CHARLES DICKENS (PG 37-38)
LIFE AND WORKS
Charles Dickens was born in Portsmounth, on the southern coast of' England, in 1812.
He had an unhappy childhood. His father was imprisoned for debt and at the age of 12 he was put to work
in a factory. When the family finances improved and his father was released, he was sent to a school in
London. At 15, he found employnent as an office boy at a lawyer’s and studied shorthand at night. By 1832
he had become a very successful shorthand reporter of parliamentary debates in the House of Commons,
and began to work as a reporter for a newspaper.
In 1833 his first story appeared and in 1836, still a newspaper reporter, he adopted the pen name ‘Boz’,
publishing Sketches by 'Boz', a collection of articles and tales describing London's people and scenes,
written for the periodical Monthly Magazine. It was immediately followed by The Posthumous Papers of
the Pickwick Club (also known as The Pickwick Papers), which was published in instalments and revealed
Dickens's humoristic and satirical qualities.
Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in April 1836, and during the same year he became editor of Bentley's
Miscellany and published the second series of Sketches by 'Boz'. After the success of the Pickwick Papers,
Dickens started a full-time career as a novelist, producing work of increasing complexity at an incredible
rate, although he also continued his journalistic and editorial activities. Oliver Twist was begun in 1837 and
continued in monthly instalments until April 1839. Nicholas Nickleby was published in 1839. Although he
was a republican, Dickens took strongly against the United States when he visited the country in 1842. In
October of that year his American Notes appeared, in which he advocated international copyright and the
abolition of slavery. Martin Chuzzlewit, part of which was set in America, appeared in 1844, one year after
the publication of A Christmas Carol, the first of Dickens's successful Christmas books. The protagonists of
his autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist (1838), David Copperfield (1850) and Little Dorrit (1857), became
the symbols of an exploited childhood confronted with the bitter realities of slums and factories. Other
works include Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854) and Great Expectations (1861), which deal with the
conditions of the poor and the working class in general. By the time of his sudden death in Kent, in 1870,
Dickens had drawn adoring crowds to his public appearances in England, Scotland and Ireland; he had met
princes and presidents and had amassed a fortune. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
CHARACTERS
Dickens shifted the social frontiers of the novel: the 18th-century realistic, upper-middle-class world was
replaced by the one of the lower orders. He was the creator of characters and caricatures who live
immortally in the English imagination: Mr Pickwick, Mr Gradgrind, Scrooge and many others. His aim was to
arouse the reader's interest by exaggerating his characters' habits as well as the language of the London
middle and lower classes, like lodging-house keepers, shopkeepers and tradesmen, whose social
peculiarities, vanity and ambition he ridiculed freely, though without sarcasm. He was always on the side of
the poor, the outcast and also the working class.
Children are often the most important characters in Dickens's novels. A lot of instances of good, wise
children as opposed to worthless parents and other grown-up people illustrate in fiction the reverse of the
natural order of things: children become the moral teachers instead of the taught, the examples instead of
the imitators. The novelist's ability lay both in making his readers love his children and putting them
forward as models of the way people ought to behave to one another.
