Titans of History

DICKENS

1812–1870

In literary matters my dividing line is: do you like Dickens or do you not? If you do not, I am sorry for you, and that is the end of the matter.

Stanley Baldwin

Charles Dickens was the English writer of his age. Rambunctious, touching, tragic and comic by turns, his novels captured the public’s imagination like no others before or since. He transmuted the realities he saw into an enthralling and encyclopedic social panorama of hypnotic power. His works effectively constitute a world, such that even those who have read little of the author know what is meant by the term Dickensian.

The master storyteller wrote a canon of classics. His books weave together darkness and light, romance and melodrama, the terrifying and the tender; one moment they are gruesome and fantastical, the next tear-inducingly funny. From the debtors’ prison of Little Dorrit (1855–7) to the workhouse and thieves’ dens of Oliver Twist (1837–8), to the machinations of the Chancery Court in Bleak House (1852–3), Dickens created a vision of London as a pulsating, living organism, which even today dominates our conceptions of the Victorian metropolis. From the moment his first major work, The Pickwick Papers, was serialized (1836), and a print run of 400 mushroomed to 40,000, he was established as the writer who understood the English better than anyone else.

Dickens’s rudimentary schooling was cut short at fifteen by the profligacy of his father, an erstwhile naval clerk. The boy who had wanted since childhood to be an actor and who was remembered by his schoolfellows for his “animation and animal spirits” became instead a reluctant legal clerk. In spring of 1833 Dickens, by now a journalist (a more exciting but “wearily uncertain” career), got an audition at Covent Garden Theatre but failed to keep the appointment on account of illness. An accident of fate, perhaps, because that summer he began to write. By the following year, under the pen-name Boz, Dickens was winning in print the fame that he had previously hoped for on the stage. His love of the theater clearly influenced his work. Later he would adapt classics such as A Christmas Carol (1843) for the stage. But he never renewed his application to Covent Garden.

The colorful names of Dickens’ characters were of paramount importance to him. He could not begin a new book until he had them right. He kept lists of those with special potential and scribbled down myriad variations. Martin Chuzzlewit was nearly Martin Sweezlewag. With age his work grew darker and more serious, but comedy was never far off. Frequently seized by hysterical mirth at the most inappropriate times, Dickens was always quick to see the ridiculous side of things.

Dickens researched carefully and many of his characters were based on fact, such as Fagin in Oliver Twist. In 1849 the journalist Henry Mayhew, founder of Punch magazine, began a series of articles for the Morning Chronicle. They would eventually become the mammoth four-volume London Labour and the London Poor, a work that shocked his middle-class readership with its unflinching picture of the realities of London’s slums and which influenced radicals, reformers and writers, among them Charles Dickens.

Mayhew revealed the dark underside of the city, a world of crime, filth and depravity. Interviewing chimney sweeps and flower girls, beggars and street entertainers, pickpockets and prostitutes, Mayhew depicted a world, as the writer Thackeray described it, “of terror and wonder.” He spoke of the “pure-finders,” who gathered dog feces to sell to tanners. He introduced his readers to the “mud-larks,” children who made their living scavenging around the banks of the cholera-infested, sewage-filled Thames for coins and wood or for coal dropped from the barges.

Mayhew let his subjects speak in their own words and reported his findings with a humanist’s eye. He told of Jack, a West End crossing-sweep, “a good-looking lad with a pair of large, mild eyes”; of his friend Gander, who earned extra money with his acrobatic “catenwheeling.” He described their room in the lodging house that was as clean as it could be and the old woman who cared for them as well as she was able. He told the story of the drunken prostitute China Emma, the “shriveled and famine-stricken” woman lying in “a hole … more like a beast in his lair than a human being in her home.”

It was in this world that the model for Oliver Twist’s Fagin lived. One of London’s most notorious pawnbrokers and fences (receivers of stolen goods), Ikey Solomon became famous for his farcical escape from Newgate Prison. After he was arrested in 1827 for theft and receiving, the hired coach that was intended to carry him to jail was in fact driven by his father-in-law. As the coach took a detour through Petticoat Lane, a gang of Solomon’s friends overpowered the guards and set Ikey free.

Solomon fled to New York, but, in lieu of the notorious criminal, the authorities transported his wife and children to Tasmania. “Determined to brave it all for the sake of my dear wife and children,” Solomon sailed to join them. For want of a warrant, it was a year before Tasmanian officials could arrest him and send him back to England.

Solomon’s trial at the Old Bailey was one of the sensations of the day. But unlike Fagin, Solomon did not hang. Found guilty on two counts of theft, he was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation and promptly sent back to Tasmania. Solomon lived out the rest of his days there. The man said at one point to be worth £30,000 died in his sixties, estranged from his family and leaving an estate of just £70.

But as well as drawing on the accounts of other peoples’ lives for inspiration, Dickens knew from his own experience how quickly a man could slide into degradation. At the same age at which Oliver Twist is confronted with the terrifying darkness of the world, Dickens had become a child laborer. His time in a blacking factory, necessitated by his father’s bankruptcy, was brief. When the family’s fortunes recovered some months later, Dickens returned to school. His parents never spoke of it again. He himself kept it a close secret, though the memory never left him. He wanted always, he said, “to present [the poor] in a favorable light to the rich.” His enduring fear of a return to poverty compelled him to work ever harder.

Dickens-mania gripped rich and poor alike. Installments of his works were read out to crowds of the urban poor, who had clubbed together to hire the latest episode from the circulating library. Dickens made the public laugh and he made them cry. His characters were as real to them as life. At New York Harbor, crowds pressed around disembarking passengers to ask about the fate of The Old Curiosity Shop’s Little Nell. Her death inspired hysteria; the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell was allegedly so enraged that he threw the book out of a train carriage window.

“I have great faith in the poor,” Dickens wrote to a friend in 1844. “I shall never cease, I hope, until I die, to advocate their being made as happy and as wise as the circumstances … may admit.” In his fantastical exaggerations the radical philanthropist showed the bleakness that faced so many. For some readers, it was an illustration of their lives; it made others realize how wretched such lives could be. One American reviewer considered Dickens’ works a force for reform far more effective than anything the “open assaults of Radicalism or Chartism” could achieve.

Dickens was renowned for his wit and his marvelous talent for mimicry. He developed an extraordinarily successful second career giving public readings of his works. His mammoth tours across England and America sold out in every city. He turned his flock of offspring into an amateur theatrical troupe, performing plays in which he generally took the starring role. In the course of these ventures he met Ellen Ternan, the young actress who was the great love of his later life.

He had a reputation for oddity. He was obsessed with light, filling his brightly painted room with mirrors. When Dickens was a child, his father pointed out to him a house that, he said, would demonstrate a man’s having made it in life. So in 1856 the adult Dickens bought it—Gad’s Hill Place in Higham, Kent. He was a demanding father, while his total repudiation of his wife Catherine after over twenty years of marriage was undeniably cruel.

Dickens’ masterpiece was A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Set in the French Revolution, it ends with Sydney Carton, rogue-turned-savior, giving his life for that of a better man, saying “It is a far, far better thing that I do now, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”