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Charles Dickens had one thing in common with his creation Thomas Gradgrind, the heartless utilitarian of Hard Times: a love of facts. Along with fourteen novels, many of them rich in topical allusion, Dickens produced a body of work as reporter, essayist, correspondent, and editor that constitutes a lifelong account of the material realities of Victorian life. In the early sketches, the as-yet unknown writer is a purveyor of urban spectacle, trying to dazzle his readers, bearing aloft, as he puts it, "not only himself, but all his hopes of future fame, and all his chances of future success." In his reporting and commentary, Dickens is often an outraged bourgeois reformer, uncompromising in his attacks on privileged interests. The surviving letters, nearly 20,000 of which have survived, reveal a man of astonishing energies, who attempted to impose an artist's vision of order on every aspect of his life and work. In the late essays, Dickens emerges as a restless, poetic wanderer, blending observation, autobiography, and allegory. While most of this work stands on its own, the product of acute observation and rhetorical artistry, it also affords a panoramic window on the novelist's attitudes and preoccupations.
The experiences that nourished this prodigious talent began in Portsmouth, where Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 to John and Elizabeth Barrow Dickens. John Dickens was an "extra clerk" in the naval pay office, a job that took him and his family to London in 1814, to Chatham in 1817, and back to London in 1822. In Chatham the young Charles Dickens spent the happiest years of his childhood. He loved the sights and sounds of the busy shipbuilding center, and both his parents encouraged his early devotion to such eighteenth-century prose masters as Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Tobias Smollett. But his father's inability to live within his means, coupled with the growth of the Dickens household (Charles Dickens had four brothers and sisters by 1822), brought an early end to his happiness that coincided with the family's second move to London. Just two days past his twelfth birthday, Dickens was sent to work pasting labels on shoe-blacking pots in a blacking warehouse to supplement the family income; eleven days later his father was arrested for debt and taken to the Marshalsea debtor's prison. (One wall of the original Marshalsea still stands today in south London; to view it, click here). The double blow of his family's fall from fortune and his own banishment into drudgery and humiliation constituted an abrupt loss of innocence whose ache never fully subsided. Although a bequest freed his father from the Marshalsea after three months, and Dickens's own warehouse tenure lasted only four, the sense of insecurity and injustice these events instilled lasted a lifetime. At the same time, the experience benefited the future writer, broadening his scope, deepening his insight, and contributing to the astonishing energy and resolve with which he subsequently pursued his vocation.
Less than a month after his father removed him from the blacking warehouse, Dickens was enrolled as a day student at the Wellington House Academy in London. Here, between the ages of twelve and fifteen, he was already trying his hand at the kind of writing that would launch him on his professional career. He submitted what was called "penny-a-line stuff" to his father's employer, the British Press: information about fires, accidents, or police reports missed by the regular reporters. Several years later, constrained by his work as a clerk in a law office, he set himself the difficult task of mastering shorthand so as to return to journalism in earnest. In 1828, during his sixteenth year, the became a free-lance reporter in the London law courts. For several years he alternated reporting, exploring the London streets, and reading avidly at the British Museum. Already devoted to the essays of Joseph Addison, Oliver Goldsmith, and Samuel Jon, he now read the major nineteenth-century essayists: Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Walter Savage Landor, and Thomas DeQuincey.
In this twentieth year, Dickens secured a job as a parliamentary reporter for the Mirror of Parliament, founded by his uncle John Henry Barrow. He worked there from 1832 to 1834. The reputation he made for himself would be the envy of any aspiring journalist. A contemporary of Dickens, James Grant of the Morning Advertiser, claimed that Dickens "occupied the very highest rank, not merely for accuracy in reporting, but for marvelous quickness in transcript." Despite his youth, he quickly won the respect of his older colleagues. "There never was such a shorthand writer!" declared one of them. Dickens's observations of parliament during and after the heady days of the Reform Bill debates constituted the liberal education neither he nor his parents could afford to finance. It also committed him to reform while making him suspicious of many reformers. The only problem with the Mirror of Parliament was that it did not pay its staff members when Parliament was not in session, which forced Dickens back to free-lance court reporting. Thus when the liberal daily newspaper the Morning Chronicle was reorganized and expanded, Dickens jumped at the chance of becoming one of its regular staff members. His thoroughness and speed helped the Chronicle provide serious competition to its conservative rival the Times. The ambition that drove Dickens during these apprenticeship years, he later admitted to this friend and biographer John Forster, "excluded every other idea from my mind for four years, at a time of life when four years are equal to four times four." He added that he "went at it with a determination to overcome all difficulties, which fairly lifted me up into that newspaper life, and floated me away over a hundred men's heads."
Dickens's reputation as a reporter was soon eclipsed, however, by his growing fame as "Boz," the name under which he wrote a series of tales and sketches published in the Monthly Magazine, Bell's Weekly Magazine, the Morning Chronicle, the evening Chronicle, and Bell's Life in London and Sporting Chronicle. (Dickens took his pseudonym from his younger brother Moses, whose sinus condition him to comically mispronounce his own name). Dickens later collected these pieces in two hardcover volumes titled Sketches by Boz (1836), adding additional material and revising the originals. Many of the sketches are in fact essays, possessing a colloquial immediacy that vividly captures the lower- and middle-class street life he observed firsthand. In them Dickens introduced many of the scenes and much of the subject matter that later appeared in his fiction. For example, the sketch "Gin-Shops," besides demonstrating Dickens's knowledge of the lower reaches of Victorian society, is an early instance of the reformer's anger at those who condemn the symptoms of poverty without addressing its causes: "Gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but wretchedness and dirt are greater; and until you improve the homes of the poor, or persuade a half-famished wretch not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his own misery, with the pittance which, divided among his family, would furnish a morsel of bread for each, gin-shops will increase in number and splendor." Dickens's perspective in Sketches by Boz is not always characterized by such uncomplicated moral sympathy, however.
Boz is a flaneur (flaneur is French for a connoisseur of street life). As Walter Benjamin has written, in order to observe, the flaneur must be in his primary place, the street, and yet he is inherently out of place there. "Let the many attend to their daily affairs . . . the man of leisure can indulge in the perambulations only if as such he is already out of place." His relationship with urban dwellers is similarly double; drawn to the crowd he "becomes deeply involved with them, only to relegate them to oblivion with a single glance of contempt." As a narrator, Boz embodies Benjamin's definition of the flaneur. His isolated, voyeuristic perspective also captures something significant about the modern city. Lewis Mumford, in The Culture of Cities, says that the urban aggregation characteristic of nineteenth-century cities was, in part, typified by the "atomic individual," a figure for whom "the whole duty of government "was "to guard his property, to protect his rights, to ensure his freedom of choice and enterprise." In what Mumford calls the "new capitalist city," each individual is concerned with developing his own interest. This individual becomes a kind of despot, presiding over his own kingdom, embodying what Mumford refers to as "the myth of the untrammeled individual."
I n her excellent study of narratorial omniscience in Dickens, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and The Subject of Omniscience, Audrey Jaffe notes that in Sketches by Boz "it is Boz . . . who enacts the fantasy of the untrammeled individual for his readers, finding interest in what the man on his way to business cannot take the time to see. He is the man whose business is his pleasure--one who finds his capital in what must be, for others, incidental: in the interstices of their lives." She adds that "Boz's ambivalence about his observational activity may express a tension between two cultural models of the middle-class subject's relationship to the poor. In Dickens's Sketches, that is, we might say that eighteenth-century benevolence encounters both nineteenth-century anxiety about social mobility and a nineteenth-century perception of the poor as requiring governmental scrutiny and regulation."
Sketches by Boz was published to considerable contemporary acclaim. The critic for the Morning Postcard that the "graphic descriptions of 'Boz' invest all he describes with amazing fidelity." The Sunday Herald hailed the collected sketches as "inimitably accurate." The reviewer for the radical weekly the Examiner said his second reading of the sketches "strengthened the favorable impression" that a new field of imaginative literature had opened up, focusing on urban and suburban London. The twenty-year old George Henry Lewes, struck by the hallucinatory, multi-generic quality of Dickens's city sketches, wrote in the National Magazine: "if asked by what peculiar talent is Boz characterized, we find ourselves at a dead fault." Making another start, Lewes claimed it was Dickens's blend of literary modes--from burlesque to satire, from the romantic to the gothic--that won Dickens his "surprising popularity" with "all classes" from his first appearances in print. Dickens's friend and first biographer John Forster, noting that "the Sketches were much more talked about than the first two or three new numbers of Pickwick;noted that "the first sprightly runnings of his genius are undoubtedly here."
Recently, increased attention has been paid to the importance of the Sketches by Boz. Peter Ackroyd's massive 1990 biography of Dickens, though frustrating as a work of scholarship, contains a detailed account of the evolution of the Sketches in relation to Dickens's early life. (Among other things, Ackroyd provides a rich discussion of Dickens's early and formative immersion in the world of Victorian theatre). In addition to Jaffe's chapter on the Sketches, Deborah Epstein Nord's book Walking the Victorian Streets discusses "The Middle-Class City and the Quarantine of Urban Suffering" in the Sketches. And Duane DeVries's Dickens's Apprentice Years: The Making of a Novelist (1976) provides a useful analysis of how these short pieces allowed Dickens to develop the technical skill necessary to his later achievements.
The origins of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837), later knows simply as The Pickwick Papers, suggest that Dickens the novelist is often difficult to separate from Dickens the journalist. The success of Sketches by Boz brought Dickens to the attention of Edward Chapman and William Hall, booksellers and publishers of periodicals who had recently begun producing books. They proposed that Dickens provide a series of Boz-like sketches to accompany the illustrations of Robert Seymour, one of England's leading comic artists. Dickens would write and edit twenty monthly installments to be sold for one shilling apiece. As reported by biographer Edgar Johnson, Dickens's friends warned him that the shilling number was a "low, cheap form of publication" that would prevent him from rising to the rank of respectable writer, but to no avail. Dickens began writing a few days after this twenty-fourth birthday, and before the end of March 1836, he had written 24,000 words, enough for the first two installments. With the twenty-nine pounds he received in payment, Dickens was able to marry Catherine Hogarth (1815-1879) on 2 April, leaving on a short honeymoon before the first installment was published (the same month Dickens took a three-year lease on 48 Doughty Street at a rate of eighty pounds a year, the only one of Dickens's London residences that is still standing; click here to see a photograph of the house as it looks today). The couple's first child, Charles, was born nine months later; over the next fifteen years came nine more children, several named after writers for whom Dickens had a special affinity: Mary, Kate, Walter Landor, Alfred Tennyson, Sydney Smith Haldemand, Henry Fielding, Dora Annie, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton (click here to view the Dickens family tree; click here to view the Hogarth family tombstone in Kensal Green cemetery).
The first number of The Pickwick Papers sold only 400 copies, but when the last number was printed in October 1837 the run was 40,000. In his preface to the first cheap edition of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens ironically recalled the warning of his friends, concluding: "how right my friends turned out to be, everybody now knows." The phenomenal success that resulted from this venture created an entirely new approach to the publication of novels. Previously, serial publication of literature was restricted to cheap reprints of classics or ephemeral nonfiction turned out by poorly paid hack writers. Readers bought or checked out novels in three-volume hardback editions. Dickens's gamble wedded the serial appeal of journalism to the emotional engagement of fiction. All of his subsequent novels were published in installments, and many other novelists adopted this mode.
The Pickwick Papers turned Dickens from an obscure reporter into a celebrity, but it did not diminish his journalistic energy. While writing The Pickwick Papers,in fact, he found that he could occasionally blend his journalism into his fiction. In May, with only two installments of The Pickwick Papers in print, Dickens, using the pseudonym Timothy Sparks, wrote a pamphlet fiercely attacking a bill that would prohibit all work and recreation on Sundays. The pamphlet, Sunday Under Three Heads: As It Is; As Sabbath Bills Would Make It; As It Might Be Made, argued that without this day of recreation and enjoyment, increasing numbers of poor would resort to the gin shops, just the result that "your saintly law-givers" are supposedly trying to avoid as they "lift up their hands to heaven, and exclaim for a law which shall convert the day intended for rest and cheerfulness, into one of universal gloom, bigotry, and persecution." In the pamphlet Dickens created a Nonconformist preacher whose hypocrisy anticipates that of the red-nosed minister Stiggins, who appeared in the December number of The Pickwick Papers. And on 22 June, on assignment for the Morning Chronicle, Dickens attended a divorce case in which Lord Melbourne was accused of adultery with the wife of the Hon. George Norton; some of this material found its way into the farcical trial of Bardell vs. Pickwick, which appeared in the July installment. It is likely that hat the monthly praise Dickens received as Pickwick's adventures unfolded convinced him of the advantages of maintaining regular contact with his readers, as journalism allowed him to do. He did sever his connection with the Morning Chronicle in November 1836, but he continued to submit articles and letters to newspapers for the remainder of his life. He even agreed to become founding editor of a new radical paper, the Daily News, in January 1846, but he was not suited for the he role of daily-newspaper editor, and his tenure lasted a short seventeen issues. His editorial ambitions, however, were not confined to newspapers.
January 1837 saw publication of the first issue of Bentley's Miscellany, a monthly collection of fiction, biographical notes, verses, and humor edited by Dickens and published by Richard Bentley. Oliver Twist, the first of Dickens's novels to be published as part of a magazine, was serialized in the Miscellany beginning with the second issue and published in three volumes by Bentley in 1838. The novel was partly inspired by Dickens's hatred of the New Poor Law, which he heard debated in Parliament and which he viewed as a subordination of the needs of the poor to institutional control and efficiency. (For a brief discussion of the 1832 Sadler Committee's report on child labor, click here). Oliver Twist was a huge success for both Dickens and Bentley, but financial and editorial disputes between the two men became increasingly bitter. In a move that foreshadowed subsequent dealings with his publishers, Dickens resigned his position at the magazine in February 1839 in a disagreement over editorial control. At the end of an otherwise judicious and moderate farewell address published in the March issue, Dickens told his readers that the magazine had "always been literally 'Bentley's Miscellany,' and never mine."
Seeking greater editorial autonomy, Dickens arranged with Chapman and Hall to bring out a new weekly periodical, and Master Humphry's Clock was born on 4 April 1840. Conceived in the spirit of Addison's Spectator papers, Master Humphry's Clock began as a blend of sketches, essays, and tales but quickly faltered when readers discovered there was no engrossing novel by Dickens to hold their interest. Before the decline Dickens had discussed with Forster a short pathetic tale he would write for the magazine; when trouble arose he responded with a characteristic adaptability, turning the tale into a novel. Thus was The Old Curiosity Shop produced, one of many cases of Dickens's journalism fostering his fiction. The Old Curiosity Shop brought the circulation of Master Humphry's Clock up to 100,000, and Chapman and Hall published the novel in two volumes in 1841. But after Barnaby Rudge (1 volume, 1841) had also appeared in its pages, Dickens arranged with Chapman and Hall to discontinue the magazine in November 1841 and return to publishing his novels in monthly parts.
For Dickens, editing (or "conducting" as he later described it) a magazine was a way of maintaining close contact with his audience, something he learned to value during the publication of The Pickwick Papers. When he decided to make his first trip to America, he used the preface to Master Humphry's Clock to announce his impending separation from his readers: "I have decided, in January next, to pay a visit to America. The pleasure I anticipate from this realization of a wish I have long entertained . . . is subdued by the reflection that it must separate us for a longer time than other circumstances would have rendered necessary." Dickens and his wife left England on 4 January 1842, arriving in Boston on 22 January and returning on 7 June.
Their itinerary was ambitious, taking them from the eastern seaboard to the southern slave states and west to St. Louis, then back via Ohio, Toronto, Montreal, and New York by way of Lake Champlain. The process whereby Dickens's infatuation with most things American turned to disillusionment is chronicled in a series of increasingly caustic letters he wrote home to friends and in books seven through thirteen of The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (published 1842-1844, in twenty parts). In much of American Notes for General Circulation, published in two volumes in October 1842, Dickens replaces this vituperation with shrewd journalistic analyses of American institutions in light of their English counterparts; asylums, factories, prisons. His accounts of New York's Tombs prison and the Philadelphia penitentiary are especially powerful, recalling "A Visit to Newgate" in Sketches by Boz. In his account of touring the Tombs, Dickens applies the mordant wit of the satirist to his description of an exchange he had with a prison guard. The guard had explained that the boy in one cramped cell had been locked up for "safe keeping" because he was a witness in the upcoming trial of his father. Dickens asked if this was not hard treatment for the witness, and the guard replied: "Well, it ain't a very rowdy life, and that's a fact!"
Despite the generally moderate tone of American Notes for General Circulation, certain U.S. papers reacted violently. The New York Herald reviewer called Dickens "that famous penny-a-liner," with "the most coarse, vulgar, imprudent, and superficial" mind, whose view of America was that of "a narrow-minded, conceited cockney." English reviewers were generally unimpressed and longed for another novel. Twentieth-centur
