Dickens, Charles

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Charles Dickens

Born February 7, 1812 (Portsmouth, England)

Died June 9, 1870 (Kent, England)

Social reformer, novelist

Charles Dickens is considered by many as the most important writer of his time and remained the most widely recognizable British author, after William Shakespeare (1564–1616), throughout the twentieth century. He ushered in an age of serious attention to novelists with his dynamic writing, detailing the Victorian era (a very conservative period of formality among upper classes) in which he lived. Dickens's imaginative characters gave him the platform he needed to address the social reforms he had championed for over thirty years.

Dickens worked toward political and educational reform within Britain and was involved internationally in the promotion of prison reform and opposition of capital punishment. His popularity with the general public never declined during his lifetime, and he was seen as an advocate for the poor man. When the Dickens Fellowship was founded in 1902, it focused on Dickens's goal of remedying existing social evils to help the poor, oppressed, and unfortunate.

"I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment [solitary confinement], prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers."

Early life of poverty

On February 7, 1812, Charles John Huffam Dickens was the second of seven children born to Elizabeth Barrow Dickens
and John Dickens. His elder sister Fanny proved to be his best friend and had a profound influence on Charles his entire life.

John Dickens was a clerk at the navy pay office of Portsmouth when Charles was born, but the growing family moved often due to John's frequent transfers. Charles began his education at William Giles's school in Chatham, Kent. When his father was transferred to London in 1822, the family once again packed up and moved on.

By 1824 John Dickens had fallen behind with his creditors. He was arrested and sent to debtors prison, often referred to simply as The Marshalsea. At age twelve Charles found work at Warren's Blacking Factory wrapping bottles of black shoe polish. Six months later an inheritance provided enough money for John to leave prison and Charles resumed his education at a nearby private school, Wellington House Academy. When his father again fell into financial difficulties in 1827, young Charles left the academy and found employment as a clerk for the law firm of Ellis and Blackmore. Although he disliked the work, Charles enjoyed what was to become a lifelong habit of walking the streets of London in the late night hours gathering characters to inhabit his stories.

Seeking to improve his lot in life, Charles learned shorthand (a system of rapid handwriting using symbols to represent words) and started working as a freelance reporter in 1828 at the age of sixteen. By 1831 he was working for the Mirror of Parliament, a newspaper that reported the daily proceedings of the British Parliament. This marked the beginning of his interest in social reform. Dickens also began contributing articles to the radical newspaper True Sun. Using his considerable knowledge of what went on in the House of Commons, he worked to promote parliamentary reform.

American Notes

Dickens's first story, "A Dinner at Popular Walk," was published in 1833 in the Monthly Magazine, using the pen name "Boz." He married Catherine Hogarth in April 1836, and by 1837 the first of their ten children was born. By 1840, Dickens was the most popular author in Britain. Novels such as The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and Oliver Twist (c. 1838) were soon followed by A Christmas Carol (1843). His fame spread across the world. In January 1842 the thirty-year old Dickens and his wife Catherine set sail from Liverpool to begin a tour of America.

Landing in Boston, Dickens received a warm welcome but as a staunch abolitionist (one who opposes slavery) he soon upset his hosts by condemning slavery. His writings were considered public property and had been adapted, imitated, and stolen on both sides of the Atlantic. As a result Dickens received no financial gain from the immense sale of his novels in the United States.

Prison Reform

In the early 1830s, two main disciplinary systems influenced the field of penitentiaries. Both came from America and were often referred to as the Philadelphia and the Auburn systems. They were named after the famous prisons in Pennsylvania and New York that had popularized them.

Under the Philadelphia, or Separate System, prisoners occupied individual cells day and night. They were sometimes given instructional books or handcraft exercises to do, but mostly they were left to meditate on their crimes and the consequences. Food was pushed into the cell through hatches and the prisoner never saw or spoke with anyone except the officers and a few approved prison visitors. Exercise took place in separate, individual yards.

Under the less strict version of the Separate System, prisoners left their cells for instruction or exercise but had to wear masks or veils to prevent seeing or being seen by fellow prisoners. The idea was that eliminating knowledge of fellow prisoners would reduce corruption upon release back into society. Critics used the term "solitary confinement" to describe the system and labeled it cruel and unusual punishment, especially for those whose sentences were for years or decades.

Under New York's Silent System, prisoners were allowed to work together but under very strict supervision. They were forbidden to speak or otherwise communicate with one another. Ideally, they were to sleep in separate cells but often they continued to sleep in the old dormitories of institutions unwilling to pay to replace the buildings. Wardens were required to be with the prisoners night and day, watching for any infringement of the rules.

The advantage of the Silent System was that it was easier to adopt in existing institutions, although it needed a very large staff to enforce discipline. The Separate System required an expensive building project, but required a much smaller staff to operate it. The merits of the two systems were hotly debated, with one side in favor of reforming offenders versus the other side in favor of deterring crime with severe punishment.

He had come prepared to advocate for an international copyright agreement to protect British authors as well as encourage budding American novelists. His speeches on the subject met with little response and the general opinion was in favor of continuing the existing practice. By June, when Dickens set sail for England aboard the George Washington, the enthusiasm that had greeted him was not evident at his farewell.

A substantial reading audience existed in England for books about America. Dickens's publishers had sent him off with a contract to write about his American adventures and compare American institutions to British ones. Dickens had expected to find a model democratic society against which British failures could be measured and criticized.

During Dickens's visit, his reputation in criminal law and prison reform (see sidebar) gave him access to tour several modern American prisons. His tour included the world famous Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia called Cherry Hill on March 8, 1842. Opened in 1830, it had become the international showplace for prisoner isolation, called the Separate System. It was the favorite method of more advanced nations of the period. Dickens denounced the Separate System as intolerably cruel in American Notes, published in October 1842. He was convinced that the suffering the Separate System inflicted on its victims produced no better results than other systems and probably far more harm.

Dickens noted that justice was not necessarily dealt out fairly. Much depended on a person's physical and financial resources. The poor and uneducated were always at a disadvantage. Dickens claimed this inequality especially held true in the case of the death penalty. He contended that executions were cruel, inefficient, and unevenly administered. He called for the death penalty to be abolished, arguing that judicial mistakes happened and were irreversible if the victim is dead.

Dickens also speculated in his writings about the effect of capital punishment on all those involved. He claimed the horror of public executions brought ruin on the community and affected the entire nation. Dickens believed there was a horrible fascination with the death penalty, and that this fascination was as harmful as the death penalty itself.

Dickens also sharply criticized slavery in America, as well as condemned America's corrupt politics and slanderous (false statements that damage a person's reputation) press. Not surprisingly, his book produced a great deal of resentment in the United States.

Although an extremely successful novelist, Dickens maintained his interest in social reform. Searching for a way to make a difference, he invested some of his royalties in a new radical newspaper called The Daily News. The newspaper regularly advocated progress and improvement of education, civil and religious liberty, and equal rights legislation. The paper began publication January 21, 1846, with Dickens as its editor.

At the same time, Dickens began work on the novel David Copperfield. The novel contained an autobiographical element and vaulted Dickens to the top of the list of popular English authors. The Daily News, however, was not a commercial success and Dickens moved on in 1850 to edit the weekly magazine Household Words. He continued his interest in charitable enterprises, including free schools for inner-city children, a program to rehabilitate prostitutes, and a low-cost housing project. Dickens was a lifelong advocate of national schools, which were not approved by Parliament until after his death in 1870.

Final tour

When Dickens had a disagreement with his partners in Household Words in 1859, he closed the journal and replaced it with All the Year Round that April. The new journal still covered social issues but also offered general interest articles and stories. Two of his most important works—A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1860–61)—first appeared as serialized novels in the magazine.

Dickens's continued practice of political agitation also kept him in the public eye. His fame led to a new adventure as an entertainer, using his own writings in public readings. The readings became an important part of his work and were made necessary, in part, by heavy financial obligations. The demands were due to his ever increasing family as well as the purchase of his dream home, Gad's Hill Place, in Kent.

Dickens's first public reading occurred in April 1858. His readings were so popular that he received an invitation to return to America and perform. He sailed for Boston aboard the Cuba on November 9, 1867, and landed ten days later amid a shower of rockets and flares welcoming him back. Both America and Dickens had changed in twenty-five years. Old resentments were forgotten during his tour of sixteen eastern cities.

Dickens triumphed on the stage as well as at the box office, but the schedule he kept exacted a heavy toll on his health. Returning to England in April 1868, the tour continued, as did his work as editor and publisher of All the Year Round. On June 9, 1870, Dickens died and was buried in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey in London on June 14. Only about a dozen of his closest friends and family attended his funeral.