Dickensindex

Biography of Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England, on February 7, 1812. He was the second of eight children. His mother had been in service to Lord Crew, and his father worked as a clerk for the Naval Pay office. The John Dickens was imprisoned for debt when Charles was very young. Dickens went to work at a blacking warehouse, managed by a relative of his mother, when he was twelve, and his brush with hard times and poverty affected him deeply. He later recounted these experiences in the semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield. Furthermore, the concern for social justice and reform which surfaced later in his writings grew out of the harsh conditions he experienced in the warehouse. Although he had little formal schooling, he was able to teach himself shorthand and launch a career as a journalist.

At the age of sixteen, Dickens got himself a job as a court reporter, and shortly thereafter he joined the staff of A Mirror of Parliament, a newspaper that reported on the decisions of the Parliament. Fast becoming disillusioned with politics, Dickens developed an interest in social reform and began contributing to the True Sun, a radical newpaper.

Although his main avenue of work was as a novelist, Dickens continued his journalistic work until the end of his life, editing The Daily News, Household Words, and All the Year Round. His connections to various magazines and newspapers as a political journalist gave him the opportunity to begin publishing his own fiction at the beginning of his career.

While he published several sketches in magazines, it was not until he serialized The Pickwick Papers over 1836-37 that he experienced true success. A publishing phenomenon, The Pickwick Papers was published in monthly installments and sold over forty thousand copies for each issue. In 1836 Dickens also married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a fellow co-worker at his newspaper. The couple had ten children before their separation in 1858.

Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby followed in monthly installments, and both reflected Dickens's understanding of the lower classes as well as his comic genius. In 1843, Dickens published one of his most famous works, A Christmas Carol. His disenchantment with the world's economic drives becomes clear in this work; he blamed much of society's ills on people's obsession with earning money and acquiring a status based on money.

His travels abroad in the 1840s, first to America and then through Europe, marked the beginning of a new stage in Dickens's life. His writings became longer and more serious. In David Copperfield (1849-50), readers find the same flawed world that Dickens discovered as a young boy. Dickens published some of his best-known novels including A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations in his own weekly periodicals.

The inspiration to write a novel set during the French Revolution came from Dickens's faithful annual habit of reading Thomas Carlyle's book The French Revolution, first published in 1839. When Dickens acted in Wilkie Collins's play The Frozen Deep in 1857, he was inspired by his own role as a self-sacrificing lover. He eventually decided to place his own sacrificing lover in the revolutionary period, a period of great social upheaval. A year later, Dickens went through his own form of social change as he was writing A Tale of Two Cities: he separated from his wife, and he revitalized his career by making plans for a new weekly literary journal called All the Year Round. In 1859, A Tale of Two Cities premiered in parts in this journal. Its popularity was based not only on the fame of its author, but also on its short length and radical (for Dickens's time) subject matter.

Dickens's health began to deteriorate in the 1860s. In 1858, in response to his increasing fame, he had begun public readings of his works. These exacted a great physical toll on him. An immensely profitable but physically shattering series of readings in America (1867-8) speeded his decline, and he collapsed during a 'farewell' series in England. On June 9, 1870, Charles Dickens died. He was buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. Though he left The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished when he died, he had already written fifteen substantial novels and countless shorter pieces. His legacy is clear. In a whimsical and unique fashion, Dickens pointed out society's flaws in terms of its blinding greed for money and its neglect of the lower classes of society. Through his books, we come to understand the virtues of a loving heart and the pleasures of home in a flawed, cruelly indifferent world. Among English writers, in terms of fame and recognition of characters and stories, he is second only to Shakespeare