Dickens

DICKENS, Charles, English novelist: b. Landport, England, 7 Feb. 1812; d. Gad's Hill, near London, 9 June 1870. Dickens, who was christened Charles John Huffham Dickens, was the eldest son and the second child among eight of John and Elizabeth Dickens. His father was a navy-clerk in the Portsmouth dockyard at the time of the novelist's birth; thence he was transferred to London, and, when Charles was five, to Chatham. Here Dickens learned to read and got some schooling. The most important influence of this early life was his acquaintance with the great novelists of the preceding cen tury, Fielding and Smollett, and also LeSage and Cervantes, all of whom had much effect on his own work. He also read much travel, and had a good deal of pleasure in the Nights' and the British essayists.

In 1821, the Dickens family returned to Lon don, in straitened circumstances, and the fol lowing year the elder Dickens was confined in the Marshalsea for debt, through hard luck and misfortune rather than, as his biographers are careful to explain, any fault or misdemeanor of his own. The young Charles was put to pasting labels in a blacking warehouse in Black friars, much as his hero, David Copperfield, toiled in the warehouse of Murdstone and Grinby, though he was not ill-used. Begin ning with 1824 he got two or three years of schooling of no very profitable sort, and found some employment, first as lawyer's clerk, and later as newspaper reporter. In order better to perfect his work in this field he learned short hand and read with some system in the British Museum. For a time, probably, he thought of becoming an actor, whose profession always' had great charm for him, but this was definitely abandoned when, in 1831, his toil was rewarded by his being made parliamentary reporter, and later, in 1834, a regular reporter on the Morning Chronicle, an important Whig newspaper. At his profession Dickens worked with great en ergy, but he found time also to begin the writ ing which led to his great popular fame.

This was a sketch entitled 'A Dinner at Poplar Walk,' and it was published early in 1834 in the Monthly Magazine. By the begin ning of 1836, enough had been published in that paper and the Evening Chronicle to make a vol ume, which shortly appeared with the title, the nickname of his boy hood, which he used as a pseudonym for many years. The sketches were so successful that Dickens shortly found it profitable to buy back the copyright for 13 times the 1150 that he had originally got for it. The same year (1836) he married Catharine Hogarth, eldest daughter of George Hogarth, the conductor of the Even ing Chronicle.

The five years following the appearance of the

In February 1837, while there is a deliberate representation, somewhat along the lines laid down by Fielding and Smollett, of the under side of life, and there is also an attack on the iniquity of the administration of charity schools and the poor law. The most intimate and affecting parts of the story are those dealing with the subterranean life of the young pickpockets and Nancy. Dickens' feel ing for reform is even more poignant in the next novel, (1838-39), where he fell upon the country schools in the person of the immortal Squeers and Dotheboys Hall. Critical opinion is in accord with regard to the infinite superiority of the portraits of the Squeers family, the actors, and the rest of those who are more or less taken from the author's own keen observation of life, to the conventional and unconvincing picture of the 'high" life in the novel. In Mrs. Nickleby, as earlier in Pickwick, and later in Mrs. Gamp, Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep and many others, Dickens made an interesting addition to the gallery of permanent and popular portraits es tablished by Chaucer, and added to by Shakes peare, Fielding, Sheridan and others.