CHARLES DICKENS: A BIOGRAPHY

Early days

Born in Portsmouth on 7th February 1812, Charles Dickens was the second of eight children born to John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. His mother had been at one time in service to Lord Crewe.
John Dickens’ work took him around the various naval bases, and Charles spent his early childhood at Portsmouth, London and Chatham. His father, although a hard worker, was rarely able to manage his money affairs well, and the family lurched from one financial crisis to another.

In prison for debt.

This culminated in a move to London in 1823, when Charles was just 11, where a family member found him a job in a bottle blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs on the banks of the River Thames, labelling bottles for six shillings a week. But even this did not help the family finances, and John Dickens was finally arrested for debt and the whole family, except Charles who was found lodgings outside, was sent to the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison. Although John Dickens was released after only three months, his poorly paid job and the shame of having a family in prison dealt Charles Dickens a blow he would remember all his life. It is a theme that recurs in his novels and indeed one of his most famous characters, Mr Micawber in David Copperfield – itself the most autobiographical of Dickens’ novels - is based on his father. The Marshalsea also features large in Little Dorrit, the heroine whose father has been locked up there so long for debt that he is known as ‘The Father of the Marshalsea’.

Learning to write.

Charles was eventually able to resume his schooling, but at 15 he began work in the offices of a firm of attorneys based in Greys Inn, London. But this didn’t quite suit his particular abilities, so he started to teach himself shorthand in his spare time and after 18 months felt proficient enough to begin work as a freelance reporter in the Court of Doctors’ Commons. From there he went on to the reporting of debates in the Houses of Parliament, building himself a good reputation for speed and accuracy.

A published writer.

At this time, too, he began to hone the writing skills that would make him a household name, starting with Sketches by Boz, a series of articles appearing in magazines from the age of 21. By the time he was 24, Dickens was on the staff of the Morning Chronicle newspaper as a reporter, but it was his Sketches by Boz which brought him to the attention of the publishers Chapman and Hall, who were looking for a writer to supply monthly instalments of text to accompany sporting prints provided by a well-known artist called Seymour.
According to Dickens later, his thought turned immediately to Mr Pickwick, and The Pickwick Papers was born. The story (written between 1836 and 1837), about the adventures of the bumbling and innocent bachelor Mr Pickwick, his man servant Sam Weller and a hotchpotch of friends as they travel around the country getting into scrape after hilarious scrape, became a publishing sensation. Part of this was due, not simply to the brilliance of Dickens’ writing, but to the method of publication, viz. regular instalments of cheaply produced prints which made them affordable to a much larger audience. This approach worked so well that Dickens used it for the majority of his other fifteen major novels, and other writers also adopted it.

A thirty-year career.

Thus began a writing career that spanned nearly 30 years. While The Pickwick Papers was still running, he started Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickelby, started in 1838, gave him his third huge success in the space of just three years. Sales of The Old Curiosity Shop, written between 1840 and 1841 were astronomical for the time. His next novel, Barnaby Rudge was set a couple of centuries earlier than his others and failed to achieve the record sales he was now getting used to. This, combined with a break he took from writing to visit America, and therefore out of the public eye, is usually given as the reason for the poor sales of his next book Martin Chuzzlewit, written between 1843 and 1844. This book was set partly in America among a mishmash of con men and tunnel-vision pioneers and reflected the huge disillusionment he felt at what he saw of the young Republic (he recorded his trip in American Notes of 1842, but recanted later when there was a huge backlash against him in America and his sales suffered.)
But although sales of Martin Chuzzlewit were disappointing, Dickens had also at that time started his hugely successful series of Christmas Books, starting with A Christmas Carol in 1843.
Dickens then went travelling again, to Italy between 1844 and 1845, then to Switzerland and Paris in 1846. (These travels were used as a back drop to his later novel Little Dorrit.) On his return he started, not another novel, but a newspaper, the Daily News, but resigned as editor after just seventeen days.
The next work, Dombey & Son, written between 1848 and 1848, was a much darker piece, concerning the duelling between a cold man and his wife over their only son and the awful but inevitable ending, and it seems that this was a precursor to his next work, David Copperfield, written between 1849 and 1850, which was a very thinly disguised autobiography. Dickens’ workload was prolific, and soon after David Copperfield (during the 1850s) he launched a weekly magazine called Household Words, which was designed to highlight social issues of the day with mass entertainment. In 1859 this was succeeded by a second magazine called All The Year Round, another huge success.

A social conscience.

Dickens became more and more concerned about social issues of the Victorian age as his career progressed, and his later works reflect his disgust at what he saw was total unconcern by those who should have known better about the condition of the poor and homeless. This theme is explored in Bleak House, written 1852 and 1853, which examined the expensive monopoly exercised by the courts and legal profession and the resulting suffering among both plaintiffs and defendants; by Hard Times (1854) which bitterly denounced the living and working conditions of those caught up in the Industrial Revolution and their stringent disregard by the owners; and Little Dorrit, written 1855 to 1857, again slammed the prison system while criticising the closed-door workings of a government (his Circumlocution Office brilliantly shows how only the very determined can survive being passed from pillar to post to get an answer before giving up from complete and utter exhaustion and frustration).

Separation.

The next year, 1858, Dickens separated from his wife Kate Hogarth, the daughter of a colleague of Dickens on the Morning Chronicle. She had borne him 10 children but one presumes the couple could not cope with his increasing fame. He befriended a young actress called Ellen Ternan, and there remains speculation as to whether they ever became lovers. He also at a later stage of his life became involved with a centre for the betterment of fallen women.

The final years.

Dickens was now living at Gad’s Hill, the only house he ever owned, near one of his childhood homes in Chatham (and also close to the Medway Town of Rochester, which is the Cloisterham of The Mystery Of Edwin Drood), where he produced the rest of his huge output. A Tale of Two Cities, 1859, leaves Victorian England for the French Revolution for its setting, while Great Expectations, 1860 to 1861, is set on the Medway marshes and the prison hulks (decommissioned battleships) moored there. Our Mutual Friend, written between 1864 and 1865, was his final completed work. His health, long failing, deteriorated further with the huge amount of public readings he had started to undertake in 1858. A final round of readings in America, 1867 to 1868, proved the final straw and on his return to England he suffered a stroke while working on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and died the next day. Edwin Drood remained unfinished and has fascinated students and writers ever since as to what he intended.
Charles Dickens remains one of our greatest writers, whose works are still read avidly throughout the world in hundreds of languages, and whose works appear regularly on television. He is buried in Westminster Abbey in Poets’ Corner.

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LITERARY TIMETABLE

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MONEY IN DICKENS’ TIME

          In Dickens’ day, and indeed up until 1970, Britain used a non-decimal currency based on pounds (£), shillings (s) and pence (d), or Lsd as it was called, the Latin equivalents. (L)ibra was pound (and the origin of the £ sign), (s)olidis for shillings and (d)enarius for penny.
Today there are 100 pence to the pound, but in those days there were 240 pence to the pound. Furthermore, there were 12 pennies making up one shilling (1s), the equivalent of today’s 5p piece, and 20 shillings (20 x 5p) making up the pound.
The complete range of British coinage was as follows:

Dickens’ money is not better illustrated than in Bleak House, when Mr Guppy the aspiring lawyer has lunch with his friends Mr Smallwood and Mr Jobling. Jobling has had seconds of some of the items, hence some of them exceeding three portions:

‘Then I’ll pay,’ says Mr Guppy, ‘and we’ll go and see him. Small, what will it be?’
Mr Smallweed, compelling the attendance of the waitress with one hitch of his eyelid, instantly replies as follows:
‘Four veals and hams is three, and four potatoes is three and four, and one summer cabbage is three and six, and three marrows is four and six, and six breads is five, and three Cheshires is five and three, and four pints of half-and-half is six and three, and four small rums is eight and three, and three Pollys is eight and six. Eight and six in half a sovereign, Polly, and eighteenpence out!’

          The total comes to 8/3, but Mr Smallweed gives Polly a 3d tip, making the total 8/6, and he wants eighteenpence (1/6) change from the 10/- (half a sovereign) Guppy has given her.

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