Take the Dickens Challenge! The long winter nights are a perfect time to revisit the greatest of the English novelists.
Charles Dickens was as interesting as any of the more than two thousand characters he created. Born in 1812 to middle class parents who loved to socialize and tended to live beyond their means, Charles was a deeply imaginative child, weak and somewhat sickly, who enjoyed observing others and exhibited an early gift for theatrics. His father (who used to take the five-year old Charles to the local pub and stand him on the counter, where he performed comic songs for the customers) was a flamboyant man who aspired to something higher but could not control his spending, and his prodigality caused the family to lose their home when Charles was eleven.
While his sister, Fanny, was sent to music school on a scholarship, Charles was sent into a dark, miserable blacking warehouse to work. He lived alone in London in a small rented room, spent a dozen hours a day pasting the labels on bottles of shoe polish, and was thrown together with a group of coarse boys who horrified him. This terrible season of his life had such an impact on Dickens that he never spoke of it, even to his wife, and in fact the details of that period were only revealed by his biographer after his death. Within a year his father was released from debtor’s prison and Charles was brought home and sent to school again, until his father’s excesses caused him, at age fifteen, to leave school for good and start out on his own as a journalist. These and other childhood experiences combined to form a man of great ambition and energy coupled with a deep appreciation for the poor and downtrodden of the world. In a way, Dickens forever saw the world through the eyes of that child in the blacking factory; a world full of terror and hope, comedy and pathos.
Dickens fell in love as a young man but was rejected by his adored Maria in favor of a more successful man. He married the next available young lady he met, Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a well-known man of letters whom Dickens admired. Their courtship, from the first, was rather more practical than romantic. Catherine had a younger sister named Mary whom Dickens idolized, and who lived with them from the day of their marriage until her sudden death just a year or so later. Dickens never got over Mary’s death, and her image recurs over and over in perfect heroines (often seventeen years of age) with sweet natures and no character flaws.
When Mary died in his arms, Dickens slipped off her ring, placed it on his finger, and wore it until the day he died. Meanwhile his relationship with Catherine grew more strained as their family grew to include ten children. After twenty-two years of marriage he separated from his wife with a rather bizarre, public announcement in his paper, Household Words. Catherine’s sister Georgina managed his home for him thereafter. He remained close to his children, who were fiercely protective of his fame and reputation. These three experiences – the abandonment by his parents and his forced labor in the warehouse, his unrequited love for Maria Beadnell, and the death of Mary Hogarth – are cited by critics as the three greatest influences on Dickens’s unique, comic-tragic style.
A Self-made Man
As a young boy Charles was walking with his father one day when they stopped before a fine house at a place called Gad’s Hill. John Dickens pointed to the home and told Charles he might own something like it some day if he worked hard and was prudent. It is indicative of the power his father held over him that, when he achieved success as a novelist, Dickens bought that very home. He died in his study at Gad’s Hill at the relatively young age of 58, exhausted by a life of extreme exertion; having written novels, papers and articles at a feverish pace for nearly forty years. The home is a museum today, a shrine to the most famous man of letters in England. Though he wished for no ceremony connected with his death, his family allowed the nation to bury him in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. His grave was left open for two days and thousands passed by to look at his simple oak coffin. Later his son said that among the many bouquets of flowers that were tossed into the grave, “were afterwards found several small rough bouquets of flowers tied up with pieces of rag.” (Dickens, Peter Ackroyd, p. xiv.) These humble tributes illustrate the love the common people had for Dickens; they felt he represented them and felt his loss as a loss of something in them.
G.K. Chesterton theorized that Dickens’s genius lay in “that most exquisite of arts-the art of enjoying everybody.” Peter Ackroyd says of him, “it was his particular genius to represent, to bring together, more aspects of the national character than any other writer of his century.” Walter Bagehot called him “a special correspondent for posterity,” and Jules Verne summed it up when he said, “There is everything in Dickens.” During his lifetime Dickens was criticized for his a lack of religious devotion. Though he did not believe in organized religion he had a deep personal faith in Christ. He wrote to a son, “Never abandon the private practice of saying your own prayers night and morning. I have never abandoned it, and I know the comfort of it.” He took the sayings of Jesus seriously, and his fiction is full of truly Christian themes. It is the fashion today to concentrate on Dickens’s later, more cynical novels, and to disparage his earlier works. But through all of the novels there is an unchanging faith in the dignity of the human soul, the redeeming power of love, and the presence of God in the weakest and humblest of settings.
A man whose life was a microcosm of the Victorian ideal, Dickens rose from obscurity to greatness on his own merits, yet never ceased to champion the forgotten masses of poor and suffering people left in the wake of the industrial revolution. When Dickens was born, very few middle class homes had more than a few books; they were too expensive for average families. At the turn of the next century, very few middle class homes were without a complete set of Dickens’s novels, since they were considered the foundation of every good education. You may have been raised in a home with Dickens on the shelf, and I predict you will find that a treasure trove lies inside the covers of these oft-neglected books.
Take the Dickens Challenge!
A good thick book is just the thing on these long winter nights. Choose a Dickens novel that you’ve wanted to read and join us in revisiting this wonderful author. I’m choosing Martin Chuzzlewit – it’s been waiting on my shelf these twenty years – though I am tempted to reread one of my old favorites.
Share your favorite Dickens with the Best Books Club and I’ll post your comments in my next article. Enjoy! Log on to the website at www.thebestbooksclub.com or write me at [email protected]“>[email protected].
