Charles Dickens - His Life and Work

INTRODUCTION

Charles Dickens thought it was his responsability as a writer to present the good and the bad sides of Victorian England. He dealt with many problems of his time such as poverty, education, workhouses, sanitation etc. and he tried to resolve them in his books. He appealed to his contemporaries` feelings trying to make them aware of the reality around them and urging them to take a stand.

But the thing that really affected Dickens was the situation of the children. He associated himself with the thought of suffering children more than any writer. We just have to read Dickens`s biography to understand why he was so interested in this situation. He himself suffered a lot during his childhood. He himself went through all those stages of humiliation, despair, sorrow exactly like the ones experienced by the children of his fantasy. Through his work he contributed a lot to the improvement of children`s living conditions. He could never forget his miserable childhood in London where he was forced to know all the sad realities of his time, the work in a warehouse, the debtors` prison, the squalid city. This is exactly what I`ll try to present in this paper.

I`ll begin this paper with a presentation of Dickens`s busy and full life, his desire to be a critic of his time. But I`ll concentrate more on his childhood because of its effects on his life as a famous writer.

In the second chapter I`ll present some of the children that appear in his novels and his sympathetic feeling for them. I`ll insist on the fact that all these children, boys and girls, act more like adults than like people of own age.

In the third chapter I`ll deal with the children`s conditions of living. I`ll present separately London as opposed to the bright English country side, the institutions of exploitations: the workhouse and the warehouse, as well as a reality specific of his age: the debtors` prison. In the end of this chapter I`ll try to show the problems of the English educational system. I`ll illustrate all these aspects with many excerpts from Dickens`s novels.

In the last chapter I`ll present the characters surrounding and influencing the children. I`ll deal with the two spheres of life always present in the novels which have a child as the hero: the evil world and the good society. In the next subchapter I`ll try to prove Dickens`s art of portraying comic and grotesque characters. A special subchapter will be dedicated to one of his best characters: Mr. Wilkins Micawber.

CHAPTER I

CHARLES DICKENS - HIS LIFE AND WORK

As a spokesman of his age, a social critic, a reformer and as an inexhaustible inventor of characters and plots, Charles Dickens was one of the most popular and internationally celebrated prose - writers of the Victorian age. His ability to combine comedy, pathos and social satire in his novels won him thousands of contemporary readers and many of his characters, such as Mr. Micawber, Mr. Pickwich, Quilp or Uriah Heep, etc. have entered the British national consciousness.

As a man of his age, he certainly could not have agreed with Henry James who believed that "the greater the writer, the smaller the audience"1, nor with Walter Pater or the aesthetes. Dickens believed that a writer should address the entire nation. Like the Renaissance dramatists or the great romantics, he wrote for a large public wanting to be read and understood, corresponding and collaborating with the public. The sentimentalization of certain categories of people, the emphasis on "tenderness", the frequent happy endings of his novels are due to the literary preferences of his age, as well as to his convinction that a novelist should be a "popular writer".

1.1 The Growth of Man and Writer

Charles Dickens was born al Landport (Portsea), near Portsmouth, on 2 February 1812. He was the second of eight children. His father, John, was a clerk in the Naval Pay Office at Portsmouth. The happiest period of Dickens`s troubled childhood was spent in Chatham, although the family moved around a great deal. In 1822, facing financial ruin, the family moved to London and, on 5 February 1824, Charles began to work in a blacking warehouse. His childhood came to an end in this "crazy tumble down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats" 2.Dickens recalled this painful experience in the early chapters of David Copperfield (1849 - 1850) and it seemed to haunt him all his life. A few days later, his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea Prison and, except for Charles, who had lodgings in Camden, all the family lived in the prison with him like the Dorrit family in the first part of Little Dorrit (1855 - 1857). John Dickens was released after three months in prison by having declared himself an insolvent debtor. Charles continued to work in the warehouse until 1825, when after a quarrel between his father and his employer, he was sent to schoot at Wellington House Academy.