Charles John Huffam Dickens,
FRSA
( ; 7 February 1812–9 June 1870), pen-name "Boz",
was the most popular English novelist
of the Victorian era, and one of the
most popular of all time. He created some of literature's
most iconic characters, with the theme of
social reform running throughout his work.
The continuing popularity of his novels and short stories is such
that they have never gone
out of
print.
Much of his work first appeared in periodicals and magazines in
serialised form, a popular way
of publishing fiction at the time. Other writers would complete
entire novels before serial publication commenced, but Dickens
often wrote his in parts, in the order they were meant to appear.
The practice lent his stories a particular rhythm, punctuated by
one "
cliffhanger" after another, to keep
the public eager for the next installment.
His work has been praised for its mastery of prose, and for its
teeming gallery of unique personalities, by writers such as
George Gissing and
G. K.
Chesterton, though the same
characteristics have prompted others, such as
Henry James and
Virginia Woolf, to criticize him for
sentimentality and implausibility.
Life
Early years
Dickens
was born on 7 February 1812, in Landport
, Portsmouth
, in Hampshire, the
second of eight children to John Dickens (1786–1851), a clerk in the
Navy Pay Office at Portsmouth, and his
wife, Elizabeth (née Barrow, 1789–1863).
He was
christened at St Mary's Church in Portsea
on 4 March
1812. When he was five, the family moved to
Chatham,
Kent
. In 1822, when he was ten, the family
relocated to 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town
, in London.
His early years seem to have been an idyllic time, although he
thought himself then a "very small and
not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy". He spent time outdoors,
but also read voraciously, with a particular fondness for the
picaresque novels of
Tobias Smollett and
Henry Fielding. He talked, later in life, of
his extremely poignant memories of childhood, and of his continuing
photographic memory of the
people and events that helped to bring his fiction to life. His
family's early, moderate wealth provided the boy Dickens with some
private education at William Giles's School, in Chatham.
This time
of prosperity came to an abrupt end, however, when his father spent
beyond his means in entertaining and in retaining his social
position, and was finally imprisoned at Marshalsea
debtor's
prison. Shortly afterwards, the rest of his family
joined him in residence at Marshalsea, south of the Thames, (except for Charles, who boarded in
Camden
Town at the house of family friend Elizabeth
Roylance). Sundays became a treat, when with his sister
Fanny, allowed out from the Royal Academy of Music
, he spent the day at the Marshalsea. The
prison provided the setting of one of his works,
Little
Dorrit, and is where the title character's father is
imprisoned.
Just
before his father's arrest, 12-year-old Dickens had begun working ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near
the present Charing Cross railway station
. He earned six
shillings a week pasting labels on jars of thick
shoe polish. This money paid for his
lodgings with Mrs. Roylance and helped support his family. Mrs.
Roylance, Dickens later wrote, was "a
reduced old lady, long known to our family", and
whom he eventually immortalized, "with a few alterations and
embellishments", as "Mrs. Pipchin", in
Dombey & Son.
Later, lodgings were
found for him in a "back-attic...at the house of an insolvent-court
agent, who lived in Lant
Street
in The
Borough
...he was a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman,
with a quiet old wife; and he had a very innocent grown-up son;
these three were the inspiration for the Garland family in
The Old Curiosity
Shop. The mostly unregulated, strenuous—and often
cruel—work conditions of the factory employees (especially
children) made a deep impression on Dickens. His experiences served
to influence later fiction and essays, and were the foundation of
his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions,
the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the
poor.
As told to
John Forster
(from
The Life of Charles Dickens):
The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the
left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford
Stairs.
It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of
course on the river, and literally overrun with
rats.
Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and
staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and
the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at
all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly
before me, as if I were there again.
The counting-house was on the first floor, looking
over the coal-barges and the river.
There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and
work.
My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking;
first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue
paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper
close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of
ointment from an apothecary's shop.
When a certain number of grosses of pots had
attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed
label, and then go on again with more pots.
Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty
down-stairs on similar wages.
One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper
cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the
string and tying the knot.
His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of
using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.
After only a few months in Marshalsea, John Dickens was informed of
the death of his paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Dickens, who had
left him, in her will, the sum of £450. On the expectation of this
legacy, Dickens petitioned for, and was granted, release from
prison. Under the
Insolvent Debtors
Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors, and he and
his family left Marshalsea for the home of Mrs. Roylance.
Although
Dickens eventually attended the Wellington House Academy in
North
London
, his mother did not immediately remove him from the
boot-blacking factory. 'The incident must have done much to
confirm Dickens's determined view that a father should rule the
family, a mother find her proper sphere inside the home. "I never
afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that
my mother was warm for my being sent back." His mother's failure in
his eyes [at this time], requesting Charles return to the blacking
factory, contributed towards his demanding and dissatisfied
attitude towards women.' Resentment stemming from his situation and
the conditions under which
working-class people lived became major themes
of his works, and it was this unhappy period in his youth to which
he alluded in his favourite, and most
autobiographical, novel,
David Copperfield: "I had no
advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no
assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call
to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!" The Wellington House Academy
as it turned out was not a good school. 'Much of the haphazard,
desultory teaching, poor discipline punctuated by the headmaster's
sadistic brutality, the seedy ushers and general run-down
atmosphere, are embodied in Mr. Creakle's Establishment in
David Copperfield.'
In May
1827, Dickens began work in the law office of Ellis and Blackmore,
attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn
, as a junior clerk.
He remained there until November 1828. Then, having worked
energetically in his spare time to acquire Gurneys system of
shorthand, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant
relative, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at
Doctors' Commons, and Dickens was able to
share his box there in order to report the legal proceedings. Here
in a court near St. Paul's he was to listen for nearly four years
to rambling, involved cases. This education informed works such as
Nicholas Nickleby,
Dombey and Son, and
especially
Bleak House—whose
vivid portrayal of the endless machinations, lethal manoeuvrings,
and strangling bureaucracy of the legal system of mid-19th-century
Britain did much to enlighten the general public, and was a vehicle
for dissemination of Dickens's own views regarding, particularly,
the injustice of chronic exploitation of the poor forced by
circumstances to "go to Law".
In 1830, Dickens met his first love, Maria Beadnell. It is believed
that she was the model for the character Dora in
David Copperfield. Maria's
parents disapproved of the courtship and effectively ended the
relationship by sending her to school in Paris.
Journalism and early novels
In 1833, Dickens was able to get his very first story,
A Dinner
at Poplar Walk, published in the London periodical,
Monthly Magazine.
The following year he rented rooms at
Furnival's
Inn
becoming a political journalist, reporting on
parliamentary debate and travelling across Britain
by stagecoach to cover
election campaigns for the Morning
Chronicle. His journalism, in the form of sketches
which appeared in periodicals, formed his first collection of
pieces
Sketches by Boz
which was published in 1836 and led to the serialization of his
first novel,
The Pickwick
Papers, in March 1836. He continued to contribute to and
edit journals throughout much of his subsequent literary career.
Dickens's keen perceptiveness, intimate knowledge and understanding
of the people, and tale-spinning genius were quickly to gain him
world renown and wealth.
In 1836, Dickens accepted the job of editor of
Bentley's Miscellany, a position
that he would hold for three years, when he fell out with the
owner. At the same time, his success as a novelist continued,
producing
Oliver Twist
(1837–39),
Nicholas
Nickleby (1838–39),
The Old Curiosity Shop and,
finally,
Barnaby Rudge: A
Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty as part of the
Master Humphrey's Clock series
(1840–41)—all published in monthly instalments before being made
into books. Dickens had a pet
raven named Grip
which, when it died in 1841, Dickens had it stuffed (it is now at
the
Free Library of
Philadelphia).
On 2 April 1836, he married
Catherine
Thomson Hogarth (1816 – 1879), the daughter of George
Hogarth, editor of the
Evening
Chronicle.
After a brief honeymoon in Chalk, Kent
, they set up home in
Bloomsbury
. They had
ten
children:
On 25
March 1837, Dickens moved with his family into 48 Doughty
Street
, London, (on which he had a three year lease at £80
a year) where he would remain until December 1839. A new
addition to the household was Dickens's younger brother Frederick.
Also, Catherine's 17 year old sister Mary moved with them from
Furnival's Inn to offer support to her newly married sister and
brother-in-law. It was not unusual for a woman's unwed sister to
live with and help a newly married couple. Dickens became very
attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in
1837. She became a character in many of his books, and her death is
fictionalized as the death of Little Nell.
First visit to America
In 1842, Dickens made his first trip to America travelling with his
wife to the United States and Canada, a journey which was
successful in spite of his support for the
abolition of slavery. The trip is
described in the short
travelogue
American Notes for General
Circulation and is also the basis of some of the episodes
in
Martin Chuzzlewit.
Dickens includes in
Notes a powerful condemnation of
slavery, with "ample proof" of the "atrocities" he found.
He called
upon President John Tyler at the White House
.
Photograph of the author, c.
During
this visit, Dickens spent time in New York City
, where he gave lectures, raised support for
copyright laws, and recorded many of his impressions of
America. He toured the City for a month, and met such
luminaries as
Washington Irving
and
William Cullen Bryant. On
14 February 1842, a Boz Ball (named after his pseudonym) was held
in his honour at the
Park
Theater, with 3,000 of New York’s elite present.
Among the
neighbourhoods he visited were Five Points
, Wall
Street
, The Bowery
, and the
prison known as The
Tombs
. At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of
Catherine, joined the Dickens household, now living at Devonshire
Terrace, Marylebone
, to care for the young family they had left
behind. She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser,
adviser and friend until her brother-in-law's death in 1870.
Shortly thereafter, he began to show interest in
Unitarian Christianity, although he remained an
Anglican, at least nominally, for the rest
of his life. Dickens's work continued to be popular, especially
A Christmas Carol written
in 1843, the first of his Christmas books, which was reputedly a
potboiler written in a matter of weeks to
meet the expenses of his wife's fifth pregnancy.
After living briefly
abroad in Italy
(1844) and
Switzerland
(1846), Dickens continued his success with
Dombey and Son (1848);
David Copperfield
(1849–50).
Philanthropy
In May 1846,
Angela
Burdett Coutts, the wealthy heir to the Coutts banking fortune,
approached Dickens about setting up a home for the redemption of
"fallen" women. Coutts envisioned a home that would offer a
different approach to other organizations that offered a harsh and
punishing regimen for these women, and instead provide a
disciplined but supportive environment where they could learn to
read and write and become proficient in domestic household chores
so as to re-integrate them into society gently.
After initially
resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named Urania
Cottage, in the Lime Grove section of Shepherds Bush
. He would end up becoming involved in many
aspects of its day-to-day running, setting the house rules,
reviewing the accounts and also interviewing prospective residents,
some of whom became characters in his books. He would scour prisons
and workhouses for potentially suitable candidates and relied on
friends, such as the Magistrate John Hardwick to bring them to his
attention. Once found, each potential candidate was given an
anonymous printed invitation written by Dickens called ‘An Appeal
to Fallen Women’, which he signed only as ‘Your friend’. If the
woman accepted the invitation, Dickens would personally interview
her and decide if she could be admitted to the home. In late
November 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he would
write
Bleak House (1852–53),
Hard Times (1854) and
Little Dorrit (1857). It was
here he got up the amateur theatricals which are described in
Forster's Life.
Middle years
In 1856,
his income from his writing had allowed him to buy Gad's Hill
Place
. This large house in Higham, Kent
, had a particular meaning to Dickens as he had
walked past it as a child and had dreamed of living in it.
The area was also the scene of some of the events of
Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 and this literary
connection pleased him.
At his desk in 1858
In 1857, in preparation for public performances of
The Frozen Deep, a play on which he and
his protégé
Wilkie Collins had
collaborated, Dickens hired professional actresses to play the
female parts. With one of these,
Ellen
Ternan, Dickens formed a bond which was to last the rest of his
life. When he separated from his wife, Catherine, in 1858, divorce
was almost unthinkable, particularly for someone as famous as he
was, and he financially supported her long afterwards. Although
they appeared to be initially happy together, Catherine did not
seem to share quite the same boundless energy for life which
Dickens had. Nevertheless, her job of looking after their ten
children, the pressure of living with a world-famous novelist, and
keeping house for him, certainly did not help. An indication of his
marital dissatisfaction may be seen when, in 1855, he went to meet
his first love, Maria Beadnell. Maria was by this time married as
well, but seemed to have fallen short of Dickens's romantic memory
of her.
During
this period, whilst pondering about giving public readings for his
own profit, Dickens was approached by Great Ormond
Street Hospital
to help it survive its first major financial crisis
through a charitable appeal. Dickens, whose philanthropy was
well-known, was asked to preside by the hospital's founder
Charles West, who happened to be a friend of
the author's. He threw himself into the task, heart and soul (a
little known fact is that Dickens reported anonymously in the
weekly
The Examiner in 1849 to help mishandled children
and wrote another article to help publicise the hospital's opening
in 1852).
On 9 February 1858, Dickens spoke at the
hospital's first annual festival dinner at Freemasons' Hall and
later gave a public reading of A Christmas Carol at
St.
Martin-in-the-Fields
church hall. The events raised enough money
to enable the hospital to purchase the neighbouring house, No. 48
Great Ormond Street, increasing the bed capacity from 20 to
75.
That summer of 1858, after separating from his wife, Dickens would
undertake his first series of public readings in London for pay
which ended on 22 July.
After a mere 10 days rest, however, he began
a gruelling and ambitious tour, which would take him through the
English provinces, Scotland and Ireland, beginning with a
performance in Clifton on 2 August and
closing in Brighton
, more than three months later, on 13
November. Altogether he was scheduled to read eighty-seven
times, on some days giving both a matinée and an evening
performance.
Major works,
A Tale of Two
Cities (1859); and
Great
Expectations (1861) soon followed and would prove
resounding successes with both his critics and his fans. During
this time he was also the publisher and editor of, and a major
contributor to, the journals
Household Words (1850–1859) and
All the Year Round
(1858–1870). A recurring theme in Dickens's writing, both as
reportage for these publications and as an inspiration for his
fiction, reflected the public's interest in Arctic exploration: the
heroic friendship between explorers
John
Franklin and
John
Richardson gave the idea for
A Tale of Two Cities,
The Wreck of the Golden Mary and the play
The Frozen Deep.In early September
1860, in a field behind Gad's Hill, Dickens made a great bonfire of
nearly his entire correspondence. Only those letters on business
matters were spared. Since Ellen Ternan burned all of his letters
as well, the dimensions of the affair between the two were unknown
until the publication of
Dickens and Daughter, a book
about Dickens's relationship with his daughter Kate, in 1939. Kate
Dickens worked with author Gladys Storey on the book prior to her
death in 1929, and alleged that Dickens and Ternan had a son who
died in infancy, though no contemporary evidence exists. On his
death, Dickens settled an
annuity on Ternan
which made her a financially independent woman. Claire Tomalin's
book,
The Invisible Woman, set out to prove that Ternan
lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life, and
was subsequently turned into a play,
Little Nell, by
Simon Gray.
In the same period, Dickens furthered his interest in the
paranormal, so much that he was one of the early
members of
The Ghost Club.
The Franklin incident
After Franklin died in unexplained circumstances on an expedition
to find the
North West Passage it
was natural for Dickens to write a piece in
Household
Words defending his hero against the discovery in 1854, some
four years after the search began, of evidence that Franklin's men
had, in their desperation, resorted to cannibalism. Without
adducing any supporting evidence he speculates that, far from
resorting to cannibalism amongst themselves, the members of the
expedition may have been "set upon and slain by the Esquimaux...We
believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and
cruel." Although publishing in a subsequent issue of
Household
Words a defence of the
Esquimaux, written
by
John Rae, one of Franklin's
rescue parties, who had actually visited the scene of the supposed
cannibalism, Dickens refused to alter his view.
Last years
On 9 June
1865, while returning from Paris
with Ternan,
Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash
in which the first seven carriages of the train
plunged off a cast iron bridge that was
being repaired. The only
first-class carriage to remain on the
track was the one in which Dickens was travelling. Dickens spent
some time trying to help the wounded and the dying before rescuers
arrived. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript
for
Our Mutual Friend,
and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it. Typically, Dickens
later used this experience as material for his short
ghost story The
Signal-Man in which the central character has a
premonition of his own death in a rail crash.
He based the story
around several previous rail accidents, such as
the Clayton
Tunnel rail crash
of 1861.
Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the
inquest into the crash, as it would have become
known that he was travelling that day with Ternan and her mother,
which could have caused a scandal. Although unharmed, Dickens never
really recovered from the Staplehurst crash, and his normally
prolific writing shrank to completing
Our Mutual Friend and starting the
unfinished
The Mystery of
Edwin Drood after a long interval. Much of his time was
taken up with public readings from his best-loved novels. Dickens
was fascinated by the theatre as an escape from the world, and
theatres and theatrical people appear in
Nicholas Nickleby. The travelling
shows were extremely popular. In 1866, a series of public readings
were undertaken in England and Scotland. The following year saw
more readings in England and Ireland.
Second visit to America
On 9
November 1867, Dickens sailed from Liverpool
embarking on his second American reading tour,
which continued into 1868. Landing at Boston
on 19
November, he devoted the rest of the month to a round of dinners
there with such notables as Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow and his American publisher James Thomas Fields. In early December,
the readings began and Dickens spent the month shuttling between
Boston and New
York
. Although he had started to suffer from what
he called the "true American catarrh", he kept to a schedule that
would have challenged a much younger man, even managing to squeeze
in some sleighing in Central
Park
. In New York, he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall between 9 December 1867 and 18
April 1868, and four at Plymouth Church of the
Pilgrims
between 16 January and 21 January 1868.
During his travels, he saw a significant change in the people and
the circumstances of America.
His final appearance was at a banquet the
American Press held in his honour at Delmonico’s
on 18 April, when he promised to never denounce
America again. By the end of the tour, the author could
hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten
in sherry. On 23 April, he boarded his ship to return to Britain,
barely escaping a
Federal Tax Lien against
the proceeds of his lecture tour.
Farewell readings
Between
1868 and 1869, Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" in
England, Scotland, and Ireland, until he collapsed on 22 April
1869, at Preston
in Lancashire
showing symptoms of a mild stroke. After further provincial readings were
cancelled, he began work on his final novel,
The Mystery of
Edwin Drood.
In an opium den in
Shadwell
, he witnessed an elderly pusher known as "Opium
Sal", who subsequently featured in his mystery novel.
When he had regained sufficient strength, Dickens arranged, with
medical approval, for a final series of readings at least partially
to make up to his sponsors what they had lost due of his illness.
There
were to be twelve performances, running between 11 January and 15
March 1870, the last taking place at 8:00 pm at St. James's
Hall
in London. Although in grave health by this
time, he read
A Christmas Carol and
The Trial from
Pickwick.
On 2 May, he made his last public appearance
at a Royal
Academy
Banquet in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, paying a special
tribute to the passing of his friend, illustrator Daniel Maclise.
Death
On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home, after
a full day's work on
Edwin Drood. The next day, on 9 June,
and five years to the day after the Staplehurst crash, he died at
Gad's Hill Place never having regained consciousness. The great
author was mourned by all his readers.
Contrary to his wish
to be buried at Rochester Cathedral
"in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly
private manner", he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner
of Westminster Abbey
. The inscription on his tomb reads: "CHARLES
DICKENS Born 7th February 1812 Died 9th June 1870." A printed
epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads: "To the Memory
of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his
residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, June 9th, 1870, aged 58
years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the
oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is
lost to the world."
On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens's interment in the
Abbey, Dean
Arthur Penrhyn
Stanley delivered a memorial elegy, lauding "the genial and
loving humorist whom we now mourn", for showing by his own example
"that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded
characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be
innocent." Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the
novelist's grave, Stanley assured those present that "the spot
would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the
Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this
island only, but of all who speak our English tongue."
Dickens's will stipulated that no memorial be erected to honour
him.
The
only life-size bronze statue of Dickens, cast in 1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell, is located in
Clark
Park
in the Spruce
Hill
neighbourhood of Philadelphia
, Pennsylvania
in the United States.
Literary style
Dickens loved the style of 18th century
gothic romance, although it had already
become a target for
parody. One "character"
vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. From the
coaching inns on the outskirts of the
city to the lower reaches of the
Thames, all
aspects of the capital are described over the course of his body of
work.
His writing style is florid and poetic, with a strong comic touch.
His
satires of British aristocratic
snobbery—he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator"—are often
popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug
boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of
Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy. Many of his characters' names
provide the reader with a hint as to the roles played in advancing
the storyline, such as Mr. Murdstone in the novel David
Copperfield, which is clearly a combination of "murder" and stony
coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of
fantasy and
realism.
Characters
Dickens is famed for many things—his depiction of the hardships of
the working class, his intricate plots, his sense of humour. But he
is perhaps most famed for the characters he created. His novels
were heralded early in his career for their ability to capture the
everyday man on paper and thus create a memorable character to whom
readers could relate, and envision as a real person. Beginning with
Pickwick Papers in 1836, Dickens
wrote numerous novels, each uniquely filled with believable
personalities and vivid physical descriptions. Dickens's friend and
biographer,
John Forster,
said that Dickens made "characters real existences, not by
describing them but by letting them describe themselves."
Dickensian
characters—especially their
typically whimsical names—are among the most memorable in English
literature. The likes of
Ebenezer
Scrooge,
Tiny Tim,
Jacob Marley,
Bob Cratchit,
Oliver Twist,
The Artful Dodger,
Fagin,
Bill Sikes,
Pip,
Miss
Havisham,
Charles Darnay,
David Copperfield,
Mr. Micawber,
Abel Magwitch,
Daniel
Quilp,
Samuel Pickwick,
Wackford Squeers,
Uriah Heep and many others are so well known and
can be believed to be living a life outside the novels that their
stories have been continued by other authors.
The author worked closely with his illustrators supplying them with
an overall summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that
his vision of his characters and settings were exactly how he
envisioned them to be. He would brief the illustrator on plans for
each month's instalment so that work on the two illustrations could
begin before he wrote them.
Marcus
Stone, illustrator of
Our Mutual
Friend, recalled that the author was always "ready to describe
down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ...
life-history of the creations of his fancy." This close working
relationship with his illustrators is important to readers of
Dickens today. The illustrations give us a glimpse of the
characters as Dickens described them to the illustrator and
approved when the drawing was finished. Film makers still use the
illustrations as a basis for characterization, costume, and set
design in the dramatization of Dickens's works.
Often these characters were based on people that he knew. In a few
instances Dickens based the character too closely on the original
and got into trouble, as in the case of Harold Skimpole in
Bleak House, based on Leigh Hunt, and Miss Mowcher in
David Copperfield| based on his wife's dwarf chiropodist.
These are not over-dramatized caricatures, but believable people we
might see walking down the street. Indeed, the acquaintances made
when reading a Dickens novel are not easily forgotten. The author,
Virginia Woolf, maintained that "we
remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens" as he
produces "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or
exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily
revealing remarks."
Autobiographical elements
All authors might be said to incorporate autobiographical elements
in their fiction, but with Dickens this is very noticeable, even
though he took pains to mask what he considered his shameful, lowly
past.
David
Copperfield is one of the most clearly autobiographical
but the scenes from
Bleak House
of interminable court cases and legal arguments are drawn from the
author's brief career as a court reporter. Dickens's own father was
sent to prison (where he was joined by his wife and younger
children) for debt, and this became a common theme in many of his
books, with the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison
in
Little Dorrit resulting
from Dickens's own experiences of the institution. Little Nell in
The Old Curiosity
Shop is thought to represent Dickens's sister-in-law,
William Dorrit, Nicholas Nickleby's father and
Wilkins Micawber are certainly Dickens's
own father, just as Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Micawber are similar to
his mother. The snobbish nature of
Pip
from
Great Expectations
also has some affinity to the author himself. Childhood sweethearts
in many of his books (such as Little Eml’y in
David Copperfield) may have
been based on Dickens’ own childhood infatuation with Lucy
Stroughill.Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but
he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was
where he gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew
the details of his early life until six years after his death when
John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had
collaborated. A shameful past in Victorian times could taint
reputations, just as it did for some of his characters, and this
may have been Dickens's own fear.
Episodic writing
As noted above, most of Dickens's major novels were first written
in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as
Master Humphrey's Clock and
Household Words, later
reprinted in book form. These instalments made the stories cheap,
accessible and the series of regular
cliff-hangers made each new episode widely
anticipated. American fans even waited at the docks in New York,
shouting out to the crew of an incoming ship, "Is Little Nell
dead?" Part of Dickens's great talent was to incorporate this
episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at
the end. The monthly numbers were illustrated by, amongst others,
"
Phiz" (a pseudonym for
Hablot Browne). Among his best-known works are
Great Expectations,
David
Copperfield,
Oliver
Twist,
A Tale of Two
Cities,
Bleak House,
Nicholas Nickleby,
The Pickwick Papers,
and
A Christmas Carol.
Dickens's technique of writing in monthly or weekly instalments
(depending on the work) can be understood by analysing his
relationship with his
illustrators. The
several artists who filled this role were privy to the contents and
intentions of Dickens's instalments before the general public.
Thus, by reading these correspondences between author and
illustrator, the intentions behind Dickens's work can be better
understood. What was hidden in his art is made plain in these
letters. These also reveal how the interests of the reader and
author do not coincide. A great example of that appears in the
monthly novel
Oliver Twist. At one point in this work,
Dickens had Oliver become embroiled in a robbery. That particular
monthly instalment concludes with young Oliver being shot. Readers
expected that they would be forced to wait only a month to find out
the outcome of that gunshot. In fact, Dickens did not reveal what
became of young Oliver in the succeeding number. Rather, the
reading public was forced to wait
two months to discover
if the boy lived.
Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style
resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers. Since
Dickens did not write the chapters very far ahead of their
publication, he was allowed to witness the public reaction and
alter the story depending on those public reactions. A fine example
of this process can be seen in his weekly serial
The Old Curiosity Shop, which is
a chase story. In this novel, Little Nell and her Grandfather are
fleeing the villain Quilp. The progress of the novel follows the
gradual success of that pursuit. As Dickens wrote and published the
weekly instalments, his friend
John Forster pointed out: "You
know you're going to have to kill her, don't you?" Why this end was
necessary can be explained by a brief analysis of the difference
between the structure of a comedy versus a tragedy. In a comedy,
the action covers a sequence "You think they're going to lose, you
think they're going to lose, they win". In tragedy, it is: "You
think they're going to win, you think they're going to win, they
lose". The dramatic conclusion of the story is implicit throughout
the novel. So, as Dickens wrote the novel in the form of a tragedy,
the sad outcome of the novel was a foregone conclusion. If he had
not caused his heroine to lose, he would not have completed his
dramatic structure. Dickens admitted that his friend Forster was
right and, in the end, Little Nell died.
Social commentary
Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of
social commentary. He was a fierce critic
of the
poverty and
social stratification of
Victorian society.
Dickens's second
novel, Oliver Twist (1839),
shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime and was responsible for the clearing of the
actual London slum that was the basis
of the story, Jacob's
Island
. In addition, with the character of the
tragic prostitute,
Nancy,
Dickens "humanised" such women for the reading public; women who
were regarded as "unfortunates," inherently immoral casualties of
the Victorian class/economic system.
Bleak House and
Little Dorrit elaborated expansive
critiques of the Victorian institutional apparatus: the
interminable lawsuits of the
Court of
Chancery that destroyed people's lives in
Bleak House
and a dual attack in
Little Dorrit on inefficient, corrupt
patent offices and unregulated market
speculation.
Literary techniques
,_1910-1912_rotated.jpg/180px-Stamp_in_The_Centenary_Edition_of_The_Works_of_Charles_Dickens_in_36_Volumes._36_vols._Chapman_&_Hall,_Ltd.-_London_(and_Charles_Scribner%E2%80%99s_Son-_New_York),_1910-1912_rotated.jpg)
Stamp in "The Centenary Edition of The
Works of Charles Dickens in 36 Volumes."
Dickens is often described as using 'idealised' characters and
highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his
caricatures and the ugly social truths he
reveals. The story of Nell Trent in
The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)
was received as incredibly moving by contemporary readers but
viewed as ludicrously sentimental by
Oscar
Wilde:"You would need to have a heart of stone", he declared in
one of his famous witticisms, "not to laugh at the death of Little
Nell." (although her death actually takes place off-stage). In 1903
G. K. Chesterton said, "It is not the death of
Little Nell, but the life of Little Nell, that I object to."
In
Oliver Twist Dickens
provides readers with an idealised portrait of a young boy so
inherently and unrealistically 'good' that his values are never
subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a
gang of young
pickpockets. While later
novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in
Bleak House and Amy Dorrit in
Little Dorrit), this idealism
serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant
social commentary. Many of his novels are
concerned with social realism, focusing on mechanisms of social
control that direct people's lives (for instance, factory networks
in
Hard Times and hypocritical
exclusionary class codes in
Our
Mutual Friend). Dickens also employs incredible
coincidences (e.g., Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of
the upper class family that randomly rescues him from the dangers
of the pickpocket group). Such coincidences are a staple of
eighteenth century
picaresque
novels such as Henry Fielding's
Tom Jones that
Dickens enjoyed so much. But, to Dickens, these were not just
plot devices but an index of the
humanism that led him to believe that good wins out in the end and
often in unexpected ways.
Legacy
well-known personality, his novels proved immensely popular during
his lifetime. His first full novel,
The Pickwick Papers
(1837), brought him immediate fame, and this success continued
throughout his career. Although rarely departing greatly from his
typical "Dickensian" method of always attempting to write a great
"story" in a somewhat conventional manner (the dual narrators of
Bleak House constitute a notable exception), he
experimented with varied themes, characterisations, and
genres. Some of these experiments achieved more
popularity than others, and the public's taste and appreciation of
his many works have varied over time. Usually keen to give his
readers what they wanted, the monthly or weekly publication of his
works in episodes meant that the books could change as the story
proceeded at the whim of the public. Good examples of this are the
American episodes in
Martin
Chuzzlewit which Dickens included in response to
lower-than-normal sales of the earlier chapters.Although his
popularity has waned a little since his death, he continues to be
one of the best known and most read of English authors. At least
180 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens's works
help confirm his success. Many of his works were adapted for the
stage during his own lifetime and as early as 1913 a silent film of
The Pickwick Papers was made. His characters were often so
memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books.
Gamp became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character
Mrs. Gamp and Pickwickian,
Pecksniffian, and Gradgrind all entered dictionaries due to
Dickens's original portraits of such characters who were
quixotic, hypocritical, or emotionlessly logical.
Sam Weller, the
carefree and irreverent
valet of
The
Pickwick Papers, was an early superstar, perhaps better known
than his author at first. It is likely that
A Christmas Carol stands as his
best-known story, with new adaptations almost every year. It is
also the most-filmed of Dickens's stories, with many versions
dating from the early years of cinema. This simple
morality tale with both
pathos and its theme of redemption, sums up (for
many) the true meaning of
Christmas.
Indeed, it eclipses all other
Yuletide stories
in not only popularity, but in adding archetypal figures (Scrooge,
Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) to the Western cultural
consciousness. Prominent phrases from the novel,
'Bah! Humbug!',
and
'Merry
Christmas', entered the English language. Novelist
William Makepeace
Thackeray, called the book; "a national benefit, and to every
man and woman who reads it a personal kindness". Some historians
claim the book significantly redefined the "spirit" and importance
of Christmas, and initiated a rebirth of seasonal merriment after
Puritan authorities in 17th century England and America suppressed
pagan rituals associated with the holiday.
A Christmas
Carol was written by Dickens in an attempt to forestall
financial disaster as a result of flagging sales of his novel
Martin Chuzzlewit. Years later, Dickens shared that he was
"deeply affected" in writing
A Christmas Carol. The novel
rejuvenated his career as a renowned author.
At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power
of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor
and disadvantaged at the heart of
empire. Through his journalism he campaigned
on specific issues—such as
sanitation and
the
workhouse—but his fiction probably
demonstrated its greatest prowess in changing public opinion in
regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation
and repression of the poor and condemned the public officials and
institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but
flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of this
condition is in
Hard Times (1854), Dickens's only
novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In this
work, he uses both vitriol and satire to illustrate how this
marginalised social stratum was termed "Hands" by the factory
owners; that is, not really "people" but rather only appendages of
the machines that they operated. His writings inspired others, in
particular journalists and political figures, to address such
problems of class oppression.
For example, the prison scenes in The
Pickwick Papers are claimed to have been influential in having
the Fleet
Prison
shut down. As
Karl
Marx said, Dickens, and the other novelists of Victorian
England, "...issued to the world more political and social truths
than have been uttered by all the professional politicians,
publicists and moralists put together...". The exceptional
popularity of his novels, even those with socially oppositional
themes (
Bleak House, 1853;
Little Dorrit, 1857;
Our Mutual Friend, 1865) underscored not only his almost
preternatural ability to create compelling storylines and
unforgettable characters, but also ensured that the Victorian
public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been
ignored.
His fiction, with often vivid descriptions of life in nineteenth
century England, has inaccurately and anachronistically come to
symbolise on a global level Victorian society (1837 – 1901) as
uniformly "Dickensian", when in fact, his novels' time span spanned
from the 1770s to the 1860s. In the decade following his death in
1870, a more intense degree of socially and philosophically
pessimistic perspectives invested British fiction; such themes
stood in marked contrast to the religious
faith that ultimately held together even the bleakest
of Dickens's novels. Dickens clearly influenced later Victorian
novelists such as
Thomas Hardy and
George Gissing; however, their works
display a greater willingness to confront and challenge the
Victorian institution of religion. They also portray characters
caught up by social forces (primarily via
lower-class conditions), but they usually
steered them to tragic ends beyond their control.
Novelists continue to be influenced by his books; for instance,
such disparate current writers as
Anne
Rice,
Tom Wolfe, and
John Irving evidence direct Dickensian
connections. Humorist
James Finn
Garner even wrote a tongue-in-cheek "politically correct"
version of
A Christmas
Carol, and other affectionate parodies include the
Radio 4 comedy
Bleak Expectations.
Matthew Pearl's novel
The Last Dickens is a thriller about how
Charles Dickens would have ended
Edwin
Drood.
Although
Dickens's life has been the subject of at least two TV miniseries
and two famous one-man shows, he has
never been the subject of a Hollywood
"big screen" biography.
Allegations of anti-semitism and racism
Paul Vallely writes in
The Independent that Dickens's
Fagin in
Oliver
Twist—the Jew who runs a school in London for child
pickpockets—is widely seen as one of the most grotesque Jews in
English literature, and the most vivid of Dickens's 989
characters.
The mud lay thick upon the stones, and a black mist
hung over the streets; the rain fell sluggishly down, and
everything felt cold and clammy to the touch.
It seemed just the night when it befitted such a being
as the Jew to be abroad.
As he glided stealthily along, creeing beneath the
shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like
some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness
through which he moved, crawling forth by night in search of some
rich offal for a meal.
The character is thought to have been based on Ikey Solomon, a 19th
century Jewish criminal in London, who was interviewed by Dickens
during the latter's time as a journalist. Nadia Valdman, who writes
about the portrayal of Jews in literature, argues that Fagin's
representation was drawn from the image of the Jew as inherently
evil, that the imagery associated him with the Devil, and with
beasts.
The novel refers to Fagin 257 times in the first 38 chapters as
"the Jew," while the ethnicity or religion of the other characters
is not mentioned. In 1854, the
Jewish Chronicle asked why "Jews alone
should be excluded from the 'sympathizing heart' of this great
author and powerful friend of the oppressed." Eliza Davis, whose
husband had purchased Dickens's home in 1860 when he had put it up
for sale, wrote to Dickens in protest at his portrayal of Fagin,
arguing that he had "encouraged a vile prejudice against the
despised Hebrew," and that he had done a great wrong to the Jewish
people. Dickens had described her husband at the time of the sale
as a "Jewish moneylender," though also someone he came to know as
an honest gentleman.
Dickens took her complaint seriously. He halted the printing of
Oliver Twist, and changed the text for the parts of the
book that had not been set, which is why Fagin is called the Jew
257 times in the first 38 chapters, but barely at all in the next
179 references to him. In his next novel,
Our Mutual
Friend, he created the character of Riah (meaning "friend" in
Hebrew), whose goodness, Vallely writes, is almost as complete as
Fagin's evil. Riah says in the novel: "Men say, 'This is a bad
Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there are
good Turks.' Not so with the Jews ... they take the worst of us as
samples of the best ..." Davis sent Dickens a copy of the Hebrew
bible in gratitude.
His views on the
Inuit are detailed in the
Franklin
Incident above.
In
The Perils of Certain English Prisoners Dickens offers
an allegory of the
Indian
Mutiny, where the "native
Sambo", a perverted paradigm of the
Indian mutineers is a "double-dyed traitor, and a most infernal
villain" who takes part in a massacre of women and children, in an
allusion to the
Cawnpore Massacre.
Perils greatly influenced the cultural reaction from
English writers to the mutiny, by attributing guilt so as to
portray the imperialist dominators as victims, and the dominated as
villains.
Wilkie Collins, who
co-wrote
Perils, deviates from Dickens's extremism,
writing the second chapter from a less biased point of view who,
quoting poet Jaya Mehta, was "parodying British racism, instead of
promoting it". Contemporary literary critic
Arthur Quiller-Couch praised Dickens
for eschewing any real-life depiction of the incident, for fear of
inflaming his "raging mad" readership further, in favour of a
romantic story "empty of racial or propagandist hatred". A modern
inference is that it was his son's position in India, there on
military service, at the mercy of inept imperial leaders who
misunderstood conquered people, that may have influenced his
reluctance to set
Perils in India, for fear that his
criticism may antagonise the son's superiors.
Reacting to reports of incidents of atrocities commited by Indians,
including one involving over a hundred prisoners, most of them
women and children, killed,Dickens wrote in a private letter to
Baronness Burdett-Coutts on 4 October 1857:
I wish I were the Commander in Chief in
India.
...
I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom
the stain of the late cruelties rested... to blot it out of mankind
and raze it off the face of the earth."
Names: 'Dickens' and 'Boz'
Charles Dickens had, as a contemporary critic put it, a "queer
name". The name Dickens was used in interjective exclamations like
"What the Dickens!" as a substitute for "
devil". It was recorded in the
OED
as originating from Shakespeare's
The Merry Wives of Windsor.
It was also used as a substitute for "
deuce"
as in the phrase "to play the Dickens" in the meaning "to play
havoc/mischief".
'Boz' was Dickens' occasional
pen-name, but
was a familiar name in the Dickens household long before Charles
became a famous author. It was actually taken from his youngest
brother
Augustus Dickens' family
nickname 'Moses', given to him in honor of
one of the brothers in
The
Vicar of Wakefield (one of the most widely read novels
during the early 19th century). When playfully pronounced through
the nose 'Moses' became 'Boses', and was later shortened to 'Boz' -
pronounced through the nose with a
long
vowel 'o'.
Siblings of Charles Dickens
Adaptations of readings
There have been several performances of Dickens readings by
Emlyn Williams, Bransby Williams,
Clive Francis performing the
John Mortimer adaptation of
A Christmas Carol and also
Simon Callow in the
Mystery of Charles
Dickens by
Peter Ackroyd.
Museums and festivals
There are museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and
works in many of the towns with which he was associated.
- The Charles
Dickens Museum, in Doughty Street, Holborn
is the only one of Dickens's London homes to
survive. He lived there only two years but in that time
wrote The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and
Nicholas Nickleby. It contains a major collection of
manuscripts, original furniture and memorabilia.
- Charles Dickens Birthplace
Museum in Portsmouth is the house in which Dickens was born. It
has been re-furnished in the likely style of 1812 and contains
Dickens memorabilia.
- The Dickens House Museum in
Broadstairs
, Kent is the house of Miss Mary Pearson Strong, the
basis for Miss Betsey Trotwood in
David
Copperfield. It is visible across the bay from the
original Bleak House (also a museum until 2005) where David
Copperfield was written. The museum contains memorabilia,
general Victoriana and some of Dickens's letters. Broadstairs has
held a Dickens Festival annually since 1937.
- The Charles Dickens Centre
in Eastgate House, Rochester
, closed in 2004, but the garden containing the
author's Swiss chalet is still open.
The 16th century house, which appeared as Westgate House in The
Pickwick Papers and the Nun's House in Edwin Drood,
is now used as a wedding venue. The city's annual Dickens
Festival (summer) and Dickensian
Christmas celebrations continue unaffected.
- Dickens World
themed attraction, covering , and
including a cinema and restaurants, opened in Chatham on 25 May 2007. It stands on a small
part of the site of the former naval dockyard
where Dickens's father had once worked in the Navy
Pay Office.
- Dickens Festival in
Rochester,
Kent. Summer Dickens is held at
the end of May or in the first few days of June, it commences with
an invitation only ball on the Thursday and then continues with
street entertainment, and many costumed characters, on the Friday,
Saturday and Sunday. Christmas Dickens is the
first weekend in December- Saturday and Sunday only.
Dickens festivals are also held across the world. Four notable ones
in the United States are:
- The Riverside Dickens
Festival in Riverside, California
, includes literary studies as well as
entertainments.
- The Great Dickens Christmas
Fair /www.dickensfair.com/> has been held in San Francisco
, California
, since the 1970s. During the four or five
weekends before Christmas, over 500 costumed performers mingle with
and entertain thousands of visitors amidst the recreated full-scale
blocks of Dickensian London in over of public area. This is the
oldest, largest, and most successful of the modern Dickens
festivals outside England. Many (including the Martin Harris who
acts in the Rochester festival and flies out from London to play
Scrooge every year in SF) say it is the most impressive in the
world.
- Dickens on The Strand in
Galveston
, Texas
, is a
holiday festival held on the first weekend in December since 1974,
where bobbies, Beefeaters and the "Queen" herself are on hand to
recreate the Victorian London of Charles Dickens. Many
festival volunteers and attendees dress in Victorian attire and
bring the world of Dickens to life.
- The Greater Port Jefferson-Northern
Brookhaven Arts Council /www.gpjac.org> holds a Dickens
Festival in the Village of Port Jefferson, NY
each year. In 2009, the Dickens Festival is
4 December, 5 December and 6 December. It includes many events,
along with a troupe of street performers who bring an authentic
Dickensian atmosphere to the town.
Other memorials
Charles Dickens was commemorated on the Series E £10 note issued by
the
Bank of England
which was in circulation in the UK between 1992 and 2003. Dickens
appeared on the reverse of the note accompanied by a scene from
The Pickwick Papers.
Notable works by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens published over a dozen major novels, a large number
of short stories (including a number of Christmas-themed stories),
a handful of plays, and several non-fiction books. Dickens's novels
were initially serialised in weekly and monthly magazines, then
reprinted in standard book formats.
Novels
|
|
- Dombey and Son (Monthly
serial, October 1846 to April 1848)
- David
Copperfield (Monthly serial, May 1849 to November
1850)
- Bleak House (Monthly
serial, March 1852 to September 1853)
- Hard Times: For These Times
(Weekly serial in Household Words, 1 April 1854, to 12
August 1854)
- Little Dorrit (Monthly
serial, December 1855 to June 1857)
- A Tale of Two
Cities (Weekly serial in All the Year Round, 30
April 1859, to 26 November 1859)
- Great Expectations
(Weekly serial in All the Year Round, 1 December 1860 to 3
August 1861)
- Our Mutual Friend
(Monthly serial, May 1864 to November 1865)
- The Mystery of Edwin
Drood (Monthly serial, April 1870 to September 1870. Only
six of twelve planned numbers completed)
|
Short story collections
Christmas numbers of Household Words
magazine:
- What Christmas Is, as We Grow Older (1851)
- A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire (1852)
- Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire
(1853)
- The Seven Poor Travellers (1854)
- The Holly-Tree Inn (1855)
- The Wreck of the "Golden Mary" (1856)
- The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857)
- A House to Let (1858)
|
Christmas numbers of All the Year Round
magazine:
- The Haunted House (1859)
- A Message From the Sea (1860)
- Tom Tiddler's Ground (1861)
- Somebody's Luggage (1862)
- Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings (1863)
- Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy (1864)
- Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions (1865)
- Mugby Junction
(1866)
- No Thoroughfare
(1867)
|
Selected non-fiction, poetry, and plays
Notes
- "What the Dickens?", by Simon Swift.
The
Guardian, Wednesday 18 April 2007. "Dickens's books have
never gone out of print."
- "Victorian squalor and hi-tech gadgetry: Dickens
World to open in England", Bloomberg News, 23 May 2007.
- Stone, Harry. Dickens' Working Notes for His Novels,
Chicago, 1987
- Henry James, "Our Mutual Friend", The
Nation, 21 December 1865.
- Myheritage.com Dickens Family Tree website
- Angus Wilson, The World of Charles Dickens p.53
- Project Gutenberg's Life of Charles Dickens
(James R. Osgood & Company, 1875), by John Forster, Volume I,
Chapter II, accessed 2 August 2008
- Angus
Wilson The World of Charles Dickens ISBN
0140034889
- Angus
Wilson The World of Charles Dickens ISBN
0-14-003488-9
- Pope-Hennessy (1945: 18)
- RE: Cremains / Ravens
- Victorianweb.org - Mary Scott Hogarth,
1820–1837: Dickens's Beloved Sister-in-Law and Inspiration
- Dickens (1842: 53–55)
- Kenneth T. Jackson: The Encyclopedia of New York City:
The New York Historical Society; Yale
University Press; 1995. P. 333.
- Adams Hamilton Literary and Historical Maunscripts, 2009
- 'The Letters of Charles Dickens', Pilgrim Edition, Vol. VII,
p.527.
- Charles Dickens: Family History edited by Norman Page,
University of Nottingham
- "Charles Dickens' Work to Help Establish Great Ormond Street
Hospital, London." by Sir Howard Markel, The Lancet, 21 Aug, p
673.
- Sofii.org
- Household Words 12 June 1858
- The New York Public Library, Berg Collection of English and
American Literature
- Slater (2004)
- The British Academy/The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of
Charles Dickens: Volume 12: 1868-1870
- "Printed at J. H. Woodley's Funeral Tablet Office, 30 Fore
Street, City, London." and reproduced on page 4, A Christmas Carol Study Guide by Patti
Kirkpatrick, Education Department, Dallas
Theater Center.
- New York Public Library, Berg Collection
- The Life of Charles Dickens (first published 1872-1874) by John
Forster
- Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators by Jane R. Cohen.
Ohio State University Press
- The Essays of Virginia Woolf ed. by Andrew McNellie. Hogarth
Press 1986
- Everybody in Dickens by George Newlin
- And They All Died Happily Ever After - New York
Times
- Dickens, Charles. Harry Stone. Dickens' working notes for
his novels. University of Chicago Press ISBN 0226145905
- In conversation with Ada Leverson. Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar
Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 469.
- G. K.
Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of
Charles Dickens, Chapter 6: Curiosity Shop
- IMDB entry for Charles Dickens as writer accessdate
2009-06-02
- Thomas J. Burns - Christmas Readers Digest
Retrieved 2009-20-11
- excerpt read by William Makepeace Thackeray, New York City
(1852)
- Michael Patrick Hearn. The Annotated Christmas Carol.
W.W. Norton and Co. ISBN 0-393-05158-7
- Les Standiford. The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles
Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our
Holiday Spirits, Crown, 2008. ISBN 978-0307405784
- Richard Michael Kelly. A Christmas Carol. Broadview
Press, 2003.
- Vallely, Paul. Dickens' greatest villain: The faces of Fagin,
October 7, 2005.
- Oliver Twist, Hurd and Houghton, 1867,
chapter 19, pp. 221–222.
- Rutland, Suzanne D. The Jews in Australia. Cambridge
University Press, 2005, p. 19. ISBN 9780521612852; Newey, Vincent.
The Scriptures of Charles Dickens.
- Valdman, Nadia. Antisemitism, A Historical Encylopedia of
Prejudice and Persecution. ISBN 1-85109-439-3
- Letters of Charles Dickens volume 8 1856-58 Clarendon
Press
- John Bowen (2000) Other Dickens: Pickwick to
Chuzzlewit, ISBN 0199261407, p. 36
- "Augustus Dickens" in The Chicago
Herald, February 19 1895
- Serial publication dates from Chronology of Novels by E. D. H. Johnson,
Holmes Professor of Belles Lettres, Princeton University. Retrieved
11 June 2007.
References
- Ackroyd, Peter, Dickens,
(2002), Vintage, ISBN 0099437090
- Drabble, Margaret (ed.),
The Oxford Companion to English Literature, (1997), Oxford
University Press
- Glavin, John. (ed.) Dickens on Screen,(2003), New
York: Cambridge University
Press.
- Kaplan, Fred. Dickens: A Biography William Morros,
1988
- Lewis, Peter R. Disaster on the Dee: Robert Stephenson's
Nemesis of 1847, Tempus (2007) for a discussion of the
Staplehurst accident, and its influence on Dickens.
- Meckier, Jerome. Innocent Abroad: Charles Dickens' American
Engagements University
Press of Kentucky, 1990
- Moss, Sidney P. Charles Dickens' Quarrel with America
(New York: Whitson, 1984).
- Patten, Robert L. (ed.) The Pickwick Papers
(Introduction), (1978), Penguin Books.
- Slater, Michael. "Dickens,
Charles John Huffam (1812 – 1870)", Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept
2004
- Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by
Writing, 2009 [577],
External links
- Online Works
- Sites about Dickens
- Museums
and Google
Books. Scanned books.
, London, WC1
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