I watched the movie, Great Expectations, recently. The story of an orphan boy adopted by a blacksmith’s family has great expectations to become a gentleman. In the ups and downs, he pulled himself out of poverty, gained friendships, love, and became a better person. Several elements of the character, Pip, could be reflected in the life of Dickens such as laborious childhood, desire to get out of poverty, and pursuits of love and friendships.
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England on February 7, 1812. Charles was the second of eight children to John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. His mother taught him to read when he was little. He received a few years of education till 11 while he also read voraciously even though the family moved around and settled in Camden Town, a poor neighborhood of London in 1822. He retained poignant memories of childhood, helped by a near-photographic memory of people and events, which he used in his writing.
The family income could not keep up with the expenses of the children, and John was constantly in debts. Charles Dickens was used by his father as a messenger to carry apologies and requests for help to family and friends. His mother attempted to start a school for girls, “Mrs. Dickens’s Establishment” but to no avail. Charles’s world was shattered in February 1824 when John was arrested and sent to Marshalsea debtors’ prison. The young Dickens was forced to quit school and worked ten-hour days at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse at 12 to support the family. His elder sister Frances (Fanny), though continued her study at the Royal Academy of Music during that time. At one point, Charles attended a ceremony where she was awarded a prize, and the contrast between brother and sister caused the tears to run down his face. He described himself as a “poor little drudge” and the self-pity feeling was with him for a long time often reflected in his novels.
John was released from the prison a few months later as he received inheritance from his grandmother at her death. However, his mother Elizabeth Dickens did not immediately remove him from the boot-blacking factory. The episode left a scar in his heart and was a factor in his dis-satisfied attitude towards women. John declared bankruptcy and applied for retirement. John was granted his pension and retired from the Pay Office in March 1825. Charles did not remember how long he was pasting and labeling at the factory, but it seems to have lasted a little over a year. Charles attended the Wellington House Academy in North London afterwards. A school fellow in Wellington Academy recalled that Charles was one of the contributors to Our Newspaper,” a handwritten weekly publication circulated among the pupils and lend out in return for marbles and pieces of slate pencil.
The strenuous and often cruel working conditions in the factory made a lasting impression on Dickens. He later reflected his memory in his fiction and essays vividly. This experience left profound psychological and sociological effects on Charles. It gave him a firsthand acquaintance with poverty and made him the most vigorous and influential voice of the working classes in his age. However, his life took another turn at age of fifteen. John was granted £150 pension annually while the annual rent was £26 according to one account. The parents did not manage the money well so the family still struggled financially. Charles was forced to quit school and worked as a junior clerk at a law office in 1827. He wrote in his 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 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.”
With industrial revolution underway, there was army of clerks needed to copy and organize the paperwork of a developing economy. Charles packed his fiction with clerks was a canny business decision and drew upon his own experience. For all John Dickens’s shortcomings, he led a good example for Charles by mastering shorthand and became a reporter for a newspaper. Charles had tried to advance his career prospect by studying shorthand in the evening while working as clerk during the day. Charles also spent time in comedian shows regularly, and studied in British Museum frequently. In 1829, Charles started to make his living from the shorthand skills he had learned. The movement of Reform in England and later became law of Reform Bills transformed the newspaper business into modern Journalism. The process created a great demand of reporters. Charles began his career as a reporter for the Mirror of Parliament newspaper in 1831, and then later for Morning Chronicle in 1834. The job at the Morning Chronicle gave Charles the financial security for the first time so he could plan to best put his life in order.
A Dinner at Popular Walk was Dickens’s first published story. It appeared in the Monthly Magazine in December 1833. The Monthly Magazine took a liberal position of political freedom and reform, and was a much smaller periodical with about 600 copies in circulation while the rival Chamber’s had 50,000 copies in circulation. In 1834, he adopted the soon to be famous pseudonym Boz. Dickens’s first book, a collection of stories titled Sketches by Boz, was published in 1836.
Charles Dickens soon entered the upward part of his career in writing. He had four publishers, Macrone for Sketches, Chapman & Hall for Pickwick Papers, Tomas Tegg for a children’s book, and Richard Bentley for two novels in 1836. On top of all these, he got married to Catherine Hogarth on April 2, 1836.
John Forster first noticed Dickens at the True Sun in 1831. They got closer and became life-long friends. They noticed Forster’s birthday coincided with Dickens’s wedding anniversary; a ritual celebration was set up to have a lunch every April 2. The world changed for both, they are amazed at their good fortune, greedy for one another’s company, delighted by the wit, generosity, perception and brilliance that flash between them. Dickens confided to Forster his life stories that forms the biography composed by Forster.
Many Dickens’s novels were published in installments such as
- The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (Monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837)
- The Adventures of Oliver Twist (Monthly serial in Bentley’s Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839)
- David Copperfield (Monthly serial, May 1849 to November 1850)
- 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)
As Dickens gained fames and popularity by his novels, he became very wealthy. In May 1846 Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens about setting up a home for the redemption of fallen women from the working class. Coutts envisioned a home that would replace the punitive regimes of existing institutions with a reformative environment conducive to education and proficiency in domestic household chores. After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named “Urania Cottage”, which he was to manage for ten years. Emigration and marriage were central to Dickens’s agenda for the women on leaving Urania Cottage, from which it is estimated that about 100 women graduated between 1847 and 1859.
Dickens was approached by Great Ormond Street Hospital to help it survive its first major financial crisis through a charitable appeal. His ‘Drooping Buds’ essay in Household Words earlier in 3 April 1852 was considered by the hospital’s founders to have been the catalyst for the hospital’s success. Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked by his friend, the hospital’s founder Charles West, to preside and he threw himself into the task, heart and soul. Dickens’s public readings secured sufficient funds for an endowment to put the hospital on a sound financial footing — one of 9 February 1858 alone raised £3,000.
As the opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens wrote:
–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
There are social injustice and inequality at different time. It is especially true in America right now that the social economic divide has widened into an M shape society that the rich becomes richer and the poor becomes poorer. The call of duty for community involvement and equal opportunities in education is more relevant now than ever.
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 within society. 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 oppression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result.
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. Karl Marx asserted that Dickens …”issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together”.
Charles Dickens died at home on June 9, 1870 after suffering a stroke. Contrary to his wish to be buried in Rochester Cathedral, he was buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on his tomb reads:
“He was a sympathiser to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England’s greatest writers is lost to the world.”
For Further Reading:
The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster
Written in February, 2013