Charles Dickens’s Life and Works
Charles Dickens wrote a vast amount, and lived a full life. This short chapter can do little more than summarise his life and works as briefly as possible, and mention issues relevant to our two texts.
Dickens’s childhood
Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, in Portsmouth, where his father John worked in the Navy Pay Office. Charles was the second of six siblings. He had an elder sister, Fanny (born 1810), a younger sister, Laetitia (born 1816), and three younger brothers, Frederick, Alfred and Augustus (born 1820, 1822 and 1827 respectively). The Dickens family moved house five times in the first few years of Charles’s life: John’s job moved him to London (in 1815) and then to Chatham (1816), where they settled for a five-year spell that Dickens remembered fondly.
At the age of nine, Dickens was sent to a school run by William Giles, an enthusiastic young Baptist minister, and when the family moved to London (1822) Charles remained behind until the end of the term before joining them. Dickens had only one further period of education, at Wellington House Academy, between 1825 and 1827. The school was run by a certain William Jones, described by Dickens as among the ‘most ignorant’ men who ever existed. From there, the young Dickens left to take employment as a solicitor’s clerk. That was the end of his formal education.
Charles Dickens, then, must be regarded as self-educated. William Giles and Mrs. Dickens encouraged his early love of reading, but his schooling was brief and his childhood experiences very chequered. What does seem to have been a persistent part of Dickens’s childhood, however, is storytelling and theatricals, with a strong emphasis on live performances. It seems that he brought groups of his friends together, for reading, acting and performing tragedies, comic songs and tales of the marvellous, that he was doing this at the age of 7 or 8 in Chatham, and was still doing it at the age of 16 with his Wellington House schoolmates.
Two further episodes of Dickens’s childhood need to be remembered: his father’s imprisonment in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, and Dickens’s employment in Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, just south of Covent Garden. Dickens began working at Warren’s during February 1824, just after his twelfth birthday; and only a week or two later, his father was arrested for debt and on 20 February entered the Marshalsea Prison where the rest of the family joined him, except for Dickens, who stayed outside in lodgings.
Dickens worked six ten-hour days each week, pasting labels onto pots of blacking, in the factory, and continued at this job for about fourteen months. Towards the end of that time, he and another boy called Bob Fagin worked in Chandos Street, where they worked in front of a window and passers-by would stop to watch them. This public display of menial work was a matter of deep shame to Dickens, seemingly at the time, as well as later in his life: he hid this part of his childhood from public view.
Debtors’ prison was a species of enclosed yard with a gate that was locked at night. Dickens’s father was detained until he was declared insolvent on 28 May, and consequently discharged from prison. There are several books that describe what the Marshalsea was like at that time. However, for a vivid description there is no need to go further than Dickens’s own account, in Little Dorrit.
Charles Dickens’s childhood consisted of a period of happy play, imagination and fantasy, a short period of good schooling, a period of hard child labour and family disgrace, rounded off with a period of bad schooling. This was a potent mixture. What seems to have resulted is a combination within one young man, which must have been virtually unique: Dickens read voraciously and widely, loved performing, getting up theatricals and exercising his imagination. At the same time, he had picked up a London boy’s street wisdom, for he had observed London’s street life from the invisible vantage point of a little labouring boy.
Dickens finding his way
Between 1827 and 1833, Dickens worked as a solicitor’s clerk, then as a shorthand reporter, first in the court of Doctors’ Commons, then in Parliament. He dabbled in reporting other minor events, as a ‘penny-a-line’ freelance journalist. His earnings during these years were small, and his family’s financial situation was still rocky. John Dickens was always improvident: so much so that years later, Dickens more or less forcibly moved his parents to Devon, in the hope that so far from London, his father might stay out of debt.
Dickens was extraordinarily busy during these years. In May 1830 he met one Maria Beadnell, and fell in love. He courted her for three years, but when she returned from a stay in Paris and, on his twenty-first birthday, made it plain that she had lost interest in him, Dickens gave her up.
On most days Dickens spent hours reading in the British Museum. He went to the theatre several times a week; was frequently involved in amateur theatricals; prepared himself for an audition at Covent Garden, hoping for a career as an actor (he fell ill and missed the audition); was often taking down speeches in Parliament until well after midnight (particularly during passage of the first Reform Act, 1832, and the Poor Law Amendment Act, fertile material for Oliver Twist); began to write ‘sketches’ describing curious events and people on London’s streets; and pursued Maria Beadnell – all at the same time.
In December 1833, the first of Dickens’s ‘sketches’ to be published appeared anonymously in a small magazine called The Monthly, and further sketches appeared subsequently. This was unpaid work, but in the summer of 1834 Dickens finally became a reporter on The Morning Chronicle at a salary of five guineas a week. He benefited from a supportive editor, and the Chronicle carried more of his London ‘sketches’, under the pseudonym ‘Boz’.
The next three years – to 1836 – continued the enormous investment of energy Dickens had given to his many activities since leaving school. Now, however, he was frantically busy with his work on the Chronicle, which involved covering events, elections, accidents and so forth all over Britain; writing more ‘sketches by Boz’, which were increasingly popular; and a new courtship. An editor of the Evening Chronicle was one George Hogarth, and when Dickens met his family, he found the eldest daughter Catherine charming. The fact that she was submissive, and admired Dickens, may have been decisively in her favour in contrast to the coquettish Maria Beadnell. It is probable that Catherine Hogarth represented the comforts of marriage – a housekeeper and sexual satisfaction – without challenging Dickens’s superiority. In 1836 they were married, and in the same year Dickens published Sketches by Boz as a single volume. This was a great success, and the author immediately started work on a second series. Simultaneously, The Pickwick Papers began to appear as a monthly serial, and Dickens negotiated to deliver a novel in November 1837, for a fee of £200. With a different publisher he agreed to write two further novels for £500. At the end of 1836, Dickens was an established and popular author, had given up his bread-and-butter work on The Morning Chronicle, was earning enough to live comfortably, and was a settled married man. In short, both his career and his personal life were fully launched.
As the year 1837 continued, it confirmed Dickens’s rise to fame, with continuing episodes of The Pickwick Papers and the serialising of Oliver Twist. The Dickens family was further established with the birth of a boy, Charles, and their move into a respectable house at 48 Doughty Street. Also in 1837, however, a tragedy occurred in the sudden death of Mary Hogarth, Catherine’s seventeen-year-old sister. She had become a close companion of Dickens when staying with them. Dickens was deeply upset by Mary’s death, naturally – but he went further, believing her an angel. He was openly convinced that he was more perfectly intimate – even spiritually joined – with Mary, than he was with anybody else. He dreamed of her every night; decided to be buried in the same grave; and took from the corpse’s finger a ring that he wore for the rest of his life. How Catherine reacted to these sentimental excesses, we do not know.
We have recorded how Dickens became a celebrated author, dominating the popular imagination with his affecting and socially daring fictions. His childhood and rise to wealth and celebrity is the most extraordinary part of his story. We have remarked that, by 1837, he was an established author and family man. We will give only a skeleton account of what we call the ‘middle years’. Many biographies overwhelm us with details of his frantic social life and activities, which show that he continued to be phenomenally energetic. He pursued his writings, entertainments, charity work and campaigns for social reform; travelled in Europe and visited America; ran and edited his own periodicals Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1859–1870), after editing Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840–1841) for Chapman & Hall. He met hundreds of people and participated in countless events. Even the demands of his domestic life ballooned as Catherine underwent ten pregnancies between 1837 and 1852. Nine of the children reached adulthood – a good figure for those days; although Dickens remarked that after his third child, the rest were more-or-less unwanted.
During these ‘middle years’, however, Dickens’s situation remained substantially the same: he was an author, his fame grew, his family grew. He produced theatricals; set up a hostel for reforming prostitutes; tried to live abroad; and took holidays with male friends, away from his crowded home. Dickens comes across as a restless figure, who suffered from contradictory wishes concerning his way of life. He has hardly moved the workmen out of and his large family in to one house, before they take a house at Broadstairs, or they obtain a monstrous coach to carry the household of fourteen people (including, by that time, five children) to Genoa in Italy; or they find another house in London, move the workmen in, and the process starts all over again. It seems that Dickens longed for the settled home he had yearned for in his own childhood; so, he threw himself into creating such homes, one after the other. On the other hand, he had a habit of nomadic restlessness: elsewhere was always more likely to prove satisfying, and the settled contentment of which he dreamed was never where he was. Following Dickens’s addresses, let alone his temporary tenancies of seaside houses or country retreats, is a maze of confusing dates and details. However, all such activity, which involved heaving his large family around London, and around Europe, was simply activity, not change. The next major development in Dickens’s life came after 20 of these ‘middle years’, in 1857, when he met Ellen Ternan and separated from Catherine.
Dickens wrote The Pickwick Papers to make people laugh; then, he wrote the equally popular Oliver Twist to shock, while at the same time powerfully attacking the Poor Law. In 1838 and 1839 Nicholas Nickleby was published, again to public acclaim. The schoolmaster, Wackford Squeers, provided high comedy, as did Vincent Crummles and his aged Infant Phenomenon; while poor Smike touched the readers’ heart strings. Dickens wrote four novels of boys growing up, the other three being Martin Chuzzlewit (monthly, 1843–1844), David Copperfield (monthly, 1849 to 1850) and Great Expectations (weekly, 1860–1861). In the 1840s Dickens wrote a further three novels (The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge and Dombey and Son). He also published A Christmas Carol (1843), the famous story of Scrooge the miser and the Christmas ghosts, and followed this with other ‘Christmas books’, an annual treat for his readers. His public seems to have had a healthy appetite for tearful melodrama. The grief that greeted the death of Little Nell (The Old Curiosity Shop); the pity lavished upon sick Tiny Tim (A Christmas Carol); and the public emotion when Paul Dombey died (Dombey and Son), all bear witness to a Victorian appetite for weeping. At the same time, the general public took to their hearts a series of comic personalities, following the immensely popular Sam Weller (Pickwick Papers) and the Artful Dodger (Oliver Twist) with the schoolmaster Squeers, Pecksniff and his daughters (from Chuzzlewit), Micawber (from Copperfield) and Captain Cuttle (in Dombey); and shuddered with fear at the villainous Fagin, Murdstone, Uriah Heep, Carker, the dwarf Quilp, and so on. In short, Dickens played upon the three great chords of his readers’ hearts: pity, fun and fear, and there seemed no likelihood that his supply of invention would ever run out.
This said, there were one or two significant weaknesses also on display. The good characters showed a tendency to being colourless, while their selflessness was not always convincing. Both Brownlow and Nancy in Oliver Twist have been criticised as characterless and unrealistic respectively. As to the heroines, Dora Spenlow/Copperfield gives us a death scene it is hard to read dry-eyed; we studied Ada’s and Rachael’s angelic natures in Part 1; Florence Dombey offers little to interest us; and Esther is criticised for overdoing her self-deprecation.
Between January and June 1842, Dickens and Catherine visited North America. They took passage in a steamship, and were ill for most of a rough passage. On their arrival, Dickens was lionised. He found himself welcomed at gala events attended by thousands, and toured New York, Boston, Washington and Richmond before going on a grand sweep ending at Toronto, then back to New York via Montreal and Quebec, before returning to England. Visits to prisons, factories and Congress were arranged for Dickens, who was celebrated in a ‘Boz ball’ for three thousand excited fans, in New York; met the President; and was fêted wherever he went.
In 1842, however, there was no copyright agreement with the United States, so publishers simply copied books without paying the author. Dickens’s works sold in their thousands, but he received nothing. He made speeches campaigning for an international agreement, but all he managed to do was offend the American press. Then, before the end of 1842 Dickens published criticisms of American society in American Notes. This left a legacy of bad blood Dickens had to overcome on his second visit to America, in 1867.
In 1844, following disappointing sales of Barnaby Rudge, American Notes, and Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens quarrelled with his publishers. Eventually, with the help of his lifelong friend and business agent John Forster, these quarrels were resolved, and Dickens went to live in Italy, which was cheaper than London. While in Italy the Dickens’s met a couple called De La Rue, and Dickens began giving a course of hypnosis to Mrs De La Rue, to cure her of a nervous complaint. This interest occupied Dickens’s attention so thoroughly (he would mesmerise Mrs. De La Rue in her bedroom until four in the morning) that Catherine became jealous: even when they were travelling, Dickens would sit on the box of the coach attempting to hypnotise his patient at a distance.
The family returned to England in the summer of 1845. The autumn and winter were full of activities including amateur theatrical productions; the birth of another boy; discussions with Dickens’s philanthropic friend Angela Burdett Coutts, concerning their charitable refuge for street women; and an abortive job as editor of a new Daily News. By May 1846 the Dickens’s were on their way again, this time to Switzerland, where they settled near Lausanne, intending to stay for a year, but they were in Paris by December, and returned to England in February. The refuge for reforming prostitutes, called ‘Urania Cottage’ and situated in Shepherd’s Bush, opened later in 1847, and Dickens remained active in its management for the next decade.
The Dickens family habitually spent three or four months of the summer away from London, renting a house in Broadstairs (1847, 1850, 1851), the Isle of Wight (1849) or Dover (1852). The summer months of 1853 and 1854 were spent at Boulogne. In November 1851, they had moved their London home to Tavistock House, where Dickens intended to remain for the rest of his life.
In February 1852, the first episode of Bleak House appeared. The family now consisted of eight children (Dora, born in 1850, died suddenly in 1851 aged only eight months; Edward, the tenth and last child, was born later in 1852), and Georgina Hogarth, another of Catherine’s younger sisters. Georgina or ‘Georgy’ joined the household in 1842 at the age of 15 to help with the children. She idolised Dickens, quickly became a favourite companion, and she was still single and living with the family at the time of his death. In 1850, Charley, the eldest child, went to Eton. Meanwhile, there had also been two bereavements: Dickens’s favourite sibling, his elder sister Fanny, died of tuberculosis in 1848; and his father John died in 1851.
The final episode of David Copperfield came out in November 1850, and only a few months later Dickens’s mind was already filling with the various strands that would be woven together into his biggest novel: Bleak House. In August he wrote an article satirising an imaginary Mrs Bellows, who must ‘agitate, agitate, agitate’,1 clearly a prototype for Mrs Jellyby and Mrs Pardiggle; and he followed The Times’s campaign against Chancery that year. However, the deaths in March and April respectively of his father and his baby daughter, followed quickly by house hunting and the long process of getting the builders into and then out of Tavistock House, made it difficult to start a new novel. After a frustrating delay, Dickens was finally writing the famous opening description of ‘Fog everywhere’ around the beginning of December 1851. On 7 December, he reported that the first number was finished except for one ‘short’ chapter (‘In Fashion’).
Bleak House was ignored by the major reviewers, and such comments as appeared were disappointing for Dickens. The novel was said to be poorly constructed, and it portrayed a dark world, lacking the humour of his earlier works. On the other hand, it sold well: the public lapped it up. Dickens also had to field some other issues thrown up by Bleak House. This was his first attempt at a female first-person narrative: was Esther convincing as a woman? There were those (including Charlotte Brontë) who found her submissive ‘busy little housewife’ tone irritating and unconvincing.
Next, Dickens was accused of racism in the Borrioboola-Gha satire, and criticised for mistiming his attack on Chancery, a charge publicly levelled by Lord Denman.2 Then, Lawrence Boythorn and Harold Skimpole were immediately recognised as portraits of Walter Savage Landor3 and Leigh Hunt4 respectively. While the Boythorn portrait pleased Landor, Leigh Hunt was offended at his portrayal as the sponger Skimpole. Dickens denied that Skimpole was modelled on Hunt, but the resemblance was such that nobody believed him.
Finally, there was controversy over the death of Krook from Spontaneous Combustion. The philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes took public issue with spontaneous combustion, saying that it was bad science: such things did not happen. According to Lewes, treating the author with patronising amusement, Dickens must have met the phenomenon ‘among the curiosities of his reading’.5 That these niggling criticisms irritated Dickens is evident from the Preface to Bleak House, dated August 1853, when he refutes the defence of Chancery offered ‘a few months ago’6 by a judge, reasserts the phenomenon of spontaneous combustion against Lewes’s criticism, and concludes by boasting the extent of his readership (see BH, 5–6).
Bleak House was serialised between February 1852 and September 1853, a period embracing Dickens’s fortieth and forty-first birthdays. During this time the family passed the summer months in Dover (1852) and Boulogne (1853); Dickens continuously edited Household Words; there were amateur theatrical performances in the provinces; his tenth and last child, Edward, was born (April 1852); and he was actively engaged in the management of Urania Cottage. Immediately after finishing this bulkiest of all his novels, coming to the end of 20 months of sustained pressure and work, he took some time off for a jaunt to Switzerland and Italy with his friends Wilkie Collins7 and Augustus Egg.8 Returning to England in December, he found the circulation of Household Words declining, and was persuaded to undertake a new novel, to be serialised weekly rather than monthly, and to be a quarter the length of Bleak House. This became Hard Times, and the size and weekly format subjected Dickens to two kinds of constraints to which he was unaccustomed. First, weekly delivery dates allowed little time for the maturing of ideas or for revision; second, the story’s brevity did not allow Dickens to indulge his normal more expansive style, exploring character and setting through extended description, direct and indirect speech, with numerous fringe characters and multiple simultaneous stories. This novel, of necessity, would be a more skeletal, spare piece of work.
The final days of 1853 were spent in Birmingham, where Dickens gave public readings from his Christmas stories, for the benefit of the new Birmingham and Midland Institute. Dickens was so exhilarated by the audience’s applause and his own performances that the idea of public readings attracted him from that time onwards. Dickens also gave a speech urging a better relationship between workers and owners in the industrial Midlands and north, hoping to improve the worker’s lot and the masters’ honesty. A long-running strike was taking place in Preston at the time, where the mill masters had locked out their Hands, and families were starving. This national event clearly engaged Dickens’s sense of humanity and justice, and he visited Preston at the end of January. The strike contributed much to Hard Times (although Dickens resisted identifying the fictitious Coketown as Preston), just as the campaign in The Times had focused his attention on Chancery when his mind was gestating Bleak House. During 1854, Hard Times was written, serialised and published. The constraints of a much shorter novel and weekly episodes did put a strain on the author. He wanted to add an extra episode at the end, but was persuaded instead to publish a double-length final episode on the final date planned.
The years 1855 and 1856 were also eventful. Perhaps as a sign of his dissatisfaction with Catherine, Dickens met Maria Beadnell again (now Mrs. Winter and a widow). He wrote excited letters to her, perhaps expecting a renewal of his passion, but when they met he was disappointed. She was matronly, plump and not very clever. In 1855, the Dickens family spent most of the summer in Folkestone, then settled in Paris in December. The following April they returned to England, before returning to Boulogne for three months that summer. In March 1856, Dickens bought Gad’s Hill Place, a substantial house he remembered from that happy period of his childhood spent in Chatham, Kent.
Another novel, Little Dorrit, this time returning to a monthly and full-length format, was serialised between December 1855 and June 1857. Parts of the story were set in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison. The satire of government institutions so apparent in Bleak House’s Chancery and Hard Times’s Utilitarian politics, is carried on by the celebrated ministry of state, the Circumlocution Office. These two years are also distinctive for numerous theatrical ventures, and for the increasing number of readings from his own works that Dickens undertook. Dickens’s mood was clearly boosted by applause, and he revelled in a personal connection with his mass public. He loved to make them laugh or cry in their thousands, and the charitable tours of 1854 and 1855 were harbingers of the professional tours in Britain and America, on which Dickens would come increasingly to rely during his final decade.
The separation from Catherine
In February 1857 Dickens put on Wilkie Collins’s play The Frozen Deep at Tavistock House, then in Manchester. Parts that were played by Katey and Mamie Dickens and ‘Georgy’ in London, were played in Manchester by three professional actresses: Mrs Frances Ternan
and her two daughters Maria and Ellen (Nelly). None of the biographies are quite sure what happened – even to whether Dickens was smitten first by Maria, or immediately by Nelly. Whatever the exact details, Dickens clearly fell for Nelly Ternan. During the remainder of 1857 and most of 1858, his life took on an even more elevated level of restlessness: he could not openly live with Nelly, as he fervently desired, and meanwhile, what could be done about Catherine?
Dickens and Ellen Ternan seem to have spent an increasing amount of time together from late 1857 onwards as they gradually found ways to be more together. For example, Dickens paid for Nelly to be employed by the Haymarket Theatre in London. He also helped her sister Fanny to study music in Italy. Straight after The Frozen Deep, Dickens and Wilkie Collins suddenly left for a tour of Cumberland, then visited Doncaster for race week, when Dickens knew that the Ternans were working there. Some coy pieces of writing about the narrator’s golden-haired ‘little reason’, or letters in which he fantasises about rescuing the ‘Princess I adore’ or dying in the attempt, can be strung together to tell us about the progress of the affair, but very little is known even after all the scholarly ferreting that has taken place.
We can find a more connected story when we see how Dickens dealt with Catherine. There had been signs of marital difficulties for some time: Dickens demanded absolute submission from Catherine. He did not expect her to think, and was completely oblivious to any idea of fault in himself. So, for example, in 1853 he commanded her to write to Mrs De La Rue, and accused her of having failed to understand what a wonderful husband she had, when she became jealous (back in 1844). In the same year he asserted that Charley had inherited ‘lassitude of character’ from his mother. While these arrogant tyrannies were being perpetrated, many of the letters Dickens wrote to Catherine are detailed, intimate and affectionate – but presumably only while she remained submissive.
For a short time in 1857 he characterised the break-up as probably the fault of both sides; but then he reverted to his usual attitude: Catherine was pathetic, lacking the qualities needed to understand an exceptional man like himself. He complained of her constant jealousy, and accused her of being a bad mother:
… she has never attached one of them [the children] to herself, never played with them in their infancy, never attracted their confidence as they have grown older, never presented herself before them in the aspect of a mother. I have seen them fall off from her in a natural – not unnatural – progress of estrangement …
(From a letter to Angela Burdett Coutts, May 1858)
In a later letter Dickens goes further, telling Miss Coutts that any affection shown between Catherine and the children is only a ‘little play’, a false act. It is hard to escape the conclusion: the more Dickens wanted Nelly Ternan, the more guilty Catherine became, until she was so guilty that she pretended to love her children!
In his biography Charles Dickens, Michael Slater suggests that Dickens progressively wrote Catherine and his marriage out of his life: it was as if what he wrote took on a life of its own, and became a form of truth for the writer. Was Dickens in control when he wrote, or was he a victim of his own persuasion? Slater ends his chapter on this topic by quoting another letter to Miss Coutts, where Dickens says ‘That figure is out of my life for evermore (except to darken it) and my desire is, Never to see it again’.9 Slater’s suggestion raises interesting questions about the relationship between Dickens and his fictions; questions perhaps relevant to his public readings, where he experienced a kind of exaltation from his emotionally aroused audience. For it was at about this time, in the spring of 1858, that Dickens embarked upon a new career, giving readings from his works to paying audiences.
The final decade
There were two full-length novels written for weekly serialisation, a prodigious task. These were A Tale of Two Cities (serialised in All the Year Round during 1859); and Great Expectations (serialised in All the Year Round, during 1860 and 1861). Both were successful, and there are many who will argue that his best work, with the most powerful unified theme, the most sustained psychological fable, and with the most rigorous avoidance of sentimentality, is Great Expectations. Some three years after finishing Great Expectations, Dickens returned to monthly serialisation with Our Mutual Friend (serialised during 1864 and 1865). There was then another gap before April 1870, when the first monthly episode of a new novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, appeared. Dickens died before finishing this work.
The volume of Dickens’s writing tailed off as the 1860s proceeded. There was no novel for about three years between 1861 and 1864; then another gap of almost six years before the start of Edwin Drood. The one major work from the middle, Our Mutual Friend, received mixed reviews and disappointing sales. Time has confirmed this as an important novel: the obsessive schoolmaster Bradley Headstone, and the satirical character-group seated around the Veneerings’s dinner table, are as good as anything Dickens had done. On the other hand, the plot concerning John Harmon’s identity, the Boffins and Bella Wilfer’s progress, creaks with awkwardness.
Between 1861 and 1865, Dickens’s personal life is little known, because he repeatedly went ‘off the map’, with frequent covert journeys to France. These were clearly visits to Nelly Ternan, who by this time was surely Dickens’s mistress (although there are still some who deny this). The evidence also suggests that Dickens and Nelly had a child together, who died young. Claire Tomalin10 combs through the evidence of those visits to France about which we know, and suggests dates for the child’s birth and death. Two of Dickens’s children corroborate this theory: both Katey and Henry stated that there was a child who died in infancy. Tomalin guesses it was born in the winter of 1862–1863 and died in 1865, when Dickens, Nelly and Mrs. Ternan travelled from Dover to London on the ferry-train, and there was an accident at Staplehurst in Kent. A bridge collapsed; Nelly was injured but safely rescued and spirited away before any gossip could start, while Dickens actively helped other trapped passengers.
The remainder of Dickens’s final decade tells of intensive reading tours, undertaken despite the author’s foot often so swollen he could not walk, or his suffering from chest pains and degenerating health. Dickens and his manager, first Arthur Smith, then, after his death in 1861, George Dolby, would crisscross Britain, giving reading performances in numerous cities in a three-month tour. Often Dickens would perform nightly, with a long railway journey in between. This was gruelling work and Dickens was often exhausted by the schedule. On the other hand, he obtained so much pleasure, and reassurance about his popularity, that he continued undertaking these tours. In April 1869, in Chester and after 74 readings of a lengthy tour, Dickens suffered a stroke and his health finally forced him to cancel the remaining dates. There were a few farewell readings in London, but no more tours.
The one different episode in the eighteen-sixties was Dickens’s second visit to the United States. He had had to wait for the American Civil War to end before crossing the Atlantic, but he finally travelled in November 1867 and returned in April 1868. The readings and celebrations of Dickens’s visit were all a great success and the tour earned £20,000. However, Dickens’s foot was often so bad that Dolby had to help him across stage to his reading desk, and support him offstage at the end. This time, Dickens was complimentary about improvements in the United States, and he became reconciled with his American readers.
Before this visit, Dickens had some hope that Nelly might travel with him. Dolby went in advance to make delicate inquiries of their hosts whether this would be acceptable. The answer was no, so Nelly visited her sister in Italy instead.
By the summer of 1870, Dickens had given his final farewell reading, and was settled at Gad’s Hill writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood. A close friend, the actor Charles Fechter, had sent a model Swiss chalet as a present. This was erected on the grounds of Gad’s Hill, and Dickens was using its peaceful isolation as his study. On Wednesday 8 June Dickens took his breakfast early, went to the chalet to work, returned to the main house for luncheon and then went back to the chalet. In the evening he returned to the house to dine with Georgina. He complained of feeling ‘very ill’. During the meal he suffered another stroke and collapsed to the floor. On Thursday 9 June Dickens died, having not recovered consciousness. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, following a small private funeral for close friends and family, but the grave was left open for two further days so that the public could throw flowers upon Dickens’s coffin. Crowds continued to come for days, even after the grave had been filled in.
We have mentioned a few of the people who were significant in Dickens’s life, but many others have not been named. Dickens was extremely gregarious, living a busy social life. Here is a very selective list of some of his nearest friends.
Of contemporary writers, Dickens knew and published Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865), including her novels Cranford and North and South. It seems that Mrs Gaskell was often annoyed by Dickens; in particular she was irritated, when writing North and South, to find Dickens’s own industrial novel Hard Times serialised first. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863), the celebrated author of Vanity Fair, was a friend. Dickens and Thackeray admired each other at first, but they quarrelled and did not speak for years. They had begun a reconciliation just before Thackeray’s death.
Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) met Dickens in 1851. Both of his most successful novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone were serialised in Dickens’s All the Year Round; but Collins became much more than a contributing author. He accompanied Dickens on jaunts to the continent – most notably in 1853 with Augustus Egg; he collaborated with Dickens on plays (they wrote The Frozen Deep together) and on the Christmas editions of All the Year Round, as well as other projects such as the ‘lazy tour’ of 1857 which took Dickens and Collins to Doncaster when the Ternans were there. In short, Collins was a close friend and collaborator. His brother Charles married Katey Dickens in 1860, against her father’s advice.
Other writers Dickens admired and knew, included Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), prolific author and playwright, and Sir Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), the essayist, and social and political commentator. Dickens also knew George Henry Lewes, the partner of Marian Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot, and he admired Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) so much that he offered to serialise her next novel in All the Year Round. She refused this offer.
Among Dickens’s many friends, some preeminent names have been mentioned, such as Angela Burdett-Coutts, who worked with him running Urania Cottage, a prostitutes’ refuge. She also continued to urge a reconciliation with Catherine, for several years. We have also mentioned John Forster, Dickens’s closest and most trusted friend of all. Forster helped to manage publishers and contracts, including breaking and renegotiating contracts at Dickens’s behest. He was a constant and dependable adviser and an encouraging critic as well. It was to Forster that Dickens entrusted his ‘autobiographical sketch’ revealing details about his childhood that were never published in his lifetime (his childhood factory work, and his father’s imprisonment for debt, in particular), and Forster was Dickens’s authorised biographer.
William Wills (1810–1880) became assistant editor of Household Words at its inception in 1850. He was Dickens’s journalistic right-hand-man up until he was injured in 1868. Wills was unable to continue working, but had been a vital part of the Dickens ‘industry’ for nearly two decades.
We have mentioned several members of the Dickens family in passing, but we have not provided a list. Dickens was the second child and had five siblings: two sisters and three brothers. Fanny, who died in 1848, trained at the Royal Academy of Music, and was the closest to Charles. His brother Augustus deserted his wife in 1858, and another brother Frederick was divorced in 1859, provoking some comments about ‘the Dickens boys’, when the author’s marriage foundered at the same time.
Nine of Dickens’s children lived to become adults. Dickens wanted the eldest, Charley, to become a businessman, which he did, but without much success. He married against his father’s wishes, and had recurrent money troubles and seven children. Mary remained single and at home. Katey became an artist, married Charles Collins who died in 1873, then married another artist, Carlo Perugini, in 1874, apparently a happy union. Walter joined the army in India and died of sickness at the age of 22 (1863). Frank lived to be 42 as a Canadian ‘Mountie’. Alfred, and the youngest, Edward, were both on an Australian sheep-station when Dickens died. Sydney became a naval officer and died when he was 25 (1872). Finally, Henry persuaded Dickens to send him to Cambridge rather than stopping his education at 15, which was his father’s first idea. He became a successful lawyer and lived a long and prosperous life with his wife and seven children. There were therefore two men – Charley and Henry – and two women – Mamie and Katey – present at their father’s funeral. The others were dead or overseas.
Numerous other names could be mentioned here, such as Dickens’s first sweetheart Maria Beadnell; the De La Rues; Mr. and Mrs. Field who hosted Dickens in America; Charles Fechter, actor and donor of the chalet; Mrs. Brown, companion to Miss Coutts; Hablot Browne, pseudonym ‘Phiz’, Dickens’s illustrator; numerous male inhabitants of the London literary scene who shared the entertainment and boisterousness of Dickens’s social character; and not forgetting Mrs. Ternan and her three daughters, from 1857 onwards. Perhaps one has to mention Maclise, Macready, Stanfield, and so on, and so on. Reading Dickens’s biography is rather like strapping oneself into a roller coaster and holding on tight for a rollicking ride. We leave you to undertake such an entertainment with one of the full-length biographies,11 where you will meet the many other characters who played larger or smaller parts in Charles Dickens’s life.
The influence of his life and the times on Dickens’s works
This section is a discussion of how Dickens’s life and times can be seen as generating his novels and fuelling his creative energy.
As we have remarked, Dickens’s childhood left him peculiarly equipped to become a writer who was also a chronicler of his society. His early habits of reading and make-believe games had turned him into a devotee of the imagination, while his episode of child labour and his father’s spell in debtors’ prison gave him a perspective on society, that no ordinarily educated young man could have developed. However, his childhood left Dickens with another trait that was to influence his writing life: an unfortunate combination of arrogance about his talent, and need for admiration from others. Dickens seems to have longed to be middle-class, to become a gentleman; and despite his success, he never quite believed that he had arrived. Furthermore, he was forever insecure about money and driven to earn more just to avoid that constant poverty that had bedevilled his father; all this despite his becoming a rich man.
In Dickens’s defence it should be said that the English class system resists movement obstinately: you can make a fortune without moving up in social class, in the eyes of the (English) world. So, even if others might forget his origin, Dickens kept the embarrassing parts of his childhood a secret throughout his life. With regard to money, Dickens took on several extra financial commitments in the 1860s: he was looking after the families of dead relatives, paying alimony to Catherine, and funding both the Ternans’ and his own homes (he maintained a home in Wellington Street as well as Gad’s Hill). The calls on his purse were considerable, but his only complaints were about Catherine’s alimony, still resentfully mentioned in his will.
These awkward contradictions in his character gave Dickens a need for regular reassurance and proof that his public loved him. This proof could be found in three ways: first, from the sales figures of his periodicals or his books; second in the form of reviews, the encouragement of his friends, and the general talk about his work; finally, in the form of tears and laughter followed by ecstatic applause at one of his public readings. Increasingly, after the 1850s, public readings apparently brought him the most satisfying form of reassurance. Sales figures were a mixed blessing as each notch of extra popularity had to be sustained – any drop in the figures engendered a terrible anxiety (such as the poor sales achieved by Our Mutual Friend, for example).
The suggestion is this: Dickens needed reassurance, so he gave the public what he believed would earn it. Consequently, his novels swing towards melodrama and sentimentality at crucial moments. Further, Dickens’s novels adopt the mid-Victorian stereotype of femininity without question. We have seen how Rachael does Stephen’s housework by tidying up his wife, in Part I; and we have noted Esther’s ‘little woman’ or ‘Dame Trot’ housekeeping persona. To these should be added Florence Dombey, Lucie Manette, Bella Wilfer, Caddy Jellyby, Ada Clare/Carstone and numerous others.
This remark levels a serious criticism at Dickens’s oeuvre: that where there was the potential for a theme concerning human life or social reality, Dickens chose instead to elicit response on a sentimental level. This is underlined by what happened to the ending of Great Expectations. Dickens wrote a rigorous ending, offering no consummation of the romance between Pip and Estella. Such an ending suited the dour themes of money and class, the self-deceiving characterisation of Pip, and the distorted upbringing of Estella, in this dark novel. Unfortunately, Bulwer Lytton begged Dickens to give the romantic pair a happy ending. Claire Tomalin’s opinion is that ‘amazingly’12 Dickens complied, and the romantic final chapter is now the actual ending of the book. According to our theory, this not at all ‘amazing’, – it merely underlines Dickens’s vulnerability. For all his brash manners, Dickens was not sure of himself. When there was a choice, an easy popularity ruled over his better instincts.13
The social and historical background: Britain
Most of Dickens’s novels display themes that call out for social or political reform. We are familiar with the critique of Chancery and the law, explored in Bleak House; and that of Utilitarian ‘political economy’,14 and the evils of an industrial society, in Hard Times. The law was already a target when Pickwick was wrongly accused of breach of promise, in The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837); then Oliver Twist (1837–1839) attacks workhouses and the Poor Law, a theme still present when Betty Higden dies avoiding the workhouse, in Our Mutual Friend (1865). Throughout his writing life, Dickens aired his anger at injustice, his pity for the poor and illiterate, and his fury at the hypocrites who presided over such a society. He ridiculed those in charge with biting sarcasm and merciless satire. Dickens was one of several voices calling for reform, and the nineteenth century was the century of reform: parliament legislated to reform the legal profession, provision for the poor, conditions in factories, child labour and to reform the political and electoral systems.
Reform of the British political system had been overdue since the 1780s, when the Gordon Riots (1780) rocked English society, and there were already reform-minded politicians such as Edmund Burke and John Wilkes, calling for liberalisation. However, the double foreign shocks of, first, the American War of Independence (1775–1783), and second, the French Revolution (1789), led to a backlash against political progress. The Establishment suppressed calls for reform, using trials for sedition and treason, and giving the excuse that nothing could be done while the war against Napoleon continued. The Battle of Waterloo (1815) brought an end to that war; but there was still an acrimonious debate before the first Reform Act was finally passed, in 1832. This Act abolished the Rotten Boroughs15 and widened the electorate. However, it was still only one in five adult males who could vote; and several abuses, including the treating and patronage lampooned in the ‘National and Domestic’ chapter of Bleak House, still featured. In summary, then, a society that had waited 50 years was finally granted a measure of partial reform when Dickens was 20; but it was clear that further reforms would be needed: the Second Reform Act, further purging Rotten Boroughs and greatly increasing the electorate, was passed in 1867. Dickens’s writing career falls between these two Acts, in the period when parliamentary reform was a constant topic of debate.
Social reform
When Dickens was 22 (1834), the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed. Dickens had taken down in shorthand many of the speeches debating this measure, and he was well aware that this legislation would set up an inhumane system that became one of his targets as a writer. Again, as with political reform, numerous small changes occurred over succeeding years, which tinkered with the system (for example when the Poor Law Commission was scrapped in favour of the Poor Law Board, in 1847); but nothing happened to alter the pitiable picture of Oliver Twist’s dying mother, or old Betty Higden running away from the workhouse.
The Factories Act of 1833 was significant in establishing an inspectorate, and in prescribing the hours children (i.e. those aged 9–13) could work. Further important measures were passed, on hours of work permitted, hygiene and safety in factories, in 1844, 1847, 1850 and 1856. The Act of 1847 was a milestone, as it instituted the ten-hour day, and this bill stood as an example of successful factory regulation. We remember Dickens’s Coketown mill-owners who complain that they will be ‘ruined’ by any regulation: written during 1854. In 1855 the owners formed a National Association ‘to watch over factory legislation with a view to prevent any increase of the present unfair and injudicious enactments’. This pressure group was particularly against putting safety fences around machinery. In 1856 the safety fences rule was abolished. This detail serves as a reminder that all the reforms of the period, which seem self-evident to us in the twenty-first century, were bitterly fought over in Dickens’s day; furthermore, not all the battles were won by reformers: there were steps back as well.
Much of the raw material for industrial relations as shown in Hard Times clearly came from Dickens’s visits to the Midlands and the north during the winter of 1853–1854, and in particular from his visit to Preston, recorded in the article ‘On Strike’, which appeared in Household Words, 11 February 1854. A student of Hard Times should read this article. Dickens imagines a conversation on the train, with a Mr. Snapper, a proponent of Political Economy and so a model for Mr. Gradgrind; gives an account of an Union meeting and the dignified bearing of the striking Hands, although a Mr. Gruffshaw is the model for Slackbridge, the union man in Hard Times. Over and above these possible direct connections, ‘On Strike’ also raises three interesting questions. First, it quotes from a placard posted around the town by ‘the Committee’. Dickens is rather dismissive: such placards ‘were not remarkable for their logic certainly, and did not make the case particularly clear; but, considering that they emanated from, and were addressed to, people who had been out of employment for three-and-twenty consecutive weeks, at least they had little passion in them though they had not much reason’; and he copies one into his article saying: ‘Take the worst I could find.’ Far from lacking reason or clarity, the text of this placard is eloquent, strongly reasoned and moving. Second, ‘On Strike’ paints an admiring picture of the striking workers, whose behaviour is moderate and polite throughout; Dickens notes a complete absence of intimidation between the small number of ‘blacklegs’ still working, and the pickets at the mill-gate; and he shows the fiery Gruffshaw being silenced by the Union meeting chairman. Why, then, does he describe a dominant and effective Slackbridge, and Stephen’s being sent to Coventry by the other Hands, in Hard Times?
Third, ‘On Strike’ proposes Dickens’s solution, a step that Hard Times does not attempt. Dickens finishes ‘On Strike’ by suggesting that the Preston dispute should be referred to those ‘men in England above suspicion, to whom they [Owners and Workers] might refer the matters in dispute, with a perfect confidence above all things in the desire of those men to act justly, and in their sincere attachment to their countrymen of every rank and to their country’.
These men, who are respected by both sides, should arbitrate the dispute, and their judgment would be accepted by both sides. ‘On Strike’, then, makes a fascinating study in relation to Hard Times. You may also wish to read ‘Fire and Snow’, an article in the 21 January 1854 issue of Household Words. This tells of a journey to the industrial Midlands (the ‘Black Country’) in winter snow, and you may be struck by the jolly people described. It is almost as if the snow changes hardship into a Christmas card for the locals, while Dickens discourses on the cosy slippers and hot drinks provided at the inn.16
One of the evils that was a target for particular opprobrium, was the Court of Chancery. Dickens was accused of jumping onto the bandwagon with his attack in Bleak House, because The Times was attacking Chancery at the same time. Considering the sins of Chancery, the complaint about Dickens’s timing hardly matters – the Court richly deserved the lambasting it received. As with factory safety, there were several piecemeal reforms, partial repairs to mend the system’s worst breakdowns. From the beginning of the century, numerous small measures increased the number of officials who could hear cases, and attacked the system of sinecures that added costs and delayed cases, because lawyers profited from long documents and complicated procedure. Lord Denman criticised Dickens for attacking just as the court was reformed, presumably referring to the Suitors in Chancery Relief Act (1852), which gave court officials salaries, abolished fees and all forms of ‘bonus’. Additionally, the Master in Chancery Abolition Act (1852), allowed cases to be heard by judges instead of bounced back-and-forth between judges and Masters. These reforms did increase efficiency, and temporarily reduced the backlog. However, they were not an enduring solution, and further tinkering with the system continued through the 1850s and 60s, before Chancery was finally abolished in the Supreme Court of Judicature Act (1875). Dickens seems to have been right to defend himself in his preface to Bleak House. Chancery remained a dust-heap of legal delays, obfuscation, nonsensical procedure and the financial bleeding of all involved, after the Acts of 1852.
Of course, the legal professions still have an unappealing reputation; lawyers are still proverbial for high fees and outrageous arguments, and proceedings are over-complicated, slow, and in some respects ridiculous (robes and wigs, for example, have spawned hundreds of jokes). Dickens’s attack on the law was not confined to Chancery: Tulkinghorn was a repository for the scandals of a corrupt establishment. Bleak House does not quite accuse him of blackmail. Kenge, with his sophistic defence of the legal profession, and Vholes who feeds from his client as a leech fixes on flesh, both carry on a literary tradition stretching back to Chaucer’s Man of Law. Sadly, the law still provides numerous examples of absurdity, over-obscure procedures and enormous costs. In this more general sense of the law as an institution, there is nothing that restricts Dickens’s target to the 1850s alone.
The provision of education expanded during Dickens’s working life; but there remained much to be done before basic literacy became widespread. Dickens’s active life was bracketed by important legislation in this field. In 1833, Parliament voted regular sums of money to construct schools for poor children. Then, in 1870, the Elementary Education Act set up the board schools and made school attendance compulsory for five- to ten-year-olds. During Dickens’s lifetime, therefore, there was gradual expansion of the partly state-funded board schools, of the philanthropic ‘ragged schools’ for the poor, and liberalisation of the curriculum of grammar schools. We know from the passage in Bleak House describing the benighted state of illiteracy in Jo the crossing sweeper’s mind,17 that Dickens’s dedication to the cause of literacy was founded on a heartfelt sympathy for the illiterate. Dickens imagined their intellectual darkness vividly.
Dickens also held strong opinions on the kind of education that would most benefit the child. This is a theme to which his novels regularly return. So, in Bleak House we have Jo’s illiteracy, and Richard who can compose Latin verses and do nothing else.18 In Hard Times the novel opens with an attack on Utilitarians, and ends in debate between the brainwashed Bitzer, a converted Gradgrind and Sleary of the circus. Elsewhere in the novels we meet several so-called educators such as M’Choakumchild, Creakle and Squeers. Perhaps the most effective portraits of education gone wrong are the doomed obsessional, Bradley Headstone, and his self-righteous pupil, Charlie Hexam, from Our Mutual Friend. Among these portraits, hypocrisy, sadism, stupidity and a limited intellect, are the faults of teachers excoriated in Dickens’s fiction. He favoured educating the sentiments, fancy and imaginations of children, and his best products (such as, for example, Sissy Jupe in Chapter 9 of Hard Times) voice the ethics of a loving and forgiving Christianity.19
Foreign affairs
So far, we have restricted ourselves to domestic issues, but we must remember that the middle of the nineteenth century was the hey-day of the British Empire, and the power of Queen Victoria, Empress of India, straddled the globe. We cannot undertake any overview of international affairs during Dickens’s lifetime. We will have to make do with mentioning three foreign concerns, for their closeness to those years when Dickens was composing Bleak House and Hard Times.
First, 1848 was the Year of Revolutions in Europe. Virtually all the countries of the continent suffered from insurrections during that year, some successful, and others brutally put down. The variety and extent of these uprisings, although they were not coordinated, can be guessed when Wikipedia tells us of revolutions ‘in France, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Italy, and the Austrian Empire’ and affecting some 50 countries. There seems to have been a combination of causes: royalty and feudal authorities were anathema to both the growing bourgeois-democratic population and the working-class, although these two sections of society did not act together. Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto in February 1848, but the German Communist League, at whose request it had been written, issued only watered-down demands following the uprising in Berlin. Although little was achieved in the way of progress, the year 1848 was an earthquake that shook the foundations of virtually all European societies. Denmark changed from absolute to constitutional monarchy; France put an end to its royal succession; and serfdom was abolished in several states. Britain was one of very few states to escape the ‘Year of Revolutions’, although there were rebellious plots, and mass action by the Chartist movement, with a petition presented to parliament in April. One of the critics we mention in Chapter 10 below, sees the events of 1848 as the start of a ‘providential discourse’ of British complacency, and this in turn as a target of Dickens’s social critique in Bleak House.20
The second ‘foreign’ issue we mention is the War in the Crimea, which began in October 1853 and continued until 1856. Britain and France acted together, joining the Ottoman Empire in a war against Russia, which was regarded as an expansionist threat. The diplomatic situation was far from clear and involved the whole continent, but we are only interested in the campaign of French and British armies besieging Sevastopol, the main Russian port on the Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea.
In the late autumn of 1854, there was a battle at Balaclava. During the conflict, the Light Brigade made its famous charge, and the 93rd Highlanders went into history as the ‘Thin Red Line’. The action of the Light Brigade, however brave, was an example of stupid military leadership and a waste of life. Furthermore, although the actual battle was won, the camp was rife with disease, and Sevastopol was still in Russian hands. It was during this campaign that Florence Nightingale became famous, nursing the sick soldiers. In early 1855 the government fell, ousted largely by war fever, whipped up by the popular press, and the government’s handling of the war was portrayed as indecisive. Dickens contributed his article ‘Mr. Bull’s Somnambulist’ that appeared in Household Words on 25 November 1854. Dickens imagines the household of ‘Mr. Bull’ (i.e. John Bull, or England) with a sleepwalking helpless old woman in charge. She is Abigail or ‘Aby’ Dean (i.e. Lord Aberdeen), a merciless caricature of indecisiveness. The article calls for this hopeless old woman housekeeper to be replaced by one who is ‘emphatically – a Man’.
Our third ‘foreign’ affair is the events that became known as the ‘Indian Mutiny’. This series of conflicts erupted in India in 1857, for a variety of reasons. The Indian population nursed a number of grievances concerning both Hindu and Muslim religious traditions: many believed their religion was under attack from the administration. There were also many foolish regulations, such as those regarding inheritance of land. These frictions differed between different localities, but were many, and when taken together make a catalogue of maladministration by the East India Company. When news came of the terrible massacres at Cawnpore in June 1857, where some hundreds of English women and children were hacked to pieces and their remains thrown into a well, Dickens wrote to Miss Burdett Coutts that, given command, he would ‘exterminate the race [the people of India] … to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth’. Patriotism is one thing, but genocide is quite another! Michael Slater explains Dickens’s agitation as images of women being attacked ‘were perhaps beginning to resonate in Dickens’s mind with his image of Nelly and his fantasies about rescuing her from ogres’. Slater then slips back into the domestic arena: it was ‘high time to begin planning the next Christmas number of Household Words’.21 The bathos with which Slater completes his paragraph may be intentional; it implies something typical of Dickens’s response to foreign affairs. He was always affected by misery, poverty, slavery, dirt, disease and ignorance when he met these phenomena; and this happened regularly in Britain. Events abroad, however, did not hold his interest: the onrushing demands of his own life naturally reoccupied the central position in Dickens’s psyche.
Furthermore, Dickens’s reactions to both domestic and foreign issues operated at a particular level. His emotions were quick, his pity and anger both ready, and he was an impressive critic of his society, pitying the powerless oppressed, and hating hypocrites. On the other hand, Dickens was not analytical in the manner of a student of society, and so he did not offer considered solutions to the problems and evils he described. As we have just seen, he offered genocide as the solution to the Indian Mutiny. His solution to the Preston Strike was to find a highly respected man somewhere, who would arbitrate between owners and workers. Imagine the laughter of a true social analyst – Karl Marx, say – at such a suggestion. After all, Dickens’s solution appeared six years after the Communist Manifesto. Again, we note from ‘Mr. Bull’s Somnambulist’ the caricature of a weak, indecisive leader as an old woman. The solution? Replace her with ‘a Man’. Dickens presumably means by this a strong, decisive leader.
One important international event we have not discussed was the American Civil War. This took place between 1861 and 1865. One positive result was the abolition of Slavery in the defeated southern states.22 The war itself was an all-encompassing destruction, the first example of the kind of warfare that would reach its zenith in 1914–1918. This war raged over the whole huge territory of the United States, and left more than 600,000 dead. In 1862, Dickens’s contempt for American politics was still so much alive that he could not see ‘a pin’ difference between the North and the South, and he did not believe that slavery was the issue. Dickens had campaigned against slavery, however, and in the end he was pleased at the victory of the abolitionist North. Aside from his low expectations at the outset, the main effect of the war upon him was to postpone his plans for a second journey across the Atlantic.
1 Quoted in Slater, Michael, Charles Dickens, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009, p. 335.
2 Lord Denman (1779–1854), Lord Chief Justice until 1850.
3 Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864), English poet and writer.
4 Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), English critic, poet and essayist.
5 Quoted in Slater, Charles Dickens, 2009, p. 349.
6 In May 1853, the ‘judge’ being Sir William Page Wood.
7 Wilkie Collins (1824–1889), English novelist.
8 Augustus Egg (1816–1863), English painter.
9 Letters, vol. IX, p. 230.
10 Charles Dickens: A Life, London: Penguin Books, 2012.
11 You could try Michael Slater’s Charles Dickens, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009; Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life, Viking, 2011; London: Penguin Books, 2012; or Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens, Vintage, 2002, which are just three of several biographies.
12 Tomalin, Charles Dickens, p. 315.
13 Although the present ending is defended by some critics, such as Q. D. Leavis and J. Hillis Miller.
14 John Stuart Mill, the Utilitarian philosopher, published his widely influential The Principles of Political Economy in 1848.
15 ‘Rotten boroughs’ were those with very few voters, where it was consequently easy corruptly to ‘fix’ an election.
16 Dickens’s journals Household Words and All the Year Round are available in full at http://www.djo.org.uk (Dickens Journals Online). You can not only read Dickens’s articles there, but also other writers’ contributions to the journals he edited.
17 See Bleak House, pp. 235–238.
18 See Bleak House, p. 180.
19 See Hard Times, p. 57, for example, when Sissy’s ‘To do unto others as I would that they should do unto me’ is pronounced ‘very bad’ by Mr. Gradgrind.
20 Morris, Pam, Dickens’s Class Consciousness: A Marginal View, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. See Chapter 9.
21 Slater, Charles Dickens, 2011, p. 441.
22 A student of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s is entitled to wonder how much difference this made to the life of a southern black, however.