Charles Dickens

Directly following CHAUCER [5], I have selected Charles Dickens, who, like the author of The Canterbury Tales, magnificently “numbered the classes of men.” Literary critic Edmund Wilson has called Dickens “the greatest dramatic writer that the English had had since Shakespeare who created the largest and most varied world.” Dickens’s enormous stature as a writer was acknowledged by his fellow Victorians, by TOLSTOY [4] and DOSTOEVSKY [14], and by such modern writers as GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [44] and GEORGE ORWELL [118]. With the exception of SHAKESPEARE [1], no writer in English literature has enjoyed a comparable degree of popular and critical acclaim. Dickens is sim-ply England’s greatest novelist and deserves to be ranked with the top literary artists of all time.

Despite such high praise, an appreciation of Dickens is not free from criticism. It is possible to charge him with sentimentality, of tugging too insistently at our heartstrings, and of reducing experience to idealized and overly melodramatic patterns. His power and singularity as a novelist more than compensate for his defects, however. His range and depth are enormous, while his imaginative power, energy, and intensity as a writer earn him a comparison with Shakespeare. Through the power of his imagination and skill, Dickens offers a unique view of the world, rich in comedy, horror, and pathos, and we live in a world that still can be described as Dickensian in many important ways.

The trajectory of Dickens’s career is a spectacular rise from what he considered the unspeakable degradation his family experienced in his youth. The second child and eldest son of John and Elizabeth Dickens, the novelist was born in Portsmouth, England, where his father worked as a clerk in the navy pay office. Both his parents came from lower-middle-class backgrounds of domestic service and clerical work. John Dickens, the inspiration for his son’s portrait of the tragicomic spendthrift Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield, could barely manage a respectable household, and Dickens’s childhood was disrupted by a series of moves to increasingly less genteel addresses, first in Chatham on the east coast of England and later in London.Charles was a slight, unathletic child who was extremely sensitive and a voracious reader. His early upbringing and imaginative habits explain much about his writing, particularly his love of theatrical blood-and-thunder scenes, with their dramatic confrontations between good and evil, the weak and the powerful. 

His earliest memories were the tales told by his nurse about a huge black cat that hunted small children and of “Captain Murderer,” who, like Sweeney Todd, converted his victims into meat pies. Remembering these stories, Dickens stated, “I suspect we should find our nurses responsible for most of the dark corners we are forced to go back to, against our wills.” One of his favorite toys was a miniature theater in which he could act out his favorite stories. The theater, therefore, was the backdrop for his initial imaginary creations, and his lifelong dramatic interest helps explain his later statement that “every writer of fiction in effect writes for the stage.”Dickens’s developing imagination received a traumatic jolt when his father was arrested for debt and sent to debtor’s prison. Two days after his 12th birthday, separated from his family, who accompanied John Dickens to prison in the custom of the time, Charles was sent to work as a boy apprentice in a blacking factory, pasting labels on pots of dye for 12 hours a day in a rat-infested warehouse. 

Having been encouraged in his intellectual accomplishments and claims to gentility, Dickens felt as if he had fallen through the social hierarchy to the lowest depths of the laboring class, “utterly neglected and hopeless.” After four months he was rescued by his father and allowed to resume his education, but the humiliating stigma cast a permanent shadow on his psyche. Years later, when breaking the silence of this deep secret by preparing to re-experience it in David Copperfield, Dickens recalled, “My father said I should go back no more, and should go to school. I do not write resentfully or angrily; for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am: but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.” It is possible to view Dickens’s frantic assault on success and some of his darkest themes, particularly the victimization of children, as a response to the pain caused by this early experience.

Critical estimation of Dickens’s career generally divides his novels into two groups: the early novels, from his debut with The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) to David Copperfield (1849–50), and his later novels, beginning with Bleak House (1852–53). Admirers of all that is commonly meant by the term Dickensian— the novelist’s irrepressible vitality and inexhaustible supply of eccentrics, comic situations, sentiment, and humor—locate Dickens’s greatness in this first period. Modern critics, beginning with George Bernard Shaw, generally tend to emphasize the complexity, psychological subtlety, and profound social exploration of the later novels as the primary source of Dickens’s genius. Regardless of reader preference, Dickens’s entire canon shows amazing technical and artistic development.

Dickens began his career as a novelist almost by accident, when he was hired to write narrative connectives for a series of illustrations of Cockney sporting scenes that became The Pickwick Papers, but he quickly took control of the project, shifting his story to the primary interest, and Pickwick became one of the 19th century’s phenomenal best-sellers. Dickens’s early books were mostly written in the serialized installment form that The Pickwick Papers first popularized, a “detached and desultory form of publication,” as he described it in his 1837 preface, in which “no artfully interwoven or ingeniously complicated plot can with reason be expected.”Improvised and with little pre-planning or attendance to a larger theme, Dickens’s early novels, such as Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Martin Chuzzlewit, show him working toward a more complex structure of characters who cause the drama rather than having it imposed on them, and much more elaborate and massive portraits of society supported by the most demanding narrative method of all, that of mystery and suspense. 

Dickens’s later novels—Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood—are all cut to the pattern of intrigue and detection that joins a vast network of relationships and social and psychological themes in a unified whole.Unlike most modern novelists, Dickens is a traditional storyteller who employs such theatrical techniques as secrets, surprises, and coincidences to heighten suspense and uncover universal patterns beneath the surface of things. His fictional formula, expressed in his preface to Bleak House, is to show the “romantic side of familiar things.” His novels are built on conflict, with dramatic action replacing authorial analysis and commentary. “My notion always is,” Dickens observed, “that when I have made the people to play out the play, it is, as it were, their business to do it, and not mine.” In the arranged collision of characters, Dickens reaches his desired illumination of increasingly more complex psychological and social themes. Through the combination of realism and symbolism, evident particularly in his later novels, Dickens anticipates the central dynamic of the modern novel, linking his work with later novelists such as THOMAS HARDY [43], JAMES JOYCE [7], FRANZ KAFKA [31], and WILLIAM FAULKNER [15].While working at a frenzied pace, Dickens still managed a full social and personal life. In 1836, he married Catherine Hogarth, who gave birth to 10 children. 

Although secure in his literary and financial success, Dickens remained restless and dissatisfied. He visited America, hoping to find an ideal democracy but discovering instead moral and political anarchy that helped confirm his own Englishness and increasing distrust of political solutions to social ills. Traveling and living abroad, busy as an editor of his own periodicals, acting in amateur theatricals and in dramatic readings from his books, Dickens channeled his restless energy into continual, often manic, activity. His later career was marked by domestic unhappiness, in which he separated from his wife and had an affair with Ellen Ternan, an actress 20 years his junior. 

In 1870, after a second tour of America and an exhausting series of public readings, and while at work on his last book, Dickens had a stroke and died in the grand house he had seen years before as a boy, with his father, as a symbol of material accomplishment impossibly beyond his reach.Dickens’s life is an amazing story of the power of the imagination to produce a seemingly inexhaustible supply of unforgettable characters—Pickwick, Sam and Tony Weller, Fagin, Bumble, Quilp, Scrooge, Pecksniff, Sairey Gamp, Micawber, Lady Dedlock, Mr. F’s Aunt, Miss Havisham, to name just a few—in an imaginary yet recognizable universe animated by the novelist’s great powers of visualization. Dickens remains the novelist nonpareil, capable of probing at the deepest level the light and dark elements of his mind and world.