Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens is the most widely read Victorian writer. The Victorian era, 1837-1901, was an era of new social developments that caused many of the writers of the period to take positions on the new developments in society. Dickens petitioned that social consciousness would overcome social misery. He often wrote in satire of the society around him, a smug and genius approach to the social injustices that he witnessed, making it widely available to the general public, educating them of the abuses that plagued the Victorian age. Dickens' popularity as a writer gave some importance to his written attacks on the abuses of courts and schools, whose objects were not the education of children or the justice of citizens, but the fortification of the proprietors.

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England in 1812 to John and Elizabeth Dickens. (http://www.helsinki.fi/kasv/nokol/dickens.html) He was the second of eight children and he was raised on the assumption that he would receive an education if he worked hard. Charles Dickens' father, John, on whom Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield is based, fell into deep financial debt and was arrested and imprisoned. Due to his families financial crisis, Dickens went to work at Warren's Blacking Factory labeling bottles, but after his father's debts were paid, he continued his education at Wellington House Academy from 1824 to 1826. After his education was complete, he became a court reporter for various newspaper sources until he devoted his time to writing.

Dickens' first published work appeared in December of 1833 in the Monthly Magazine, followed by nine other works. These writings were collected into two volumes

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and published in 1836. The time spent as a reporter made Dickens familiar with the middle and lower classes of London and his familiarity is displayed in the two volume set of his early works. These volumes also reveal his humor and concern for the less fortunate classes and his desires for social justice, two popular themes that often dominate his novels.

Dickens wed Catherine Hogarth and they had ten children before their separation in 1858. Regardless of his wedding vows to Catherine, he was always secretly in love with her younger sister Mary, who lived with the Dickens' shortly after the honeymoon. When Mary died, Dickens grieved her death and this led some to speculate that he had always loved Mary instead of Catherine. Dickens' ideals of women were shaped entirely by his unrequited romance with Mary.

The introduction of Sam Weller in the fourth issue of The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) launched Dickens into the most popular literary career in the history of Victorian literature. The Pickwick Papers became a literary and publishing phenomenon, selling over forty-thousand copies of each issue. Published in installments, the Pickwick Papers took England by storm: everyone was reading it. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club chronicled the life and times of Mr. Pickwick, a lovable character that seeks to discover the world with his companions, parodies of the lover, the sportsman, and the poet. While the Papers begin as a hilarious romp parodying the eighteenth-century novels that Dickens had examined over his childhood, they eventually assumed the shape of rising to the pentacle level of great literature. Pickwick's education, under the guidance of Sam Weller, his streetwise manservant, guides him into his discovery of a world filled

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with shyster lawyers, craftiness, corruption, dishonesty, vice, and imprisonment. The Pickwick Papers also displayed interpolated tales of madness, betrayal, and murder. Due to several unfortunate turns of event, Mister Pickwick is forced to become a prisoner in his own room in the Fleet for three months. The horrors that Charles Dickens had witnessed as a small child while working in the blacking warehouse are not eliminated from Pickwick's world; It is through his awareness of their existence that Mister Pickwick is allowed to become a optimistic, if finally not fully effective human being, who, with Sam's help, can see reality and ease the sting of evil to the best of his limited abilities. (http://www.helsinki.fi/kasv/nokol/dickens.html)

When Pickwick Papers was at the height of its success, Dickens began writing Oliver Twist in 1837. It was originally published as The Parish Boy's Progress and it appeared in monthly installments in various newspapers. In Oliver Twist Dickens explored the social abuses and evils inflicted on a political economy that made the pauper status prominent in England in the Nineteenth century. In Oliver Twist a young orphan named Oliver is stationed in a boys workhouse before he is sold to the Sowerbys' where he apprentices as an undertaker. After fleeing Sowerbys he is befriended by the ever-impressible Artful Dodger and begins his life as an honestly dishonest pickpocket with Fagin and his crew of miscreants. Through this tale, Dickens presents a portrait of the filth and immorality that surround poverty. Refusing to romanticize the criminal world, and making it clear that this district has been forgotten by society just as surely as Oliver and the other boys have been abandoned by an indifferent society, this is the world that Dickens saw at the blacking warehouse as a child.

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After Oliver Twist, Dickens began writing Barnaby Rudge. Upon completion of

Barnaby Rudge, Dickens visited America and quickly became disenchanted with America after he realized that both he and Catherine's privacy were hot topics on the American gossip circuit. In American Notes (1842) he expresses his reservations about America, much to the chagrin of his American audience. In The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens resumed his monthly publishings in twenty installments 1843 to 1844. (http://www.helsinki.fi/kasv/nokol/dickens.html) The story of Martin Chuzzlewit is organized around the theme of self-centeredness and lack of consideration to others, and marks an advance in Dickens' development as a literary novelist. Some have argued that the themes of this novel were inspired by his and Catherine's experiences in America. Unfortunately, sales dropped off to twenty thousand, and in an effort to increase sales, Dickens sent Martin Chuzzlewit to America where the main character discovers the boorish behavior Dickens had only gently portrayed in American Notes .

In December of 1843, Dickens published the most popular and beloved of all his works, A Christmas Carol. A Christmas Carol was a work that expresses succinctly his "Carol philosophy." Scrooge has sacrificed joy, love, and beauty for the pursuit of money and selfishness