Titans of History

The implication that man and the apes must share a common ancestor was obvious. Darwin made this explicit when, in 1871, he eventually published the long-awaited sequel The Descent of Man. No longer did humanity possess some special status as God’s appointed steward on earth, separate from and superior to the other animals. Man was now just one beast among many. It was a bleaker world view that Darwin bequeathed to us, but it was also more intellectually honest and showed us that there was still as much—or more—wonder and mystery in a Darwinian universe.

DICKENS

1812–1870

In literary matters my dividing line is: do you like Dickens or do you not? If you do not, I am sorry for you, and that is the end of the matter.

Stanley Baldwin

Charles Dickens was the English writer of his age. Rambunctious, touching, tragic and comic by turns, his novels captured the public’s imagination like no others before or since. He transmuted the realities he saw into an enthralling and encyclopedic social panorama of hypnotic power. His works effectively constitute a world, such that even those who have read little of the author know what is meant by the term Dickensian.

The master storyteller wrote a canon of classics. His books weave together darkness and light, romance and melodrama, the terrifying and the tender; one moment they are gruesome and fantastical, the next tear-inducingly funny. From the debtors’ prison of Little Dorrit

(1855–7) to the workhouse and thieves’ dens of Oliver Twist (1837–8), to the machinations of the Chancery Court in Bleak House (1852–3), Dickens created a vision of London as a pulsating, living organism, which even today dominates our conceptions of the Victorian metropolis. From the moment his first major work, The Pickwick Papers, was serialized (1836), and a print run of 400 mushroomed to 40,000, he was established as the writer who understood the English better than anyone else.

Dickens’s rudimentary schooling was cut short at fifteen by the profligacy of his father, an erstwhile naval clerk. The boy who had wanted since childhood to be an actor and who was remembered by his schoolfellows for his “animation and animal spirits” became instead a reluctant legal clerk. In spring of 1833 Dickens, by now a journalist (a more exciting but “wearily uncertain” career), got an audition at Covent Garden Theatre but failed to keep the appointment on account of illness. An accident of fate, perhaps, because that summer he began to write. By the following year, under the pen-name Boz, Dickens was winning in print the fame that he had previously hoped for on the stage. His love of the theater clearly influenced his work. Later he would adapt classics such as A Christmas Carol (1843) for the stage. But he never renewed his application to Covent Garden.

The colorful names of Dickens’ characters were of paramount importance to him. He could not begin a new book until he had them right. He kept lists of those with special potential and scribbled down myriad variations. Martin Chuzzlewit was nearly Martin Sweezlewag. With age his work grew darker and more serious, but comedy was never far off. Frequently seized by hysterical mirth at the most inappropriate times, Dickens was always quick to see the ridiculous side of things.

Dickens researched carefully and many of his characters were based on fact, such as Fagin in Oliver Twist. In 1849 the journalist Henry Mayhew, founder of Punch

magazine, began a series of articles for the Morning Chronicle. They would eventually become the mammoth four-volume London Labour and the London Poor, a work that shocked his middle-class readership with its unflinching picture of the realities of London’s slums and which influenced radicals, reformers and writers, among them Charles Dickens.

Mayhew revealed the dark underside of the city, a world of crime, filth and depravity. Interviewing chimney sweeps and flower girls, beggars and street entertainers, pickpockets and prostitutes, Mayhew depicted a world, as the writer Thackeray described it, “of terror and wonder.” He spoke of the “pure-finders,” who gathered dog feces to sell to tanners. He introduced his readers to the “mud-larks,” children who made their living scavenging around the banks of the cholera-infested, sewage-filled Thames for coins and wood or for coal dropped from the barges.