Dickens

Charles, an English novelist. He was born near Portsmouth, February 7, 1812. His father held a very respectable position in the pay department of the British navy, with an income of $1,750, equivalent to $2,500 at the present time. He supported his family in comfort. The childhood of Dickens was happily spent in roaming about the countryside, in romping, playing games, attending school, and reading. He was fond of imaginative reading. Among his favorite books were The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and Arabian Nights'.

When Charles was about ten or twelve years old the Dickens family moved to London. The father appears to have been an easy-going, indulgent man, who spent money faster than he made it. According to an English custom of the time, he was arrested for debt and thrown into prison. Mrs. Dickens attempted to support the family by opening a private school. Employment was found for Charles in a warehouse engaged in the manufacture of shoeblacking. A room was rented for him, and he was allowed his-wages to buy his meals or to use as he pleased. This was a sad change in circumstances. Hitherto servants had blacked the shoes of the entire family. Charles would have considered it beneath him to black his own shoes, and now to be engaged in the making of blacking was a grievous humiliation. He never referred to this period of his life without showing bitterness. It appears, however, to have been of great benefit to him. He was thrown on his own resources. He saved money from his lunches to buy comic papers and to attend the theater. He roamed about the book stalls and streets of London, and without becoming in the least depraved, became acquainted with the pickpocket, thieving side of London life, which he afterward made famous in such books as Oliver Twist and Old Curiosity Shop.

Later, the fortunes of the family mended; the elder Dickens was released from prison and Charles was sent again to school. He entered a law office to prepare himself for the profession, but did not enjoy the work. He learned, instead, shorthand, and began reporting parliamentary debates for the London papers. In this he was so successful that he was sent out at election time to write up the scenes connected with the election of members of Parliament. One step led to another. He soon began writing bright sketches on such subjects as The Election for Beadle, Greenwich Fair, and Seven Dials. As in the case of Kipling, Thackeray, Fields, and other noted writers, newspaper work lead him on into literature. The reception of the sketches mentioned was so encouraging that he wrote next a connected series describing the adventures and observations of an old gentleman and one or two companions, who set out to tour England and see something of the world. These sketches are known as the Pickwick Papers. They made Dickens famous and independent.

He bought Gadshill, a piece of property near Rochester, that he had much admired when a boy. He rebuilt the house to suit his own notions, and built himself a sort of eyrie or elevated study up in the tree-tops, where he could be alone and from the windows of which he could see a wide stretch of surrounding country. He never cared to go far from London, however. He claimed that the rattle and noise of the streets, and the crowds of people gave him the opportunity to select characters and scenes for his novels.

Dickens' works give a wonderful picture of England, especially London life, as he saw it. David Copperfield is supposed to give a glimpse of Dickens' boyhood, but it is much too sorrowful. The Tale of Two Cities is a story of the French Revolution. Nicholas Nickleby acquaints the reader with the country boarding school kept by Mr. Wackford Squeers, the Yorkshire schoolmaster. Little Dorrit discusses Marshalsea and imprisonment for debt. Bleak House shows how the delays of the law eat up property and ruin clients. Martin Chuzzlewit exposes the renowned hypocrite, Mr. Pecksniff, and, incidentally, the questionable methods of Americans in luring settlers to make unprofitable investments in wild lands. Barnaby Rudge, Dombey and Son, and Our Mutual Friend are good reading.

Dickens was fond of children and very much attached to the Christmas season. As it approached he used to take his children to the toy shops and let them purchase everything they wanted. The Dickens home was turned over to Christmas festivities. For a number of years he made it a practice to write a Christmas story for each holiday season. The Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, and many others were written in this way.

That Dickens aimed consciously in many of his works to bring about reform in existing institutions and conditions is shown in the prefaces to the early editions. In these attempts he was remarkably successful. Daniel Webster said that Dickens had done more to ameliorate the condition of the English poor than all the statesmen Great Britain had sent into Parliament. He attacked such evils as imprisonment for debt, the poorhouse systems, the management of the court of chancery, capital punishment (prescribed at the beginning of the nineteenth century for more than 160 offenses), above all, the prevailing systems of education. It has been said that "no other writer has attacked so many phases of wrong training, unjust treatment, and ill usage of childhood." His name has been coupled with Froebel's as one of the two most sympathetic friends of childhood.

Dickens visited America twice to give courses of lectures. He wrote a volume of observations, called American Notes, that gave offense, but no doubt did Americans good by making them see themselves as others see them. Although his complete works extended to thirty volumes, one who has acquired a taste for Dickens is unwilling to leave a single volume unread. While he has left perhaps few proverbial expressions that pass current, he is remarkable for his description and character sketches. He is a master hand at describing a fire, a runaway, a thief chase, the arrest of a pickpocket, a murder scene, a dinner table, a courtroom, a crowded steamboat, a wharf landing, an old building, a stretch of country, a shrieking railway train. Certainly no one else can make the wind howl through the chimney pots like Dickens.

His characters are genuine creations. Squeers, Pecksniff, Dolly Varden, Micawber, Captain Cuttle, Peggotty, Barkis, Sir Mulberry, Smike, Little Nell, Betsy Trotwood, Uriah Heep, Mr. Gradgrind, Mr. Boffin, Mark Tapley, Barnaby and his raven, Quilp, Pickwick, and Sam Weller are quite as real as Shakespeare's characters.

Dickens died quietly at Gadshill June 9, 1870. He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, between the statues of Addison and Campbell.

The following is a list of Dickens' works:

No one thinks first of Mr. Dickens as a writer. He is at once, through his books, a friend. He belongs among the intimates of every pleasant-tempered and large-hearted person. He is not so much the guest as the inmate of our homes. He keeps holidays with us, he helps us to celebrate Christmas with heartier cheer, he shares at every New Year in our good wishes; for, indeed, it is not in his purely literary character that he has done most for us, it is as a man of the largest humanity, who has simply used literature as the means by which to bring himself into relation with his fellow-men, and to inspire them with something of his own sweetness, kindness, charity, and good-will.--North American Review, April, 1868.

Dickens has introduced a reform as to the habit of terrorizing children. Corporal punishment has diminished to one-fourth of its former amount, and Charles Dickens is the prophet to whom the reform owes its potency. . . . Dickens shares with all reformers some of their weaknesses, but he does not share his most excellent qualities with many of them. He stands apart and alone as one of the most potent influences of social reform in the nineteenth century, and therefore deserves to be read and studied by all who have to do with schools and by all parents everywhere in our day and generation.--W. T. Harris.

The chief work of Dickens was to lay bare the injustice, the meanness, and the blighting coercion practised on helpless children not only by "ignorant, sordid, brutal men called schoolmasters," but in a less degree by the best teachers and parents of his time. His was a noble work, and it was well done.--James L. Hughes.

It is as a humorist that Dickens is at his best. There is a whimsical and ludicrous extravagance in his humor, an irresistible ingenuity in the ridiculous, peculiar to him alone. From the time when a delighted people waited in rapturous impatience for the forthcoming number of Pickwick, to the publication of the unfinished Edwin Drood (1870), nineteenth century England laid aside her weariness and her problems to join in Dickens' overflowing, infectious laughter.--Pancoast.