Dickens
EARLY YEARS
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born February 7, 1812, in
Portsmouth, Hampshire, but left it in infancy. His happiest childhood years
were spent in Chatham (1817-22), an area to which he often reverts in his
fiction. From 1822 he lived in London, until, in 1860, he moved permanently
to a country house, Gad's Hill, near Chatham. His origins were middle class,
if of a newfound and precarious respectability; one grandfather had been
a domestic servant, and the other an embezzler. His father, a clerk in
the navy pay office, was well paid, but his extravagance and ineptitude
often brought the family to financial embarrassment or disaster. (Some
of his failings and his ebullience are dramatized in Mr. Micawber in the
partly autobiographical David Copperfield.) In 1824 the family reached
bottom. Charles, the eldest son, had been withdrawn from school
and was now set to manual work in a factory, and his father went to prison
for debt. These shocks deeply affected Charles. Though abhorring
this brief descent into the working class, he began to gain that sympathetic
knowledge of their life and privations that informed his writings. Also,
the images of the prison and of the lost, oppressed, or bewildered child
recur in many novels. Much else in his character and art stems from this
period, including, as the 20th-century novelist Angus Wilson has argued,
his later difficulty, as man and author, in understanding women: this may
be traced to his bitter resentment against his mother, who had, he felt,
failed disastrously at this time to appreciate his sufferings. She had
wanted him to stay at work when his father's release from prison and an
improvement in the family's fortunes made the boy's return to school possible.
Happily the father's view prevailed.
His schooling, interrupted and unimpressive, ended at 15. He became
a clerk in a solicitor's office, then a shorthand reporter in the lawcourts
(thus gaining a knowledge of the legal world often used in the novels),
and finally, like other members of his family, a parliamentary and newspaper
reporter. These years left him with a lasting affection for journalism
and contempt both for the law and for Parliament. His coming to manhood
in the reformist 1830s, and particularly his working on the Liberal Benthamite
Morning
Chronicle (1834-36), greatly affected his political outlook. Another
influential event now was his rejection as suitor to Maria Beadnell because
his family and prospects were unsatisfactory; his hopes of gaining and
chagrin at losing her sharpened his determination to succeed. His feelings
about Maria then and at her later brief and disillusioning reentry into
his life are reflected in David Copperfield's adoration of Dora Spenlow
and in the middle-aged Arthur Clennam's discovery (in Little Dorrit)
that Flora Finching, who had seemed enchanting years ago, was "diffuse
and silly," that Flora "whom he had left a lily, had become a peony."