The undersized and malnourished boy kept steadily at his task of
pasting labels on pots of blacking in a rotting warehouse that
overlooked the Thames River in London.
The undersized and malnourished boy kept steadily at his task of pasting labels on pots of blacking in a rotting warehouse that overlooked the Thames River in London. Hour after dreary hour, day after day, he repeated the same movements and the squalor of his surroundings matched the bleakness in his heart.
He was to write of that time long afterwards: “No words can express the secret agony of my soul. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless, of the shame I felt in my position…cannot be written.”
And every Sunday without fail young Charles Dickens dutifully visited his father, John Dickens, at Marshalsea prison where he had been committed for debt and where he was living with his wife and their youngest children.
The thoughts of his earlier life, from the house at Portsea, where he was born on Feb. 7, 1812, to the pleasant house in Chatham where he had discovered a treasure trove of books, became bitter to young Charles as he toiled on for a shilling a day. For two years, from age 12 to 14, he worked that unrelieved grind until a turn in his family’s circumstances released him.
Dickens vowed never to be poor again. He sensed that writing would be his guarantee of freedom. He taught himself shorthand and worked for awhile as a law clerk, then entered journalism.
His brilliant pen delighted readers and attracted critical attention. Within 15 years of his time in the rat-infested warehouse he was providing for the needs of his parents and brothers and sisters with the money from his articles.
A publisher had a series of unrelated pictures for which he needed a story. He commissioned Dickens to write in and the merry “Pickwick Papers” was the result. Emboldened, Dickens turned to other novels. Like many another budding novelist he found the going difficult. But the background of want and social inequities of his day inspired another tale, a short story that appeared just before Christmas in 1842 and sold out immediately. Thus was “A Christmas Carol” born.
Had it been his sole contribution to literature it would have assured his reputation but he had many more stories to tell. Most achieved success and are still popular today.
His heroes were often boys who strove valiantly in circumstances in which they had become enmeshed. Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, young Pip of “Great Expectations” all had the same strength of character that their creator had shown in his youth.
Some critics, most whose names are forgotten, charged Dickens with excessive sentimentality and, of course they were right. But it was sentimentality born of compassion. When a ship bearing the penultimate chapter of the magazine carrying “The Old Curiosity Shop” anchored in New York Harbor, crewmen cried out to people waiting on the dock, “Little Nell is dead!” Within hours newspapers put out editions with the obituary of the fictional child.
Dickens’s continuing stream of books and stories assured him celebrity, but he never ceased the struggle for social justice in his writing or lecture tours. He did not care much for Americans as evidenced in his satirical, often corrosive characterizations in “Martin Chuzzlewit.” But they liked him and every appearance he made in America was sold out. Many contemporaries rated him the best-known Englishman.
When he died in June 1870, he was interred in Westminster Abbey between the memorials to Shakespeare and Dryden. His best memorials are to be found in the books that filtered his bleak memories into an unceasing attack on social injustice.
Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Fagin, Sidney Carton, Mr. Micawber, Sam Weller, Dick Swiveller, Joe Gargery, Uriah Heep and many others continue to amaze and instruct the public as they did when they were the fresh new creations of Charles Dickens.
