Charles Dickens

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles Dickens earned six shillings a week pasting labels onto pots of boot blacking in a tumble-down warehouse overrun with rats. He was twelve years old, and his father had just been locked inside the Marshalsea debtors' prison in Southwark. He later wondered "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age." That misery never left him. It became the foundation of his interest in reforming the conditions he believed the poor bore unfairly. The boy who tied string around blacking pots would grow into the most famous celebrity of his era, regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age. He created some of literature's best-known characters and pioneered a way of publishing fiction that gripped a nation in suspense. But how does a child laborer become an author whose name turns into an everyday adjective? Why would crowds wait on a New York dock screaming questions at an incoming ship? And what was he burning in a field behind his house in 1860? Dickens, born in Portsmouth in 1812, left a trail of clues across fifteen novels and more than fourteen thousand letters.

• 2. The Blacking Warehouse

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  Warren's Blacking Warehouse stood on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station. Dickens recalled it as "a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats." He worked ten-hour days there. A boy in a ragged apron and a paper cap came up one morning to show him the trick of tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin, and Dickens later borrowed it for Oliver Twist. When the warehouse moved to Chandos Street in Covent Garden, the boys worked beside a window that opened onto the street. Small audiences gathered and watched them. His biographer Simon Callow called this public display "a new refinement added to his misery." His release came through grief and money together. His father's mother died and left John Dickens four hundred and fifty pounds, and on the expectation of that legacy Dickens was freed from his connection to the prison. His mother, Elizabeth Dickens, did not immediately support taking him out of the warehouse. He never forgot it. "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back." That wound shaped his lifelong view of family roles, and his dissatisfied attitude toward women traces back to her failure to ask for his return.

• 3. Boz And The Bump

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  "Boz" was a family nickname Dickens used as a pseudonym for years. It came from "Moses," the name he gave his youngest brother Augustus after a character in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. Pronounced with a head cold, "Moses" became "Boses," then shortened to Boz. Under that name his first collection, Sketches by Boz, appeared in 1836. The success of those sketches brought a proposal from publishers Chapman and Hall to supply text for Robert Seymour's engravings in a monthly letterpress. Seymour took his own life after the second instalment. Dickens, wanting a connected series, hired "Phiz" to provide the engravings, and the result became The Pickwick Papers. The first few episodes flopped. Then came Sam Weller. The Cockney character entered in the fourth episode, and the story's popularity climbed sharply. The final instalment sold forty thousand copies. The Paris Review later called it "arguably the most historic bump in English publishing," the Sam Weller Bump. John Sutherland, Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, named The Pickwick Papers "the most important single novel of the Victorian era." The phenomenon spawned Pickwick cigars, playing cards, china figurines, Sam Weller puzzles, Weller boot polish and joke books. Dickens was a creature of capitalism who used new printing presses, advertising revenues and the railroads to sell more books. He made his work available in cheap bindings for the lower orders and in morocco-and-gilt for people of quality, a reach that ran from pickpockets to Queen Victoria, who found Oliver Twist "exceedingly interesting."

• 4. Writing In Fragments

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  Cliffhanger endings were Dickens's signature weapon. Most of his novels appeared in monthly or weekly instalments, a mode he pioneered and that became the dominant Victorian way to publish fiction. The format let him read his audience's reaction and modify plot and character as he went. When his wife's podiatrist felt distress that Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to mirror her own disabilities, he revised the character with positive features. Forster had a significant hand in this collaborative method. His friend toned down melodramatic exaggerations, cut long passages such as Quilp's drowning in The Old Curiosity Shop, and suggested that Charley Bates be redeemed in Oliver Twist. Dickens had not planned to kill Little Nell; it was Forster who advised him to consider it. Readers reached back across the ocean for her fate. When The Old Curiosity Shop was being serialised, American fans waited at the docks in New York harbour, shouting to the crew of an incoming British ship, "Is little Nell dead?" The masses found their own way in. Illiterate poor people each paid a halfpenny to have every new monthly episode read aloud to them, opening a new class of readers. The Guardian observed that "the DNA of Dickens's busy, episodic storytelling" is traceable in television soap operas and film series.

• 5. A Gallery Of Names

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  Mr Murdstone in David Copperfield carries twin allusions to murder and stony coldness. Dickens worked intensively on arresting names that would reverberate for his readers, giving what one critic called an "allegorical impetus" to his meanings. His biographer Claire Tomalin regards him as the greatest creator of characters in English fiction after Shakespeare. Some of those names left the page and entered the language. A "scrooge" means a miser or someone who dislikes Christmas festivity. "Gamp" became slang for an unwieldy umbrella, after Mrs Gamp who always carries one. "Pickwickian," "Pecksniffian" and "Gradgrind" all reached the dictionaries for the quixotic, hypocritical and vapidly factual figures Dickens drew. Sam Weller's one-liners that turn proverbs on their heads became known as Wellerisms. Many of these people were drawn from life. Mrs Nickleby is based on his mother, who did not recognise herself in the portrait, while Mr Micawber is built from his father's rhetorical exuberance. Harold Skimpole in Bleak House is based on James Henry Leigh Hunt. T. S. Eliot wrote that Dickens "excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings." One "character" was a place. Dickens described London as a magic lantern, and walked at least a dozen miles a day, once writing, "If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish."

• 6. The Reformer's Pen

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  "Strike a sledge hammer blow" for the poor was the resolve that produced A Christmas Carol. The 1843 novella took shape after a trip to Manchester to witness manufacturing workers' conditions and scenes at the Field Lane Ragged School. Dickens wept and laughed and wept again as he walked fifteen or twenty miles many a night through the black streets of London. Oliver Twist, his second novel, shocked readers with images of poverty and crime, making any pretence of ignorance about poverty impossible. It was the first Victorian novel with a child protagonist. The prison scenes in The Pickwick Papers are claimed to have helped shut down the Fleet Prison. His 1853 novel Bleak House, a satire on the judicial system, supported a reformist movement that culminated in the legal reform of the 1870s in England. His philanthropy extended past the page. Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached him in May 1846 to set up a home for fallen women of the working class. Dickens founded and managed Urania Cottage in Shepherd's Bush for ten years, setting house rules and interviewing residents. About one hundred women graduated from it between 1847 and 1859. Karl Marx asserted that Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together."

• 7. Ternan And The Bonfire

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  Ellen Ternan was eighteen and Dickens forty-five when he fell in love with her in 1857. He had hired professional actresses for The Frozen Deep, the play he wrote with his protégé Wilkie Collins, and this passion lasted the rest of his life. The cost to his marriage was brutal and public. After accusing Catherine of not loving their children and suffering from "a mental disorder," statements that disgusted contemporaries including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, he tried to have her institutionalised. When that failed, they separated. Catherine left and never saw her husband again. Her sister Georgina stayed at Gads Hill to raise the children. Then he destroyed the evidence. In early September 1860, in a field behind Gads Hill, Dickens made a bonfire of most of his correspondence, sparing only business letters. Ternan destroyed all his letters to her, so the affair remains speculative. Claire Tomalin's book The Invisible Woman argues that Ternan lived with him secretly for the last thirteen years of his life. The secrecy reached even into disaster. On the 9th of June 1865, returning from Paris with Ternan, Dickens survived the Staplehurst rail crash in Kent, where ten passengers were killed. He tended the wounded with a flask of brandy, then climbed back into his hanging carriage to retrieve the unfinished manuscript of Our Mutual Friend. He later avoided the inquest to keep from disclosing that he had been travelling with Ternan.

• 8. The Final Readings

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  Seventy-six readings netted Dickens nineteen thousand pounds during his second American tour, from December 1867 to April 1868. He gave twenty-two of them at Steinway Hall in New York and shuttled between there and Boston, where he dined with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. By the end he could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. At a banquet at Delmonico's on the 18th of April, he promised never to denounce America again. The tours were destroying him. His farewell readings in 1868 and 1869 brought giddiness and fits of paralysis. He had a stroke on the 18th of April 1869 in Chester and collapsed on the 22nd of April in Preston, Lancashire, and the tour was cancelled on doctor's advice. He then began his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a "dark and gothic" tale of a drug-addicted choirmaster named John Jasper. The end came at his desk. On the 8th of June 1870, after a full day's work on Edwin Drood, Dickens had another stroke at Gads Hill Place. He never regained consciousness and died the next day, aged 58. His last words were "On the ground," answering Georgina's request that he lie down. Against his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral in a private manner, he was laid to rest in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. A letter to the Clerk of the Privy Council in March shows he had accepted a baronetcy, which was never gazetted. Three ravens of the Tower of London have been named Grip, after the talking raven Dickens kept and wrote into Barnaby Rudge, the bird that helped inspire Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven."