Early Years
In
spite of humble beginnings, little education, and the sometimes-critical
literary reviewers, Charles Dickens was loved by his public, and amassed
wealth, prestige, and a large legacy of published works. He was one of the few
writers to enjoy both popular acceptance and financial success while still
alive. The drive for this success had its roots in his childhood.
Charles
John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England on Friday, February 7, 1812. He was the
second of eight children born to John and Elizabeth Dickens. His father, John,
was the son of illiterate servants. John Dickens managed to escape a similar
fate when the family his parents worked for got him a job in a navy pay office.
John continued his upward climb by keeping his own lowly background a secret
and courting Elizabeth Barrow, the daughter of a wealthy senior clerk who
worked there. The marriage succeeded, but John's hopes for further advancement
fizzled when his father-in-law was accused of embezzlement and fled the
country. The loss of this financial opportunity did not slow the spending
habits of John and Elizabeth, who liked the upper-class lifestyle. This problem
would be their downfall as time went on.
During
Charles Dickens' early years, his family moved a great deal due to his father's
job and spending habits. He recalled later that the best time of his childhood
was their five years in Chatham, where they moved when Dickens was five, and
where life was stable and happy. Dickens loved the area, learned to read, and
was sent to school.
However
his father's financial problems required a move to smaller quarters in London
when Dickens was ten. Their four-room home was cramped, creditors called
frequently trying to collect payments, and Dickens' parents alternated between
the stress of survival and the gaiety of continuing to party. Dickens wanted to
return to school but was instead sent to work at the age of twelve to help
support the family.
For
twelve hours a day, six days a week, Charles Dickens pasted labels to bottles
of shoe polish at the rat-infested, dilapidated Warren's Blacking factory. He
was ridiculed and harassed by the older, bigger workers and shamed by the
stigma of working in such filthy, low-class surroundings. Intellectually
frustrated, resentful of his older sister (who was studying at the Royal
Academy of Music), and hurt by his parents' lack of interest in his education,
Dickens despaired.
When his father was
arrested for nonpayment of a debt, Dickens' mother and younger siblings moved
into prison with his father, leaving the twelve-year-old alone on the outside
to continue working. His older sister remained at the music academy. Lonely,
scared, and abandoned, Dickens lived in a run-down neighborhood close to the
prison so that he could visit his family. It was a firsthand experience of
poverty and prison life and a reinforcement of the considerable insecurity and
emotional abandonment that marked his childhood.
A
small inheritance a few months later allowed his family to leave prison.
Dickens was finally allowed to attend school over his mother's objections — she did not want to lose his
income. School was short-lived though: At fifteen, Dickens had to return to
work. Dickens never got over the time he spent at Warren's and his fierce sense
of betrayal and rage at his mother's callousness stayed with him for life.
Recalling that time, he said: "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall
forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back [to
Warren's Blacking]."
Education
In
the strictest sense, Dickens' formal education was limited. His mother taught
him to read when he was a young boy, and his early education was of a
self-taught nature. By the age of ten, he had devoured novels such as Daniel
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and Miguel Cervantes' Don
Quixote. At nine, he experimented with writing a play for his family and called
it Misnar, the Sultan of India.
In 1821, Dickens attended
the Giles Academy in Chatham for about one year. Later, when he was twelve, he
attended the Wellington House Academy in London. At fifteen, family problems
required him to return to work, and so his last "schooling" was
again, self-taught. He purchased a reading ticket to the British Museum at
eighteen and immersed himself in its large library. He also taught himself
shorthand.
Jobs
For
seven years after Dickens left Wellington House, he lived at home and worked at
various jobs. He spent the first two years as a law clerk. After learning
shorthand he spent four years as a legal reporter, then as a shorthand reporter
in Parliament. In 1834 he joined the staff of the Morning Chronicle as a news
reporter covering elections, Parliament, and other political events. Dickens
also spent some of his time involved in the theater, and he also began to write
for publication. His adulthood was marked by a feverish work pace and a desire
to achieve.
Love and Family
At
eighteen Dickens met Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a rich banker. She was two
years older, beautiful — he fell
totally in love. He wrote to her: "I never have loved and I never can love
any human creature breathing but yourself." Though the relationship went
well for a while, she lost interest in him after returning from finishing
school in Paris. Dickens' friend and biographer, John Forster, was at first
surprised that Dickens was so affected by this relationship, a pain that
continued even years later. But Forster realized that this was fueled by a deep
sense of social inferiority. Dickens was determined to succeed beyond
everyone's wildest dreams and show them how wrong they were about him.
Interestingly enough, he met Maria again years later. Eagerly looking forward
to his meeting with her, and expecting the desirable vision of his youth, he
was crushed when a middle-aged woman resembling his wife showed up. As his
sister-in-law happily put it, Maria "had become very fat!"
In
1834, Dickens met Catherine Hogarth, the oldest daughter of the Morning
Chronicle's editor, George Hogarth. Hogarth had favorably reviewed Dickens'
work, Sketches by Boz, and the two men had become friends. Charles and
Catherine were engaged in 1895 and married in 1836. It was a strange courtship:
While the two held each other in affection and Catherine share his interest in
a family, the courtship lacked the passion of his relationship with Beadnell.
Dickens often broke dates with Catherine to meet work deadlines and sent her
reprimanding letters if she protested.
As
time went on their differences grew more apparent. Catherine was not outgoing
or socially poised, and she avoided the public and social events her husband
attended. In addition, Catherine's younger sister, Mary, had come to live with
them shortly after their marriage. Dickens was very attached to Mary and when
she died suddenly in 1838 at the age of seventeen, he was devastated. His
enduring grief over her death incurred his wife's jealousy. Mary, adored by
Charles Dickens, would show up again and again as a character in his works.
In time, another
seventeen-year-old would steal his heart. Middle-aged, hard working, and
disillusioned with his marriage, Dickens met Ellen Ternan, an actress in one of
his plays. She was everything his wife was not: lovely, young, and slim.
Catherine, with ten pregnancies, had grown stout, and at forty-three could not
compete with the younger woman. It did not take long for the marriage to
dissolve, resulting in something of a scandal at the time. Catherine, rejected
by her husband, left the family home. The children rarely saw her because they
stayed with Dickens, and she died in 1879, nine years after he. Dickens spent
the rest of his life maintaining a secret relationship with Ternan.
Literary Writing and the Rest of Life
During
his early working years, Dickens had started writing short pieces or
"sketches." Some were stories; others, descriptions of places in
London, such as Newgate Prison or the shopping districts. One of these, "A
Dinner at Poplar Walk," was published in 1833 in the Monthly Magazine. It
was an emotional and exciting moment for the young writer even though he
received no payment or credit for that first article. The magazine requested
more and he started using the pen name, Boz. In 1836, he published a collection
of sixty of these pieces in a book called Sketches by Boz. It received critical
praise and sales were good. Monthly Magazine then asked Dickens to write a
humorous novel that they would publish in twenty installments. Thus, Dickens'
novel Pickwick Papers was born.
By
the fourth installment of Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens was a dramatic
success. People at all levels of society loved him. The acclaim only fueled his
intensity. While still working on Pickwick Papers, Dickens started a much
darker novel, Oliver Twist. It was a social criticism of the exploitation of
orphans both in institutions and on the streets. Not to be slowed, he began
Nicholas Nickleby when Oliver Twist was only half-finished. Nickleby combined
both the humor of his first novel with the criticism of his second, focusing on
the corruption of private boarding schools.
His
grief over the death of his sister-in-law, Mary, probably served as the basis
for the character, Little Nell, in his next novel, The Old Curiosity Shop. His
readers followed the story closely especially when Nell became sick — many, desperately hoping she would
not die, begged the publisher to spare her. Barnaby Rudge was Dickens' next
novel, a historical novel set in England during the French Revolution.
In
1842, Dickens and his wife traveled through America. He found himself crushed
with admirers to the point of feeling oppressed by his fame. In addition, the
attitudes and vanity of some of the Americans disturbed him, especially with
regard to slavery, and he was frustrated by the lack of copyright protection in
the States — many of his works
were being published there without any payment to him. When he returned home,
Dickens wrote American Notes. While polite, Dickens' feelings about America
were nevertheless obvious. American critics were, as you may expect, hostile.
His
next works were a series of five Christmas stories, of which "A Christmas
Carol" was the most successful. Martin Chuzzlewit, a more direct attack on
America and its attitudes, followed. Dickens also spent time creating and
editing a newspaper, the Daily News, and acting in a number of amateur theater
productions. At this same time, he had a number of flirtations with other women
and his marriage was crumbling. Concentration and sleep suffered, so much so
that his seventh novel, Dombey and Son, took a great deal of time and struggle
to finish. However, the slower pace didn't diminish the quality of Dickens
work: Philip Collins called Dombey and Son Dickens' "first mature
masterpiece."
This
period was marked by a number of painful personal experiences: the death of his
older sister, Fanny, in 1848; Catherine's nervous breakdown in 1850 after the
birth of their daughter Dora Annie; the 1851 death of Dora; and the death of
Dickens' father, John, in 1851. Yet during this period, Dickens achieved a
major turning point in his writing: David Copperfield. Lawrence Kappel, a
modern reviewer, crystallizes the achievement:
"For the first time,
he conceived a hero who could survive in the midst of the problem-filled world
of experience by using his artistic imagination, like Dickens himself. This
autobiographical novel was a celebration of the artist's ability to cope with
the world right in the center of it, as opposed to just surviving the world by
retreating to some safe place at the edge of it, as Dickens' earlier heroes had
done."
The
next several years would bring the publication of Dickens' next three novels —
Bleak House, Hard Times, and Little Dorrit — as well as the anguish and
personal scandal of his involvement with Ellen Ternan and his divorce from
Catherine. The novels were darker than anything he had previously written and
their focus was mostly social criticism: Bleak House's criticism targeted the
legal system (it may have been the first detective novel published in English),
Hard Times hit the government, and Little Dorritt aimed at the problems of
society's class structure. This period also saw Dickens become involved in more
theatrical productions, start a weekly magazine, Household Words, and give public
readings of his works.
In
1859, after a dispute with the publishers of Household Words, Dickens left and
started another magazine, All the Year Round. The first issue carried the first
installment of his next novel, A Tale of Two Cities. Like Barnaby Rudge it was
a historical novel, set in France during the riotous 1770s and 1780s. The novel
was popular with his readers, but did not receive much critical acclaim.
Struggling to improve the magazine's circulation and revenue, Dickens hit gold
and a financial rescue with his next novel: Great Expectations. In spite of a
mixed reception by reviewers, the reading public loved it — many proclaimed it to be his best
work.
Also
during this time, Dickens burned most of his letters and papers: In his
success, he did not want anyone to make his life more interesting than his
novels. By destroying his notes, he effectively took his insights regarding his
works to the grave, leaving the interpretations of his stories up to his
literary critics and readers.
After Great Expectations,
Dickens began work on his last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend. It was a
return to Dickens' darker style: social criticism was of a corrupt society,
with London's dumps and polluted river symbolizing a modern industrial
wasteland. Dickens continued to chain-smoke and overwork, maintaining a heavy
public-reading schedule as well as national and international tours. From 1865
until his death, Dickens experienced a number of health problems, including a
possible heart attack and a series of small strokes. The work he began in 1869,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was never finished — on June 8,
1870 he suffered an apparent cerebral hemorrhage, collapsing on the
floor after dinner. He died the next day.
