Charles Dickens
133ms
Charles John Huffam Dickens, born February 7th, 1812, was an English novelist, journalist, short story writer, and social critic. He brought to life some of literature's most unforgettable characters, earning him a place as arguably the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His popularity soared during his lifetime, and by the 20th century, he was widely recognized as a literary genius. Today, his novels and short stories continue to captivate readers worldwide.
Born in Portsmouth, Dickens's life took a sharp turn at the age of 12 when his father, John, was imprisoned for debt. This forced young Charles to leave school and work in a boot-blacking factory. After three years, he returned to his studies before embarking on a literary career as a journalist. Dickens went on to edit a weekly journal for two decades, penned fifteen novels, five novellas, countless short stories, and nonfiction articles. He lectured, performed readings extensively, was a prolific letter writer, and a passionate advocate for children's rights, education, and social reform.
Dickens's literary ascent began with the 1836 serial publication of *The Pickwick Papers*. This publishing sensation, largely propelled by the introduction of the beloved character Sam Weller, sparked a wave of merchandise and spin-offs. Within a few short years, Dickens achieved international celebrity, celebrated for his wit, satire, and astute observations of character and society. His novels, many of them released in monthly or weekly installments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, a dominant Victorian mode. The suspenseful cliffhangers in his serials kept readers eagerly awaiting each new installment. This format also allowed Dickens to gauge his audience's reactions, often influencing plot and character development. For instance, when his wife's chiropodist expressed concern about the portrayal of Miss Mowcher in *David Copperfield*, Dickens enhanced the character with positive traits. His plots were meticulously crafted, weaving in elements from current events. Masses of the illiterate poor would pay a halfpenny for each new monthly episode to be read to them, thus opening up literature to a new audience.
His 1843 novella, *A Christmas Carol*, remains exceptionally popular, inspiring adaptations across every creative medium. *Oliver Twist* and *Great Expectations* are also frequently adapted, evoking vivid images of early Victorian London. *Bleak House*, published in 1853, a sharp satire of the judicial system, contributed to a reformist movement that culminated in legal reforms in the 1870s. *A Tale of Two Cities*, set in London and Paris, is widely regarded as his most famous work of historical fiction. As the era's most celebrated personality, he embarked on public reading tours in response to overwhelming public demand. The term "Dickensian" itself has become synonymous with conditions reminiscent of his writings – be it poor social or working conditions, or comically repulsive characters.
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on February 7th, 1812, in Portsmouth, Hampshire. He was the second of eight children to Elizabeth and John Dickens. His father, a clerk in the Royal Navy Pay Office, was temporarily stationed in the area and asked a naval rigger, Christopher Huffam, to be Charles's godfather. Huffam is believed to be the inspiration for Paul Dombey in Dickens's novel *Dombey and Son*.
In 1815, the family moved to London. Four years later, they relocated to Kent, where Charles spent his formative years until age eleven. His early life, though he described himself as a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy," appears to have been idyllic. He was an avid reader, devouring the works of Smollett and Fielding, as well as *Robinson Crusoe* and *Gil Blas*. He also revisited *The Arabian Nights* and Elizabeth Inchbald's *Collected Farces* repeatedly. At seven, he witnessed Joseph Grimaldi, the father of modern clowning, perform, an experience that would later influence his own attempts at imitation and his editing of Grimaldi's memoirs. His father's brief tenure in the Navy Pay Office afforded him a few years of private education.
This period of relative stability ended in June 1822 when his father was recalled to London. The family moved to Camden Town, but amidst mounting debts, John Dickens was forced into the Marshalsea debtors' prison in 1824. Charles, then 12, was sent to live with a family friend, Elizabeth Roylance, whom Dickens later immortalized as Mrs. Pipchin. He later lodged with Archibald Russell, an agent for the Insolvent Court, whose family inspired the Garlands in *The Old Curiosity Shop*.
On Sundays, Charles would visit his father in the Marshalsea, a setting that would later appear in *Little Dorrit*. To contribute to his family's support, Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, pasting labels on boot polish pots for six shillings a week. The harsh working conditions left an indelible mark, fueling his lifelong concern for socio-economic and labor reform. He later recalled, "I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!"
Eventually, Dickens was sent to Wellington House Academy, though he considered it a poor school, its harsh discipline and "sadistic brutality" informing the character of Mr. Creakle in *David Copperfield*. He then worked as a junior clerk in a law office from 1827 to 1828. A gifted mimic, he was captivated by London's theatre scene. Having learned shorthand, he became a freelance reporter, covering legal proceedings for nearly four years. In 1830, he met Maria Beadnell, his first love, though her parents ended their courtship.
In 1832, at the age of 20, Dickens was energetic and self-confident, seeking fame. He pursued acting, but a cold caused him to miss a crucial audition. Before another opportunity arose, he had already begun his writing career. In 1833, his first story, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk," was published in the *Monthly Magazine*. He worked as a political journalist, reporting on Parliamentary debates and election campaigns.
His journalism, in the form of periodical sketches, formed his first collection, *Sketches by Boz*, published in 1836. "Boz" was a pseudonym he used for years, derived from his brother's nickname, Moses. Dickens's name was considered "queer" by a contemporary critic, who noted his tendency to bestow equally peculiar names upon his fictional creations. He consistently contributed to and edited journals throughout his career. In 1835, he began visiting the home of George Hogarth, editor of the *Evening Chronicle*, and became close with Hogarth's three daughters, particularly Catherine, whom he would later marry.
Dickens's professional and social life flourished. He befriended William Harrison Ainsworth and met his first publisher, John Macrone. The success of *Sketches by Boz* led to a proposal from Chapman and Hall for Dickens to provide text for Robert Seymour's illustrations. After Seymour's suicide, Dickens hired "Phiz" to illustrate the story, which became *The Pickwick Papers*. Though initial installments were slow to gain traction, the introduction of Sam Weller in the fourth episode led to a dramatic surge in popularity, with the final installment selling 40,000 copies. The "Sam Weller Bump" became a publishing phenomenon, solidifying *The Pickwick Papers* as a landmark Victorian novel. The unprecedented success spawned numerous spin-offs and merchandise.
The "Sam Weller Bump" highlighted not only Dickens's comic genius but also his entrepreneurial spirit. He leveraged new printing technologies and advertising to reach a wide audience, ensuring his books were accessible to all classes. *The Pickwick Papers* was so impactful that Nicholas Dames in *The Atlantic* argued it defined a new category of "entertainment." In November 1836, Dickens became editor of *Bentley's Miscellany*, a position he held for three years. While finishing *The Pickwick Papers*, he began *Oliver Twist*, writing prolifically. *Oliver Twist*, published in 1838, became one of his most well-known stories and the first Victorian novel with a child protagonist.
On April 2nd, 1836, Dickens married Catherine Thomson Hogarth, daughter of George Hogarth. They had ten children. Dickens became deeply attached to Catherine's younger sister, Mary, whose sudden death in 1837 profoundly affected him, causing him to halt work and idealize her memory in his writing. His grief was so immense that he missed deadlines for both *The Pickwick Papers* and *Oliver Twist*. During this time, his friendship with John Forster deepened, with Forster becoming his business manager and first reader.
Dickens's novelistic success continued with *Nicholas Nickleby*, *The Old Curiosity Shop*, and his first historical novel, *Barnaby Rudge*. The latter, serialized in *Master Humphrey's Clock*, inspired Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" through its talking raven, Grip. Amidst his prolific output, Dickens experienced publisher disputes and personal restlessness. In 1841, he embarked on a tour of Scotland and then decided to travel to America.
Dickens was perturbed by the return of the Tories to power and considered standing for Parliament, but financial constraints prevented it. He penned three anti-Tory verse satires.
On January 22nd, 1842, Dickens and his wife arrived in Boston for their first trip to the United States and Canada. Georgina Hogarth, Catherine's sister, joined the household to care for their children and remained with them as housekeeper, advisor, and friend until Dickens's death. Dickens chronicled his impressions in *American Notes for General Circulation*, including a strong condemnation of slavery. Despite his abolitionist sentiments, some modern commentators have noted inconsistencies in his views on racial inequality. During his American visit, he spent a month in New York, advocating for international copyright laws. His popularity shifted his self-perception, making him increasingly aware of his role as a cultural commodity. His US trip concluded with a visit to Canada.
Upon his return to England, Dickens began his series of Christmas stories, starting with the highly popular *A Christmas Carol* in 1843. This work, tapping into an old tradition, significantly revived enthusiasm for Christmas in Britain and America. The story was inspired by his observations of the harsh conditions of factory workers in Manchester and scenes at the Field Lane Ragged School, prompting him to "strike a sledge hammer blow" for the poor. He became deeply engrossed in its writing, experiencing a range of emotions.
Between 1843 and 1844, *Martin Chuzzlewit* was serialized. After living briefly in Italy, Dickens traveled to Switzerland in 1846, where he began *Dombey and Son*. Around this time, he became aware of a significant embezzlement at a firm where his brother worked, carried out by a man named Thomas Powell. Powell later published a book on English authors, including a chapter on Dickens, which annoyed him. This led to a public dispute and legal entanglements.
In 1846, Angela Burdett Coutts approached Dickens about establishing a home for "fallen women." Dickens helped found Urania Cottage, managing it for ten years and implementing rules focused on education and domestic skills, with emigration and marriage as goals for the women.
As a young man, Dickens expressed a distaste for certain aspects of organized religion, defending the people's right to pleasure on Sundays. He honored the figure of Jesus Christ and is considered a professing Christian. His son described him as having "deep religious convictions." He showed interest in Unitarian Christianity and wrote *The Life of Our Lord* for his children. Dickens disapproved of Roman Catholicism and 19th-century evangelicalism, viewing them as limiting and hypocritical. He advocated for Catholic civil liberties but strongly disliked the Catholic Church's influence in certain countries. He also rejected the Evangelical conviction of the Bible's infallibility, his views on biblical interpretation aligning with "progressive revelation." Tolstoy and Dostoevsky referred to him as "that great Christian writer."
In December 1845, Dickens became editor of the liberal *Daily News*, aiming to advocate for "Principles of Progress and Improvement." He resigned after ten weeks due to exhaustion and frustration. A Francophile, Dickens often holidayed in France and met prominent French literary figures. In early 1849, he began writing *David Copperfield*, his personal favorite among his novels. His extensive correspondence covered a wide range of subjects. He reviewed the Great Exhibition in 1851. Post-Opium War, he viewed China with a mixture of mockery and fear, alluding to the "yellow peril" stereotype.
In late 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House, where he wrote *Bleak House*, *Hard Times*, and *Little Dorrit*. *Bleak House*, with its depiction of London as a foggy, murky city, introduced urban fog as a literary element. It also contains an early mention of dinosaurs. At Tavistock, Dickens engaged in amateur theatricals with Wilkie Collins. In 1856, he purchased Gads Hill Place, a house he had admired as a child. He also edited and contributed to *Household Words* and *All the Year Round*, journals that explored various aspects of culture. He viciously attacked Arctic explorer John Rae in *Household Words* for his report on the Franklin expedition, a stance later satirized in his play *The Frozen Deep*.
In 1855, Dickens joined an Administrative Reform Association, advocating for parliamentary reform. He believed the political aristocracy's incompetence was detrimental to England. He championed Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini and supported vaccination. Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857, he criticized the East India Company but expressed extreme views towards Indians.
In 1857, Dickens hired professional actresses for *The Frozen Deep*, falling in love with Ellen Ternan. In 1858, he and Catherine separated. Catherine left, never to see him again, while Georgina stayed to raise their children. During this period, Dickens undertook popular and profitable reading tours, which, along with his journalism, consumed much of his creative energy for the next decade, during which he wrote only two novels. His first reading tour spanned 1858-1859.
Other works followed, including the successful *A Tale of Two Cities* and *Great Expectations*. In 1860, he burned most of his correspondence, and Ellen Ternan also destroyed his letters to her, leaving their affair largely speculative. Dickens's daughter, Kate, claimed they had a son who died in infancy, though without contemporary evidence. Upon his death, Dickens settled an annuity on Ternan. Claire Tomalin's book *The Invisible Woman* argues that Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life. He also became an early member of The Ghost Club.
On June 9th, 1865, returning from Paris with Ellen Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. The carriage he was in remained on the tracks, and he tended to the wounded before retrieving his unfinished manuscript for *Our Mutual Friend*. He later used the experience in his ghost story "The Signal-Man." The crash left him nervous about train travel.
Dickens's second American reading tour began in November 1867. He performed 76 readings, earning £19,000. He observed a change in America and its people. His final American appearance was at a banquet held in his honor, where he promised not to denounce America again.
In 1868–69, Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" in England, Scotland, and Ireland. He managed 75 readings in the provinces and 12 in London. However, he was affected by giddiness and paralysis, suffering a stroke in April 1869. The tour was cancelled. He began his final novel, *The Mystery of Edwin Drood*, a dark and gothic tale.
After regaining some strength, he arranged a final series of readings to compensate his sponsors for losses due to his illness. These 12 performances took place from January to March 1870. On May 2nd, he made his last public appearance at a Royal Academy banquet.
On June 8th, 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home. He never regained consciousness and died the next day at Gads Hill Place. Contrary to his wish for a private burial, he was laid to rest in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. His epitaph described him as "England's most popular author," a "sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed." He had been offered a baronetcy, which was not gazetted before his death. His last words were "On the ground."
Dickens's literary style is marked by linguistic creativity, satire, and caricature. He developed memorable character names that resonated with his readers. His style blends fantasy and realism, with sharp satires of British aristocratic snobbery. He worked closely with his illustrators, ensuring his visions of characters and settings were accurately depicted. He employed Cockney English in his works to represent working-class Londoners.
Dickens's characters are among the most memorable in English literature, often distinguished by whimsical names. Figures like Ebenezer Scrooge, Oliver Twist, Pip, Sydney Carton, and David Copperfield have become cultural touchstones. His characters often took on a life of their own, influencing language itself. Many were drawn from real life, though his mother, for example, did not recognize herself in Mrs. Nickleby.
His novels are rich with autobiographical elements. *David Copperfield* is considered a veiled autobiography. The legal scenes in *Bleak House* reflect his experiences as a law clerk, and his father's imprisonment for debt informed the prison settings in many of his works.
A pioneer of serial publication, Dickens wrote most of his major novels in installments, making them affordable and accessible. This episodic format, with its regular cliffhangers, generated immense anticipation. He was able to incorporate reader and friend feedback, even altering plot points based on their suggestions. Eliza Davis's letter to him about the portrayal of Fagin in *Oliver Twist* led to changes and the creation of sympathetic Jewish characters in his next novel.
Dickens's novels served as powerful social commentary. He was a fierce critic of Victorian poverty and social stratification. *Oliver Twist* shocked readers with its depiction of poverty and crime, challenging middle-class assumptions. The term "Dickensian" now describes insanitary social conditions or grim institutions. His writings highlighted the lives of the poor and disadvantaged, inspiring journalists and politicians to address class oppression. *Bleak House*'s satire of legal cases contributed to judicial reform.
Dickens often contrasted idealized characters and sentimental scenes with caricatures and stark social realities. His depiction of Little Nell's death in *The Old Curiosity Shop* was seen as excessively sentimental by some, while others, like G. K. Chesterton, objected to the life of the character. The question of whether Dickens belongs to the sentimental novel tradition is debated, though his sentimental scenes are considered crucial to the power of his novels. His fiction frequently uses coincidence, reflecting a belief in providence.
Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time and remains one of England's most read authors. His works have been continuously adapted for stage and screen. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is considered by many the greatest British novelist of the Victorian era. While his critical reputation saw some decline in the mid-19th century, his popularity with the public never wavered. His public readings were unparalleled, drawing comparisons to modern pop stars.
Among his peers, opinions varied. Wordsworth found him vulgar, while Trollope favored Thackeray. However, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were admirers, with Tolstoy calling *David Copperfield* his favorite book. Jules Verne considered Dickens his favorite writer. Vincent van Gogh was inspired by Dickens's novels. Oscar Wilde admired his caricature but disparaged his character portrayal. Henry James called him "the greatest of superficial novelists." Virginia Woolf had a complex relationship with Dickens, finding his novels mesmerizing but reproaching his sentimentality.
Around 1940, critical attitudes began to warm towards Dickens, with George Orwell and Edmund Wilson leading the reassessment. Later critics recognized his finest artistry in his later novels. Dickens was a favorite author of Roald Dahl, and Paul McCartney named *Nicholas Nickleby* his favorite novel. Jonathan Nolan's screenplay for *The Dark Knight Rises* was inspired by *A Tale of Two Cities*.
Museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and works exist in many associated locations. His *A Christmas Carol* is his most famous story, widely adapted and credited with reviving Christmas traditions. The term "Scrooge" became a synonym for miser. Dickens was commemorated on the £10 note.
In 2002, he was ranked 41st in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. Literary critic Harold Bloom placed him among the greatest Western writers. Five of his books appeared in the BBC's Top 100 in 2003. Actors have portrayed him on screen, and his image has appeared on postage stamps worldwide. A crater on Mercury was named in his honor. A lost portrait of Dickens by Margaret Gillies was discovered in South Africa.
Dickens published fifteen major novels, several novellas, numerous short stories, plays, and non-fiction books, most of which were initially published in serial form. His works include *The Pickwick Papers*, *Oliver Twist*, *Nicholas Nickleby*, *The Old Curiosity Shop*, *Barnaby Rudge*, *Martin Chuzzlewit*, *A Christmas Carol*, *The Chimes*, *The Cricket on the Hearth*, *Dombey and Son*, *The Battle of Life*, *The Haunted Man*, *David Copperfield*, *Bleak House*, *Hard Times*, *Little Dorrit*, *A Tale of Two Cities*, *Great Expectations*, *Our Mutual Friend*, and the unfinished *The Mystery of Edwin Drood*.
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Charles John Huffam Dickens ( ; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English novelist, journalist, short story writer and social critic. He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.
Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school at age 12 to work in a boot-blacking factory when his father John was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. After three years, he returned to school before beginning his literary career as a journalist. Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years; wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and nonfiction articles; lectured and performed readings extensively; was a tireless letter writer; and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education and other social reforms.
Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers, a publishing phenomenon—thanks largely to the introduction of the character Sam Weller in the fourth episode—that sparked Pickwick merchandise and spin-offs. Within a few years, Dickens had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire and keen observation of character and society. His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication. Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense. The installment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback. For example, when his wife's chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her own disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features. His plots were carefully constructed and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives. Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.
His 1843 novella A Christmas Carol remains especially popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every creative medium. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1853 novel Bleak House, a satire on the judicial system, helped support a reformist movement that culminated in the 1870s legal reform in England. A Tale of Two Cities (1859; set in London and Paris) is regarded as his best-known work of historical fiction. The most famous celebrity of his era, he undertook, in response to public demand, a series of public reading tours in the later part of his career. The term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social or working conditions, or comically repulsive characters.
== Early life ==
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 at 1 Mile End Terrace (now 393 Commercial Road), Landport in Portsea Island (Portsmouth), Hampshire, the second of eight children of Elizabeth Dickens (née Barrow; 1789–1863) and John Dickens (1785–1851). His father was a clerk in the Royal Navy Pay Office and was temporarily stationed in the district. He asked Christopher Huffam, rigger in the Royal Navy and head of an established firm, to act as godfather to Charles. Huffam is thought to be the inspiration for Paul Dombey, the owner of a shipping company in Dickens's novel Dombey and Son (1848).
In January 1815 John Dickens was called back to London, and the family moved to Norfolk Street, Fitzrovia. When Charles was four they relocated to Sheerness and thence to Chatham, Kent, where he spent his formative years until the age of 11. His early life seems to have been idyllic, though he thought himself a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy".
Charles spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, including the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding, as well as Robinson Crusoe and Gil Blas. He read and re-read The Arabian Nights and the Collected Farces of Elizabeth Inchbald. Aged seven, he first saw Joseph Grimaldi—the father of modern clowning—perform at the Star Theatre in Rochester, Kent. He later imitated Grimaldi's clowning on several occasions, and would also edit the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. He retained poignant memories of childhood, helped by an excellent memory of people and events, which he used in his writing. His father's brief work as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office afforded him a few years of private education, first at a dame school and then at a school run by William Giles, a dissenter, in Chatham.
This period came to an end in June 1822, when John Dickens was recalled to Navy Pay Office headquarters at Somerset House and the family (except for Charles, who stayed behind to finish his final term at school) moved to Camden Town in London. The family had left Kent amidst rapidly mounting debts and, living beyond his means, John Dickens was forced by his creditors into the Marshalsea debtors' prison in Southwark, London in 1824. His wife and youngest children joined him there, as was the practice at the time. Charles, then 12 years old, boarded with Elizabeth Roylance, a family friend, at 112 College Place, Camden Town. Mrs Roylance was "a reduced impoverished old lady, long known to our family", whom Dickens later immortalised, "with a few alterations and embellishments", as "Mrs Pipchin" in Dombey and Son. Later, he lived in a back-attic in the house of an agent for the Insolvent Court, Archibald Russell, "a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman ... with a quiet old wife" and lame son, in Lant Street in Southwark. They provided the inspiration for the Garlands in The Old Curiosity Shop.
On Sundays—with his sister Frances, free from her studies at the Royal Academy of Music—he spent the day at the Marshalsea. Dickens later used the prison as a setting in Little Dorrit. To pay for his board and to help his family, Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station, where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. The strenuous and often harsh working conditions made a lasting impression on Dickens and later influenced his fiction and essays, becoming the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor. He later wrote that he wondered "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age". As he recalled to John Forster (from Life of Charles Dickens):
The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.
When the warehouse was moved to Chandos Street in the smart, busy district of Covent Garden, the boys worked in a room in which the window gave onto the street. Small audiences gathered and watched them at work—in Dickens's biographer Simon Callow's estimation, the public display was "a new refinement added to his misery".
A few months after his imprisonment, John Dickens's mother, Elizabeth Dickens, died and bequeathed him £450. On the expectation of this legacy, Dickens was released from prison. Under the Insolvent Debtors Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors, and he and his family left the Marshalsea, for the home of Mrs Roylance.
Charles's mother, Elizabeth Dickens, did not immediately support his removal from the boot-blacking warehouse. This influenced Dickens's view that a father should rule the family and a mother find her proper sphere inside the home: "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back." His mother's failure to request his return was a factor in his dissatisfied attitude towards women.
Righteous indignation stemming from his own situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes of his works, and it was this unhappy period in his youth to which he alluded in his favourite and most autobiographical novel, David Copperfield: "I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!"
Dickens was eventually sent to the Wellington House Academy in Camden Town, where he remained until March 1827, having spent about two years there. He did not consider it to be a good school: "Much of the haphazard, desultory teaching, poor discipline punctuated by the headmaster's sadistic brutality, the seedy ushers and general run-down atmosphere, are embodied in Mr Creakle's Establishment in David Copperfield."
Dickens worked at the law office of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn, as a junior clerk from May 1827 to November 1828. He was a gifted mimic and impersonated those around him: clients, lawyers and clerks. Captivated with London's theatre scene, he went to theatres obsessively: he claimed that for at least three years he went to the theatre every day. His favourite actor was Charles Mathews and Dickens learnt his "monopolylogues" (farces in which Mathews played every character) by heart. Then, having learned Thomas Gurney's system of shorthand in his spare time, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant relative, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at Doctors' Commons and Dickens was able to share his box there to report the legal proceedings for nearly four years.
In 1830 Dickens met his first love, Maria Beadnell, thought to have been the model for the character Dora in David Copperfield. Maria's parents disapproved of the courtship and ended the relationship by sending her to school in Paris.
== Career ==
=== Journalism and writing ===
In 1832, at the age of 20, Dickens was energetic and increasingly self-confident. He enjoyed mimicry and popular entertainment, lacked a sense of what he wanted to become, and yet knew he wanted fame. Drawn to the theatre—he became an early member of the Garrick Club—he landed an acting audition at Covent Garden, where the manager George Bartley and the actor Charles Kemble were to see him. Dickens prepared meticulously and decided to imitate the comedian Charles Mathews, but ultimately he missed the audition because of a cold. Before another opportunity arose, he had set out on his career as a writer.
In 1833 Dickens submitted his first story, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", to the London periodical Monthly Magazine. His uncle William Barrow offered him a job on The Mirror of Parliament and he worked in the House of Commons for the first time early in 1832. He rented rooms at Furnival's Inn and worked as a political journalist, reporting on Parliamentary debates, and he travelled across Britain to cover election campaigns for the Morning Chronicle.
His journalism, in the form of sketches in periodicals, formed his first collection of pieces, published in 1836: Sketches by Boz—Boz being a family nickname he employed as a pseudonym for some years. Dickens apparently adopted it from the nickname 'Moses', which he had given to his youngest brother Augustus Dickens, after a character in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. When pronounced by anyone with a head cold, "Moses" became "Boses"—later shortened to Boz.
Dickens's name was considered "queer" by a contemporary critic, who wrote in 1849: "Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations". Dickens contributed to and edited journals throughout his literary career. In January 1835, the Morning Chronicle launched an evening edition, under the editorship of the Chronicle's music critic, George Hogarth. Hogarth invited him to contribute Street Sketches and Dickens became a regular visitor to his Fulham house—excited by Hogarth's friendship with Walter Scott (whom Dickens greatly admired) and enjoying the company of Hogarth's three daughters, Georgina, Mary and 19-year-old Catherine.
Dickens made rapid progress professionally and socially. He began a friendship with William Harrison Ainsworth, the author of the highwayman novel Rookwood (1834), whose bachelor salon in Harrow Road had become the meeting place for a set that included Daniel Maclise, Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and George Cruikshank. All these became his friends and collaborators, with the exception of Disraeli, and he met his first publisher, John Macrone, at the house.
The success of Sketches by Boz led to a proposal from publishers Chapman and Hall for Dickens to supply text to match Robert Seymour's engraved illustrations in a monthly letterpress. Seymour committed suicide after the second instalment and Dickens, who wanted to write a connected series of sketches, hired "Phiz" to provide the engravings (which were reduced from four to two per instalment) for the story. The resulting story became The Pickwick Papers and, although the first few episodes were not successful, the introduction of the Cockney character Sam Weller in the fourth episode (the first to be illustrated by Phiz) marked a sharp climb in its popularity. The final instalment sold 40,000 copies. On the impact of the character, The Paris Review stated in 2015, "arguably the most historic bump in English publishing is the Sam Weller Bump." A publishing phenomenon, John Sutherland, Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, called The Pickwick Papers "[t]he most important single novel of the Victorian era". The unprecedented success led to numerous spin-offs and merchandise including Pickwick cigars, playing cards, china figurines, Sam Weller puzzles, Weller boot polish and joke books.
The Sam Weller Bump testifies not merely to Dickens's comic genius but to his acumen as an "authorpreneur", a portmanteau he inhabited long before The Economist took it up. For a writer who made his reputation crusading against the squalor of the Industrial Revolution, Dickens was a creature of capitalism; he used everything from the powerful new printing presses to the enhanced advertising revenues to the expansion of railroads to sell more books. Dickens ensured that his books were available in cheap bindings for the lower orders as well as in morocco-and-gilt for people of quality; his ideal readership included everyone from the pickpockets who read Oliver Twist to Queen Victoria, who found it "exceedingly interesting".
On its impact on mass culture, Nicholas Dames in The Atlantic writes, "'Literature' is not a big enough category for Pickwick. It defined its own, a new one that we have learned to call 'entertainment'." In November 1836 Dickens accepted the position of editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a position he held for three years, until he fell out with the owner. In 1836, as he finished the last instalments of The Pickwick Papers, he began writing the beginning instalments of Oliver Twist—writing as many as 90 pages a month—while continuing work on Bentley's and also writing four plays, the production of which he oversaw. Oliver Twist, published in 1838, became one of Dickens's better known stories and was the first Victorian novel with a child protagonist.
On 2 April 1836, after a one-year engagement, and between episodes two and three of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1815–1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle. They were married in St Luke's Church, Chelsea, London. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk in Kent, the couple returned to lodgings at Furnival's Inn. The first of their ten children, Charles, was born in January 1837 and a few months later the family set up home in Bloomsbury at 48 Doughty Street, London (on which Charles had a three-year lease at £80 a year) from 25 March 1837 until December 1839. Dickens's younger brother Frederick and Catherine's 17-year-old sister Mary Hogarth moved in with them. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. Unusually for Dickens, as a consequence of his shock, he stopped working, and he and Catherine stayed at a little farm on Hampstead Heath for a fortnight. Dickens idealised Mary; the character he fashioned after her, Rose Maylie, he found he could not now kill, as he had planned, in his fiction, and, according to Ackroyd, he drew on memories of her for his later descriptions of Little Nell and Florence Dombey. His grief was so great that he was unable to meet the deadline for the June instalment of The Pickwick Papers and had to cancel the Oliver Twist instalment that month as well. The time in Hampstead was the occasion for a growing bond between Dickens and John Forster to develop; Forster soon became his unofficial business manager and the first to read his work.
His success as a novelist continued. The young Queen Victoria read both Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers, staying up until midnight to discuss them. Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and, finally, his first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty, as part of the Master Humphrey's Clock series (1840–41), were all published in monthly instalments before being made into books. Dickens's biographer Peter Ackroyd has called Barnaby Rudge "one of Dickens's most neglected, but most rewarding, novels". The poet Edgar Allan Poe read Barnaby Rudge, and the novel's talking raven, Grip, who Dickens named after his own talking pet raven Grip, inspired in part Poe's 1845 poem "The Raven". Three ravens of the Tower of London have been named after Grip, the latest in 2012 to mark the bicentenary of Dickens's birth.
In the midst of all his activity during this period, there was discontent with his publishers and John Macrone was bought off, while Richard Bentley signed over all his rights in Oliver Twist. Other signs of a certain restlessness and discontent emerged; in Broadstairs he flirted with Eleanor Picken, the young fiancée of his solicitor's best friend and one night grabbed her and ran with her down to the sea. He declared they were both to drown there in the "sad sea waves". She finally got free, and afterwards kept her distance. In June 1841, he precipitously set out on a two-month tour of Scotland and then, in September 1841, telegraphed Forster that he had decided to go to America. His weekly periodical Master Humphrey's Clock ended, though Dickens was still keen on the idea of the weekly magazine, an appreciation that had begun with his childhood reading of Samuel Johnson's The Idler and the 18th-century magazines Tatler and The Spectator.
Dickens was perturbed by the return to power of the Tories, whom he described as "people whom, politically, I despise and abhor." He had been tempted to stand for the Liberal Party in Reading, but decided against it due to financial straits. He wrote three anti-Tory verse satires ("The Fine Old English Gentleman", "The Quack Doctor's Proclamation" and "Subjects for Painters") which were published in The Examiner.
=== First visit to the United States ===
On 22 January 1842, Dickens and his wife arrived in Boston, Massachusetts, aboard the RMS Britannia during their first trip to the United States and Canada. At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, joined the Dickens household, now living at Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone to care for the young family they had left behind. She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser and friend until Dickens's death in 1870. Dickens modelled the character of Agnes Wickfield after Georgina and Mary.
He described his impressions in a travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation. In it Dickens includes a powerful condemnation of slavery which he had attacked as early as The Pickwick Papers, correlating the emancipation of the poor in England with the abolition of slavery abroad citing newspaper accounts of runaway slaves disfigured by their masters. In spite of the abolitionist sentiments gleaned from his trip to America, some modern commentators have pointed out inconsistencies in Dickens's views on racial inequality. For instance, he has been criticised for his subsequent acquiescence in Governor Edward John Eyre's harsh crackdown during the 1860s Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and his failure to join other British progressives in condemning it. From Richmond, Virginia, Dickens returned to Washington, D.C., and started a trek westwards, with brief pauses in Cincinnati and Louisville, Kentucky, to St. Louis. While there he expressed a desire to see an American prairie before returning east. A group of 13 men then set out with Dickens to visit Looking Glass Prairie, a trip 30 miles into Illinois.
During his American visit, Dickens spent a month in New York City, giving lectures, raising the question of international copyright laws and the pirating of his work in America. He persuaded a group of 25 writers, headed by Washington Irving, to sign a petition for him to take to the US Congress, but the press were generally hostile to this, saying that he should be grateful for his popularity and that it was mercenary to complain about his work being pirated.
The popularity he gained caused a shift in his self-perception according to the critic Kate Flint, who writes that he "found himself a cultural commodity, and its circulation had passed out his control", causing him to become interested in and delve into themes of public and personal personas in the next novels. She writes that he assumed a role of "influential commentator", publicly and in his fiction, evident in his next few books. His trip to the US ended with a trip to Canada—Niagara Falls, Toronto, Kingston, Ontario, and Montreal—where he appeared on stage in light comedies.
=== Return to England ===
Soon after his return to England, Dickens began work on the first of his Christmas stories, A Christmas Carol, written in 1843, which was followed by The Chimes in 1844 and The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845. Of these, A Christmas Carol was most popular and, tapping into an old tradition, did much to promote a renewed enthusiasm for the joys of Christmas in Britain and America. The seeds for the story became planted in Dickens's mind during a trip to Manchester to witness the conditions of the manufacturing workers there. This, along with scenes he had recently witnessed at the Field Lane Ragged School, caused Dickens to resolve to "strike a sledge hammer blow" for the poor. As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He later wrote that as the tale unfolded he "wept and laughed, and wept again" as he "walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed".
Between 1843 and 1844 Martin Chuzzlewit, the last of his picaresque novels, was serialised. It includes the character of Sarah Gamp, a nurse who is dissolute, sloppy and generally drunk, and also features one of the first literary private detective characters, Mr Nadgett. After living briefly in Italy (1844), Dickens travelled to Switzerland (1846), where he began work on Dombey and Son (1846–48).
At about this time, he was made aware of a large embezzlement at the firm where his brother, Augustus, worked (John Chapman & Co). It had been carried out by Thomas Powell, a clerk, who was on friendly terms with Dickens and who had acted as mentor to Augustus when he started work. Powell was also an author and poet and knew many of the famous writers of the day. After further fraudulent activities, Powell fled to New York and published a book called The Living Authors of England with a chapter on Charles Dickens, who was not amused by what Powell had written. One item that seemed to have annoyed him was the assertion that he had based the character of Paul Dombey (Dombey and Son) on Thomas Chapman, one of the principal partners at John Chapman & Co. Dickens immediately sent a letter to Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the New York literary magazine The Knickerbocker, saying that Powell was a forger and thief. Clark published the letter in the New-York Tribune and several other papers picked up on the story. Powell began proceedings to sue these publications and Clark was arrested. Dickens, realising that he had acted in haste, contacted John Chapman & Co to seek written confirmation of Powell's guilt. Dickens did receive a reply confirming Powell's embezzlement, but once the directors realised this information might have to be produced in court, they refused to make further disclosures. Owing to the difficulties of providing evidence in America to support his accusations, Dickens eventually made a private settlement with Powell out of court.
==== Philanthropy ====
Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens in May 1846 about setting up a home for the redemption of fallen women of the working class. Coutts envisioned a home that would replace the punitive regimes of existing institutions with a reformative environment conducive to education and proficiency in domestic household chores. After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named Urania Cottage, in the Lime Grove area of Shepherd's Bush, which he managed for ten years, setting the house rules, reviewing the accounts and interviewing prospective residents. Emigration and marriage were central to Dickens's agenda for the women on leaving Urania Cottage, from which it is estimated that about 100 women graduated between 1847 and 1859.
==== Religious views ====
As a young man, Dickens expressed a distaste for certain aspects of organised religion. In 1836, in a pamphlet titled Sunday Under Three Heads, he defended the people's right to pleasure, opposing a plan to prohibit games on Sundays. "Look into your churches—diminished congregations and scanty attendance. People have grown sullen and obstinate, and are becoming disgusted with the faith which condemns them to such a day as this, once in every seven. They display their feeling by staying away [from church]. Turn into the streets [on a Sunday] and mark the rigid gloom that reigns over everything around."
Dickens honoured the figure of Jesus Christ. He is regarded as a professing Christian. His son, Henry Fielding Dickens, described him as someone who "possessed deep religious convictions". In the early 1840s, he had shown an interest in Unitarian Christianity and Robert Browning remarked that "Mr Dickens is an enlightened Unitarian." Professor Gary Colledge has written that he "never strayed from his attachment to popular lay Anglicanism". Dickens authored a work called The Life of Our Lord (1846), a book about the life of Christ, written with the purpose of sharing his faith with his children and family. In a scene from David Copperfield, Dickens echoed Geoffrey Chaucer's use of Luke 23:34 from Troilus and Criseyde (Dickens held a copy in his library), with G. K. Chesterton writing, "among the great canonical English authors, Chaucer and Dickens have the most in common."
Dickens disapproved of Roman Catholicism and 19th-century evangelicalism, seeing both as extremes of Christianity and likely to limit personal expression, and was critical of what he saw as the hypocrisy of religious institutions and philosophies like spiritualism, all of which he considered deviations from the true spirit of Christianity, as shown in the book he wrote for his family in 1846. While Dickens advocated equal rights for Catholics in England, he strongly disliked how individual civil liberties were often threatened in countries where Catholicism predominated and referred to the Catholic Church as "that curse upon the world." Dickens also rejected the Evangelical conviction that the Bible was the infallible word of God. His ideas on Biblical interpretation were similar to the Liberal Anglican Arthur Penrhyn Stanley's doctrine of "progressive revelation". Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky referred to Dickens as "that great Christian writer".
== Middle years ==
In December 1845 Dickens took up the editorship of the London-based Daily News, a liberal paper through which Dickens hoped to advocate, in his own words, "the Principles of Progress and Improvement, of Education and Civil and Religious Liberty and Equal Legislation." Among the other contributors Dickens chose to write for the paper were the radical economist Thomas Hodgskin and the social reformer Douglas William Jerrold, who frequently attacked the Corn Laws. Dickens lasted only ten weeks on the job before resigning due to a combination of exhaustion and frustration with one of the paper's co-owners.
A Francophile, Dickens often holidayed in France and, in a speech delivered in Paris in 1846 in French, called the French "the first people in the universe". During his visit to Paris, Dickens met the French literati Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Eugène Scribe, Théophile Gautier, François-René de Chateaubriand and Eugène Sue. In early 1849 Dickens started to write David Copperfield. It was published between 1849 and 1850. In Dickens's biography, Life of Charles Dickens (1872), John Forster wrote of David Copperfield, "underneath the fiction lay something of the author's life". It was Dickens's personal favourite among his novels, as he wrote in the preface to the 1867 edition. His collection of letters, of which more than 14,000 are known, covered a wide range of subject-matter. Letters during this period included a correspondence with Mary Tyler, dated 6 November 1849, on the comedic merits of Punch and Judy, a puppet show dominated by the anarchic clowning of Mr. Punch, and his review of the Great Exhibition, the first in a series of world's fairs, which he attended at Hyde Park, London, in 1851. After the First Opium War Dickens viewed China through a lens of both mockery and fear, alluding to the Western "yellow peril" stereotype. During his visit to the Great Exhibition, he scorned Chinese exhibits as symbols of stagnation, labelling them a "glory of yellow jaundice", writing progress was hindered by the isolationist approach of the Qing dynasty with "China, shutting itself up, as far as possible, within itself."
In late 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he wrote Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1855–57). A work incorporating Gothic elements such as the depiction of London as a murky city swathed in fog, Bleak House is credited with introducing urban fog to the novel, which would become a frequent characteristic of urban Gothic literature and film. Reflecting the public enthusiasm for dinosaurs that first developed in Victorian England, the opening of Bleak House contains an early mention of dinosaurs in literature: "it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill".
While at Tavistock Dickens indulged in amateur theatricals, and he worked closely with the novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins. In 1856, his income from writing allowed him to buy Gads Hill Place in Higham, Kent. As a child Dickens had walked past the house and dreamt of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of William Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 and this literary connection pleased him. During this time Dickens was also the publisher, editor and a major contributor to the journals Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1858–1870), with both titles deriving from a Shakespearean quotation. The journals contained a mix of fiction and non-fiction, and dealt with aspects in the culture. For example, the latter included Dickens's assessment of Madame Tussauds, a wax museum established in Baker Street in 1835, which he called "something more than an exhibition, it is an institution." In 1854, at the behest of Sir John Franklin's widow Lady Jane, Dickens viciously attacked Arctic explorer John Rae in Household Words for his report to the Admiralty, based on interviews with local Inuit, that the members of Franklin's lost expedition had resorted to cannibalism. These attacks would later be expanded on his 1856 play The Frozen Deep, a collaboration with Wilkie Collins, which satirises Rae and the Inuit. Twentieth-century archaeology work in King William Island later confirmed that the members of the Franklin expedition resorted to cannibalism.
In 1855, when Dickens's good friend the Liberal MP Austen Henry Layard formed an Administrative Reform Association to demand significant reforms of Parliament, Dickens joined and volunteered his resources in support of Layard's cause. With the exception of Lord John Russell, who was the only leading politician in whom Dickens had any faith and to whom he later dedicated A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens believed that the political aristocracy and their incompetence were the death of England. When he and Layard were accused of fomenting class conflict, Dickens replied that the classes were already in opposition and the fault was with the aristocratic class. Dickens used his pulpit in Household Words to champion the Reform Association. He also commented on foreign affairs, declaring his support for Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, helping raise funds for their campaigns and stating that "a united Italy would be of vast importance to the peace of the world, and would be a rock in Louis Napoleon's way," and that "I feel for Italy almost as if I were an Italian born." Dickens also published dozens of writings in Household Words supporting vaccination, including multiple laudations for the vaccine pioneer Edward Jenner.
Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857, Dickens joined in the widespread criticism of the East India Company for its role in the event, but reserved his fury for Indians, wishing that he was the commander-in-chief in India so that he would be able to "do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested."
In 1857 Dickens hired professional actresses for The Frozen Deep, which he and his protégé Wilkie Collins had written. Dickens fell in love with one of the actresses, Ellen Ternan, and this passion was to last the rest of his life. In 1858, when Dickens was 45 and Ternan 18, divorce would have been scandalous for someone of his fame. After publicly accusing Catherine of not loving their children and suffering from "a mental disorder"—statements that disgusted his contemporaries, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning—Dickens attempted to have Catherine institutionalised. When his scheme failed, they separated. Catherine left, never to see her husband again, taking with her one child. Her sister Georgina, who stayed at Gads Hill, raised the other children.
During this period, whilst pondering a project to give public readings for his own profit, Dickens was approached through a charitable appeal by Great Ormond Street Hospital to help it survive its first major financial crisis. His "Drooping Buds" essay in Household Words earlier on 3 April 1852 was considered by the hospital's founders to have been the catalyst for the hospital's success. Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked by his friend, the hospital's founder Charles West, to preside over the appeal, and he threw himself into the task, heart and soul. Dickens's public readings secured sufficient funds for an endowment to put the hospital on a sound financial footing; one reading on 9 February 1858 alone raised £3,000.
After separating from Catherine, Dickens undertook a series of popular and remunerative reading tours which, together with his journalism, were to absorb most of his creative energies for the next decade, in which he was to write only two novels. His first reading tour, lasting from April 1858 to February 1859, consisted of 129 appearances in 49 towns throughout England, Scotland and Ireland. Dickens's continued fascination with the theatrical world was written into the theatre scenes in Nicholas Nickleby, and he found an outlet in public readings. In 1866, he undertook a series of public readings in England and Scotland, with more the following year in England and Ireland.
Other works soon followed, including A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861), which were resounding successes. Set in London and Paris, A Tale of Two Cities is his best-known work of historical fiction and includes the famous opening sentence "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." It is regularly touted as one of the best-selling novels of all time. Themes in Great Expectations include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil.
In early September 1860, in a field behind Gads Hill, Dickens made a bonfire of most of his correspondence; he spared only letters on business matters. Since Ellen Ternan also destroyed all of his letters to her, the extent of the affair between the two remains speculative. In the 1930s, Thomas Wright recounted that Ternan had unburdened herself to a Canon Benham and gave currency to rumours they had been lovers. Dickens's daughter, Kate Perugini, stated that the two had a son who died in infancy to biographer Gladys Storey in an interview before the former's death in 1929. Storey published her account in Dickens and Daughter, though no contemporary evidence was given. On his death, Dickens settled an annuity on Ternan which made her financially independent. Claire Tomalin's book The Invisible Woman argues that Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life. The book was turned into a play, Little Nell, by Simon Gray, and a 2013 film. During the same period, Dickens furthered his interest in the paranormal, becoming one of the early members of The Ghost Club in London. In Christmas Eve of 1862, a theatrical production of his novella, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, saw the first public demonstration of "Pepper's ghost"—a method of projecting the illusion of a ghost into a theatre (named after its developer John Henry Pepper)—which caused a sensation among those in attendance at the Regent Street theatre.
In June 1862 he was offered £10,000 for a reading tour of Australia. He was enthusiastic, and even planned a travel book, The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down, but ultimately decided against the tour. Two of his sons, Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, migrated to Australia, Edward becoming a member of the Parliament of New South Wales as Member for Wilcannia between 1889 and 1894.
== Later life ==
On 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris with Ellen Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash in Kent. The train's first seven carriages plunged off a cast iron bridge that was under repair and ten passengers were killed. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track—which was left hanging precariously off the bridge—was the one in which Dickens was travelling. For three hours before rescuers arrived, Dickens tended and comforted the wounded and the dying with a flask of brandy and a hat refreshed with water. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it.
Dickens later used the experience of the crash 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 also based the story on several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash in Sussex of 1861. Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquest to avoid disclosing that he had been travelling with Ternan and her mother, which would have caused a scandal. After the crash, Dickens was nervous when travelling by train and would use alternative means when available. In 1868 he wrote, "I have sudden vague rushes of terror, even when riding in a hansom cab, which are perfectly unreasonable but quite insurmountable." Dickens's son, Henry, recalled, "I have seen him sometimes in a railway carriage when there was a slight jolt. When this happened he was almost in a state of panic and gripped the seat with both hands."
=== Second visit to the United States ===
While he contemplated a second visit to the United States, the outbreak of the Civil War in America in 1861 delayed his plans. On 9 November 1867, over two years after the war, Dickens set sail from Liverpool for his second American reading tour. Landing in Boston, he devoted the rest of the month to a round of dinners with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his American publisher, James T. Fields. In early December, the readings began. He performed 76 readings, netting £19,000, from December 1867 to April 1868. Dickens shuttled between Boston and New York, where he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall. Although he had started to suffer from what he called the "true American catarrh", he kept to a packed schedule, even managing to squeeze in some sleighing in Central Park.
During his travels, he saw a change in the people and the circumstances of America. His final appearance was at a banquet the American Press held in his honour at Delmonico's on 18 April, when he promised never to denounce America again. By the end of the tour Dickens could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. On 23 April he boarded the Cunard liner Russia to return to Britain, barely escaping a federal tax lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.
=== Farewell readings ===
In 1868–69 Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" in England, Scotland and Ireland, beginning on 6 October. He managed, of a contracted 100 readings, to give 75 in the provinces, with a further 12 in London. As he pressed on he was affected by giddiness and fits of paralysis. He had a stroke on 18 April 1869 in Chester. He collapsed on 22 April 1869, in Preston, Lancashire; on doctor's advice, the tour was cancelled. After further provincial readings were cancelled, he began work on his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Described as a "dark and gothic" tale, his unfinished novel focuses on Drood's uncle, John Jasper, a drug-addicted choirmaster. It was fashionable in the 1860s to 'do the slums' and, in company, Dickens visited opium dens in Shadwell in the East End of London, where he witnessed an elderly addict called "Laskar Sal", who formed the model for "Opium Sal" in Edwin Drood.
After Dickens regained enough strength, he arranged, with medical approval, for a final series of readings to partly make up to his sponsors what they had lost due to his illness. There were 12 performances, on 11 January to 15 March 1870; the last at 8:00pm at St James's Hall, London. Though in grave health by then, he read A Christmas Carol and The Trial from Pickwick. On 2 May, he made his last public appearance at a Royal Academy banquet in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, paying a special tribute on the death of his friend the illustrator Daniel Maclise.
=== Death ===
On 8 June 1870 Dickens had another stroke at his home after a full day's work on Edwin Drood. He never regained consciousness. The next day, he died at Gads Hill Place. His biographer Claire Tomalin has suggested Dickens was actually in Peckham when he had had the stroke and his mistress Ellen Ternan and her maids had him taken back to Gads Hill so that the public would not know the truth about their relationship. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner", he was laid to rest in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads:
To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world.
A letter from Dickens to the Clerk of the Privy Council in March indicates he had been offered and accepted a baronetcy, which was not gazetted before his death. His last words were "On the ground" in response to his sister-in-law Georgina's request that he lie down. On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens was buried in the Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley delivered a memorial elegy, lauding "the genial and loving humorist whom we now mourn", for showing by his own example "that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be innocent". Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the novelist's grave, Stanley assured those present that "the spot would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue."
In his will, drafted more than a year before his death, Dickens left the care of his £80,000 estate (£10,000,000 in 2023) to his long-time colleague John Forster and his "best and truest friend" Georgina Hogarth who, along with Dickens's two sons, also received a tax-free sum of £8,000 (equivalent to £1,000,000 in 2023). He confirmed his wife Catherine's annual allowance
of £600 (£70,000 in 2023). He bequeathed £19 19s (£2,000 in 2023) to each servant in his employment at the time of his death.
== Literary style ==
Dickens's approach to the novel is influenced by various things, including the picaresque novel tradition, melodrama and the novel of sensibility. According to Ackroyd, other than these, perhaps the most important literary influence on him was derived from the fables of The Arabian Nights. Satire and irony are central to the picaresque novel. Comedy is also an aspect of the British picaresque novel tradition of Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett. Fielding's Tom Jones was a major influence on the 19th-century novelist including Dickens, who read it in his youth and named a son Henry Fielding Dickens after him. Influenced by Gothic fiction—a literary genre that began with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole—Dickens incorporated Gothic imagery, settings and plot devices in his works. Victorian gothic moved from castles and abbeys into contemporary urban environments: in particular London, such as Dickens's Oliver Twist and Bleak House. The jilted bride Miss Havisham from Great Expectations is one of Dickens's best-known gothic creations; living in a ruined mansion, her bridal gown effectively doubles as her funeral shroud.
No other writer had such a profound influence on Dickens as William Shakespeare. On Dickens's veneration of Shakespeare, Alfred Harbage wrote in A Kind of Power: The Shakespeare-Dickens Analogy (1975) that "No one is better qualified to recognise literary genius than a literary genius". Regarding Shakespeare as "the great master" whose plays "were an unspeakable source of delight", Dickens's lifelong affinity with the playwright included seeing theatrical productions of his plays in London and putting on amateur dramatics with friends in his early years. In 1838, Dickens travelled to Stratford-upon-Avon and visited the house in which Shakespeare was born, leaving his autograph in the visitors' book. Dickens would draw on this experience in his next work, Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), expressing the strength of feeling experienced by visitors to Shakespeare's birthplace: the character Mrs Wititterly states, "I don't know how it is, but after you've seen the place and written your name in the little book, somehow or other you seem to be inspired; it kindles up quite a fire within one."
Dickens's writing style is marked by a profuse linguistic creativity. Satire, flourishing in his gift for caricature, is his forte. An early reviewer compared him to the artist and social critic Hogarth for his keen practical sense of the ludicrous side of life, though his acclaimed mastery of varieties of class idiom may in fact mirror the conventions of contemporary popular theatre. Dickens worked intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that would reverberate with associations for his readers and assist the development of motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an "allegorical impetus" to the novels' meanings. To cite one of numerous examples, the name Mr Murdstone in David Copperfield conjures up twin allusions to murder and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery—he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator"—are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy. On his ability to elicit a response from his works, the English screenwriter Sarah Phelps writes, "He knew how to work an audience and how to get them laughing their heads off one minute or on the edge of their seats and holding their breath the next. The other thing about Dickens is that he loved telling stories and he loved his characters, even those horrible, mean-spirited ones."
The author worked closely with his illustrators, supplying them with a summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them. He briefed the illustrator on plans for each month's instalment so that work could begin before he wrote them. Marcus Stone, illustrator of Our Mutual Friend, recalled that the author was always "ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ... life-history of the creations of his fancy". Dickens employs Cockney English in many of his works, denoting working-class Londoners. Cockney grammar appears in terms such as ain't, and consonants in words are frequently omitted, as in 'ere (here) and wot (what). An example of this usage is in Oliver Twist. The Artful Dodger uses cockney slang which is juxtaposed with Oliver's 'proper' English, when the Dodger repeats Oliver saying "seven" with "sivin".
=== Characters ===
Dickens's biographer Claire Tomalin regards him as the greatest creator of character in English fiction after Shakespeare. Dickensian characters are amongst the most memorable in English literature, especially so because of their typically whimsical names. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley and Bob Cratchit (A Christmas Carol); Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin and Bill Sikes (Oliver Twist); Pip, Miss Havisham, Estella and Abel Magwitch (Great Expectations); Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay and Madame Defarge (A Tale of Two Cities); David Copperfield, Uriah Heep and Mr Micawber (David Copperfield); Daniel Quilp and Nell Trent (The Old Curiosity Shop), Samuel Pickwick and Sam Weller (The Pickwick Papers); and Wackford Squeers (Nicholas Nickleby) are so well known as to be part and parcel of popular culture, and in some cases have passed into ordinary language: a scrooge, for example, is a miser or someone who dislikes Christmas festivity.
His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. "Gamp" became a slang expression for an unwieldy umbrella from the character Mrs Gamp because she always carries one, and "Pickwickian", "Pecksniffian" and "Gradgrind" all entered dictionaries due to Dickens's original portraits of such characters who were, respectively, quixotic, hypocritical and vapidly factual. Sam Weller, the character that made Dickens famous, became known for his Wellerisms—one-liners that turn proverbs on their heads. Many were drawn from real life: Mrs Nickleby is based on his mother, although she did not recognise herself in the portrait, just as Mr Micawber is constructed from aspects of his father's 'rhetorical exuberance'; Harold Skimpole in Bleak House is based on James Henry Leigh Hunt; his wife's dwarfish chiropodist recognised herself in Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield. Perhaps Dickens's impressions on his meeting with Hans Christian Andersen informed the delineation of Uriah Heep (a term synonymous with sycophant).
Virginia Woolf maintained that "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens" as he produces "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks". T. S. Eliot wrote that Dickens "excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings". One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. Dickens described London as a magic lantern, inspiring the places and people in many of his novels. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital—Dickens's London—are described over the course of his body of work. Walking the streets (particularly around London) formed an integral part of his writing life, stoking his creativity. Dickens was known to regularly walk at least a dozen miles (19 km) per day, and once wrote, "If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish."
=== Autobiographical elements ===
Authors frequently draw their portraits of characters from people they have known in real life. David Copperfield is regarded by many as a veiled autobiography of Dickens. The scenes of interminable court cases and legal arguments in Bleak House reflect Dickens's experiences as a law clerk and court reporter, and in particular his direct experience of the law's procedural delay during 1844 when he sued publishers in Chancery for breach of copyright. Dickens's father was sent to prison for debt, and this became a common theme in many of his books, with the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit resulting from Dickens's own experiences of the institution. Lucy Stroughill, a childhood sweetheart, may have affected several of Dickens's portraits of girls such as Little Em'ly in David Copperfield and Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities.
Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew the details of his early life until six years after his death, when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated. Though Skimpole brutally sends up Leigh Hunt, some critics have detected in his portrait features of Dickens's own character, which he sought to exorcise by self-parody.
=== Episodic writing ===
A pioneer of the serial publication of narrative fiction, Dickens wrote most of his major novels in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as Master Humphrey's Clock and Household Words, later reprinted in book form. These instalments made the stories affordable and accessible, with the audience more evenly distributed across income levels than before. His instalment format inspired a narrative that he would explore and develop throughout his career, and the regular cliffhangers made each new episode widely anticipated. When The Old Curiosity Shop was being serialised, American fans waited at the docks in New York harbour, shouting out to the crew of an incoming British ship, "Is little Nell dead?" Dickens was able to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end. He wrote, "The thing has to be planned for presentation in these fragments, and yet for afterwards fusing together as an uninterrupted whole."
Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers and friends. His friend Forster had a significant hand in reviewing his drafts, an influence that went beyond matters of punctuation; he toned down melodramatic and sensationalist exaggerations, cut long passages (such as the episode of Quilp's drowning in The Old Curiosity Shop), and made suggestions about plot and character. It was he who suggested that Charley Bates should be redeemed in Oliver Twist. Dickens had not thought of killing Little Nell and it was Forster who advised him to entertain this possibility as necessary to his conception of the heroine. When in 1863 the Jewish English reader Eliza Davis wrote to rebuke him for having "encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew" with the character of Fagin in Oliver Twist, Dickens halted the second printing of the novel and made some changes to the original 1837 text. He also created a group of sympathetic Jewish characters in his next novel, Our Mutual Friend, published 1864–1865.
At the helm in popularising cliffhangers and serial publications in Victorian literature, Dickens's influence can also be seen in television soap operas and film series, with The Guardian stating that "the DNA of Dickens's busy, episodic storytelling, delivered in instalments and rife with cliffhangers and diversions, is traceable in everything." His serialisation of his novels also drew comments from other writers. In the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Wrecker, Captain Nares, investigating an abandoned ship, remarked: "See! They were writing up the log," said Nares, pointing to the ink-bottle. "Caught napping, as usual. I wonder if there ever was a captain yet that lost a ship with his log-book up to date? He generally has about a month to fill up on a clean break, like Charles Dickens and his serial novels."
=== Social commentary ===
Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. Simon Callow states, "From the moment he started to write, he spoke for the people, and the people loved him for it." He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. In a New York address, he expressed his belief that "Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen". Dickens's second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime: it challenged middle class polemics about criminals, making impossible any pretence to ignorance about what poverty entailed. Today, Dickensian is a term applied to insanitary social conditions or grim institutions akin to those denounced by Dickens in his work, with the Oxford professor Peter Conrad writing, "Dickens, like Banksy, writes blackly prophetic graffiti on the wall."
At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged within society. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues—such as sanitation and the workhouse—but his fiction probably demonstrated its greatest prowess in changing public opinion in regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and oppression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of this condition is in Hard Times (1854), Dickens's only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In this work, he uses vitriol and satire to illustrate how this marginalised social stratum was termed "Hands" by the factory owners; that is, not really "people" but rather only appendages of the machines they operated. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address such problems of class oppression. For example, the prison scenes in The Pickwick Papers are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. Karl Marx asserted that Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together". George Bernard Shaw even remarked that Great Expectations was more seditious than Marx's Das Kapital. The exceptional popularity of Dickens's novels, even those with socially oppositional themes (Bleak House, 1853; Little Dorrit, 1857; Our Mutual Friend, 1865), not only underscored his ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also ensured that the Victorian public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored. Bleak House, a satire of protracted legal cases with Jarndyce and Jarndyce—a fictional long-running Chancery case which has been cited by courts as a symbol of a legal case that interminably drags on—the central plot of the novel, helped support a judicial reform movement that culminated in the enactment of legal reform in England in the 1870s.
It has been argued that his technique of flooding his narratives with an 'unruly superfluity of material' that, in the gradual dénouement, yields up an unsuspected order, influenced the organisation of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
=== Literary techniques ===
Dickens is often described as using idealised characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and the ugly social truths he reveals. The story of Nell Trent in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was received as extremely moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde. "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell", he said in a famous remark, "without dissolving into tears ... of laughter." G. K. Chesterton stated, "It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell, that I object to", arguing that the maudlin effect of his description of her life owed much to the gregarious nature of Dickens's grief, his "despotic" use of people's feelings to move them to tears in works like this.
The question as to whether Dickens belongs to the tradition of the sentimental novel is debatable. Valerie Purton, in her book Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition, sees him continuing aspects of this tradition, and argues that his "sentimental scenes and characters [are] as crucial to the overall power of the novels as his darker or comic figures and scenes", and that "Dombey and Son is [ ... ] Dickens's greatest triumph in the sentimentalist tradition". The Encyclopædia Britannica online comments that, despite "patches of emotional excess", such as the reported death of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843), "Dickens cannot really be termed a sentimental novelist".
In Oliver Twist, Dickens provides readers with an idealised portrait of a boy so inherently and unrealistically good that his values are never subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a gang of young pickpockets. While later novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit), this idealism serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant social commentary. Dickens's fiction, reflecting what he believed to be true of his own life, makes frequent use of coincidence, either for comic effect or to emphasise the idea of providence. For example, Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper-class family that rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group. Such coincidences are a staple of 18th-century picaresque novels, such as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, which Dickens enjoyed reading as a youth.
== Reputation ==
Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time, and remains one of the best-known and most-read of English authors. His works have never gone out of print, and have been adapted continually for the screen since the invention of cinema, with at least 200 motion pictures and television adaptations based on Dickens's works documented. Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime—early productions included The Haunted Man which was performed in the West End's Adelphi Theatre in 1848—and, as early as 1901, the British silent film Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost was made by Walter R. Booth. Contemporaries such as the publisher Edward Lloyd cashed in on Dickens's popularity with cheap imitations of his novels, resulting in his own popular 'penny dreadfuls'.
Dickens created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest British novelist of the Victorian era. From the beginning of his career in the 1830s, his achievements in English literature were compared to those of Shakespeare. Dickens's literary reputation, however, began to decline with the publication of Bleak House in 1852–53. Philip Collins calls Bleak House "a crucial item in the history of Dickens's reputation. Reviewers and literary figures during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, saw a 'drear decline' in Dickens, from a writer of 'bright sunny comedy ... to dark and serious social' commentary". The Spectator called Bleak House "a heavy book to read through at once ... dull and wearisome as a serial"; Richard Simpson, in The Rambler, characterised Hard Times as "this dreary framework"; Fraser's Magazine thought Little Dorrit "decidedly the worst of his novels". All the same, despite these "increasing reservations amongst reviewers and the chattering classes, 'the public never deserted its favourite'". Dickens's popular reputation remained unchanged, sales continued to rise, and Household Words and later All the Year Round were highly successful.
As his career progressed, Dickens's fame and the demand for his public readings were unparalleled. In 1868, The Times wrote, "Amid all the variety of 'readings', those of Mr Charles Dickens stand alone." A Dickens biographer, Edgar Johnson, wrote: "It was [always] more than a reading; it was an extraordinary exhibition of acting that seized upon its auditors with a mesmeric possession." The author David Lodge called him the "first writer to be an object of unrelenting public interest and adulation". Juliet John backed the claim for Dickens "to be called the first self-made global media star of the age of mass culture". The word "celebrity" first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1851, and the BBC states "Charles Dickens was one of the first figures to be called one". Comparing his reception at public readings to those of a contemporary pop star—the BBC compared his reception in the US to the Beatles—The Guardian states, "People sometimes fainted at his shows. His performances even saw the rise of that modern phenomenon, the 'speculator' or ticket tout (scalpers)—the ones in New York City escaped detection by borrowing respectable-looking hats from the waiters in nearby restaurants."
Among fellow writers, there was a range of opinions on Dickens. William Wordsworth thought him a "very talkative, vulgar young person", adding he had not read a line of his work, while the novelist George Meredith (1828–1909), found Dickens "intellectually lacking". In 1888 Leslie Stephen commented in the Dictionary of National Biography that "if literary fame could be safely measured by popularity with the half-educated, Dickens must claim the highest position among English novelists". Anthony Trollope's Autobiography famously declared Thackeray, not Dickens, to be the greatest novelist of the age. However, both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were admirers. Dostoyevsky commented: "We understand Dickens in Russia, I am convinced, almost as well as the English, perhaps even with all the nuances. It may well be that we love him no less than his compatriots do. And yet how original is Dickens, and how very English!" Tolstoy referred to David Copperfield as his favourite book, and he later adopted the novel as "a model for his own autobiographical reflections". The French writer Jules Verne called Dickens his favourite writer, writing his novels "stand alone, dwarfing all others by their amazing power and felicity of expression". Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was inspired by Dickens's novels in several of his paintings, such as Vincent's Chair, and in an 1889 letter to his sister stated that reading Dickens, especially A Christmas Carol, was one of the things that was keeping him from committing suicide. Oscar Wilde generally disparaged his depiction of character, while admiring his gift for caricature. Henry James denied him a premier position, calling him "the greatest of superficial novelists": Dickens failed to endow his characters with psychological depth, and the novels, "loose baggy monsters", betrayed a "cavalier organisation". Joseph Conrad described his own childhood in bleak Dickensian terms, noting he had "an intense and unreasoning affection" for Bleak House dating back to his boyhood. The novel influenced his own gloomy portrait of London in The Secret Agent (1907). Virginia Woolf had a love-hate relationship with Dickens, finding his novels "mesmerizing" while reproving him for his sentimentalism and a commonplace style.
Around 1940–41, the attitude of the literary critics began to warm towards Dickens—led by George Orwell in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (March 1940), Edmund Wilson in The Wound and the Bow (1941) and Humphry House in Dickens and His World. However, even in 1948, F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition, asserted that "the adult mind doesn't as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness"; Dickens was indeed a great genius, "but the genius was that of a great entertainer", though he later changed his opinion with Dickens the Novelist (1970, with Q. D. (Queenie) Leavis): "Our purpose", they wrote, "is to enforce as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers". In 1944 the Soviet film director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein wrote an essay on Dickens's influence on cinema, such as cross-cutting—where two stories run alongside each other, as seen in novels such as Oliver Twist.
In the 1950s, "a substantial reassessment and re-editing of the works began, and critics found his finest artistry and greatest depth to be in the later novels: Bleak House, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations—and (less unanimously) in Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend". Dickens was among the favourite authors of Roald Dahl; the best-selling children's author would include three of Dickens's novels among those read by the title character in his 1988 novel Matilda. In 2005, Paul McCartney, an avid reader of Dickens, named Nicholas Nickleby his favourite novel. On Dickens he states, "I like the world that he takes me to. I like his words; I like the language", adding, "A lot of my stuff—it's kind of Dickensian." The screenwriter Jonathan Nolan's screenplay for The Dark Knight Rises (2012) was inspired by A Tale of Two Cities, with Nolan calling the depiction of Paris in the novel "one of the most harrowing portraits of a relatable, recognisable civilisation that completely folded to pieces". On 7 February 2012, the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, Philip Womack wrote in The Telegraph: "Today there is no escaping Charles Dickens. Not that there has ever been much chance of that before. He has a deep, peculiar hold upon us".
== Legacy ==
Museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and works exist in many places with which Dickens was associated. These include the Charles Dickens Museum in London, the historic home where he wrote Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby; and the Charles Dickens' Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth, the house in which he was born. The original manuscripts of many of his novels, as well as printers' proofs, first editions and illustrations from the collection of Dickens's friend John Forster are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dickens's will stipulated that no memorial be erected in his honour—"I conjure to my friends on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial or testimonial whatsoever. I rest my claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works". Nonetheless, a life-size bronze statue of Dickens entitled Dickens and Little Nell, cast in 1890 by Francis Edwin Elwell, stands in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, United States. Another life-size statue of Dickens is located at Centennial Park in Sydney, Australia. In 1960 a bas-relief sculpture of Dickens, notably featuring characters from his books, was commissioned from the sculptor Estcourt J Clack to adorn the office building built on the site of his former home at 1 Devonshire Terrace, London. In 2014, a life-size statue was unveiled near his birthplace in Portsmouth on the 202nd anniversary of his birth; this was supported by his great-great-grandsons, Ian and Gerald Dickens.
A Christmas Carol is most probably his best-known story, with frequent new adaptations. It is also the most-filmed of Dickens's stories, with many versions dating from the early years of cinema. According to the historian Ronald Hutton the current state of the observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by A Christmas Carol. Dickens catalysed the emerging Christmas as a family-centred festival of generosity, in contrast to the dwindling community-based and church-centred observations, as new middle-class expectations arose. Its archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) entered into Western cultural consciousness. "Merry Christmas", a prominent phrase from the tale, was popularised following the appearance of the story. The term Scrooge became a synonym for miser, and his exclamation "Bah! Humbug!'", a dismissal of the festive spirit, likewise gained currency as an idiom. The Victorian-era novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called the book "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness".
Dickens was commemorated on the £10 note issued by the Bank of England that circulated between 1992 and 2003. His portrait appeared on the reverse of the note accompanied by a scene from The Pickwick Papers. The Charles Dickens School is a high school in Broadstairs, Kent. A theme park, Dickens World, was open in Chatham from 2007 to 2016. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth in 2012, the Museum of London held the UK's first major exhibition on the author in 40 years. From September 2011 to February 2012, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York celebrated him with its exhibition Charles Dickens at 200 with manuscripts, photographs, and original illustrations.
In 2002 Dickens was number 41 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. American literary critic Harold Bloom placed Dickens among the greatest Western writers of all time. In the 2003 UK survey The Big Read carried out by the BBC, five of Dickens's books were named in the Top 100.
Actors who have portrayed Dickens on screen include Anthony Hopkins, Derek Jacobi, Simon Callow, Dan Stevens and Ralph Fiennes, the latter playing him in The Invisible Woman (2013) which depicts Dickens's alleged secret love affair with Ellen Ternan which lasted for thirteen years until his death in 1870.
Dickens and his publications have appeared on a number of postage stamps in countries including: the United Kingdom (1970, 1993, 2011 and 2012 issued by the Royal Mail—their 2012 collection marked the bicentenary of Dickens's birth), the Soviet Union (1962), Antigua, Barbuda, Botswana, Cameroon, Dubai, Fujairah, Saint Lucia and the Turks and Caicos Islands (1970), Saint Vincent (1987), Nevis (2007), Alderney, Gibraltar, Jersey and Pitcairn Islands (2012), Austria (2013) and Mozambique (2014). In 1976 a crater on the planet Mercury was named in his honour.
In November 2018 it was reported that a previously lost portrait of a 31-year-old Dickens, by Margaret Gillies, had been found in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Gillies was an early supporter of women's suffrage and had painted the portrait in late 1843 when Dickens, aged 31, wrote A Christmas Carol. It was exhibited, to acclaim, at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1844. The Charles Dickens Museum is reported to have paid £180,000 for the portrait.
== Works ==
Dickens published 15 major novels, several novellas, a large number of short stories (including a number of Christmas-themed stories), a handful of plays and several non-fiction books.
=== Novels and novellas ===
Most of Dickens's work was initially published in serial form, either weekly in magazines or monthly in free-standing instalments, then reprinted in standard book formats.
The Pickwick Papers (The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club; monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837). Novel.
Oliver Twist (The Adventures of Oliver Twist; monthly serial in Bentley's Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839). Novel.
Nicholas Nickleby (The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby; monthly serial, April 1838 to October 1839). Novel.
The Old Curiosity Shop (weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, April 1840 to November 1841). Novel.
Barnaby Rudge (Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty; weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, February to November 1841). Novel.
Martin Chuzzlewit (The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit; monthly serial, January 1843 to July 1844). Novel.
A Christmas Carol (A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost-story of Christmas; 1843). Novella.
The Chimes (The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In; 1844). Novella.
The Cricket on the Hearth (The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home; 1845). Novella.
Dombey and Son (Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation; monthly serial, October 1846 to April 1848). Novel.
The Battle of Life (The Battle of Life: A Love Story; 1846). Novella.
The Haunted Man (The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain: A Fancy for Christmas-time; 1848). Novella.
David Copperfield (The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery [Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account]; monthly serial, May 1849 to November 1850). Novel.
Bleak House (monthly serial, March 1852 to September 1853). Novel.
Hard Times (Hard Times: For These Times; weekly serial in Household Words, 1 April 1854, to 12 August 1854). Novel.
Little Dorrit (monthly serial, December 1855 to June 1857). Novel.
A Tale of Two Cities (weekly serial in All the Year Round, 30 April 1859, to 26 November 1859). Novel.
Great Expectations (weekly serial in All the Year Round, 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861). Novel.
Our Mutual Friend (monthly serial, May 1864 to November 1865). Novel.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (monthly serial, April 1870 to September 1870). Novel. Left unfinished due to Dickens's death.
== See also ==
List of Dickensian characters
Racism in the work of Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens bibliography
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
Vision of Contemporary England in Dombey and Son
== Notes ==
== References ==
== Sources ==
== Further reading ==
"Dickens, Charles" . Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
== External links ==
=== Works ===
Charles Dickens's works on Bookwise
Works by Charles Dickens in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
Works by Charles Dickens at Project Gutenberg
Works by Charles Dickens at Faded Page (Canada)
Works by or about Charles Dickens at the Internet Archive
Works by Charles Dickens at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Online books, and library resources in your library and in other libraries by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens at the British Library. Archived 24 June 2021 at the Wayback Machine.
=== Organisations and portals ===
"Archival material relating to Charles Dickens". UK National Archives.
Portraits of Charles Dickens at the National Portrait Gallery, London
Charles Dickens on the Archives Hub
Archival material at Leeds University Library
The Dickens Fellowship, an international society dedicated to the study of Dickens and his Writings
Correspondence of Charles Dickens, with related papers, ca. 1834–1955
Finding aid to Charles Dickens papers at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
=== Museums ===
Dickens Museum Situated in a former Dickens House, 48 Doughty Street, London, WC1
Dickens Birthplace Museum Archived 9 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine Old Commercial Road, Portsmouth
Victoria and Albert Museum The V&A's collections relating to Dickens
Dickens House Museum Dedicated to Dickens' time in Broadstairs, Kent, including original letters and possessions
=== Other ===
Dickens on In Our Time at the BBC
Charles Dickens's Traveling Kit From the John Davis Batchelder Collection at the Library of Congress
Charles Dickens's Walking Stick From the John Davis Batchelder Collection at the Library of Congress
Charles Dickens Collection: First editions of Charles Dickens's works included in the Leonard Kebler gift (dispersed in the Division's collection). From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress
Charles Dickens at IMDb
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