Early years of Charles Dickens:
DICKENS, CHARLES JOHN
HUFFAM (1812—1870), English novelist, was born on the 7th of February 1812 at a
house in the Mile End Terrace, Commercial Road, Landport (Portsea)—a house
which was opened as a Dickens Museum on 22nd July 2904. His father John Dickens
(d. 1851), a clerk in the navy-pay office on a salary of £80 a year, and
stationed for the time being at Portsmouth, had married in 1809 Elizabeth,
daughter of Thomas Barrow, and she bore him a family of eight children, Charles
being the second. In the winter of 1814 the family moved from Portsea in the
snow, as he remembered, to London, and lodged for a time near the Middle sex
hospital. The country of the novelist’s childhood, however, was the kingdom of
Kent, where the family was established in proximity to the dockyard at Chatham
from 1816 to 1821. He looked upon himself in later years as a man of Kent, and
his capital abode as that in Ordnance Terrace, or 18 St Mary’s Place, Chatham,
amid surroundings classified in Mr Pickwick’s notes as “ appearing “to be
soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers and dockyard men. He fell
into a family the general tendency of which was to go down in the world, during
one of its easier periods (John Dickens was now fifth clerk on £250 a year),
and he always regarded himself as belonging by right to a comfortable, genteel,
lower middle class stratum of society. His mother taught him to read; to his
father he appeared very early in the light of a young prodigy, and by him
Charles was made to sit on a tall chair and warble popular ballads, or even to
tell stories and anecdotes for the benefit of fellow-clerks in the office. http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40255733.pdf?acceptTC=true
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First visit to the United States
Master Humphrey’s Clock concluded, Dickens started in 1842 on his first visit to America—an episode hitherto without parallel in English literary history, for he was received everywhere with popular acclamation as the representative of a grand triumph of the English language and imagination, without regard to distinctions of nationality. He offended the American public grievously by a few words of frank description and a few quotations of the advertisement columns of American papers illustrating the essential barbarity of the old slave system (American Notes). Dickens was soon pining for home—no English writer is more essentially and insularly English in inspiration and aspiration than he is. He still brooded over the perverseness of America on the copyright question, and in his next book he took the opportunity of uttering a few of his impressions about the objectionable sides of American democracy, the result being that “all Yankee-doodle-dom blazed up like one universal soda bottle,” as Carlyle said. Martin Clzuzzlewit (1843—1844) is important as closing his great character period. His sève originale, as the French would say, was by this time to a considerable extent exhausted, and he had to depend more upon artistic elaboration, upon satires, upon tours de force of description, upon romantic and ingenious contrivances. But all these resources combined proved unequal to his powers as an original observer of popular types, until he reinforced himself by autobiographic reminiscence, as in David Copperfield and Great Expectations, the two great books remaining to his later careerhttp://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40255733.pdf?acceptTC=true
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Charles Dickens Literary style
Dickens loved the style of the 18th century picaresque novels which he found in abundance on his father's shelves. According to Ackroyd, other than these, perhaps the most important literary influence on him was derived from the fables of The Arabian Nights.[84]His writing style is marked by a profuse linguistic creativity.Satire, flourishing in his gift for caricature is his forte. An early reviewer compared him to Hogarth for his keen practical sense of the ludicrous side of life, though his acclaimed mastery of varieties of class idiom may in fact mirror the conventions of contemporary popular theatre. Dickens worked intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that would reverberate with associations for his readers, and assist the development of motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an "allegorical impetus" to the novels' meanings. To cite one of numerous examples, the name Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield conjures up twin allusions to "murder" and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery—he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator"—are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy.
The author worked closely with his illustrators, supplying them with a summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them. He would brief the illustrator on plans for each month's instalment so that work could begin before he wrote them. Marcus Stone, illustrator of Our Mutual Friend, recalled that the author was always "ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ... life-history of the creations of his fancy."
For these reasons among others our interest in Dickens’s novels as integers has diminished and is diminishing. But, on the other hand, our interest and pride in him as a man and as a representative author of his age and nation has been steadily augmented and is still mounting. Much of the old criticism of his work, that it was not up to a sufficiently high level of art, scholarship or gentility, that as an author he is given to caricature, redundancy and a shameless subservience to popular caprice, must now be discarded as irrelevant.
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Charles Dickens published over a dozen major novels, a large number of
short stories (including a number of Christmas-themed stories), a
handful of plays, and several non-fiction books. Dickens's novels were
initially serialised in weekly and monthly magazines, then reprinted in
standard book formats.
- The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (Monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837)[126]
- The Adventures of Oliver Twist (Monthly serial in Bentley's Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839)
- The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Monthly serial, April 1838 to October 1839)
- The Old Curiosity Shop (Weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, 25 April 1840, to 6 February 1841)
- Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty (Weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, 13 February 1841, to 27 November 1841)
- The Christmas books:
- A Christmas Carol (1843)
- The Chimes (1844)
- The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)
- The Battle of Life (1846)
- The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848)
- The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (Monthly serial, January 1843 to July 1844)
Short story collections
- Sketches by Boz (1836)
- The Mudfog Papers (1837) in Bentley's Miscellany magazine
- Reprinted Pieces (1861)
- The Uncommercial Traveller (1860–1869)
Selected non-fiction, poetry, and plays
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