Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–1870) was born on 7 February 1812 in Landport, Portsmouth, the second of eight children. His father, John Dickens, was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office — an amiable, improvident man whose inability to manage money would provide the model for Wilkins Micawber. His mother, Elizabeth Barrow, came from a family of slightly higher social standing. The family moved frequently through Dickens’s childhood as his father’s postings changed, settling finally in Chatham, Kent, where the young Dickens experienced the happiest years of his early life.

Life and Career

The defining trauma came in 1824, when John Dickens was imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison and the twelve-year-old Charles was sent to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory, pasting labels on bottles of boot polish. The experience lasted only a few months, but the humiliation, the sense of abandonment, and the proximity to London’s underworld of poverty never left him. He told almost no one about it during his lifetime — the secret came out only after John Forster published his biography — but it burns through every page he wrote. Pip’s shame, David Copperfield’s labours at the wine warehouse, Oliver’s workhouse — these are all refractions of that childhood wound.

Dickens’s formal education was brief and interrupted. After a few years at the Wellington House Academy, he became a clerk in a solicitor’s office, taught himself shorthand, and by the age of twenty was a parliamentary reporter of exceptional speed and accuracy. Journalism led to fiction: his sketches of London life, published under the pseudonym “Boz,” were collected as Sketches by Boz (1836), and their success led to a commission from Chapman and Hall for a series of comic sketches to accompany sporting illustrations by Robert Seymour. When Seymour died, Dickens seized control of the project, and The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–1837), published in monthly parts, made him the most famous writer in England almost overnight. He was twenty-four.

What followed was an extraordinary three-and-a-half decades of sustained creative output: fourteen complete novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories, two travel books, a child’s history, public readings that drew vast crowds across England and America, and the editorship of two weekly journals, Household Words and All the Year Round. He wrote compulsively and performed even more compulsively — his public readings, which he began in 1858 and continued until shortly before his death, were theatrical events of enormous emotional intensity that earned him huge sums and almost certainly shortened his life.

His domestic life was less successful. He married Catherine Hogarth in 1836; they had ten children. The marriage became unhappy, and in 1858 Dickens forced a separation, treating Catherine with a cruelty that is difficult to reconcile with the generous humanity of his fiction. His relationship with the young actress Ellen Ternan, which began around 1857, was kept secret during his lifetime and for decades after.

Dickens suffered a stroke during dinner at Gad’s Hill Place on 8 June 1870 and died the following day. He was fifty-eight. Against his explicit wishes for a modest funeral, he was buried in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.

Major Works and Themes

Dickens’s concerns were consistent across thirty-five years: the cruelty of institutions toward the vulnerable, the corruptions of money and class, the resilience of the poor, and the possibility — sometimes fulfilled, sometimes frustrated — of individual moral transformation. He was also the supreme comic novelist in English, a writer of unfailing verbal inventiveness whose characters — Micawber, Pecksniff, Uriah Heep, Miss Havisham, Sairey Gamp, Wemmick with his castle — have entered the common imagination with a vividness rivalled only by Shakespeare.

Bleak House (1852–1853) is the masterpiece of the mature Dickens: a vast, intricately plotted novel that uses the interminable Chancery lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce as a metaphor for all of England’s institutional paralysis. Its dual narration — the omniscient present-tense narrator and the first-person retrospective voice of Esther Summerson — was daringly innovative. The opening paragraphs, with London drowning in fog and mud, are among the greatest things in English prose.

Great Expectations (1860–1861) is the most perfectly constructed of the novels, a first-person bildungsroman that follows Pip from the Kent marshes to London and back, confronting the corrosive effects of snobbery, money, and shame. It is the novel in which Dickens most directly drew on his childhood trauma, transmuted into art of the highest order.

David Copperfield (1849–1850), Dickens’s own favourite among his novels, is the most autobiographical — the blacking factory becomes the wine warehouse, John Dickens becomes Micawber, and the narrative voice achieves an intimacy and warmth unique in his work. A Tale of Two Cities (1859) remains the best-selling novel of all time in English.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Dickens was the most popular novelist in the English-speaking world during his lifetime, and his popularity has never seriously waned. The critical establishment’s attitude has shifted more dramatically. The Victorians adored him but sometimes questioned his artistry; early twentieth-century critics (with notable exceptions like George Orwell and Edmund Wilson) tended to patronise him as a popular entertainer. F.R. Leavis excluded him from “the great tradition.”

This condescension was demolished by the mid-twentieth century. Lionel Trilling, Humphry House, and above all the sustained critical work of scholars from the 1960s onward established Dickens as a formal innovator of the first rank — a master of symbolism, structure, and the urban novel. He is now universally recognised as the greatest English novelist of the nineteenth century, with only George Eliot as a serious rival for the title.

His influence on subsequent fiction is incalculable: Dostoevsky, Kafka, Joyce, and practically every subsequent novelist who has attempted to combine social breadth with symbolic depth owes him a debt.

Key Works

• Sketches by Boz (1836)
• The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837)
• Oliver Twist (1837–1839)
• Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839)
• The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841)
• Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844)
• A Christmas Carol (1843)
• Dombey and Son (1846–1848)
• David Copperfield (1849–1850)
• Bleak House (1852–1853)
• Hard Times (1854)
• Little Dorrit (1855–1857)
• A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
• Great Expectations (1860–1861)
• Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865)
• The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870, unfinished)

Collecting Dickens

Dickens is one of the pillars of book collecting, with a market stretching from affordable Victorian reprints to six-figure rarities. Because most of his novels were first published in monthly parts (serialized in paper wrappers over nineteen or twenty months), the collecting landscape is unusually complex.

The true first editions of the major novels are the parts issues — the individual monthly instalments in their original green (or occasionally blue or pink) paper wrappers, with the advertisements, inserts, and plates as issued. A complete set of Pickwick Papers in the original parts, with all the required plates and advertisements in correct states, is the Mount Everest of Dickens collecting: fine copies have sold for over $200,000. Key points for Pickwick include the “Veller” vs. “Weller” spelling on the plate in Part XV and the presence of the Seymour plates in their earliest states.

A Christmas Carol (1843, Chapman and Hall) is the most iconic Dickens collectible. The true first edition has “Stave I” as the chapter heading (corrected from “Stave One” in later issues), the title page printed in red and blue, the text date of 1843, and the original red cloth binding with gilt edges. Points to distinguish the four textual states of the first issue include the color of the endpapers (yellow-coated or plain green) and the reading “and” vs. ”&” on the title page. Fine copies in the original cloth bring $20,000–$80,000 depending on state and condition.

For collectors who cannot afford parts issues, the first bound editions — issued after serialization was complete, usually in one or two volumes — are the alternative. These are generally more affordable, ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 for the major novels depending on condition and binding state.

Dickens autograph material is relatively available because he was an indefatigable correspondent. Routine letters bring $1,000–$5,000; letters of literary or biographical significance can reach $20,000 or more. Presentation copies of his works are great rarities and command prices commensurate with his stature.

The market for Dickensiana — extra illustrations, Phiz and Cruikshank plates, advertising inserts, playbills from his amateur theatricals and reading tours — is an active and specialized collecting area in its own right.