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Charles John Huffam Dickens FRSA (7 February 1812
– 9 June 1870), pen-name "Boz", was the foremost English novelist of the Victorian
era, as well as a vigorous social campaigner. Considered one of the English
language's greatest writers, he was acclaimed for his rich storytelling and
memorable characters, and achieved massive worldwide popularity in his
lifetime.
Later critics, beginning with George Gissing and G.
K. Chesterton, championed his mastery of prose, his endless invention of memorable
characters and his powerful social sensibilities. Yet he has also received
criticism from writers such as George Henry Lewes, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf,
who list sentimentality, implausible occurrence and grotesque characters as faults
in his oeuvre.
The popularity of Dickens' novels and short stories
has meant that none have ever gone out of print. Dickens wrote serialised novels,
which was the usual format for fiction at the time, and each new part of his
stories would be eagerly anticipated by the reading public.
 Early years
Charles Dickens was born in Landport, Portsmouth,
Hampshire, the second of eight children to John Dickens (1786–1851), a clerk in the
Navy Pay Office at Portsmouth, and his wife Elizabeth Dickens (née Barrow,
1789–1863) on February 7, 1812. When he was five, the family moved to Chatham,
Kent. When he was ten, the family relocated to 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town in
London.
Although his early years seem to have been an idyllic
time, he thought himself then as a "very small and
not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy". He spent his time outdoors, reading
voraciously with a particular fondness for the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett
and Henry Fielding. He talked later in life of his extremely poignant memories of
childhood and his continuing photographic memory of people and events that helped
bring his fiction to life. His family was moderately wealthy, and he received some
education at the private William Giles' school in Chatham. However, this time of
prosperity came to an abrupt end when his father, after spending too much money
entertaining and retaining his social position, was imprisoned at Marshalsea
debtors' prison.
A 12-year-old Dickens began working 10 hour days in a
Warren's boot-blacking factory, located near the present Charing Cross railway
station. He earned six shillings a week pasting labels on the jars of thick polish.
This money paid for his lodging in Camden Town and helped support his
family.
In May 1827, Dickens began work in the office of
Ellis and Blackmore as a law clerk, a junior office position with potential to
become a lawyer, a profession for which he later showed his dislike in his many
literary works. He later became a court stenographer at the age of 17. In 1830,
Dickens met his first love, Maria Beadnell, who has been said to be the model for
Dora in David Copperfield. Her parents disapproved of their courtship and they
effectively ended the relationship when they sent her to school in
Paris.
In 1856, his popularity had allowed him to buy
Gad's Hill Place. This large house in Higham, Kent, had a particular meaning to
Dickens as he had walked past it as a child and had 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.
In 1857, in preparation for public performances
of The Frozen Deep
, a play on which he and his protégé Wilkie
Collins had collaborated, Dickens hired professional actresses to play the
female parts. With one of these, Ellen Ternan, Dickens formed a bond which
was to last the rest of his life. The exact nature of their relationship is
unclear, as both Dickens and Ternan burned each other's letters, but it was
clearly central to Dickens's personal and professional life. On his death, he
settled an annuity on her which made her a financially independent woman.
Claire Tomalin's book, The Invisible
Woman , set out to prove that Ellen
Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life, and has
subsequently been turned into a play by Simon Gray called
Little Nell .
When Dickens separated from his wife in 1858,
divorce was almost unthinkable, particularly for someone as famous as he was, and
so he continued to maintain her in a house long after, until she passed away.
Although they appeared to be initially happy together, Catherine did not seem to
share quite the same boundless energy for life which Dickens had. Nevertheless, her
job of looking after their ten children, the pressure of living with a world-famous
novelist, and keeping house for him, certainly did not help.
An indication of his marital dissatisfaction may
be seen when, in 1855, he went to meet his first love, Maria Beadnell. Maria was by
this time married as well, but seemed to have fallen short of Dickens's romantic
memory of her.
In 9 June 1865, while returning from France with
Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash in which the first seven
carriages of the train plunged off a cast iron bridge that was being repaired. The
only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was
travelling. Dickens spent some time tending the wounded and the dying before
rescuers arrived. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our
Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it. Typically, Dickens
later used this experience 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
based the story around several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel
rail crash of 1861.
Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the
inquest into the crash, as it would have become known that he was travelling that
day with Ellen Ternan and her mother, which could have caused a scandal. Ellen had
been Dickens's companion since the breakdown of his marriage, and, as he had met
her in 1857, she was most likely the ultimate reason for that breakdown. She
continued to be his companion, and likely mistress, until his death. The dimensions
of the affair were unknown until the publication of Dickens and Daughter , a
book about Dickens's relationship with his daughter Kate, in 1939. Kate Dickens
worked with author Gladys Storey on the book prior to her death in 1929, and
alleged that Dickens and Ternan had a son who died in infancy, though no
contemporary evidence exists.
Dickens, though unharmed, never really recovered
from the Staplehurst crash, and his normally prolific writing shrank to
completing Our Mutual Friend
and starting the unfinished
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
after a long interval. Much of his time
was taken up with public readings from his best-loved novels. Dickens was
fascinated by the theatre as an escape from the world, and theatres and
theatrical people appear in Nicholas
Nickleby . The travelling shows were
extremely popular. In 1866 a series of public readings were undertaken in
England and Scotland. The following year saw Dickens give a series of
readings in England and Ireland. Dickens was now really unwell but carried
on, compulsively, against his doctor's advice.
Later in the year he embarked on his second
American reading tour, which continued into 1868. During this trip, most of
which he spent in New York, he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall between 9
December 1867 and 20 April 1868, and four at Plymouth Church of the
Pilgrims between 16 January and 21 January 1868. In his travels, he saw a
significant change in the people and the circumstances of America. His final
appearance was at a banquet at Delmonico’s on 18 April 1868, when he promised
to never denounce America again. Dickens boarded his ship to return to Britain
on 23 April 1868, barely escaping a Federal Tax Lien against the proceeds
of his lecture tour.
During 1869, his readings continued, in England,
Scotland, and Ireland, until at last he collapsed, showing symptoms of mild
stroke. Further provincial readings were cancelled, but he began upon The
Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens's final public readings took place in London in
1870. He suffered another stroke on 8 June at Gad's Hill, after a full day's
work on Edwin Drood, and five years to the day after the Staplehurst crash, on
9 June 1870, he died at his home in Gad's Hill Place. He was mourned by all his
readers.
Contrary to his wish to be buried in Rochester
Cathedral, he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. The
inscription on his tomb reads: "He was a sympathiser to the poor, the suffering,
and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to
the world." Dickens's will stipulated that no memorial be erected to honour him.
The only life-size bronze statue of Dickens, cast in 1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell,
is located in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania in the United States.
Notable works by Charles
Dickens
Charles Dickens published over a dozen major novels,
a large number of short stories (including a number of Christmas-themed stories), a
handful of plays, and several nonfiction books. Dickens' novels were initially
serialized in weekly and monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book
formats.
Novels
The Pickwick Papers (Monthly serial, April 1836 to
November 1837)
The Adventures of Oliver Twist (Monthly serial in
Bentley's Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839)
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 25, 1840, to February 6, 1841)
Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty (Weekly
serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, February 13, 184l, to November 27,
1841)
The Christmas books:
A Christmas Carol (1843)
The Chimes (1844)
The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)
The Battle of Life (1846)
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain
(1848)
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (Monthly
serial, January 1843 to July 1844)
Dombey and Son (Monthly serial, October 1846 to April
1848)
David Copperfield (Monthly serial, May 1849 to
November 1850)
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Charles
Dickens - Manifesting Generator - Biography
