Dickens, Charles (1812–1870)

Charles Dickens was a 19th-century British novelist, journalist, and social critic. Dickens was born in 1812 in Portsmouth, England, the son of a clerk in the navy pay office. When his father was imprisoned for debt, the young Charles, at the age of 12, was forced to work in a blacking warehouse in order to support the rest of the family. This youthful experience of poverty deeply affected Dickens. Its impact can be felt most poignantly in his novels, in his stories of poor boys like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip in Great Expectations, who struggle to rise out of the impoverished circumstances of their childhoods to achieve success and respectability. Dickens's own struggles against poverty produced the central contradiction of his adult life and career. His experiences imbued his writing with an ever-present social conscience while at the same time they fostered his own material ambitions. Dickens the grown-up would always suffer from a profound fear of financial insecurity despite his ever-increasing wealth and celebrity.

After working as an office boy, Dickens became a Parliamentary reporter for the London Morning Chronicle and embarked on a career in journalism that would set the stage for his future success as a popular novelist and influential editor. The role of journalism in Dickens's career is frequently underestimated. Throughout his life, Dickens was a leading figure in the Victorian periodical press. All the novels that we know so well today saw their first publication in serial form in magazines or newspapers. From 1833 to 1835, Dickens published a series of articles on London street life, which were collected and published together under the title Sketches by Boz in 1836. These short pieces chronicled the lives of both the poor and the [Page 454]wealthy in Victorian London, the first industrialized city in the world's history. For example, in a description of a typical London pawn shop, Dickens portrays the representatives of various social classes, each with their individual motives and life stories, gathered together at the pawn brokers to engage in the daily commerce enacted there. The huge success of Sketches by Boz led to Dickens's securing of a contract for his first novel, The Pickwick Papers of 1837, and launched his literary career. With the publication of the Sketches and of Pickwick, Dickens found himself a celebrity at the age of 25.

In 1837, Dickens published Oliver Twist, the story of an orphan who escapes through equal measures of luck and virtue first from life in a workhouse and then from his apprenticeship to an undertaker and makes his way to the metropolis of London, only to fall in with a gang of thieves, pickpockets, and prostitutes. While chronicling the misfortunes of young Oliver, Dickens simultaneously presented Victorian readers with a compelling portrait of the life of the poor and criminal classes, the left-behinds of British progress and prosperity in the early half of the 19th century. The publication of Oliver Twist and other successive novels secured Dickens's status as the most widely read author of his time. In 1842, Dickens visited America for the first time for a series of public appearances that underscored his popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. Dickens expressed his disillusionment with the United States in American Notes (1842), a series of travel sketches and dispatches, and in the novel Martin Chuzzlewit. His stereotyped portrayal of American life deeply offended his American audience. At the same time, Dickens became an impassioned advocate for the abolition of slavery in the United States.

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