The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

Charles Dickens was Victorian England's most beloved and distinctive novelist. In the words of the eulogy that the classicist Benjamin Jowett spoke at his funeral service, Dickens "occupied a greater space than any other writer during the last thirty- five years. We read him, talked about him, acted him; we laughed with him, wc were roused by him to a consciousness of the misery of others, and to a pathetic [i.e., emotional] interest in human life."

Charles Dickens was born the second of eight children in the coastal town of Portsmouth in southern England. His father, a clerk in the Naval Pay Office, found it difficult to keep his family out of debt. Plagued by financial insecurity, the family moved from place to place, to increasingly poorer lodgings, finally ending up in London. In an effort to help the family out, a friend of his father's offered Charles a job in a shoe-blacking factory. Two days before his twelfth birthday, he began work, labeling bottles for six shillings a week. Two weeks later his father was arrested and sent to the Marshalsea Prison for debt. His family went to live in prison with him, as was the custom; but they decided that Charles should remain outside, living with a woman who took in young boarders and continuing to work.

The months in which Charles lived alone and worked in the blacking warehouse were traumatic, and the intense feeling Dickens had of humiliation and abandonment shaped his fiction in profound ways. The sense he had of himself as "a child of singular abilities: quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally," who had been cast

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away to suffer unjustly, formed the basis for characters such as Oliver Twist, the young David Copperfield, and Pip in Great Expectations (1860�61), whose mistreatment represents Dickens's harshest indictment of society.

Dickens's father was able to leave debtors' prison after three months, upon receipt of a legacy from his mother. He removed Charles from the factory and sent him to school. At fifteen Dickens began work as a junior clerk at a law office; eighteen months later he became a freelance newspaper reporter, first reporting court proceedings and later debates in the House of Commons. Reporting led him to fiction. He began publishing literary sketches, at first anonymously and then under the pseudonym Boz. In 1836, on his twenty-fourth birthday, he published the collection Sketches by Boz. The success of the volume led to a commission from the publishers Chapman 8t Hall to publish a book in serial installments with companion illustrations. The result, Pickwick Papers (1836�37), brought Dickens fame and prosperity. This picaresque novel, relating the adventures of Mr. Pickwick and his friends as they travel around England, set the pattern of illustrated serial publication that was to define Dickens's writing career and to shape the reading habits of his generation. Families would wait in suspense for the next installment of a novel to be issued, which they would read aloud as an evening's entertainment. Successes followed quickly: Oliver Twist (1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41).

By the time of Pickwick's completion, Dickens had married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a fellow journalist, and had begun a family; they eventually had ten children, and household chaos would come increasingly to frustrate him. If Dickens's portrayal of women as inadequate keepers of domestic order was inspired by conditions at home, then the frequent appearance in his fiction of a very different kind of feminine character, the impossibly good and unreachable ideal, can be linked to two young women he knew in his early adulthood. Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a banker, was his first love; but his courtship was discouraged by her family, who felt he was beneath her. He was left with a painful sense that he had lost his perfect woman. Dickens was still more devastated when Mary, his seventeen-year-old sisterin- law, whom he idolized, died in his arms.

Through the 1840s and 1850s Dickens continued to write novels at an intense pace, producing Barnaby Rudge (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843�44), Dombey and Son (1846-48), David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855-57), and A Tale of Two Cities (1859). He also became deeply involved in a number of other activities, including traveling, working for charities, and acting. During this time he founded and edited the weekly magazine Household Words (incorporated in 1859 into All the Year Round), which published fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Dickens himself, and other novelists as well as opinion pieces about political and social issues. And he began a series of Christmas books, the first of which was A Christmas Carol (1843).