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"No
words can express the secret agony of my soul...
I felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man
crushed in my breast."
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Charles John
Huffham Dickens was born on 7th February 1812, in the English coastal town
of Portsmouth, where his father, John Dickens was a clerk in the Navy Pay
office. When Charles was born, his father John Dickens was 26 and was an
excitable, extravagant man who liked to entertain in style, a style that
his meager salary as a clerk was unable to support. This led him into a
succession of financial crisis throughout his life.
The second
of eight children, Charles was a delicate, sensitive child, unable to join
in the play of other children and he withdrew into books. Later in life,
recalling his boyhood days, he wrote: "When I think of it, the
picture always arises in my mind of a summer evening, the boys at play in
the churchyard and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life."
As a child,
the books Charles Dickens read were Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights,
Don Quixote and a child's Tom Jones and this reading creating for him a
world of magic, wonder and adventure, a world that he himself was so
vividly to create for others to enjoy in his own books.
At the age
of 12, the childhood of Dickens came to a sudden and dramatic end. His
father, unable to pay his large debts, was packed off to the Marshalsea
Debtors' Prison in London. Within a few days, the rest of the family were
to join him there, except Charles, whose education was cut short and who
was made to earn his living, washing bottles at Warren's Blacking Factory.
This experience proved so shocking and humiliating to the boy that it was
to haunt him for the rest of his life. "No words can express the
secret agony of my soul...I felt my early hopes of growing up to be a
learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast."
Though soon
re-united with his family, the previous easy life enjoyed by Charles was
never the same. Two years later, at the age of 14, his irregular and
inadequate schooling ended and he began work as a clerk in a lawyer's
office in Gray's Inn, London. This experience, again not a happy one, gave
him two things: a lifelong loathing of the legal profession and much raw
material for many of his later novels.
Charles then
became a reporter on the Parliamentary newspaper 'True
Sun', where his
natural talent for reporting and keen observation was first recognized. He
taught himself shorthand and, on the Mirror
of Parliament,
and then the Morning
Chronicle, he was
soon acknowledged as the best Parliamentary Reporter of the age.
In 1833, now
very much the young man about town, Charles Dickens wrote his first piece
of fiction: A
Dinner at Poplar Walk,
in the Old Monthly Magazine. Asked by the Editor to contribute more, under
the pen name 'Boz', Dickens wrote a series of pieces that were collected
and published in 1836 under the title Sketches
by Boz.
The modest
success of Sketches
was followed by the enormously popular and successful Pickwick
Papers, which was
published in a monthly instalments in 1836-37. Pickwick became a national
Hero overnight, and his exploits were followed by an average of 40,000
readers. Thought yet not 30, Dickens was now rich and famous.
Two days
after the publication of Pickwick, Dickens married Catherine Hogarth,
daughter of a fellow Journalist. "So perfect a creature never
breathed," he wrote of her at the time, "She had not a
fault." But with time his view of her was to change, and in later
years he was to admit, "She is amiable and complying but nothing on
earth would make her understand me." They were to separate in 1858,
when Charles Dickens was 46.
Throughout
his life, Charles enjoyed traveling. In the 1840s he journeyed to
Scotland, America, France, Switzerland and Italy. And throughout this
period, he poured out a succession of novels that exposed the cruelty,
hypocrisy and appalling poverty of early Victorian Society, novels such as
Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, A
Christmas Carol, Martin Chuzzlewit, and Dombey and Son.
Even his
novel writing (which continued to be published in monthly instalments)
proved inadequate for his boundless energy and restless spirit. In the
1840s, apart from all his major novels and work on David
Copperfield
(published in 1850), he started a daily newspaper, the Daily
News, and a
weekly Magazine, Household
Words, in
addition to writing a travel book American
Notes and a three
volume Child's
History of England.
In all that
he wrote, Charles Dickens strove to draw people together and led them to a
better understanding of each other. As he himself believed, "In this
world a great deal of bitterness among us arises from an imperfect
understanding of one another."
But as he
grew older, the subjects he wrote of grew bleaker and the mood more grim. Bleak
House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great
Expectations, Our Mutual Friend
and his unfinished Novel, The
Mystery of Edwin Drood, all
reflect a growing pessimism.
Despite a
steady decline in health, Dickens continued to give dramatic public
readings of his works to packed houses in both Britain and the United
States, which he visited again in 1867/68. Of these, a contemporary
witness reported, "He seemed to be physically transformed as he
passed from one character to another; he had as many distinct voices as
his books had characters; he held at command the fountains of laughter and
tears...When he sat down it was not mere applause that followed, but a
passionate outburst of love for the man."
But the
strain proved too much and on 8 June 1870, during a farewell series of
talks in England, he suffered a stroke and the next day, Charles Dickens
died at his house, 'Gad's Hill Place', near Rochester, Kent, at the age of
58.
Two days
after his death, Queen Victoria wrote in her Diary, "Charles Dickens
is a very great loss. He had a large loving mind and the strongest
sympathy with the poorer classes." On 14 June, he was buried in the
Poet's corner, Westminster Abbey, close to the monuments of Chaucer and
Shakespeare.
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