Authors: Charles Dickens

His first book, Sketches by Boz, stemmed from his work as a journalist; it led to his being commissioned to write the text accompanying a collection of comic drawings of Cockney sportsmen, which was to be published in monthly installments. With the appearance of Sam Weller in Chapter X, the success of The Pickwick Papers was not merely assured but sensational. From then on, Dickens was the most popular of all English novelists in his lifetime.

Even while The Pickwick Papers was appearing, Oliver Twist was being published as a serial in a magazine. These two novels show the two sides of Dickens’s genius. The Pickwick Papers is a work of pure humor, in which the crudities and miseries of the real world are sterilized by laughter and the vicious are objects of comedy, without reference to moral judgment. The world of The Pickwick Papers is almost fairyland. In Oliver Twist, however, fairyland has become the country of nightmare, and the bad fairies have become ogres. There is still laughter, but it has become savage, satirical; the appeal is to derision. On the surface, Oliver Twist is an exposure novel, an attack on the working of the poor law of the day, but its underlying theme is the fate of innocence and weakness. The savage comedy, seen in a character like Bumble, is accompanied by equally savage melodrama, the melodrama of Fagin and the robber Bill Sikes.

Fairyland and nightmare exist side by side in Dickens’s subsequent novels. During the first part of his career, these novels are naïve in form, based on eighteenth-century picaresque fiction, in which readers follow the fortunes of the hero who gives his name to the book, as in Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit. The weaknesses of structure inherent in picaresque fiction were accentuated by Dickens’s practice of writing for serialization and by his lack of what today might be called the artistic conscience. For example, Martin Chuzzlewit was sent to America not because the pattern of the novel demanded it but because sales were falling off and an element of novelty seemed appropriate to revive interest. Today the earlier novels are read for their incidentals, not for their plots. They are read for the scenes at Dotheboys Hall and the character of Mrs. Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby, for the wonderful Pecksniff and the sublime Mrs. Gamp—as a comic creation second only to Falstaff in English literature—in Martin Chuzzlewit.

The masterpiece of this first part of Dickens’s career is the semiautobiographical David Copperfield, the most varied of the earlier works and the best proportioned, containing, too, some of his most delightful characters, among them Mr. Micawber, modeled on his father. The darkening of his vision is already apparent, however, in Dombey and Son (published before David Copperfield), and henceforth his criticism of the age, which up to then had largely dealt with specific abuses, becomes general, focusing on the themes of money and class conflict. The humor is no longer that of delighted appreciation of the absurd, but bitterly sardonic, as in the rendering of Mr. Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens’s last completed novel. Plot becomes much more highly organized; at the same time, a rich symbolism enters his fiction, sometimes as an extraordinary intensification of atmosphere, as in the description of Dombey’s house in Dombey and Son, sometimes as a feature of the London scene, such as the dust-piles (trash heaps) that dominate Our Mutual Friend, sometimes even as an atmospheric condition, as in the fog that enshrouds the beginning of Bleak House. Symbolism of this kind was something almost entirely new in English fiction, and while his contemporaries preferred the earlier books, in which he portrayed comical eccentrics and stressed high spirits and the gospel of kindliness, later critics have tended more to admire the later novels, with their dark poetic sweep, the passionate intensity of their symbolism. Outstanding also among the later works are Little Dorrit, which is partly autobiographical in inspiration, and Great Expectations. He wrote two historical novels, Barnaby Rudge, based on the Gordon Riots of eighteenth century London, and A Tale of Two Cities, set during the French Revolution. His mystery story, Edwin Drood, was unfinished at Dickens’s death, and many critics believe that the completed part suggests a level of accomplishment not yet realized in Dickens’s previous work. A Christmas Carol is the most famous of his shorter pieces.

Dickens married in 1836 and separated from his wife in 1858. His first visit to the United States, in 1841, resulted in American Notes, a work which, together with the American chapters in Martin Chuzzlewit, was extremely resented in the United States. A second visit, in 1867, was a triumphant success. He died at his home at Gadshill on June 9, 1870.