Biography
Introducion
Charles Dickens was born in 1812 and he lived during a very challenging time for Europe. His stories were very realistic and sometimes very sad to read. They dealt with how life was for the poor and lower-classes. His art, although not always pleasant to read, has a unique style and I love the way Dickens put words together. He lived until 1870 and during his life-time, he wrote several books. Out of all his works, my favorites are "Great Expectations" and "A Tale of Two Cities".
Charles Dickens is to Victorian England what Shakespeare is to Renaissance England: he typifies the period his writings disclose and expose. The greatest comic genius of his age, Dickens relentlessly calls for reform at every level, implores us to embrace the disadvantaged for our own good, and offers the values of a loving heart and the image of a warm hearth as the emblem of the solution to the cruel and mindless indifference of a society given over to the pursuit of "money, money, money, and what money can make of life," as Bella Wilfer says in Our Mutual Friend.
Born in Portsmouth, England, on February 7, 1812, the second of John and Elizabeth Dickens's eight children, Charles was raised with the assumption that he would receive an education and, if he worked hard, might some day come to live at Gad's Hill Place, the finest house on the main road between Rochester and Gravesend. But John Dickens, on whom Mr. Micawber is based, moved the family to London in 1823, fell into financial disaster, was arrested for debt and imprisoned in the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison.
Forced to go to work
Charles was forced to go to work at Warren's Blacking Factory at Hungerford Stairs labeling bottles. In his Life of Charles Dickens, John Forster shares the fragment of Dickens's autobiography upon which David Copperfield's Murdstone and Grinby experiences are based: It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me, that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion on me -- a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt,
bodily or mentally -- to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.
Education
Dickens himself did not know how long this ordeal lasted, "whether for a year, or much more, or less"; surely it must have seemed as if it would last forever to this sensitive twelve-year-old boy and it so seared his psyche that Dickens the man never "until I impart it to this paper [a full quarter century later], in any burst of confidence to anyone, my own wife not excepted, raised the curtain I then dropped, thank God."
Dickens was able to continue his education after his father received a legacy from a relative and was released from the Marshalsea. Charles attended Wellington House Academy from 1824 to 1826 before taking work as a clerk in Gray's Inn for two years. In order to qualify himself to become a newspaper parliamentary reporter, Dickens spent eighteen months studying shorthand, a perfect command of which was "equal in difficulty to the mastery of six languages," he was cautioned, and studying in the reading room of the British Museum.
Reputation for his quickness
He won a reputation for his quickness and accuracy during his two years (1828-1830) as a reporter in the court of Doctors' Commons before reporting for the True Sun and the Mirror Parliament and finally becoming a reporter for the Morning Chronicle in 1834. Dickens's first published piece appeared in the December, 1833, number of the Monthly Magazine , followed by nine others, the last two appearing over the signature "Boz," a pseudonym Dickens adopted from a pet name for his younger brother. These sketches were collected into two volumes and published on Dickens's twenty-fourth birthday, February 7, 1836, as Sketches by Boz. Illustrative of Everyday Life and Everyday People.
Dickens's skills as an observant reporter intimately familiar with middle and lower class London are demonstrated in these descriptive vignettes of everyday life, which also reveal his high humor and his deep concern for social justice, qualities that will dominate his novels.
Marriage
On April 2, 1836, Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, daughter of George Hogarth, with whom Dickens worked on the Morning Chronicle . Catherine and Charles had ten children before they separated in 1858. Mary Hogarth, Catherine's beautiful younger sister, joined the Dickens household shortly after the honeymoon. Mary's death, at seventeen years of age, in Dickens's arms established in his mind an image of ideal womanhood that never left him. The ring he took from Mary's dead finger remained on his hand until his own death.
Charles Dickens is to Victorian England what Shakespeare is to Renaissance England
The introduction of Sam Weller into the fourth number of Pickwick Papers (1836-37) launched the most popular literary career in the history of the language. Pickwick Papers became a publishing phenomenon, selling forty thousand copies of every issue. Published in twenty monthly installments, Pickwick took England by storm: Judges read it on the bench, doctors in the carriages between visiting patients, boys on the street. Carlyle tells Forster the story of a clergyman who, after consoling a sick person, was alarmed to hear the patient exclaim, upon the clergyman's leaving the sickroom, "Well, Thank God, Pickwick will be out in ten days anyway!"
People named their pet animals after characters in the novel; there were Pickwick hats, cigars, and coats, and innumerable plays and sequels based on the original. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club chronicle the amusing misadventures of Mr. Pickwick, a lovable innocent who seeks to discover the world with his youthful companions, parodies of the lover, the sportsman, and the poet. While the Papers begin as a hilarious romp parodying the eighteenth-century novels Dickens had pored over as a child, they eventually assume a shape rising to the mythic level of great literature.
Inflences of education
Pickwick's education, under the guidance of Sam Weller, his streetwise, Cockney manservant, leads him to the discovery of the world of shyster lawyers, guile, corruption, vice, and imprisonment. The comic exuberance of Pickwick dominates this dark underside, though, and the sheer energy and wonderful good humor of the Papers carries the sunny day. There are, however, the Interpolated Tales of madness, betrayal, and murder, and Mr. Pickwick is forced to become a prisoner in his own room in the Fleet, for three months.
The horrors young Charles Dickens had witnessed as a boy working in the blacking warehouse while his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea are not eliminated from Pickwick's world; indeed, his awareness of their existence is what allows Mr. Pickwick to become a fully loving, if finally not fully effective human being, who, with Sam's help, can see reality and relieve evil--to the best of his limited abilities.
Started Oliver Twist
Even as Pickwick Papers was enjoying its huge success, Dickens started Oliver Twist; or The Parish Boy's Progress in January, 1837; it continued in monthly numbers through 1838. In Oliver , Dickens explores the social evils attendant upon a political economy that made pauperism the rule rather than the exception. Oliver flees the cruel Sowerbys where he is apprenticed as an undertaker, having been sold to them by the workhouse for daring to ask for more -- food, love, nutrition, warmth -- and seeks his fortune in the criminal slum world of London proper.
Befriended by the irrepressible Artful Dodger, he discovers warmth and good humor in Fagin's den, among thieves, pickpockets, prostitutes, and burglars. Dickens presents an unrelenting portrait of the filth and squalor that surround poverty and, refusing to romanticize the criminal world, at the same time makes it clear that this sector has been abandoned by society just as surely as Oliver and the other Parish Boys have been abandoned by an unresponsive system. This is the world the young Dickens saw at the blacking warehouse.
Shop (1840), beginning with the fourth number of Master Humphrey's Clock and resuming intermittently until the ninth chapter, at which point it continued uninterrupted. The story of the innocent Nell surrounded by surrealistic figures like Quilp and his gang and continuing onto a nightmarish journey through the industrial inferno with her half-crazed, gambleholic grandfather calls forth all of Dickens's original genius. The death of Nell, based on the death of Mary Hogarth, caused a nation to weep and skyrocketed sales to 100,000 copies. The publication of The Old Curiosity Shop secured Dickens's success not only in England but in America, where he was now famous as well.