Charles Dickens, the son of John and Elizabeth Dickens, was born in
Landport on 7th February 1812. John Dickens worked as a clerk at the
Navy pay office in Portsmouth. He later
found work in Chatham and Charles, the second of seven children, went
to the local school.
John Dickens found it difficult to provide for his growing family
on his meager income. In 1822 the family moved to Camden Town in London.
John Dickens' debts had become so severe that all the household goods
were sold. Still unable to satisfy his creditors, John Dickens was
arrested and sent to Marshalsea Prison.
Charles, now aged twelve, found work at Warren's Blacking Factory,
where he was paid six shillings a week wrapping shoe-black bottles.
Six months after being sent to Marshalsea, one of John Dickens's relatives
died. He was left enough money in the will to pay off his debts and
to leave prison.
Some of the inheritance was used to educated Charles at a nearby private
school, Wellington House Academy. Charles was only a moderate student
and at the age of fifteen he left school and found work as an office
boy in a firm of solicitors. Charles disliked the work but he did
enjoy walking the streets in the evening observing the people of London.
Charles Dickens decided he wanted to become a reporter. He purchased
a copy of Gurney's Brachgraphy
and taught himself shorthand. In 1828, aged sixteen, Dickens found
work as a court reporter. Later he joined the Mirror
of Parliament, a newspaper that reported the daily proceedings
of Parliament. Dickens considered most politicians to be "pompous"
who seemed to spend most of the time speaking "sentences with
no meaning in them". However, Dickens was impressed with some
of the MPs who genuinely appeared to be interested in making Britain
a better place to live.
Dickens became interested in the subject of social reform and started
contributing articles to the radical newspaper, the True Sun.
Unlike most radical newspapers such as the Poor
Man's Guardian and The Gauntlet,
the True Sun did pay the 4d. stamp
duty.
Despite having to charge the heavy tax imposed on newspapers, the
True Sun sold 30,000 copies a
day. In his articles, Dickens used his considerable knowledge of what
went on in the House of Commons to help promote the cause of parliamentary
reform. Charles Dickens was pleased when Parliament eventually agreed
to pass the 1832 Reform Act, however, like
most radicals, he thought it did not go far enough. The new reformed
House of Commons passed a series of new measures including a reduction
in newspaper tax from 4d. to 1d. As a result, the circulation of the
True Sun increased to over 60,000.
In 1833 Dickens had his first story published in the Monthly
Magazine. Using the pen-name of 'Boz', Dickens also began
contributing short stories to the Morning
Chronicle and the Evening Chronicle.
These stories were so popular that they were collected together and
published as a book entitled Sketches by
Boz (1836).
The publisher, William Hall, now commissioned Dickens to write The
Pickwick Papers in twenty monthly installments. This was
followed by Oliver Twist, published
in Bentley's Miscellany (1837-38)
and Nicholas Nickleby
(1838-39), also published monthly. Dickens was now the most
popular writer in Britain and over the next few years he wrote a series
of popular novels including The Old Curiosity
Shop (1840-1), Barnaby Rudge
(1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4)
and A Christmas Carol (1843).
Although Dickens was now a very successful novelist, he continued
to be interested in social reform. While in America in 1842 he upset
his hosts by condemning slavery. Dickens also decided to invest some
of his royalties in a new radical newspaper, The
Daily News. Dickens became editor and in the first edition
published on 21st January 1846, he wrote: "The principles advocated
in The Daily News will be principles
of progress and improvement; of education, civil and religious liberty,
and equal legislation."
The Daily News was not a great commercial
success and Dickens resigned as editor. However, he was determined
to create a means where he could communicate his ideas on social reform
and in 1850 he began editing Household
Words. The weekly journal included articles on politics, science
and history. To increase the number of people willing to buy Household
Words, it also contained short stories and humourous pieces.
Dickens also used the journal to serialize novels that were concerned
with social issues such as his own Hard Times
(1854) and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and
South (1855). By 1851 the twenty-four page Household
Words was soon selling 40,000 copies a week.
Dickens published Household Words
between 1850 and 1859 and during that time campaigned in favour of
parliamentary reform and improvements in the education of the poor.
Dickens's was extremely hostile to the 1834
Poor Law Amendment Actand wrote several articles on the workhouse
system. Dickens was also concerned with public health and the reform
of the legal system.
When Dickens's argued with the publishers of Household
Words in 1859, he closed the journal and replaced it with
All the Year Round. The new journal
still covered social issues but mainly concentrated on literary matters.
Several important novels were serialized in All
the Year Round including Dickens's
own A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
and Great Expectations (1860-61).
The journal also published three of Wilkie Collins's novels, The
Woman in White (1860), No Name
(1862) and The Moonstone (1868).
Dickens continued to published All the Year
Round until his death on 8th June, 1870.
Last
updated: 12th May, 2002
(1)
Charles Dickens, editorial in The Daily News
(21st January, 1846)
The principles advocated in The Daily News will be principles
of progress and improvement; of education, civil and religious liberty,
and equal legislation. Principles, such as its conductors believe
the advancing spirit of the time requires: the condition of the country
demands: and justice, reason and experience legitimately sanction.
(2)
Charles Dickens, letter to a friend, (April, 1855)
There is nothing in the present age at once so galling and so
alarming to me as the alienation of the people from their own affairs.
They have had so little to do with the game through all these years
of Parliamentary Reform, that they have sullenly laid down their cards,
and taken to looking on. You can no more help a people who do not
help themselves, than you can help a man who does not help himself.
I know of nothing that can be done beyond keeping their wrongs continually
before them.
(3)
In June 1865 Charles Dickens was on a train that crashed. He later
wrote a letter to a friend describing what happened.
I was in the only carriage which did not go over into the stream.
Our carriage was caught upon the turn of some of the ruin of the bridge
and hung suspended and balanced in an apparently impossible manner.
I got out with great caution and stood upon the step. Looking down
I saw the bridge had gone, and nothing below me but the line of rail.
Some people in the two other compartments were madly trying to plunge
out of the window, and had no idea that there was an open swampy field
fifteen feet below them and nothing else.
Suddenly I came upon a staggering man covered with blood (I think
he must have been flung clean out of his carriage), with such a frightful
cut across his skull that I couldn't bear to look at him. I poured
some water over his face and gave him some brandy, and laid him down
on the grass, and he said, "I am gone", and died afterwards.
(4)
George Augustus Sala worked as a journalist on Household
Words. In 1894 Sala recorded working with Charles Dickens
on the journal.
What he liked to talk about was the latest new piece at the theatres,
the latest exciting trial or police case, the latest social craze
or social swindle, frequently touched on political subjects - always
from that which was then a strong Radical point of view.
(5)
The Sunday Observer (12th
June, 1870)
If ever in the annals of our literature there was a man whose
name was, in very truth, a household word to all English speaking
men it was Charles Dickens. To all of us, to young and old, to rich
and poor, the tidings, which saddened England on Friday, came home
like the news of a friend's death. The cords he struck vibrated somehow
through all our hearts. At the time that Dombey and Son was being
published an eminent reviewer summed up his criticism of the work
with the comment that it was hard to judge of it fairly when a whole
nation was "in tears for the death of little Paul."
There have been within our day writers of fiction with subtler insight
into the working of human passions, with more varied knowledge of
society, with greater constructive faculty, with higher faculty of
diction, but there is none who, like him, could make his characters
live, move, and be.
No doubt something of Dickens's wide-spread popularity was due to
the circumstances of his time. In our days the reading public has
reached dimensions which our forefathers would have deemed impossible,
while the faculties of communication between all parts of the globe
enable the written word to circulate with a rapidity rivalling that
of the telegraph itself. But still, the like facilities were open
to all writers of our time; and yet it was Dickens, and Dickens only,
who made his works quoted through the length and breadth of everyone
of those vast regions where the English tongue rules supreme.
(6)
George Orwell, Charles Dickens (1939)
In Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House,
Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked English institutions with a
ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do
it without making himself hated, and, more he has become a national
institution himself. In its attitude towards Dickens the English public
has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with
a walking-stick as a delightful tickling. Dickens seems to have succeeded
in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes
one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack
upon society.
The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively
moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere
in his work. He attacks law, parliamentary government, the educational
system and so forth, without ever really suggesting what he would
put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business
of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but
the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive.
There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown,
or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were
overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as 'human
nature'.
It is said that Macaulay refused to review Hard Times because
he disapproved of its "sullen Socialism". There is not a
line in the book that can properly be called Socialistic; indeed,
its tendency if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral
is that capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be
rebellious. And so far as social criticism goes, one can never extract
much more from Dickens than this, unless one deliberately reads meanings
into him. His whole message is one that at first glance looks like
an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would
be decent.
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