dot. When things go well, the cricket on the hearth chirps; it is silent when there is sorrow. Tackleton, a jealous old man, poisons John's mind about Dot, but the cricket through its supernatural powers restores John's confidence and all ends happily.

This is a satirical look at the legal system in London as it consumes the minds and talents of the greedy and nearly destroys the lives of innocents--a contemporary tale indeed. Likewise, the characters run from murderous villains to virtuous girls, from a devoted lover to a "fallen woman," all of whom are affected by a legal suit in which there will, of course, be no winner.

The novel is a bitter indictment of industrialization, with its dehumanizing effects on workers and communities in mid-19th-century England. Louisa and Tom Gradgrind have been raised by their father, an educator, to know nothing but the most factual, pragmatic information. Their lives are devoid of beauty, culture, or imagination, and the two have little or no empathy for others. Louisa marries Josiah Bounderby, a vulgar banker and mill owner. Tom, unscrupulous and vacuous, robs his brother-in-law's bank. Only after these crises does their father realize that the principles by which he raised his children have corrupted their lives.

Charles Dickens's masterpiece about prison life is set in an English debtors' prison (where Dickens's own father had been imprisoned) and where Amy Dorrit, the heroine, has spent her entire life caring for her imprisoned father. The novel portrays both the physical and psychological horrors of imprisonment and the hypocrisy of a society that allows them to continue.

Best known for its opening lines, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," and for Carton's last speech, in which he says of his replacing Darnay in a prison cell, "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known." The story is set in the late 18th century against the background of the French Revolution. Dickens condemns the violence --most memorably when Madame Defarge knits beside the guillotine.

Orphaned Pipdares to dream of becoming a gentleman—and one day, under sudden and mysterious circumstances, he finds himself in possession of “great expectations.” In this tale of crime and guilt, revenge and reward, the characters include Magwitch, the fearful and fearsome convict; Estella, whose beauty is excelled only by her haughtiness; and the embittered Miss Havisham, an eccentric jilted bride.

When young Drood mysteriously disappears from his quiet cathedral town of Cloisterham, foul play seems certain. The prime suspect, John Jasper, Edwin's uncle, frequents opium dens and conceals a secret passion beneath his church choir respectability. Who did it?