Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian age. Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, published in monthly or weekly instalments, made him a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic. His characters, from Scrooge to Mr Micawber, became part of the language, and his novels exposed the poverty and injustice of industrial England.
Works
Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations
A childhood in a blacking factory
Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812, the second of eight children of John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. The family moved to Chatham, then to London, always living beyond their means. In 1824 his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea prison, where his wife and younger children joined him.
Charles, aged twelve, was sent to work ten hours a day in Warren's Blacking Warehouse near the Strand, pasting labels on pots of boot polish. The experience lasted only a few months, but it marked him for life. He told almost no one about it; his friend and biographer John Forster revealed it after his death, and Dickens gave a version of it to the young hero of David Copperfield.
From reporter to 'Boz'
After a few years of school, Dickens worked as a solicitor's clerk, learned shorthand and became a parliamentary reporter. His sketches of London life, signed 'Boz', were collected in 1836. That same year a publisher asked him to write text to accompany comic engravings about a sporting club; the result, The Pickwick Papers, began slowly and then, with the arrival of the cockney servant Sam Weller, sold tens of thousands of copies a month.
At twenty-four Dickens was famous. He married Catherine Hogarth in 1836, and they had ten children. Oliver Twist (1837–39), with its workhouse orphan and its thieves' kitchen led by Fagin, was followed by Nicholas Nickleby, which attacked cruel Yorkshire boarding schools, and The Old Curiosity Shop.
The serial novelist
Dickens published almost all his novels in parts, usually twenty monthly numbers with illustrations, or in weekly instalments in the magazines he edited, Household Words and later All the Year Round. Readers followed his stories as they appeared and wrote to him about the fate of his characters; he adjusted his plots as he went.
His later novels are darker and more ambitious: Bleak House (1852–53) satirises the endless lawsuits of the Court of Chancery, Hard Times describes an industrial town, Little Dorrit returns to the debtors' prison. A Christmas Carol (1843), written in six weeks, helped shape the modern idea of Christmas as a time of family and generosity.
Public readings and last years
From 1858 Dickens gave paid public readings of his works, acting out the voices of his characters before huge audiences in Britain and the United States. The readings brought him a fortune but exhausted him, especially the violent scene of Nancy's murder from Oliver Twist. The same year he separated from his wife; he had fallen in love with a young actress, Ellen Ternan.
In June 1865 he survived a railway accident at Staplehurst, in Kent, in which ten people died; he helped the injured among the wreckage. He never fully recovered from the shock. He died at his house, Gad's Hill Place, on 9 June 1870, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood half finished, and was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Anecdotes
Is Little Nell dead?
The Old Curiosity Shop came out in weekly parts in 1840–41, and readers grew deeply attached to its young heroine, Little Nell. According to a story often told, crowds waited on the docks of New York for the ship bringing the final instalment from England and called out to the sailors to ask whether Little Nell was dead. She was.
The manuscript saved from the train
When the train carrying Dickens and Ellen Ternan derailed on a bridge at Staplehurst in 1865, his first-class carriage was left hanging over the river. After helping the wounded, he remembered that he had left the manuscript of the latest instalment of Our Mutual Friend in the carriage, and climbed back in to fetch it.
A pet raven
Dickens kept a pet raven named Grip, which could speak several words. He put it into his novel Barnaby Rudge (1841) as Barnaby's companion. When Grip died, Dickens had it stuffed; Edgar Allan Poe reviewed Barnaby Rudge, and the bird is often said to have inspired his poem The Raven.
Frequently asked questions
What are Charles Dickens's most famous books?
A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House and The Pickwick Papers are the best known.
Why did Dickens write in instalments?
Publishing in monthly or weekly parts made novels cheaper for readers, who paid a shilling at a time, and kept them waiting for the next number. Dickens's success established the serial as the main form of the Victorian novel.
Which novel did Dickens call his favourite?
David Copperfield. In a preface he wrote that, like many fond parents, he had a favourite child, and that its name was David Copperfield. The novel draws more than any other on his own life.
Where is Dickens buried?
In Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, although he had asked for a simple funeral. The grave was left open for two days so that thousands of people could file past.