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Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 in Landport, then a suburb
of Portsmouth, where his father worked as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office.
His grandfather William had been a footman in the household of Lady Blandford,
had married her housemaid, and had gone on to become the steward of Lord
Crewe at his country seat, Crewe Hall. Two children had been born
to the couple, William and John. John Dickens had married Elizabeth
Barrow, whose father was employed by the Navy Board.
For a time the newly-married pair lived quite comfortably on John's modest salary of £300 per year at the Pay Office, where he proved himself capable, hard-working and honest. In due course, however, as the children were born (there were to be eight, of whom Charles was the second), the gap between earnings and cost of living steadily widened and the family situation soon became desperate. |
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Life in the Marshalsea was reasonably comfortable and John Dickens
quickly became president of the committee controlling the prison's internal
affairs.
Unlike his father, however, Charles could not adapt to his new way of
life. He found the work hateful and humiliating: 'no words,' he later
wrote, 'can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship,
compared these everyday associates with those of my happier childhood;
and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished
man, crushed in my breast.'
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After about six months in the Marshalsea, John Dickens was freed. Although Dickens's mother wanted Charles to go back to work, his father insisted that the boy should go back to school; thus Dickens was sent to Wellington House Academy between 1824 and 1827.
Having left school at the age of fifteen, Dickens began his career by
working in a solicitor's office: and later on became a political reporter,
working first for a journal called The Mirror of Parliament and
then for the Morning Chronicle (1833-5). This period was of
the greatest importance to Dickens's development as an author. His
interests widened, he mastered the art of rapid, fluent, popular writing,
and he acquired a stock of experience that gave his novels their tremendous
'immediacy' and impact.
| Dickens's first attempt at writing fiction, as opposed to news reporting,
was a short story published anonymously and without payment in 1833, in
an obscure periodical called The Monthly Magazine.
The editor of the magazine was sufficiently impressed, however, to commission from Dickens further articles, or sketches. Charles obliged with two more, adopting as a nom de plume the name of his brother Augustus - 'Boz'. In 1836 several of these sketches were published in two volumes as Sketches by Boz, which earned the author the princely sum of £150. In the spring of 1835 Dickens became engaged to Catherine Hogarth, daughter
of the editor of the Evening Chronicle. They were married
on 2 April 1836, and by the beginning of the following year had moved into
a town house at 48 Doughty Street, London, where Dickens was to live during
the crucial two years when he was writing Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist
and Nicholas Nickleby. Also living with the couple was Catherine's
16-year-old sister Mary.
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Tragedy struck in 1837, however, when on the evening of 7 May 1837 - a few months after Catherine had given birth to a son, also named Charles - Mary was unexpectedly taken ill, probably as a result of a heart attack. Within a few hours, she was dead. After Mary's death, for some twenty years, Dickens was almost totally taken up with his work as a writer, giving little time to family life. The real milestones were not so much the birth of his children (he had 10 of them) as the birth of his novels.
From 1837 onwards, the flow of novels never stopped. Pickwick Papers was followed by Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge.
By the end of 1839 Dickens and his family had moved to 1 Devonshire Terrace, Regents Park, in London (pictured below). Here Dickens set himself up in a thoroughly well-to-do style, with his own carriage and groom.
After
tremendous exertions, and success to match, Dickens went in search of change
to the United States in 1842. At first he was enthusiastically welcomed;
but the mood towards him began to change after Dickens publicly rebuked
the Americans in speeches for their disregard of international copyright
- as yet there was no law governing the matter - by which authors such
as himself were being deprived of their rightful income. This resentment
also surfaced in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), which soured his reputation
in America for some considerable time.
By the late 1840s Dickens was earning good money as a novelist. David Copperfield (1849-50) at once became one of the most popular of his works. Dickens himself wrote the novel in a style more directly autobiographical than in any previous works, using his childhood experiences in the blacking factory as a basis for the plot.
Dickens also made use of some of the places he had visited; in a small
cottage in the Kent seaside town of Broadstairs (which he had first visited
in 1837) there lived a Miss Mary Strong, a kind and charming old lady who
fed him tea and cakes. She was also convinced of her right to stop
the passage of donkeys in front of her cottage. The donkey incident
was also used in David Copperfield; in the novel, Miss Strong became Betsey
Trotwood, whose cottage with 'its square gravelled garden full of flowers'
and the parlour with its 'old fashioned furniture' attracted David's interest.
To avoid embarrassment to Miss Strong, however, the location of the cottage
was moved from Broadstairs to Dover.
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By this time Dickens's social conscience had become clearly evident
in works such as Bleak House (the title of which was inspired by
Fort House), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit - the last
of these novels focusing especially on the law of debt, something Dickens
had known all too well in his younger days.
Despite his success as a novelist, Dickens's family life was gradually disintegrating. Catherine had never been much interested in his work; and by 1857, after 21 years of marriage, Dickens had fallen in love with a young actress called Ellen Ternan, whom he met while working as an actor-producer on a Victorian melodrama. A year later, Dickens separated from his wife amid tremendous recriminations. |
In spite of family problems, however, Dickens did discover happiness
in certain areas. In 1856 he purchased a country house at Gad's Hill
near Rochester in Kent. This villa, built in the reign of Queen Anne
(1685-1714) had fascinated him since his boyhood days when he had visited
it on walks with his father.
Shortly after the breakdown of his marriage was made official, Dickens embarked on a new form of activity, arising from his passion for drama - public readings of famous passages from his works.
The first of these took place on 29 April 1858 in London's St. Martin's Hall; and it proved so successful that Dickens was encouraged to continue them. His acting talent was so considerable that the readings could better be described as dramatic performances. He soon decided to turn them into a new source of revenue; indeed, they became the principal source of revenue until his death in 1870.
The strain caused by the popularity of the readings took its toll on
Dickens's health. In 1868-9 he gave performances abroad, at the British
Embassy in Paris, and in the United States (where he had been forgiven
for past misdemeanours). In Washington President Andrew Johnson and
his ministers attended the readings every day for a week. Dickens
was almost dropping with fatigue. His voice was rough and harsh and
so as not so lose it completely he applied mustard plasters to his neck.
Towards the end of the tour a cough forced him to go on a predominantly
liquid diet of custards, soups, eggs, sherry and champagne.
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On his return to England, he began what was to be his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. As with David Copperfield, he made use of buildings in the area: the 'Nuns' House', the girls school Rosa Bud had attended, described by Dickens as 'a venerable brick edifice, whose present apellation is doubtless derived from the legend of its conventual uses', was actually Eastgate House, a sixteenth century building in Rochester High Street, (pictured left) which at the time was a school for young ladies. Now the building houses the Charles Dickens Centre, containing an exhibition of Dickens's life and works, items of furniture used by Dickens, plus pictures and photographs relating to his life. |
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The BBC television film of Hard Times, starring Alan Bates and Bob Peck, was shown on the first day after the formal programme.
Grahame Smith was very well prepared. He delivered his papers very professionally. He was at all times ready to mix with the audience, to answer questions, propose solutions to problems, show alternatives to students. He made an excellent impression on the audience. The majority of papers delivered by other academics were also very interesting and stimulating. A feature of this seminar, as opposed to previous events, was the fact that all speakers kept within the specified time-limits.
The 6th METU British Novelists Seminar continued the tradition of providing
a series of stimulating papers, followed by intense discussion. Enthusiasm
for these seminars prevails, the academics all express the belief that
each year the quality of these seminars improves and that they all look
forward to the next one. The organisers feel that the series has become
especially important, in that more colleagues from universities in more
remote areas of Turkey, as well as the big cities, make room in their programmes
to attend these seminars.
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Deniz Ceylan, Intimidation and Embarrassment in Conversations of Dickens' novels
Feryal Cubukcu, Duality in A Tale of Two Cities
Nursel Icoz, Evil Intentions are the Evil Person's Own Undoing
Valerie Kennedy, Three of Dickens' Marginal Women
Anthony Lake, Ghosts, bodies, selves and others in David Copperfield
Meltem Kiran Raw, The French Revolution in the Popular Imagination: A Tale of Two Cities
Grahame Smith, Dickens and Critical Theory
Grahame Smith, Dickens and the City of Light