About Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens (John Huffam) (1812-70), English novelist, born at Portsmouth. He was brought up in poverty; at the age of eleven he was obliged to support himself by working in a dye warehouse, while his father spent more than a year in deptors, jail. However, an unexpected legacy restored the elder Dickens to liberty, and for a brief period (about 1824-26) the boy attended school. Charles Dickens then entered a solicitor’s office as a clerk, and worked there for two years while learning shorthand with the intention of becoming a newspaper reporter. At twenty, he began covering debates in the House of Commons for The True Sun, and the next sixteen years continued his newspaper career on The Mirror of the Parliament and The Morning Chronicle. During this period he also contributed sketches to several periodicals, his first piece, A Dinner at Poplar Walk, appearing in The Old Monthly Magazine, December, 1833. In August, 1834, Charles Dickens began to sign these sketches with the pen name Boz, and for the next two years continued to contribute them to The Monthly Magazine as well as to The Morning Chronicle. The successes of these sketches attracted the attention of the publishers Chapman and Hall, who employed Dickens to write the literary commentary for a series of humorous drawings by the then popular artist Robert Seymour. Charles Dickens role in this collaboration was intended to be secondary, but it resulted in the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837) and won international fame for its author. Thereafter, Charles Dickens maintained his popularity at a prodigious rate of literary productivity. In addition to writing, he lectured in America (1842) on the international copyright and against slavery, managed a touring theatrical company (1847-52), edited the weekly magazines Household Words (1849) and All the Year Round (1859), and gave public readings of his works.
Charles Dickens works have been variously estimated. His humor, his perception of human frailty, and his instinct for the drama inherent in human relations are universally admitted. But to some his humor verges on the burlesque, his pathos is exaggerated, and his style is careless and loose. Charles Dickens creative power was prodigious, encompassing thousands of characters, and as many situations. The essence of his art was caricature based; however, on a profound sense of social justice, so that the more satirical was his writing, the more clearly it delineated the necessity for reform. |
