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    Charles Dickens Miscellany
    Charles Dickens Miscellany
    Charles Dickens Miscellany
    Ebook152 pages1 hour

    Charles Dickens Miscellany

    By Jeremy Clarke

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    About this ebook

    The life and works of one of England's very best writers is explored in this miscellanyCharles Dickens' life was staggeringly busy and various. This new miscellany will give readers a chance to get to know the man and his work through his work and its major themes. With carefully chosen quotations from the novels but also from his sketches and journalism, discover what Dickens had to say about the big issues like crime, the family, education, and money. Meet here, too, those wonderful characters that have been handed down to us like the real figures of history—Mr. Micawber, Fagin, Miss Havisham, David Copperfield, and many more. Concentrated in these pages is a selection of all the mad humor, passionate indignation, moral conviction, plain good sense, and sheer unstoppable energy that made up one of the very greatest of English writers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateFeb 3, 2014
    ISBN9780750957052
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      Book preview

      Charles Dickens Miscellany - Jeremy Clarke

      • CONTENTS •

      Title

      Introduction

      PART 1: LIVING

      1

      Growing Up

      2

      Taking Off

      3

      Settling Down

      4

      Abroad

      5

      Security & Secrets

      PART 2: WRITING

      6

      A Guide to the Novels

      7

      Shorter Fiction

      8

      Journalism

      9

      Subjects & Themes

      PART 3: READING

      10

      The Storyteller

      11

      A Reader’s Work

      12

      Dickens the Reader

      13

      Not an End

      Places to Visit

      Further Reading

      Copyright

      • INTRODUCTION •

      DICKENS’ REPUTATION AS A great novelist has gone up and down, and currently seems to stand very high. It might help to bear a few things in mind.

      Dickens was active (and successful) before Queen Victoria came to the throne. He was in at the very beginning of a number of developments that were to shape the culture of the nineteenth century including the growth of literacy that led to larger audiences; the development of technology that produced cheaper publications; the invention of a mass transit system (the railway) that made far-flung places (and people) startlingly accessible; and the advent of successful photography that began to distribute the faces of the famous throughout the world. All of these changed the status of the writer forever. Dickens was a pioneer.

      Dickens, and his work, has been extraordinarily popular for a very long time. He is, perhaps even more than Shakespeare, the supreme anti-elitist artist; someone who consciously and energetically set out to build a mass audience. The numbers were important to him, but so was the range. For a start, he outsold many of his ‘rivals’ by a considerable margin. When Thackeray (by any standards a major novelist) published Vanity Fair (by any standards a major novel), he saw himself as ‘having a great fight … with Dickens’ for the public’s favour. He was no doubt pleased with selling 5,000 copies a month of each instalment. Dombey and Son sold 34,000 per month at the same time. When Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers, appeared as illustrated monthly parts in the late 1830s, a contemporary noted:

      needy admirers flattened their noses against the booksellers’ windows eager to secure a good look at the etching and to peruse every line of the letterpress that might be exposed to view, frequently reading it aloud to applauding bystanders.

      People either clubbed together to buy a copy or they hired each part from a circulating library; those who could not read, listened. R. Altick’s book The English Common Reader (1957), about the history of reading, uses, as an example, ‘the [illiterate] old charwoman who never missed a subscription tea … at a snuff shop over which she lodged when the landlord read the newest number of Dombey and Son to his assembled guests’. The critic Theodore Watts-Dunton used to tell a famous story of a Covent Garden barrow girl, who, when told that the great author had died, exclaimed in dismay, ‘Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?’

      The odd thing, then, is that Dickens is so odd. We tend to think of him as the representative great Victorian novelist, but really he made his own mainstream of one. Later writers followed his publishing innovations where they did not, or could not, follow his art. Forget for a moment that Dickens is setting some kind of standard, and he seems wonderfully strange. Miss Havisham (Great Expectations) lives her wedding day, every day, in a state of ghastly corruption; Krook (Bleak House) drinks so much gin he bursts into flames and covers the area with greasy flakes of soot; young Bailey (Martin Chuzzlewit) goes for a shave though he has not a trace of a beard; Good Mrs Brown (Dombey and Son) steals the young heroine’s clothes and sends her out in rags; the starving runaway David (David Copperfield) sells his jacket to a man who grabs him by the hair, pays him in instalments of a halfpenny at a time (in between which he lies on his bed singing the Death of Nelson) and assaults him with the terrifying exclamation ‘Oh, my lungs and liver … Oh, goroo, goroo!’; Jenny Wren (Our Mutual Friend) sits on the roof. ‘Come up and be dead!’ she says. ‘Come up and be dead!’

      But Dickens knew what he was doing. A driven man, certainly, and animated by a furious energy at times, but he kept a pretty cool eye on his audience, his money and his art. The books are how they are because Dickens wanted them that way. Sometimes it is tempting to ascribe those aspects of Dickens’ work less to our taste today either to some force within him that he couldn’t resist or to some spectacular naivety that prevented him from seeing the world as it was. But rarely has any artist been so ready to engage with life as it was lived in his time. The dying children, the desperate orphans, the ‘fallen’ women, the pantomime villains, the pure heroines and the cardboard heroes that we meet in some of his novels (along with the abundant evidence of genius) are not inescapable aberrations erupted from the author’s subconscious – they are elements Dickens found vital to the whole shape of his work. This only makes him more interesting.

      Dickens was about 5ft 9in and slightly built. He was fond of loud clothes and flashy accessories. When he first travelled to America, the President’s daughter herself observed of him: ‘he wears entirely too much jewellery, very English in his appearance and not the best English.’

      PART 1

      LIVING

      • 1 •

      GROWING UP

      • CHATHAM •

      ‘HERE THE MOST DURABLE of his early impressions were received,’ wrote John Forster, Dickens’ first biographer. How did the young Charles end up in Chatham? His father, John, was a clerk who worked for the navy and had set up home in Portsmouth with his wife Elizabeth. Here, three children were born: Fanny, Charles and Alfred, although Alfred died when he was just 6 months old.

      In 1817 John Dickens was posted to the dockyard in Chatham and he took a house in Ordnance Terrace to accommodate his growing family: Letitia had been born during a brief stay in London in 1816, and Harriet (who died in childhood) and Frederick followed. Elizabeth’s widowed sister Mary Allen was also part of the household. There was one move within Chatham: to St Mary’s Place in 1821, where another Alfred was born.

      John and his family took a full part in the life of the community. They were friendly with neighbours and with the family of a local landlord, Mr Tribe; Charles and Fanny were frequently set up by their father on a table in the Mitre Inn to entertain the company with songs and ballads of the day. And it was in Chatham that Dickens began his education. He tells us through John Forster that he was taught to read by his mother, but he probably also attended a dame school with Fanny. It was not until 1821 and the move to St Mary’s Place that the children were educated more formally. The new school was in Clover Lane, now Clover Street, and run by William Giles, son of the minister of the Baptist chapel next door to the family home.

      • THE THEATRE •

      Mary Allen married for a second time while the Dickens family were in Chatham. This was to a widowed doctor, Matthew Lamert, at St Mary’s church in 1821. Matthew had a son, James, who was a little older than the young Charles, and who became a great influence upon this early part of Charles’ life. Most importantly, he accompanied Dickens to his first visits to the theatre. This was the beginning of a life-long passion. ‘I tried to recollect,’ he said in 1846, ‘whether I had ever been in any theatre in my life from which I had not brought away some pleasant association, however poor the theatre, and I protest … I could not remember even one.’

      John Dickens in about 1820. (The Percy Fitzgerald collection, with the permission of the Guildhall Museum)

      In fact, Dickens always had a great relish for bad theatre, and revisits Rochester in ‘Dullborough Town’, in The Uncommercial Traveller, to enjoy again the somewhat shaky productions he saw there. He does not spare the company, which is hard pressed to cover a long cast list:

      Many wondrous secrets of Nature had I come to the knowledge of in that sanctuary: of which not the least terrific were, that the witches in Macbeth bore an awful resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good King Duncan couldn’t rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it and calling himself somebody else.

      • MONEY •

      John Dickens’ job entitled him and his family to regard themselves as middle class. The law, the

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