Charles Dickens – A Biography – English Literature

There is something in the imaginative power of Charles Dickens that defies explanation in purely biographical terms. However, his biography shows the source of that power and is the best place to start defining it.

The second son of John and Elizabeth Dickens, Charles was born on February 7, 1812, near Portsmouth on the south coast of England. At the time, John Dickens was stationed in Portsmouth as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. The family was of lower-middle-class background, John coming from servants and Elizabeth from minor bureaucrats. Dickens’s father was lively and generous, but he had an unfortunate tendency to live beyond his means. his mother was affectionate and rather inept in practical matters. Dickens later used his father as the basis for Mr. Micawber and portrayed his mother as Mrs. Nickleby in A Tale of Two Cities.

After a transfer to London in 1814, the family moved to Chatham, near Rochester, three years later. Dickens was about five years old at the time, and for the next five years life was pleasant for him. His mother taught him to read and he devoured his parents’ small collection of classics, which included Shakespeare, Cervantes, Defoe, Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith. These left a permanent mark on his imagination; his effect on his art was quite important. Dickens also attended a few performances of Shakespeare and formed a lifelong bond with the theater. He attended school during this period and was shown to be a rather lonely boy, observant, good-natured and with a certain talent for comic routines, which his father encouraged. In retrospect, Dickens regarded these years as something of a golden age. His first novel, The Pickwick Papers, is in part an attempt to recreate his idyllic nature: he revels in innocence and youthful spirit, and his happiest scenes take place in that precise geographical area.

In light of the family’s return to London, where financial difficulties surpassed those of the Dickens, the time in Chatham must have seemed truly glorious. The family moved to the ramshackle suburb of Camden Town, and Dickens was pulled out of school and assigned to menial jobs around the house. In time, to help increase the family income, Dickens was given a job in a burnishing factory among rough-and-tumble peers. At that time his father was imprisoned for debts, but he was released three months later for a small legacy. Dickens told his friend John Forster, much later, that at this time he felt a deep sense of abandonment; the main themes of his novels date back to this period. His sympathy for the victims, his fascination with prisons and money, his desire to vindicate his heroes’ knighthood, and his idea of ​​London as an impressive, lively, and rather threatening environment reflect these experiences. Without a doubt, this temporary collapse of his parents’ ability to protect him made a vivid expression on him. On his own for a while at the age of twelve, Dickens acquired a lasting self-reliance, driven ambition, and boundless energy that he invested in everything he did.

At age thirteen, Dickens went back to school for two years and then took a job in a law office. Dissatisfied with the job, he learned shorthand and became a freelance court reporter in 1828. The job was seasonal and allowed him to read extensively in the British Museum. At the age of twenty he became a full-fledged journalist, working for three newspapers in a row. Over the next four or five years he acquired a reputation as the fastest and most accurate parliamentary reporter in London. The value of this period was that Dickens gained a solid first-hand knowledge of London and the provinces.

Dickens was very physically active. He loved to go for long walks, ride horses, take trips, entertain friends, dine well, play practical jokes. He enjoyed playing charades games with his family, he was an excellent hobby magician, and he practiced hypnotism. One tends to share Shaw’s view that Dickens, in his social life, was always on stage. He was like an eternal master of ceremonies, for the most part: flamboyant, observant, quick, dynamic, full of enthusiasm. However, he was also restless, subject to bouts of depression and short tempers, so that it must have been almost intolerable at times to live with him, pleasant as he was as a companion.

In view of his exhausting life, it is not surprising that he died at the age of fifty-eight from a stroke. At his death on June 9, 1870, Dickens was wealthy, immensely popular, and the greatest novelist the Victorian age produced. He was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, and people died all over the world.