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Overview
**Charles Dickens was in his own day the most popular novelist who had ever lived, a public figure adored like a present-day pop star.** He still holds his place as one of the greatest English writers, an original genius whose novels are an essential link in the canon of English literature. He was also actively involved in the life of his time, campaigning for social and educational reform and sharply critical of contemporary society.
This short biography provides an excellent introduction to Dickens, from his disturbed childhood with a traumatic period working in a blacking factory, his instant success as a young writer and his tumultuous acclaim in both England and America, the major novels of the 1850s and '60s and the establishment of Household Words, to the final years as a public performer of his own work.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752487090 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 05/30/2012 |
| Series: | Essential Biographies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 680 KB |
| Age Range: | 12 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Charles Dickens
By Catherine Peters
The History Press
Copyright © 2012 Catherine PetersAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-8709-0
CHAPTER 1
Childhood and Youth, 1812–32
Charles Dickens was born at 13 Mile End Terrace, Landport, Portsmouth, on 7 February 1812, into a young, cheerful and improvident household. He was the second child and eldest son of John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and his wife Elizabeth, a pretty, vain 23-year-old, rumoured to have been dancing at a ball shortly before her son's birth.
John Dickens's parents had been upper servants in the household of Lord Crewe. His father, the steward, died when John was ten. His mother rose to be housekeeper and was immortalized by her grandson as the stately Mrs Rouncewell in Bleak House. John Dickens had a disastrous fondness for a gentlemanly style of living, which was perhaps inspired by the great houses he had known from below stairs as a child. His wife's family, the Barrows, belonged to the middle class to which he aspired, but they were haunted by a financial scandal. In 1810 Elizabeth's father, also employed in the Navy Pay Office, was caught embezzling large amounts of money, and fled to the Continent to escape imprisonment.
John and Elizabeth Dickens soon proved to be losers in the battle of life, and Charles grew up in the shabby-genteel world he was often to describe in his fiction. There were no safety nets for failures, and children from such a background learnt early the value of self-presentation. A few became great actors and great writers; many more, the hypocrites and confidence tricksters Dickens drew in his novels. His early experiences provided rich material for his writing, but also left him with a hatred of the 'toadyism' and pretence produced by the English class system.
The Dickens family never settled anywhere for very long. Before Charles was six months old they were on the move, and before he was twelve had changed their living quarters eight times. His parents were often evicted for the non-payment of rent, or were 'flitting', desperately attempting to keep ahead of creditors. John Dickens was in perpetual financial trouble. His sanguine, easy-going temperament, which contrasted with brief fits of acute, even suicidal depression, are brilliantly captured in the character of Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield. Waiting hopefully 'in case anything turned up' even as he slid further and further into debt, John Dickens was constitutionally unable to live within his means.
Eight children, of whom six survived infancy, did not improve the situation. The eldest, Fanny, was born in 1810, Letitia, the only one of Charles Dickens's siblings to outlive him, in 1816. Frederick and Alfred arrived in 1820 and 1822. The youngest child, Augustus, was born after a gap of five years, in 1827. Charles and his sister Fanny, his elder by only fifteen months, were thus set apart by four and five years from the younger children, and their relationship was close and affectionate.
When Charles was five, the family moved to Chatham, Kent, where John Dickens was employed in the naval dockyard. It was a lively, bustling town, full of sailors and soldiers. To the north were the misty, sinister Kent marshes with the prison hulks moored off-shore, the setting for Pip's terrifying encounter with the convict Magwitch in the opening chapter of Great Expectations. A few miles to the west, a complete contrast to lively Chatham, lay the drowsy city of Rochester, with its ancient cathedral and castle, 'Cloisterham' in Dickens's last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
These were the most settled years of Charles's childhood, and they lived in his memory as a golden age. A rise in John Dickens's salary to £300 a year led to a period of relative stability, and though his income soon had to be buttressed by loans cadged from friends and relatives – more often used for entertaining than to pay the tradesmen's bills – the family lived in a comfortable house with a garden. Even then Charles may have been burdened by underlying insecurity, for he vividly remembered his bad dreams and childhood terrors.
Some were induced by his nurse, Mary Weller. Dickens recalled how she scared him out of his wits with bloodthirsty tales. Her combination of the stories of Bluebeard and Sweeney Todd in the tale of 'Captain Murderer' who baked his brides in a pie, was particularly horrific. He later believed it was his nurse who aroused his fascination with the dangerous edge of things. 'If we all knew our own minds (in a more enlarged sense than the popular acceptation of that phrase),' Dickens wrote, 'I suspect we should find our nurses responsible for most of the dark corners we are forced to go back to, against our own wills.'
He was small in size, and not strong. He had attacks of feverish illness throughout his childhood, with pains in his side which persisted into adult life, and had not yet developed the immense physical energy he prided himself on later. Rather than joining in boys' games, he read voraciously. His father had acquired a cheap edition of standard novels, and before he was ten Charles was reading Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, and the novels of Smollett and Fielding, visualizing the characters and acting out their stories until they became more real to him than the world around him.
He also started to write, first plays and then stories; his lifelong passion for the theatre was awoken at Chatham. He and his sister Fanny, a gifted musician, were often called on by their proud father to entertain visitors with recitations and comic songs, and Charles discovered that the imaginative world so vivid to him could be projected and made real to others. He was often taken to the Theatre Royal in Chatham by an army doctor, Dr Lamert. Lamert was courting his mother's widowed sister, who had lived with the Dickens family for most of Charles's early life. Charles remembered how 'Richard the Third, in a very uncomfortable cloak, ... had made my heart leap with terror by backing up against the stage box in which I was posted, while struggling for life against the virtuous Richmond.' When Dr Lamert married Charles's aunt and they moved to Ireland, his son James, a teenager who befriended the little boy, lodged with the Dickens family. He continued to take Charles to plays and later made him a toy theatre.
Formal education played a minor part in Dickens's childhood; when his father was later asked where his son had been educated, he replied, Micawber-like, 'Why, indeed, Sir – ha! ha! – he may be said to have educated himself!' Charles was at first taught by his mother, as were most children at the time, and, like David Copperfield, recalled with pleasure 'the fat black letters in the primer, the puzzling novelty of their shapes, and the easy good-nature of O and Q and S'. Next came a dame school of which he had only hazy memories.
By the summer of 1821 the spacious house had to be given up. A smaller one was found near the dockyard, and Charles and Fanny were sent to a school next door, run by a clergyman. Charles remembered Mr Giles with affection, though he felt the lessons were rather haphazard. A year later the precarious happiness of the Chatham years came to an end.
John Dickens was transferred to Somerset House, the London headquarters of the Navy Pay Office, with a reduction in his salary. Charles was left to board with Mr Giles for a few months, before being despatched to London, alone, in the stage-coach. He never forgot 'the smell of the damp straw in which I was packed – like game – and forwarded, carriage paid'. He found the family settled in a mean house in Bayham Street, Camden Town, with a washerwoman as next-door neighbour. It was the beginning of the worst period of his life.
To his surprise he was not sent to school at the end of the summer, but kept at home to run errands and polish his father's boots, neglected and solitary. For the first time the full weight of his father's money problems became clear to the child. As they slipped into the direst poverty, he was despatched to sell or pawn the few remaining possessions of any value, including the precious books he had first read at Chatham. He later said of his father, 'he appeared to have utterly lost at this time the idea of educating me at all, and to have utterly put from him the notion that I had any claim upon him in that regard, whatever'. Yet when the newly established Royal Academy of Music opened its doors to the first pupils the following spring, Fanny Dickens was sent there as a boarder, at a cost, that could ill be afforded, of 38 guineas a year. The contrast with Charles's own neglect was unbearably painful.
In a last forlorn attempt to avoid disaster the family moved in the autumn of 1823 to a house in Gower Street, where, with no experience or training, Elizabeth Dickens tried to start a school. A brass plate was screwed to the door; circulars were printed and Charles ordered to leave them at all the doors in the locality. Not surprisingly, there were no takers, and in this extremity James Lamert suggested a way for Charles to contribute to the household.
Lamert was working in the counting house of a blacking factory owned by his cousin. He arranged for Charles to be employed there, covering the pots of blacking with paper and pasting labels on them, at a wage of 6s a week. He began work there on 9 February 1824, two days after his twelfth birthday.
It was the crucial experience of his life. He could not later remember how long he had spent in the tumbledown factory, overrun with rats, on the river at Hungerford Stairs, Strand; his agony seemed to go on for ever. In fact, it seems to have been at most five months. The only company he had was his fellow-workers, illiterate boys with whom he had nothing in common, though they were kind to him in their rough way. He later wrote in a passage that went almost word for word into David Copperfield:
No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship ... and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast ... the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in ... was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more.
The experience was to affect the whole course of his life and work, and his campaigns on behalf of neglected and abused children sprang from his own knowledge. Many poor children began work at twelve, or younger, in the 1820s, but Charles had been brought up with middle-class expectations. From being a cherished and admired eldest son, in a lively, if chaotic household, he had now been abandoned as worthless. The few shillings a week he earned barely served for his keep, so that his sacrifice seemed gratuitous, a means of getting him out of the way. It was a fairy story in reverse; through no fault of his own the prince had become a swineherd.
Ten days after Charles began work, John Dickens was arrested for debt and imprisoned in the Marshalsea, the debtors' prison. Elizabeth Dickens and the three younger children joined her husband in the prison, where, since John Dickens's salary continued to be paid, they were rather better off than before. They even kept the little maidservant from the Chatham workhouse who had come to London with them. Charles, however, was sent into lodgings in Camden Town with an old woman who later inspired the character of the formidable Mrs Pipchin in Dombey and Son.
Now the last vestiges of home life disappeared. His landlady did not provide his meals, and out of his 6s a week he had to budget for his breakfast and supper of bread, milk and cheese, as well as lunch. He found it hard to manage his money, and was often penniless and hungry at the week's end. 'No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support, from any one that I can call to mind, so help me God.' He wondered later why he had not become a little thief. He saw his family only on Sundays, when he collected Fanny from the Royal Academy and they spent the day at the prison. After a while he prevailed on his father to let him live nearer the prison, so that he could at least join the family for breakfast and supper.
John Dickens was released from prison at the end of May, under the Insolvent Debtors' Act. But there was no immediate release for his son. When he went to see his sister receive a silver medal at the Royal Academy he wept at the humiliation of his position compared with hers. Only by chance, when his father quarrelled with James Lamert, was he taken away. His mother, however, managed to smooth things over so that he might return: Charles never forgave her. '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.' His parents must have felt guilt at their treatment of him, for they never spoke of the episode again. Nor, until he wrote his account of it to his friend and future biographer John Forster in 1847, did Dickens. 'I have never ... in any burst of confidence with any one, my own wife not excepted, raised the curtain I then dropped, thank God.'
The blacking factory left him with a lifelong insatiable need for recognition and approval; a degree of emotional reserve; and an obsession with cleanliness and order which he himself admitted was 'almost a disorder'. He was haunted by the experience for the rest of his life. 'Even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.' The Christmas before his death, playing a 'memory game' with his family, Dickens wrote down, without explanation, 'Warren's Blacking, 30, Strand', which meant nothing to his children until his biography was published after his death.
The family's affairs did not improve, and the familiar round of changed lodgings, debts and difficulties continued. Fanny's fees at the Academy were not paid, and she had to leave for a while, returning to earn her singing tuition by giving piano lessons. But Charles was, as his father had promised, sent to school.
Wellington House Academy in the Hampstead Road was not a good school. The headmaster, Mr Jones, was an ignorant and violent man who beat the boys and bullied the staff, and Dickens drew on his memories when writing David Copperfield, where the school becomes Salem House. But it was a school of sorts, and he was determined to enjoy it. His contemporaries remembered him as a cheerful boy, agreeable and friendly, but not particularly studious, involved in jokes and games and amateur theatricals. Clearly, he was applying himself to the study of being a boy; but probably, like many clever students, he worked harder at his books than his friends realized. He spent two-and-a-half years there, leaving soon after his fifteenth birthday to begin the world in earnest.
Dickens's first job, as a solicitor's clerk, provided experiences which proved useful for his fiction, from Pickwick Papers onwards; but he had no intention of remaining there. He was educating himself in ways which had nothing to do with the law. He often walked the streets late into the night, a habit which he continued for many years. His friends were astonished at the extent to which he was already familiar with the street life of London, not knowing that his wanderings had begun in the desperate loneliness of his neglected childhood. Now he began to turn his acute eye and ear to good account, listening to the conversations and noting the appearance of ordinary Londoners.
He also expanded his more conventional self-education. A reader's ticket for the British Museum Library opened a wide field of literature and history. He also taught himself shorthand. Before he was seventeen he had left clerking and moved on to become a freelance shorthand reporter at the law courts of Doctors' Commons, where he saw at close quarters the law's interminable delays, later satirized in Bleak House. With this experience, he was equipped to find posts as a reporter of parliamentary debates.
Dickens originally owed his journalistic appointments to a series of fortunate introductions. His uncle, John Barrow, was the founder and editor of the Mirror of Parliament, one of the papers for which he worked; a lifelong friend, Thomas Beard, worked for the Morning Chronicle. But he had an excellent memory and a determination to succeed, and soon made a reputation for himself as a rapid and accurate reporter. His time in the press gallery of the House of Commons, from 1831 to 1834, gave him an invaluable education in politics. It also reinforced his interest in social reform, as he listened to the 1833 debates on the Factory Act, limiting hours of work, and the Poor Law Amendment Act, which set up the workhouse system he attacked in Oliver Twist. Though his early campaigning fiction and journalism did aim to change various aspects of statutory law, he was not impressed by the parliamentary process.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Charles Dickens by Catherine Peters. Copyright © 2012 Catherine Peters. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgement,Chronology,
Family Tree,
Introduction,
1 Childhood and Youth, 1812–32,
2 The Making of 'Boz', 1832–40,
3 America and Italy, 1842–6,
4 The Critic of Society, 1846–55,
5 The End of the Marriage, 1855–9,
6 Final Years, 1859–70,
Notes,
Bibliography,