Useful Charles Dickens

By Martin Manser

This book will help you:
• plan your essays
• revise better
• prepare for exams

This book provides:
• Introduction to Charles Dickens
• Charles Dickens’s life
• Charles Dickens and the English language
• Charles Dickens’s works
• Outlines of Dickens’s Novels

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483559070

Martin Manser

Martin Manser is a professional writer and researcher. He is responsible for ‘The Penguin Wordmaster’ and ‘The Guinness Book of Words’.

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Introduction

Charles Dickens was the most popular writer of his generation and his many novels and short stories are still widely read and enjoyed around the world. To modern readers he occupies an exalted position as perhaps the leading commentator writing in English upon the times in which he lived.

Although Dickens did sometimes set his tales in earlier centuries, most of his books were set in contemporary Britain and many of them depict life as experienced by the poorer sections of society. The realism of his depictions of poverty-stricken industrial and urban life were much informed by his own childhood experiences of deprivation long before he established a highly successful literary career as a prolific novelist, magazine editor and performer of his own writings. The plight of his protagonists, not always happily resolved and to modern eyes occasionally melodramatic and sentimental, evoked a deeply emotive response in readers at all levels of society and sometimes served as a key influence in changing social policy. Because many of his novels were written in parts for publication in relatively cheap monthly magazines they became available to a much wider readership that would not normally be able to afford the complete stories in book form.

Dickens’s great literary reputation is based on many factors but perhaps the most important of these is his unmatched skill at characterization. The hundreds of characters he created include some of the best known in world fiction, and many of them have become icons personifying aspects of flawed humanity. The fact that their stories are typically told with great humour and sympathy and in language that is at once poetic and authentic makes them much more than mere ciphers for social criticism, however. Many decades after the author’s death, the term ‘Dickensian’ still denotes a style that combines biting social observation with strong characterization and convincing descriptive power.

CHARLES DICKENS

Charles Dickens’s Life

Childhood Years

Charles John Huffam Dickens, to give him his full name (he was called Huffam after his godfather), was born in 1812 in Portsmouth. His father, John Dickens, worked as a clerk in the pay office of the Royal Navy, a post he obtained through his father-in-law, who held a senior post in the pay office until he was revealed as an embezzler in 1810 and fled abroad to escape arrest.

The family moved house frequently as a result of John Dickens’s work. They spent some years in lodgings in London, before moving to Chatham, where Charles spent the happiest years of his childhood. He grew particularly fond of the neighbouring historic town of Rochester, and it was no accident that when he became a wealthy and successful author he bought himself a large house in Rochester, Gad’s Hill Place, as his final home. He went to school in Chatham from the age of six to the age of ten. He was not a very healthy child and spent a great deal of his time reading.

Charles Dickens seems to have got most of his literary talent from his mother, Elizabeth Dickens, née Barrow, who was very good mimic and story-teller. From his father, he got material for several of his characters, for John Dickens, though a cheerful and optimistic man and a fond if not very conscientious parent, wanted a lifestyle that was above his means. He was very bad with money, continually falling into debt and trying to sponge off his friends and relatives. When the family moved back from Chatham to London, John Dickens’s spendthrift ways caught up with him and he was very soon arrested for debt and confined in the Marshalsea prison.

Being imprisoned for debt was not quite like being imprisoned for a criminal offence. A debtor was allowed to take his family into the prison to live with him and to receive as many visitors as cared to call. Charles, however, was not taken to the prison along with his younger brothers and sisters. He was left outside in lodgings and sent to work in a blacking factory to earn a little money for the family. Blacking was a type of black paste