Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812.
When he was ten the family moved to London where attended regular schooling until 1824.
When his father was sent to a debtor’s prison, Dickens was forced to work in a factory at the age of 12.
Prison, the poor quarters of London, the life in the city streets and the other boys working at the factory remained in his mind and influenced his novels.

At the age of fourteen he worked as a clerk in a legal office and he also began to write for the comic newspapers and entered serious journalism.
He adopted the pen name “Boz” and in 1836 two series of Sketches by Boz, short articles describing London people and scenes, were published.
He wrote his first novel The Pickwick Papers relating the adventures of a group of eccentric people travelling on the English roads, where the comic and picaresque elements are mixed.
Between 1836 and 1837 he achieved great success in Britain and in the US thanks to the publication of The Pickwick papers.

The 1840s and 1850s were the most flourishing years of Dickens' literary production and the works were increasingly enriched with the journeys undertaken by the writer in Europe (Italy, Scotland) and in the USA (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Richmond).

In his novels, Dickens talks about social injustice, political incompetence, poverty and the class conflicts of Victorian England.

In Oliver Twist he tells the story of an orphan brought up in a workhouse who runs away to London and joins a gang of thieves made up of children.
In Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit , Dickens attacks cruelty in boarding schools, while in Hard Times he deals with the sufferings of the factory system and the harm done by utilitarianism.
In the 1840s, Dickens wrote novels which were organized around a single theme or closely related themes such as the Victorian love of money or how the delays of law can destroy the lives of ordinary people, or the image of the Victorian Christmas.
In fact, Christmas Carol belongs to a series of “Christmas Books” that were instrumental in creating the image of the Victorian Christmas.
Dickens also turned to semi-autobiographical themes as in David Copperfield, which is one of the greatest portraits in English literature of the loves, pains and wonders of childhood.
The theme of “growing up” is described again in Great Expectations, a well-structured novel.

Dickens’ novels present a variety of settings: the countryside and Merry Old England in The Pickwick Papers, provincial towns, the industrial settlements of the North in Hard Times. However, Dickens’ most typical setting is London.

Dickens creates lively, unforgettable characters and they are mainly from the lower and middle classes (eccentries, vagabonds, criminals and orphans). The upper class and aristocratic characters are not portrayed as well and tend to fall into stereotypes. Characters often are too easily divided into good and bad.

As for the plots of his novels, they involve many characters and parallel stories, plot and subplots, intrigue, mystery and incredible coincidences.

Dickens is considered a master of English literature because he is very good at mixing social criticism with lively portraits of universal characters, combining the pathetic with the comic. His ability to create dialogues is unmatched by any other English novelists; for these reasons, he influenced many of his contemporaries and successors even abroad, for example Franz Kafka and Fëdor Dostoevskij.

The main strength of Dickens’ style is humor through which he makes the strong points of his novels unforgettable.

Dickens is probably the most popular English novelist and the only writer who might be compared to William Shakespeare.
Earlier critics tended to regard him as a great comic writer and entertainer, whose plots were implausible.
Contemporary critics now tend to see his works as combining social realism with the political devices of metaphor and symbolism.

Charles Dickens died in 1870 because of a stroke.