Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on 7th February 1812, the second oldest of six children and died on 9th June 1870.
He grew to be a boy with a vivid imagination and a love of reading. Nobody knows for sure exactly when Dickens started writing, but he might have been as young as eight years old. One of his first pieces was called Misnar, the Sultan of India. It was based on a favourite story of his. In the beginning, Dickens wrote to entertain his school friends. One of his friends remembers that they had ‘a sort of club for lending and circulating’ the stories between themselves. Dickens also enjoyed reciting funny poems and singing comic songs.
When he was a bit older, Dickens’ family fell on hard times and moved to London. His father was a colourful character who loved telling jokes and stories, but wasn’t very good at managing money. In those days, you had to pay to go to school, and Dickens’ mother and father could no longer afford for him to go. Just after his twelfth birthday, he got a job in a blacking factory. Blacking was a thick paste that was put onto shoes and cast iron stoves to make them black. He had to work for ten hours a day, six days a week. The time Dickens spent in the blacking factory was one of the hardest of his life.
While Dickens was working at the blacking factory, his father was imprisoned for not paying debts. His mother and younger brothers and sisters went to live in the Marshalsea Prison with his father, and Dickens visited them there regularly. Many years later, he wrote a novel, Little Dorrit, in which a girl – Amy Dorrit – lives in the Marshalsea with her father.
After some months of Dickens working in the blacking factory and visiting the prison, his father inherited some money, which meant he was able to pay his way out of gaol and send his son to go back to school.
Dickens’ lifestyle changed a lot over the years. After the success of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, Dickens – still only in his mid-twenties – became a celebrity. He used the money he made from Pickwick to move to 48 Doughty Street, where he lived with his wife Catherine and her sister Mary, as well as some of his children (not all of them had been born by this time) and a pet raven called Grip. The house has since become the Charles Dickens Museum. Dickens only stayed in Doughty Street for a few years. As he sold more books, he moved to bigger and better houses. The last house he lived in was Gad’s Hill Place, in Kent. He had first seen the house when he was a little boy and pointed it out to his father, who told him that if he worked hard one day it would be his.
Dickens wrote 14 complete novels, as well as dozens of short stories and articles that appeared mainly in the magazines he published, Household Words and All the Year Round. He also wrote a number of plays, some of which he performed in himself – Dickens loved acting and was reputedly very good at it, he even built a small theatre in his house that could be used by his family and friends.
It is difficult to say what inspired Dickens to start writing. Many of his books seem to be inspired London and the people who lived and worked there. Dickens became obsessed by the city – the poverty, the riches, the mud and the fog, the riverboats and taverns, the little shops and houses. He often walked the streets of London, covering as many as ten or twenty miles at a time.
Some of the novels are more than 900 pages long. Most of them were published in monthly or weekly parts to begin with. People followed the stories a bit like people follow stories in TV serials today. When all of the parts had been published, the novel would come out in a single volume, just as nowadays when a TV series has been broadcast, it comes out in a DVD box set.
Dickens died on 9th June 1870 at Gad’s Hill after a full day of work on his latest book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (a recent BBC2 production). Edwin Drood is a murder mystery story and was left incomplete when Dickens died. Many people have tried to guess how the story might have ended if he had finished writing it.
Dickens did not like the elaborate and expensive funerals that were fashionable in the Victorian period. He thought it was wrong that people felt they had to make a show of their grief by buying expensive new outfits and paying for additional mourners to attend their loved one’s funeral. Some people even employed small children as ‘mutes’ who would dress in black and walk behind the coffin pretending to cry. With this in mind, Dickens had told his friends that he wished to be buried ‘in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner.’ However, he had become such a famous writer that people insisted he was laid to rest at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.
The Charles Dickens Museum in London holds the world’s most important Dickens collection with over 100,000 items including manuscripts, rare editions, personal items, paintings and other visual sources.
Based in 48 Doughty Street, the author’s only surviving London house, it offers visitors the chance to experience what Dickens’ home would have been like and learn more about the great novelist and social commentator. It is open every day of the week, and welcome visitors of all ages.
Category: Book Bag News
