Who was Charles Dickens and what made him different?

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 in Portsmouth, the second of eight children of John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office who was cheerfully and persistently unable to manage money. When Charles was twelve, his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea prison in Southwark. Charles was sent to work at Warren's blacking factory on the Thames, labelling pots of boot polish for ten shillings a week while his family lived in the prison with his father, as was common practice.

He worked at the factory for several months. His father was eventually released. Dickens went back to school and then to work as a journalist, and eventually became the most famous writer in the English-speaking world. But he never stopped being the twelve-year-old boy at the factory window, convinced he had been abandoned by everyone who should have protected him.

What made Dickens different from other Victorian novelists?#

Three things distinguish Dickens from his contemporaries and explain why his novels have outlasted most of them.

He understood popular entertainment. Dickens published almost everything he wrote in serial form -- monthly or weekly instalments sold cheaply and read by a very wide audience. He shaped his plots and characters for serial consumption: cliffhangers at the end of instalments, comic relief to break emotional intensity, a constant awareness that he was holding an audience's attention across months and years rather than hours. This made him responsive to readers in a way that writers publishing completed books were not. He sometimes changed plotlines when audience response indicated something was not working.

He could animate a crowd. Dickens gave readers more distinctive, memorable, immediately legible characters per page than any other novelist. Mr Micawber, Fagin, Miss Havisham, Uriah Heep, Scrooge, Pip, Oliver -- these are not characters who require analysis to grasp. They announce themselves immediately and remain lodged in the memory. Dickens reportedly based many of them on people he had actually known, transformed through his particular kind of caricature into something more vivid than realism.

He used fiction as a weapon. Dickens understood that novels could change things. Oliver Twist (1837-1839) attacked the New Poor Law and the workhouse system. Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839) exposed the brutal Yorkshire boarding schools. Bleak House (1852-1853) attacked the Court of Chancery's interminable legal proceedings. Hard Times (1854) attacked utilitarian educational philosophy. These were not decorative subjects -- they were active campaigns, and several of them produced results.

What was his personal life like?#

Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in 1836. They had ten children. In 1858, after twenty-two years of marriage, he separated from her in circumstances that were publicly humiliating for Catherine and involved his relationship with a young actress named Ellen Ternan. He published a statement in his journal Household Words defending himself and attacking Catherine, which appalled many of his friends and readers.

He was also an extraordinary public performer. He gave reading tours across Britain and America, performing his own work to sold-out audiences, and it is now believed that the physical and emotional intensity of these readings contributed to his death. He died on 9 June 1870, the day after suffering a stroke at the dinner table, at the age of fifty-eight. His death was announced in The Times the following day and produced a public outpouring of grief across Britain.

What is the best Dickens to start with?#

For the novel with the most self-contained pleasure: A Christmas Carol -- short, perfect, and still the most satisfying thing Dickens wrote. For the most autobiographical: David Copperfield, which is Dickens's own favourite of his works. For the most structurally ambitious: Great Expectations. For the full picture of what Dickens could do at full scale: Bleak House, which many critics consider his masterpiece.

For a full comparison, the best Dickens novels to start with covers the full range with specific recommendations for different reading moods.

---

Further reading#

For the author spotlights on his contemporaries, who George Eliot was and the broader Victorian literary landscape are covered in the cornerstone piece.

Great Expectations is free on Foxing. A Christmas Carol is free on Foxing.

Sources#

• Michael Slater, Charles Dickens, Yale University Press, 2009
• Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, HarperCollins, 1990
• John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers, Macmillan, 1995