Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic.
He created some of the world'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 recognized him
as a literary genius.
His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.
Charles Dickens drew upon his own experience for much of the material he put into his novels.
He was born in 1812 at Portsmouth.
His father was a Navy pay office clerk.
As a little boy, he was exceptionally bright and articulate.
He spent a lot of time alone reading all kinds of books.
He started his school at the age of 9
but was interrupted by his father’s imprisonment for debt at the age of 12.
He was forced to work in a shoe-polish factory.
When John was transferred to fast-paced London in 1822,
his free spending ways caught up with him.
Besides pawning the family’s books and furniture,
he was arrested for a 40-pound debt
and thrown into the notorious Marshalsea Prison.
“This wall is what’s left of the Marshalsea jail
where Dickens’ father was in prison
when Dickens was about 12, in prison for debt.
In fact, he took most of his family along with him.
They lived within the jail here.”
Except for Charles.
He was put to work in a rat-infested shoe-polish factory on the banks of Thames,
all for 6 shillings a week.
He learned to defend for himself,
navigating between London’s poverty-stricken slums and privileged neighborhoods
as he hiked half-way across town each weekend to visit his family behind the bars.
“He could see no way out there, and he thought himself as a young gentleman.
Suddenly found he was a manual worker with his family in prison.”
Those lonely, hungry days inflicted so bitter memories in the remainder of his life.
In a letter to his friend, Dickens said:
“Even now, famous and caressed and happy,
I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children;
even that I am a man;
and wander desolately back to that time of my life.”
In David Copperfield,
he spoke of that experience through the mouth of David:
“No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; …
and (I) felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned
and distinguished man, crushed in my bosom.”
His uncle helped his father clear the debt,
then his father was released and Charles was sent back to school again.
At the age of 15, he left school and worked as a clerk in a lawyer’s office.
He still spent a lot of time reading
and his experience as a Parliamentary reporter gave him rich knowledge
of different aspects of English life
and cultivated his descriptive power
which later made his creative power very impressive.
London is Charles Dicken’s magic lantern.
He showed us a realistic picture of London and its people in the early 19th century.
Soon after photography was developed in 1839,
pictures of the fogbound metropolis Charles described began to appear.
The Industrial Revolution was underway.
He saw the stage coach retired for railways and recorded the strange,
unearthly noises heard from vehicles of all shapes
mingled up together with one moving mass,
like running water.
“It was a place,” he wrote,
“where life and death went hand in hand, wealth and poverty stood side by side.”
As one of the very few to transcend the class barriers,
this self-made gentleman bridged the upper class and the lower class.
He can share the pastimes of the rich,
but he also lobbied for money to house thousands of homeless women
pushed into prostitution to survive.
He opposed executions for smaller crimes like forgery
and argued that illiterate street children would become criminals and bring the city down.
Dickens liked to stroll in the streets of London and was a careful observer
– he published his first work Sketches by Boz, in 1836,
which is a collection of short pieces Charles Dickens originally published
in various newspapers and other periodicals between 1833 and 1836.
They were re-issued in book form with illustrations in 1836.
The 56 sketches concern London scenes and people
which Charles observed in his daily life.
After that, he published one novel after another.
Perhaps he never forgot his father’s lesson.
All his life, Charles worked very hard
and published 15 novels, five novellas,
hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles.
In his later years, he did a lot of recitations of his works
and even joined in their performances.
In 1870, Dickens died of overwork,
leaving his last detective novel Edwin Drood unfinished.
Dickens’ literary career may be divided into 3 periods:
The First Period is form 1836 to 1841.
Fun, high spirit, and a tendency even to literary boisterous play alternating sometimes
with spells of sentimentality stroke the dominant note.
Novels appeared in rapid succession.
The Pickwick Papers was published as monthly installments for the first time
and made Dickens become the most popular living novelist of his day.
Oliver Twist was his representative work of this period of time.
It is about the poor law and the workhouse,
about how a little boy got in to the hands of a group of thieves
and how later he was rescued by gentle ladies and a kind-hearted gentleman.
Second Period lasts from 1842 to 1850.
In this period, Dickens’s naive optimism about capitalist society
was profoundly shaken.
His social criticism became deeper and more powerful.
In this period, he published Martin Chuzzlewit,
The Chimes, Dombey and Son, and David Copperfield.
The Third Period lasts from 1851 to 1870.
Dickens’ novels of this period
are much “darker” in content than their predecessors.
“Dickens, consciously and subconsciously, shows himself
more and more at odds with bourgeois society
and more and more aware of the absence of any readily available alternative.”
Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations
were all published in this period.
Dickens is a good story-teller: he is very familiar with London
and able to present London life with great accuracy and vividness;
he uses all kinds of novel-writing skills
such as coincidence, suspension, melodrama and so on to sustain the reader’s interest.
His characters-portrayal is the most distinguishing feature of his creation:
his characters are both types and individuals;
instead of being true to life, they are mostly larger than life;
he is best at child character portrayal;
horrible and grotesque figures are also successfully portrayed
as well as the broadly humorous or comical characters.
His writing from a child's point of view is very impressive.
His novels are characterized by a mingling of humor and pathos:
He seems to believe that life is itself a mixture of joy and grief;
he intends to make people laugh, cry and wait.