Charles John Huffam Dickens

Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870), English novelist and one of the most popular writers in the history of literature, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian era. In his enormous body of works, Dickens combined masterly storytelling, humor, pathos, and irony with sharp social criticism and acute observation of people and places, both real and imagined.

Dickens was born February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth and spent most of his childhood in London and Kent, both of which appear frequently in his novels. He started school at the age of nine, but his education was interrupted when his father, an amiable but careless minor civil servant, was imprisoned for debt in 1824. The boy was then forced to support himself by working in a shoe-polish factory. A resulting sense of humiliation and abandonment haunted him for life, and he later described this experience, only slightly altered, in his novel David Copperfield (1849-1850). From 1824 to 1826, Dickens again attended school. For the most part, however, he was self-educated. Among his favorite books were those by such great 18th-century novelists as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, and their influence can be noticed in Dickens's own novels. In 1827 Dickens took a job as a legal clerk. After learning shorthand, he began working as a reporter in the courts and Parliament, perhaps developing the power of precise description that was to make his creative writing so remarkable.

In December 1833 Dickens published the first of a series of original descriptive sketches of daily life in London, using the pseudonym Boz. The success of this work, Sketches by Boz (1836), permitted Dickens to marry Catherine Hogarth in 1836 and led to the proposal of a similar publishing venture. Dickens first caught his readers by making them laugh. Later he transformed this particular project from a set of loosely connected vignettes into a comic narrative, The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837). The success of his first novel made Dickens famous. In this work he seems to see things in an amusing and exaggerated way. He gives a most impressive picture of various aspects of the English life at that period and the most rueful criticism is directed against the English voting system and law. The light-hearted humour filling the book later gave way to severe criticism and pathos of those having power.

Dickens subsequently maintained his fame with a constant stream of novels. A man of enormous energy and wide talents, he also engaged in many other activities. He edited the weekly periodicals Household Words (1850-1859) and All the Year Round (1859-1870), composed the travel books American Notes (1842) and Pictures from Italy (1846), administered charitable organizations, and pressed for many social reforms. In 1842 he lectured in the United States in favor of an international copyright agreement and in opposition to slavery. In 1843 he published A Christmas Carol, an ever-popular children's story. Dickens's extraliterary activities also included managing a theatrical company that played before Queen Victoria in 1851 and giving public readings of his own works in England and America. All these successes, however, were shadowed by domestic unhappiness. Incompatibility and Dickens's relations with a young actress, Ellen Ternan, led to his separation from his wife in 1858, after the marriage had produced ten children. He suffered a fatal stroke on June 9, 1870, and was buried in Westminster Abbey five days later.

As Dickens matured artistically, his novels developed from comic tales based on the adventures of a central character, like The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby (1837-1838), to works of great social relevance, psychological insight, and narrative and symbolic complexity. Among his fine works are Bleak House (1852-1853), Little Dorritt (1855-1857), Great Expectations (1860-1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865). Readers of the 19th and early 20th century usually prized Dickens's earlier novels for their humor and pathos. While recognizing the virtues of these books, critics today tend to rank more highly the later works because of their formal coherence and acute perception of the human condition. In addition to those mentioned, Dickens's major writings include Oliver Twist (1837-1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841), Barnaby Rudge (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844), Dombey and Son (1846-1848), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished, 1870).

Dickens hoped to improve life with his books and he achieved his purpose. His books each dealing and criticizing this or that aspect of bourgeois reality have a social impact.

In Oliver Twist, describing the adventures of a poor orphan boy he depicted the severe conditions of life in the workhouses and drew the public attention to the problem of criminality. Though containing much comedy still, Oliver Twist is more centrally concerned with social and moral evil (the workhouse and the criminal world).

In Nicholas Nickleby he exposed the drawbacks of the English educational system.

In Bleak House he dealt with the law system.

Hard Times gave a very precise picture of a typical English mining town with its problems, struggles, etc. Many of his works evoked public response and brought about some changes and reforms.

The true-to-life presentation of reality went hand in hand in his books with some naïve beliefs in the possibility of social betterment by means of moral reformation.

In Dombey and Son some of the corruptions of money and pride, of place and the limitations of “respectable” values are explored, virtue and human decency being discovered most often among the poor, humble, and simple. In the end of the novel Good defeats Evil.

A Tale of Two Cities, his only historical novel, takes place during the French Revolution. The book’s opening lines set a tone of ambiguity for the story of a man’s discovery of his own conscience in the midst of tu`multuous historical forces: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…”

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