Charles Dickens was one of the greatest authors that Victorian England produced. Having experienced the oppression of the poor during his childhood, he used his novels to campaign against the social ills and injustices of the era. His novels continue to capture the imagination of readers to this day.
Charles Dickens was born in Landport, Hampshire on February 7th, 1812. He was the second of seven born to John and Elizabeth Dickens. John worked as a clerk in the navy pay office in Portsmouth, but often found himself unable to support his family financially.
Dickens’ early life was spent in poverty and hardship. He did attend school briefly in Chatham where he excelled but was forced to leave when his father’s debts caught up with him. John was sent to Marshlea debtor’s prison in 1824.
Faced with abject poverty, Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory at aged 12 to bring in a wage whilst his father was in prison. This employment ended after a few months when a relative died and left the family enough to cover all of their debts and afford Charles some measure of education. He attended Wellington House Academy until the age of fifteen.
In 1827, Dickens found work as a clerk in a law office. However, in order to better himself, he began to learn shorthand and became a reporter at Doctor’s Commons as a result in 1828. It was this that led to the start of his literary career.
Between 1830 and 1836, Dickens wrote for Mirror of Parliament, True Son and The Morning Chronicle. He also contributed to Monthly Magazine and The Evening Chronicle as well as editing Bentley’s Miscellany. Journalism gave him access to information from and related to the workings of parliament and fuelled his desire to rights social wrongs.
Dickens’ stories all betrayed his radical political tendencies, and thus campaigned for reform whilst being accessible to the poorer classes at the same time. Short stories that he had written for Monthly Magazine appeared in a book,Sketches by Boz, in 1836 because they had proved so popular with the common man. The publisher, William Hall, subsequently commissioned Dickens to write The Pickwick Papers, his first novel.
It was published between 1836 and 1837 in instalment form, which opened up a new and inexpensive way for the general public to purchase books. It therefore reached a much wider audience. Most of his books were initially published in this format, thus helping to make him Britain’s most popular author at the time.
1836 ultimately turned out to be a busy year for Dickens because he also got married. Catherine Hogarth was the daughter of a dear friend whom he had courted for some time. Although the marriage was not happy for long (they separated in 1858), it produced ten children.
Dickens’ success was largely because of his ability to create colourful, memorable characters that his readers could relate to. Oliver Twist (1837-38), perhaps Dickens’ most famous work, created many of them in its depiction of the Victorian London underworld. It also provided a stark warning to the upper classes of that time of how easy it was to fall into crime in order to survive yet still managed to remain sympathetic to Oliver’s plight.
Although Nicholas Nickelby (1838-39) and Barnaby Rudge (1841) followed, Dickens captured the hearts and minds of readers with A Christmas Carol (1843). The conversion of Ebenezer Scrooge from an avaricious, mean-spirited miser to a benevolent, appreciative old man is still popular today. Then it betrayed Dickens’ somewhat optimistic wish that the rich would help to solve social problems and help the poor.
Dickens’ later works included David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1860-61). They all contained the thread of social reform that had set the work of Dickens apart from that of so many others. He continued to tirelessly campaign for this reform throughout his life.
Dickens had lived in Italy, Switzerland and Paris from 1844 to 1845. However, he returned home in an attempt to make more of an impact regarding the social reform that he so badly desired. He edited and published a weekly journal,Household Words, between 1850 and 1859 and then All the Year Round until his death in order to campaign for education for the poor, public health and reform of the somewhat biased legal system.
From the 1840s onwards, Dickens took to touring in a bid to alert people to the social condition in the cities and gain support for reform. Between 1858 and 1868 he toured both Britain and the United States, giving lectures in numerous venues. It was only when his health began to fail that he was forced to give this up.
Charles Dickens died of a stroke at his home in Gadshill on June 8th, 1870. He was aged 58.
