 Charles John Huffham Dickens, 1812 - 1870
Charles Dickens was born at Landport, near the city of Portsmouth on the
south coast on England on Febuary 7, 1812.
He was the second son of eight
children. His father, John Dickens, was at the time of his birth, working
as a clerk at the Naval Pay office in Portsmouth.
The Dickens family suffered
a series of financial crises. The family moved to London in 1823, facing total
ruin. John Dickens was arrested for non-payment of his debts and imprisoned
in Marshalsea Debtor's Prison. He was joined there by the rest of the family,
except young Charles.
With his parents in prison, Charles was sent to work
at the age of twelve at a blacking warehourse in London. He received the
miserable sum of six shillings a week for sticking labels on bottles. Prison,
the courts, cheap and dirty rooms, and soul-destroting work were all to
figure in Dickens' writings. However, the experience of Dickens' childhood
were so painful that he would speak of them only with his closest friends.
After attending school only to the age of fifteen, Charles Dickens went to
work as a clerk for a legal firm in Gray's Inn, London. There he taught himself
shorthand notation and begun to to write freelance journalism. He did well
and was soon employed reporting debates in Parliament.
Dickens' writing developed
from short journalistic sketches to articles commissioned to accompany popular
illustrations of sporting events. His major breakthrough came when he started
to write fiction in popular magazines with a large readership.
His stories were
written in weekly installments and the sequence begun in 1836 with PICKWICK PAPERS.
The pattern of weekly episodes continued all through his later publications and
had an important influence on his literary style. OLIVER TWIST was begun while
PICKWICK PAPERS was in first editions and Dickens was frequently working on two
novels simultaneously. GREAT EXPECTATIONS was only written because another author's
serial was failing to win a readership and the publishers of the magazine turned
desperately to Dickens. He then begun writing episodes without knowing how the story
would end. The characterisations and descriptions which diverge from the main storylines
of Dickens' novels set him apart from other writers and allowed him to open doors
and shed light on many of the darker corners of Victorian life.
Dickens proceeded to write a series of highly popular novels that combined liberal
social criticism of the abuse of the poor and the hypocrisy of the official bureaucracy
in a gothic and sentimental style that appealed to Victorian tastes.
In the 1840's
Dickens wrote a series of Christmas novellas starting with the highly successful A
CHRISTMAS CAROL (1843). In the 1850's he established a weekly publication of social
comment HOUSEHOLD WORDS which sold tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of copies.
His success in Britain was repeated in the USA.
He had a large family, many friends, worked with philanthropic enterprises. He was
also interested in amateur theatrics, and via the theatre met Ellen Ternan, a young
actress, for whom he left his wife Catherine Hogarth.
In 1858 Dickens began to perform public readings of his work in England and America.
Biographers have suggested that it was the strain of these tours and performances
which caused Dickens' sudden physical decline in 1860's. At his death on June 8th
1870 he left a novel unfinished THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD.
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