CHARLES DICKENS
Dickens was Victorian England’s most beloved, prolific and distinctive novelist.
Thanks to his literary works we are roused to a consciousness of the misery of
others and to an emotional interest in human life. He was born the second of 8
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 at a
blacking warehouse, an enterprise that produced shoe polish. Two days before his
12 th birthday Charles started working there, labelling bottles. Two weeks later his
father was arrested and sent to prinson for debt. His family went to live in prison
with him as was the custom.; they decided that Charles shoukld remain outside
continuing to work and living with a woman who took in young lodgers.
Some 35 years later after this period Dickens told his friend and biographer John
Forster that the recollection of these times “haunted him and made him
miserable”. He started to compose his autobiographical novel “David Copperfiled”
where the eponymous hero undergoes a similar class fall into humble employment
at the age of 12. Critics have suggested that this early dramatic experience must
have been a trauma which accounts for Dickens’ emotional sympathy for the figure
of the abused, poor and abandoned child.
Dicken’s father left prison after 3 months, removed Charles from the factory and
sent him to school. At 15 he began work as a junior clerk at a law office then he
became a freelance journalist reporting proceeds and debates in the House of
Commons. This activity led him to publish his first literary sketches at first
anonymously and then under the pseudonym “Boz”. The publication of “Pickwick
papers” brought him fame and success. This picaresque novel, revolving around
the adventures of Mr. Pickwick and his friends as they travel around England set
the pattern of illustrated serial publication that would define Dickens’ writing
carrer and would shape the reading habits of his generation. People would wait in
suspence for the next installment of the novel to be issued which they would read
aloud as an evening’s entertainment.
Dickens’s popularity
His fellow novelist Anthony Trollope wrote that no other writer except Shakespeare
has left a series of characters known by their names along with a set of habits,
costumes, phrases. His ability to construct memorably distinctive human beings.
He was a master plotter, a talented writer of extraordinarily evocative prose and a
keen observer of his developing country.
Although Dickens did not regard himself a revolutionary some of his novels deal
with specific abuses – the workhouses in which poor children were confined as in
Oliver Twist; abusive and fradulent schools in Nicholas Nickleby – but as his carreer
progressed he felt the need to demonstate how institutions and some people
