DICKENS, Charles (John Huffham)

DICKENS, Charles (John Huffham) [1812–70]. English writer. Born in Portsmouth and moved to Chatham, then London. He became deeply unhappy when his father was imprisoned for debt and he worked for a time in a blacking warehouse. He became a Parliamentary reporter for the True Sun (1832), then the Morning Chronicle (1834), acquiring the knowledge of London that underlies his novels. Sketches by Boz, a series of commentaries on London life, appeared in various periodicals. It was followed by Pickwick Papers (1836), a comic episodic novel that made his name, and Oliver Twist (1837), a melodramatic tale of criminal life that established his success. In David Copperfield (1849–50), written in the first person, he put into fiction some of the bitterness of his early life. Earlier novels like Oliver Twist dealt with such specific social abuses as the workhouse, but his later novels took a more generally critical view of society. His fame was by then widespread, but his relationship with his wife Catherine (married in 1836) had steadily deteriorated and ended in 1858 with a separation accompanied by her accusations of infidelity. He increased both his income and popularity by public readings in the UK and US, but the strain was great and he died suddenly, leaving the novel Edwin Drood unfinished.

Characters and experiments

The strength of Dickens is his characters, particularly the comics and eccentrics, who live largely through their speech and through catchphrases that helped fix them for readers who met them in monthly serials. Their names are notable and often say something about their bearers: Mr Bumble the Beadle, the benevolent brothers Cheeryble, Thomas Gradgrind the Utilitarian, the fawning clerk Uriah Heep, the convict Abel Magwitch, Mr McChoakumchild the teacher, the amiable nurse Clara Peggotty, the impostor Mr Pumblechook, the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge. His place-names are also often suggestive: Blunderstone, Coketown, Dotheboys Hall, Eatanswill. Like Scott, Dickens worked dialect into his novels, particularly COCKNEY, for which he used idiosyncratic spelling that nonetheless conveyed the sounds and cadences of London, as for example the style, dialect, and accent of Mr Pickwick's servant Sam Weller:
‘That a'nt the wost on it, neither. They puts things into old gen'lm'n's heads as they never dreamed of. My father, sir, wos a coachman. A widower he wos, and fat enough for anything—uncommon fat, to be sure. His missus dies, and leaves him four hundred pound. Down he goes to the Commons, to see the lawyer and draw the blunt—wery smart—top—boots on—nosegay in his button–hole—broad-brimmed tile—green shawl—quite the gen'lm'n. Goes through the archvay, thinking how he should inwest the money—up comes the touter, touches his hat—“Licence, sir, licence?”—“What's that?” says my father.—“Marriage licence,” says the touter.—“Dash my veskit,” says my father, “I never thought o' that.”—“I think you wants one, sir, ” says the touter’ (The Pickwick Papers, ch. 10).

Dickens learned shorthand for his work as a reporter and had a good ear for slang and colloquialism, and was accused of coarseness by contemporary critics. His experiments in the presentation of material included such non-traditional syntax and punctuation as:
Thomas Gradgrind, Sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over. Thomas Gradgrind, Sir—peremptorily Thomas—Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, Sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. (Hard Times, 1854, ch. 1).

Poetic prose

Dickens's general style is usually powerful and persuasive in direct narrative and description. He convinces the reader by an accumulation of detail that can be extravagant to the point of absurdity, but makes its effect in his imaginary world. His PROSE sometimes has an underlying rhythm close to blank verse, mimetic of sounds like the movement of coaches and trains. Some passages, with their nonclassical punctuation, such as the opening of Bleak House (1852–3), have almost the quality of free verse:
LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

Stature

Like Chaucer and Shakespeare, Dickens is a giant of ENGLISH LITERATURE, his work known as much through cinema and television as through his books themselves. On his contemporary significance, David Parker, Curator of the Dickens House Museum in London, has observed: ‘For us Dickens stands where Homer did for earlier generations. We can no longer, without affectation, speak of the wisdom of Nestor, the beauty of Helen; we can, and we do, of a real Scrooge, a Micawberish attitude. Like Homer, Dickens gave us forms for the imagination, unconstrained by genre, affecting even the very language. Dramatizations of his novels were staged even before the final parts appeared, and the narratives he created now yield us, not only films and television serials, but also musicals, newspaper cartoons, Christmas cards, toby jugs, shop-window dressings, and annual festivals’ (letter to the Sunday Times, 26 Feb. 1989). See CIRCUMLOCUTION, HUMOUR, SAXONISM.