Dickens, Charles John Huffam

Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812–70). Novelist, born at Portsea, Portsmouth, where his father was serving as a clerk in the navy pay office. His father's transfers to Chatham and ultimately to London were to influence the settings of his work. A fictionalized Chatham, its neighbouring city of Rochester, and the landscapes around them figure prominently in Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations, and in the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It was, however, London which became the main focus of Dickens's work as a novelist, journalist, and essayist. It figures as an often confusing, polyphonic and exhilarating setting for the earlier fiction, but, from Bleak House (1852–3) onwards, London seems to assume a new darkness, mystery, and drabness. Dickens is the quintessential urban artist, able to transform the multivalency of Victorian city life into a new and flexible kind of fiction. His contemporary success was to some degree assured by his skilful exploitation of monthly-part publication: from 1850 until 1859 he edited Household Words. He used his popularity with readers to campaign in his novels for the reform of British institutions (e.g. the 1834 Poor Law, the prison system, the civil service, the law) which he saw as working against the public good. Thanks to the influence of Carlyle his two historical novels, Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the first set at the time of the Gordon riots and the second during the French Revolution, suggest that social upheaval is a consequence of injustice rooted in historical conditions. In his American Notes (1842) he gave a vivid account of his visit to the USA, which offended many Americans. His disillusion with aspects of American life is also reflected in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4).

Sue Minna Cannon