Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

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Biography

DICKENS, CHARLES (February 7, 1812-June 9, 1870), novelist, was the son of a clerk in the Navy Pay Office,

whose own mother had been a housekeeper famous for her story-telling ability. Charles Dickens' mother was of

slightly higher social class, her father having been a naval lieutenant. Charles was the second of eight children,

and in his early childhood was frail and given to mysterious "spasms," which ceased at adolescence. When it is

said that the elder Dickens was the prototype of Micawber, and that this was one of the acutest of his son's

portraits, his nature will be understood immediately by all readers.

When the child was two, the father was transferred from Portsea, where Charles had been born, to London,

and a few years later was transferred again to Chatham. At first the boy was taught his letters by his mother,

and early lost himself in the classics of fiction that made up his father's library; from the beginning also he

reveled in the theater, and his first writing was a very juvenile tragedy. When he was nine he was put to school

with the son of a Baptist minister who was their next door neighbor, and when once more the family moved to

London he was left behind for a while in this school. But soon he was dispatched to London, and to his darkest

days. Micawber-Dickens was deep in debt, made futile compositions with his creditors, and finally found himself

in Marshalsea Prison, familiar to all Dickens readers from Little Dorrit. His wife and younger children lodged with

him there, but soon Charles found a room in a poor street by himself; for he was now a wage-earner, at barely

twelve. The father never had much concern for his children's education, though his oldest child, Fanny, was given

a musical training; when Charles came to London he was set to household tasks. Now, with the father in prison

for debt, a step-cousin found a place for him in his blacking factory. In a window, with curious passers-by to see

him, he and another boy spent long days labeling blacking-bottles for a few shillings a week. Charles had

dreamed already of fame, he was intensely ambitious, eager for learning, and exaggeratedly sensitive; it is no

wonder that he looked back with horror always on this experience--as witness David Copperfield.

But better days came. Just as in a Dickens novel, a legacy descended on the father, and he was free. He made

no attempt to release his son, but Charles quarreled with his employer, and got himself discharged. He never

forgave his mother for having gone and begged for his reinstatement; he gave to her the most unpleasant traits

of Mrs. Nickleby. The father in some manner secured a small pension besides his legacy, and then a job as

reporter. Gradually it came to his attention that his oldest son might do with a bit more schooling. (Before the

Marshalsea episode, Mrs. Dickens had tried to open a private school of her own, but not one pupil appeared.)

For three years Charles was sent to two small schools in succession. Then at fifteen he became a solicitor's

clerk. He taught himself shorthand, and spent most of his leisure reading in the British Museum. He was

graduated to court reporting, then to reporting in the House of Commons--for the True Sun (whose reporters he

led in a successful strike), then for his uncle's Mirror of Parliament, and then for the Morning Chronicle, where his

father was working. (It must be understood that in those days a reporter was merely a stenographer, not a writer.)

During this period he tried unsuccessfully to get on the stage. And he fell violently in love, at eighteen, with Maria

Beadnell, who was sent to Paris by her family and jilted him on her return.

His first published sketch appeared, without payment, in the Monthly Magazine, in 1833, and was signed "Boz,"

a brother's nickname. Later sketches appeared in the newly organized Evening Chronicle, which paid. These

sketches, illustrated by Cruikshank, were issued as a book in 1836. In the same year Dickens was married to

Catherine Hogarth. His real love among the Hogarth sisters (daughters of an editor) appears to have been Mary,

who was the original of "Little Nell" and who died, to his lasting grief, in 1837. But she was too young to marry,

and so by some strange transference he married her older sister Catherine--a most unfortunate decision for

them both.

The Pickwick Papers, written merely to accompany some projected "cockney sporting prints" by an artist who

killed himself before the series was finished, were Dickens' opportunity for fame and wealth. Before their

publication he was the obscurest of men; after it he was famous. An uninterrupted stream of novels followed in

the thirty-odd years remaining to him. In 1841 he underwent a surgical operation, but not even that interrupted his

work for long. Nor did his unhappy first trip to the United States, in 1842, a visit that resulted in American Notes

and Martin Chuzzlewit. These turned the uncritical adulation of his reception into bitter resentment, all the more

violent because much of his aspersion was deserved. Part of the antagonism was due to his righteous

indignation over the absence of a copyright law and the pirating of his books.

Dickens by this time had a house in London, in Regent's Park, and a summer home at Broadstairs. In spite of

ill-advised early contracts, and consequent quarrels with publishers, he was accumulating a fortune. But he had

a large family--Georgina Hogarth, his wife's youngest sister, lived with them and helped care for the children from

the end of 1842, when she herself was only fifteen--and he drove himself incessantly to provide for them

generously, and to live in the comfort and luxury to which the little blacking-factory slave had aspired. At this time

also he had, under the influence of Baroness Burdett-Coutts, become deeply interested in half a dozen

expensive philanthropic enterprises.

It is to this period that belongs the Dickens best known by his portraits and by the memories of those who met

him or heard him speak--a slight, rather undersized man with delicately aquiline features, fine florid skin, brown

hair worn slightly too long, and thin, wiry beard and whiskers. To this portrait must unfortunately be added also a

superfluity of gold chains and rings, and flamboyantly colored waistcoats, the pathetically naive vulgarities of a

man who was a very poor boy and had become a rich man.

Though Dickens never paid attention to physical strain, he did realize that the calls upon his time--it was at this

period that he began to act in private theatricals, a recreation which later absorbed enormous amounts of time

and energy--were interfering with his work. The year of 1844-45 he spent with his family in Italy. He returned to

England and engaged in his only financial failure--the editorship of the Daily News. At the end of two or three

weeks he found that he was entirely incompetent to handle such a position on a political daily, and resigned,

spending the next year in Lausanne and Paris. In 1849, however, he became editor of a magazine which was a

huge success, largely because it contained much of his own writing. This was the weekly Household Words. He

remained as editor of this and its successor, All the Year Round (the change was due to a quarrel with the

publishers of Household Words in the painful year 1858) until his death.

Even Dicken's unbounding energy was beginning to flag a little. But he was deep in private theatricals, benefits

for Leigh Hunt and the widow of Douglas Jerrold, free readings of his Christmas stories--the predecessors of the

highly paid public readings from his other works which finally killed him at fifty-eight. In 1856 he bought Gadshill

Place, which he had dreamed of as a small boy in Chatham, and it became his permanent home. Two years

later the English-speaking world was shocked by the news that Dickens had separated from his wife.

The marriage had been unhappy from the start. To modern eyes the shocking thing about it was, not that the

couple parted amicably and with due financial settlement in 1858, but that for twenty-two years they had lived

together, and produced ten children, when they had never really loved each other or been compatible at all.

The oldest son went with his mother, the others stayed with their father and their Aunt Georgina. The rumor that

connected Dickens' name with that of a young actress may have been pure libel; but his own public exhibition

of his private affairs was a startling mixture of conceit and caddishness. It is true that the letter he wrote,

explaining the separation and hinting at his wife's insanity, which was published in the New York Tribune, was

probably meant to be circulated only among his friends; but he published another article on the subject in

Household Words, and then quarreled with his publishers and his closest friend because they would not reprint

it in Punch!

Meanwhile he was undertaking more and more of the exhausting public readings, with the long, uncomfortable

train journeys which they involved, and pouring out manuscript as copiously as ever. He was never slovenly in

his writing, and put immense energy into it. His health broke, and in 1865 he had a slight stroke of paralysis

which should have been a warning; he was lame thereafter. But in 1867 and 1868 he went to America again.

This time he and the country, matured by Civil War, were both politer to each other, and he came back after a

triumph, with L 20,000 and permanently broken health. He was never well again. But he engaged himself for

another long reading tour, which he was, to his distress, forced to leave uncompleted. He kept on writing, and

was at work on The Mystery of Edwin Drood the day before he died. He came into the house from his writing

(in a garden house called the "Chateau"), said a few incoherent words, and fell stricken with apoplexy. He died

twenty-four hours later. Though his wish for a quiet funeral was observed, it was not in the country graveyard he

had contemplated, but in Westminster Abbey.

To understand Dickens' nature, it must be remembered that he was the apotheosis of the English lower middle

class. Because he was an authentic genius, he possessed all its attributes, good and bad, to a superlative

degree. He was tender-hearted, courageous, generous, supremely industrious, social-minded, a hater of

injustice and a champion of the oppressed--and he was also arrogant, obstinate, conceited, sentimental, and a

bit of a bounder. His vulgar tastelessness in dress, which could not hide the fine distinction of his features, was

no mere accident. He was entirely without self-criticism or self-discipline.

But he was also an inventive genius of the first order, with an enormous creative fertility. All the accusations

leveled against the characters and the novels of Dickens are quite true: he is guilty often of mawkishness, of

theatricality, of caricature, of artificiality. The world he created in thirty years is often quite unlike our world: the

people in it are frequently unreal, the incidents strained, the drama stagy. But it is a coherent, vital, and immortal

world in its own right. As one of his biographers has said, there is no other English author, not even

Shakespeare, who is admired for so many different reasons by so many different kinds of people. His buoyancy,

his charm, his tireless ebullience, attracted and held many friends for Charles Dickens the man. His imaginative

freshness, his deep and sincere tenderness and pity, his whole-souled humor that is seldom sharpened into wit,

his superabundance of creative energy, have built a a lasting place for Dickens in the history of English literature.

(M. A. deF.)