1812-1870
1812.     Born at Landport, Portsmouth, February 7.
1816.     Parents move to Chatham; 1821, to London.
1822.     Father bankrupt and in prison. Charles in blacking warehouse.
1827.     Charles enters lawyer’s office.
1831.     Reporters’ Gallery in Parliament.
1836.     Marries Catherine Hogarth. Publishes Sketches by Boz.
1837.     Pickwick Papers. 1838. Nicholas Nickleby.
1842.     First American journey. 1843. Martin Chuzzlewit.
1844-5.     Eleven months’ residence in Italy, chiefly at Genoa.
1846.     Editor of Daily News for a few weeks.
1846-7.     Six months at Lausanne; three months at Paris. Dombey and Son.
1849-50.     David Copperfield.
1850.     Editor of weekly periodical, Household Words.
1851-2.     Manager of theatrical performances. 1852. Bleak House.
1853.     Italian tour: Rome, Naples, and Venice.
1856.     Purchase of Gadshill House, near Rochester.
1858.     Beginning of public readings.
1859.     Tale of Two Cities appears in All the Year Round.
1860.     Gadshill becomes his home instead of London.
1867.     Second American journey. Public readings in America.
1869.     April, collapse at Chester. Readings stopped.
1870.     Dies at Gadshill, June 9.
Charles Dickens
Novelist and Social Reformer

In these days when critics so often repeat the cry of ‘art for art’s sake’ and denounce Ruskin for bringing moral canons into his judgements of pictures or buildings, it is dangerous to couple these two titles together, and to label Dickens as anything but a novelist pure and simple. And indeed, all would admit that the creator of Sam Weller and Sarah Gamp will live when the crusade against ‘Bumbledom’ and its abuses is forgotten and the need for such a crusade seems incredible. But when so many recent critics have done justice to his gifts as a creative artist, this aspect of his work runs no danger of being forgotten. Moreover, when we are considering Dickens as a Victorian worthy and as a representative man of his age, it is desirable to bring out those qualities which he shared with so many of his great contemporaries. Above all, we must remember that Dickens himself would be the last man to be ashamed of having written ‘with a purpose’, or to think that the fact should be concealed as a blemish in his art. There was nothing in which he felt more genuine pride than in the thought that his talents thus employed had brought public opinion to realize the need for many practical reforms in our social condition. If these old abuses have mostly passed away, we may be thankful indeed; but we cannot feel sure that in the future fresh abuses will not arise with which the example of Dickens may inspire others to wage war. His was a strenuous life; he never spared himself nor stinted his efforts in any cause for which he was fighting; and if he did not win complete victory in his lifetime, he created the spirit in which victory was to be won.

Charles Dickens was born in 1812, the second child of a large family, his father being at the time a Navy clerk employed at Portsmouth. Of his birthplace in Commercial Road Portsmouth is justifiably proud; but we must think of him rather as a Kentishman and a Londoner, since he never lived in Hampshire after his fourth year. The earliest years which left a distinct impress on his mind were those passed at Chatham, to which his father moved in 1816. This town and its neighbouring cathedral city of Rochester, with their narrow old streets, their riverside and dockyard, took firm hold of his memory and imagination. To-day no places speak more intimately of him to the readers of his books. Here he passed five years of happy childhood till his father’s work took the family to London and his father’s improvidence plunged them into misfortune.

For those who know Wilkins Micawber it is needless to describe the failings of Mr. Dickens; for others we may be content to say that he was kindhearted, sanguine and improvident, quite incapable of the steady industry needed to support a growing family. When his debts overwhelmed him and he was carried off to the Marshalsea prison, Charles was only ten years old, but already he took the lead in the house. On him fell the duty of pacifying creditors at the door, and of making visits to the pawn-broker to meet the daily needs of the household. His initiation into life was a hard one and it began cruelly soon. If he was active and enterprising beyond his years, with his nervous high-strung temperament he was capable of suffering acutely; and this capacity was now to be sorely tried. For a year or more of his life this proud sensitive child had to spend long hours in the cellars of a warehouse, with rough uneducated companions, occupied in pasting labels on pots of boot-blacking. This situation was all that the influence of his family could procure for him; and into this he was thrust at the age of ten with no ray of hope, no expectation of release. His shiftless parents seemed to acquiesce in this drudgery as an opening for their cleverest son; and instead of their helping and comforting him in his sorrow, it was he who gave his Sundays to visiting them in prison and to offering them such consolation as he could. The iron burnt deep into his soul. Long after, in fact till the day when the district was rebuilt and changed out of knowledge, he owned that he could not bear to revisit the scene; so painful were his recollections, so vivid his sense of degradation. Twenty-five years later he narrated the facts to his friend and biographer John Forster in a private conversation; and he only recurred to the subject once more when under the disguise of a novel he told the story of the childhood of David Copperfield. By shifting the horror from the realm of fact to that of fiction, perhaps he lifted the weight of it from the secret recesses of his heart.

When his father’s debts were relieved, the child regained his freedom from servitude, but even then his schooling was desultory and ineffective. Well might the elder Dickens, in a burst of candour, say to a stranger who asked him about his son’s education, ‘Why indeed, sir, ha! ha! he may be said to have educated himself.’

At the age of fifteen Charles embarked again on his career as a wage-earner. At first he was taken into a lawyer’s office, where he filled a position somewhat between that of office-boy and clerk, and two years later he was qualifying himself by the study of shorthand for the profession of a parliamentary reporter, which his father was then following. He entered ‘the Gallery’ in 1831, first representing the True Sun and later the well-known Morning Chronicle; and at intervals he enlarged his experiences by journeys into the provinces to report political meetings. Thus it was that he familiarized himself with the mail coaches, the wayside hostelries, and the rich variety of types that were to be found there; with London in most of its phases he was already at home. So, when in 1834 he made his first attempts at writing in periodical literature, although he was only twenty-two years old, he had a wealth of first-hand experiences quite outside the range of the man who is just finishing his leisurely passage through a public school and university: of schools and offices, of parliaments and prisons, of the street and of the high road, he had been a diligent and observant critic; for many years he had practised the maxim of Pope: ‘The proper study of mankind is Man.’

Friends sprang up wherever he went. His open face, his sparkling eye, his humorous tongue, his ready sympathy, were a passport to the goodwill of those whom he met; few could resist the appeal. Many readers will be familiar with the early portrait by Maclise; but his friends tell us how little that did justice to the lively play of feature, ‘the spirited air and carriage’ which were indescribable. On the top of a mail coach, on a fresh morning, they must have won the favour of his fellow travellers more easily than Alfred Jingle won the hearts of the Pickwickians. And beneath the radiant cheerfulness of his manner, the quick flash of observation and of speech, there was in him an element of hard persistence and determination which would carry him far. If the years of poverty and neglect had failed to chill his hopes and break his spirit, there was no fear that he would tire in the pursuit of his ambition when fortune began to smile upon him. He had touched life on many sides. He had kept his warmth of sympathy, his buoyancy, his capacity for rising superior to ill-fortune; and the years of adversity had only deepened his feeling for all that were oppressed. He had much to learn about the craft of letters; but he already had the first essential of an author — he had something to say.

The year 1836 is a definite landmark in the life of Dickens. In this year he married; in this year he gave up the practice of parliamentary reporting, published the Sketches by Boz, and began the writing of The Pickwick Papers. This immortal work achieved wide popularity at once. Criticism cannot hope to do justice to the greatness of Sam Weller, to the humours of Dingley Dell and Eatanswill, to the adventures of the hero in back gardens or in prison, on coaches or in wheelbarrows. Every one must read them in the original for himself. In this book Dickens reached at once the height of his success in making his fellow countrymen laugh with him at their own foibles. If in the art of constructing a story, in the depiction of character, in deepening the interest by the alternation of happiness and misfortune, he was to go far beyond his initial triumph — still with many Dickensians, who love him chiefly for his liveliness of observation and broad humour, Pickwick remains the prime favourite.

The effect of this success on the fortunes of the author was immediate and lasting. Henceforth he could live in a comfortable house and look forward to a family life in which his children should be free from all risk of repeating his own experience. He could afford himself the pleasures and the society which he needed, and he became the centre of a circle of friends who appreciated his talents and encouraged him in his career. His relations with his publishers, though not without incident, were generally of the most cordial kind. If Dickens had the self-confidence to estimate his own powers highly, and the shrewd instinct to know when he was getting less than his fair share in a bargain, yet in a difference of opinion he was capable of seeing the other side, and he was loyal in the observance of all agreements.

The five years which followed were so crowded with various activities that it is difficult to date the events exactly, especially when he was producing novels in monthly or weekly numbers. Generally he had more than one story on the stocks. Thus in 1837, before Pickwick was finished, Oliver Twist was begun, and it was not itself complete before the earlier numbers of Nicholas Nickleby were appearing. In the same way The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge, which may be dated 1840 and 1841, overlapped one another in the planning of the stories, if not in the execution of the weekly parts. There is no period of Dickens’s life which enables us better to observe his intense mental activity, and at the same time the variety of his creations. Here we have the luxuriant humour of Mrs. Nickleby and the Crummles family side by side with the tragedy of Bill Sikes and the pathos of Little Nell. Here also we can see the gradual development of constructive power in the handling of the story. But for our purpose it is more significant to notice that we here find Dickens’s pen enlisted in the service of the noblest cause for which he fought, the redemption from misery and slavery of the children of his native land. Lord Shaftesbury’s life has told us what their sufferings were and how the machinery of Government was slowly forced to do its part; and Dickens would be the last to detract from the fame of that great philanthropist, whose efforts on many occasions he supported and praised. But there were wide circles which no philanthropist could reach, hearts which no arguments or statistics could rouse; men and women who attended no meetings and read no pamphlets but who eagerly devoured anything that was written by the author of The Pickwick Papers. To them Smike and Little Nell made a personal and irresistible appeal; they could not remain insensible to the cruelty of Dotheboys Hall and to the depravity of Fagin’s school; and if these books did not themselves recruit active workers to improve the conditions of child life, at least society became permeated with a temper which was favourable to the efforts of the reformers.

As far back as the days of his childhood at Rochester Dickens had been indignant at what he had casually heard of the Yorkshire schools; and his year of drudgery in London had made him realize, in other cases beside his own, the degradation that followed from the neglect of children. On undertaking to handle this subject in Nicholas Nickleby, he journeyed to Yorkshire to gather evidence at first hand for his picture of Dotheboys Hall. And for many years afterwards he continued to correspond with active workers on the subject of Ragged Schools and on the means of uplifting children out of the conditions which were so fruitful a source of crime. He discovered for himself how easily miscreants like Fagin could find recruits in the slums of London, and how impossible it was to bring up aright boys who were bred in these neglected homes. Even where efforts had been begun, the machinery was quite inadequate, the teachers few, the schoolrooms cheerless and ill-equipped. Mr. Crotch22 has preserved a letter of 1843 in which Dickens makes the practical offer of providing funds for a washing-place in one school where the children seemed to be suffering from inattention to the elementary needs. His heart warmed towards individual cases and he faced them in practical fashion; he was not one of those reformers who utter benevolent sentiments on the platform and go no further.

Critics have had much to say about Dickens’s treatment of child characters in his novels; the words ‘sentimental’ and ‘mawkish’ have been hurled at scenes like the death of Paul Dombey and Little Nell and at the more lurid episodes in Oliver Twist. But Dickens was a pioneer in his treatment of children in fiction; and if he did smite resounding blows which jar upon critical ears, at least he opened a rich vein of literature where many have followed him. He wrote not for the critics but for the great popular audience whom he had created, comprising all ages and classes, and world-wide in extent. The best answer to such criticism is to be found in the poem which Bret Harte dedicated to his memory in 1870, which beautifully describes how the pathos of his child-heroine could move the hearts of rough working men far away in the Sierras of the West. Nor did this same character of Little Nell fail to win special praise from literary critics so fastidious as Landor and Francis Jeffrey.

In 1842 he embarked on his first voyage to America. Till then he had travelled little outside his native land, and this expedition was definitely intended to bear fruit. Before starting he made a bargain with his publishers to produce a book on his return. The American Notes thus published, dealing largely with institutions and with the notable ‘sights’ of the country, have not retained a prominent place among his works; with Martin Chuzzlewit and its picture of American manners it is different. This stands alone among his writings in having left a permanent heritage of ill-will. Reasons in abundance can be found for the bitterness caused. He portrayed the conceit, the self-interest, the disregard for the feelings of others which the less-educated American showed to foreigners in a visible and often offensive guise; and the portraits were so life-like that no arrow fails to hit the mark. The American people were young; they had made great strides in material prosperity, they had not been taught to submit to the lash by satirists like Swift or more kindly mentors like Addison. Their own Oliver Wendell Holmes had not yet begun to chastise them with gentle irony. So they were aghast at Dickens’s audacity, and indignant at what seemed an outrage on their hospitality, and few stopped to ask what elements of truth were to be found in the offending book. No doubt it was one-sided and unfair; Dickens, like most tourists, had been confronted by the louder and more aggressive members of the community and had not time to judge the whole. In large measure he recanted in subsequent writings; and on his second visit the more generous Americans showed how little rancour they bore. But the portraits of Jefferson Brick and Elijah Pogram will live; with Pecksniff, ‘Sairey’ Gamp, and other immortals they bear the hall-mark of Dickens’s creative genius.

To America he did not go again for twenty-five years; but, as he grew older, he seemed to feel increasing need for change and variety in his mode of life. In 1844 he went for nearly twelve months to Italy, making his head-quarters at Genoa; and in 1846 he repeated the experiment at Lausanne on the lake of Geneva. Later, between 1853 and 1856, he spent a large part of three summers in a villa near Boulogne. Though he desired the change for reasons connected with his work, and though in each case he formed friendly connexions with his neighbours, it cannot be said that his books show the influence of either country. His genius was British to the core and he remained an Englishman wherever he went. He complained when abroad that he missed the stimulus of London, where the lighted streets, through which he walked at night, caused his imagination to work with intensified force. But even in Genoa he proved capable of writing The Chimes, which is as markedly English in temper as anything which he wrote.

The same spirit of restlessness comes out in his ventures into other fields of activity at home. At one time he assumed the editorship of a London newspaper; but a few weeks showed that he was incapable of editorial drudgery and he resigned. His taste for acting played a larger part in his life; and in 1851 and other years he put an enormous amount of energy into organizing public theatrical performances with his friends in London. He always loved the theatre. Macready was one of his innermost circle, and he had other friends on the stage. Indeed there were moments in his life when it seemed that the genius of the novelist might be lost to the world, which would have found but a sorry equivalent in one more actor of talent on the stage, however brilliant that talent was. But the main current of his life went on in London with diligent application to the book or books in hand; or at Broadstairs, where Dickens made holiday in true English fashion with his children by the sea.

In the years following the American voyage the chief landmarks we............