There is a joke that after studying English literature for a while, most questions on authors and books yield one answer – Charles Dickens. This joke came about because of the massive volume of Dickens’ work.

He was considered the greatest comic genius of his age. Whether or not one agrees with this, there is no denying the fact that he was a great reformer who fought against the injustices of Victorian England, especially those perpetrated against children.  

Through his powerful novels, he succeeded to a large extent in this endeavour. His Nicholas Nickleby drew attention to fraudulent schools that treated children harshly. This led to the closing down of many such schools.

Born in Portsmouth, England, on February 7, 1812, the second of John and Elizabeth Dickens's eight children, Charles Dickens had a tragic childhood. His father ran into heavy debts and his parents were put behind bars in the debtors’ prison at Marshalsea. 

Charles was forced to go to work at a factory, Hungerford Stairs, which labelled bottles. Whenever he could, he visited his parents in the prison. The experience, with its unfairness to an eleven-year-old child, and his understanding of life in the prison left a deep mark in his mind.  The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield were reflections of this experience.

After a while, the fortunes of the family changed for the better and Charles attended the Wellington House Academy from 1824 to 1826. After this brief stint at formal education, he became an office boy at a solicitor’s office. Soon he also mastered the technique of shorthand and became a reporter.

Around this time, Charles began to write and draw sketches depicting the lives of the lower and middle class families in London, under the pseudonym Boz. He soon became very popular. Besides showing deep concern for social issues, the creations of Boz also displayed a refined sense of humour.

Charles married an ex-colleague’s daughter in 1836 and the couple had ten children before they separated.

The work that catapulted Charles to fame was the Pickwick Papers. It was considered a publishing phenomenon.  Soon after he began writing Oliver Twist, in which he exposed the way young boys were encouraged to steal. Nicholas Nickleby, which was serialised through twenty instalments, followed this and it had had the same vitality and comic exuberance that dominated the Pickwick Papers.  

Charles Dickens next launched a weekly magazine, Master Humphrey's Clock. It is said that it was so popular that the first issue sold seventy thousand copies. A Christmas Carol appeared in December 1843, followed by The Chimes in 1844, where he launched an attack on the prevailing philosophy that the poor have no right to anything beyond meagre subsistence. Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend were works wherein Charles integrated his ridicule of the prevailing social philosophy into novels.

Among Dickens’ works, David Copperfield is considered autobiographical. His boyhood experiences, the growing dissatisfaction with his marriage and other aspects of his life find expression in this serialised work. Here Dickens, through David, launches into the philosophy of equating the world of vision with the world of actuality. Dickens’ tirade against an inept government found expression in Little Dorrit, which was published in monthly numbers from December 1855 to June 1857.

A summing up of the life of Charles Dickens can never be complete without the story of the birth of A Tale of Two Cities.  It appeared in the first instalment of All the Year Round, a weekly journal launched by Dickens in April 1859. Set in the backdrop of the French Revolution, the novel continued to appear until November of the same year. Similarly, Great Expectations too was a serialised novel that appeared in All Year Round.

Besides the print medium, Charles Dickens also loved the theatre. He was an extremely skilled and accomplished actor and he produced plays to support the charitable concerns he associated himself with. He also conducted public reading sessions of his novels. The success of these sessions may be gauged from the fact that people used to stand in queues one and a half miles long for procuring tickets.

Dickens’ last novel was The Mystery Of Edwin Drood. He died on June 8, 1870.

Back