Charles Dickens

Chapter 1 · The Blacking Factory

A secret he kept for twenty years

1812 – 1833 · Portsmouth · Chatham · London

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 near Portsmouth. His father John was a clerk in the navy pay office, generous, talkative and hopeless with money — the model for Mr Micawber.

The family's happiest years were at Chatham, where Charles read his father's small collection of novels obsessively. Then the debts caught up. In 1824, when Charles was twelve, John Dickens was arrested and imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors' prison, and the rest of the family moved in with him, as was then permitted.

Charles did not. He was sent to work at Warren's Blacking Warehouse by the Thames, pasting labels onto pots of boot polish for ten hours a day, six shillings a week, in a rat-infested building. He lodged alone. He worked there for something between four months and a year.

What marked him was not only the labour but the shame and the abandonment. He wrote later, in a fragment given to his friend John Forster, that no words could express the secret agony of his soul as he sank into that companionship, and that he felt his early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man were crushed. He never spoke of it to his wife or children. Forster published it only after his death.

A legacy released his father, and Charles went back to school. But when his mother argued that he should stay at the factory, he recorded that he never afterwards forgot it.

He became a solicitor's clerk, taught himself shorthand, and by nineteen was a parliamentary reporter of exceptional speed — a training in listening to how people actually talk.

Why this matters

The blacking factory is the engine of Dickens's fiction: nearly every novel contains an abandoned or exploited child, and he never wrote about it directly except in David Copperfield.

You have the secret. What would you ask him?

Ask Dickens

• “Why did you keep the blacking factory secret?”
• “What was it like living alone at twelve?”
• “How did you feel about your mother's wish that you stay?”
• “What did shorthand reporting teach you about speech?”
• “How much of David Copperfield is your own story?”

Chapter 2 · Boz

Serial publication and instant celebrity

1836 – 1843 · London

Dickens published sketches of London life under the pen name Boz, collected in 1836. That year he was hired to write text accompanying sporting illustrations. The result, *The Pickwick Papers*, was slow at first; then he introduced the Cockney servant Sam Weller in the fourth instalment, and sales rose from hundreds to tens of thousands.

Serial publication changed the relationship between novelist and reader. A monthly number cost a shilling, within reach of clerks and shopkeepers, and instalments were read aloud in households and workshops, so his audience was far larger than the number of purchasers. He could also respond as he went — adjusting a plot when readers disliked a character, or extending one they loved.

*Oliver Twist* followed in 1837, the first English novel with a child at its centre, opening in a workhouse and moving into a criminal underworld that middle-class readers had never seen described.

He married Catherine Hogarth in 1836 and they had ten children. In 1837 her seventeen-year-old sister Mary died suddenly in his arms, and the grief he expressed was extravagant even by the standards of the period; he wore her ring for life and asked to be buried beside her.

*A Christmas Carol*, written in six weeks in late 1843 and published a few days before Christmas, came directly out of political anger. He had visited a Ragged School and read a parliamentary report on children working in mines and factories, and initially planned a pamphlet. He decided a story would strike a sledgehammer blow instead. It sold out in days and has never been out of print.

Why this matters

Serial publication made Dickens the first mass-market novelist and gave fiction the reach of journalism — which is what allowed his novels to function as campaigns.

You have the making of a celebrity. What would you ask him?

Ask Dickens

• “How did serial publication change how you wrote?”
• “Why write A Christmas Carol instead of a pamphlet?”
• “What did readers react to that surprised you?”
• “Why open Oliver Twist in a workhouse?”
• “Why did Mary Hogarth's death affect you so deeply?”

Chapter 3 · The Novel as an Instrument

Chancery, utilitarianism and the Circumlocution Office

1844 – 1861 · London · United States · Italy

Dickens's later novels are darker, more tightly structured, and aimed at institutions rather than individuals.

*Bleak House* (1853) attacks the Court of Chancery, where property disputes ran for decades until the estate was consumed by costs; the opening fog is the case itself. Legal reform followed within a few years, and lawyers acknowledged the novel's effect on public opinion.

*Hard Times* (1854) attacks utilitarian education and industrial economics: a schoolroom where children are numbered rather than named and taught nothing but facts, in a town of soot and machinery.

*Little Dorrit* (1857) returns to the debtors' prison of his childhood and invents the Circumlocution Office, a government department whose sole function is How Not To Do It — the most enduring satire on bureaucracy in English.

He also acted directly. From 1847, with the heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts, he ran Urania Cottage, a home in Shepherd's Bush for women who had turned to prostitution or been imprisoned, offering training and emigration rather than punishment. He interviewed applicants himself, wrote the rules, and kept it going for over a decade.

One charge against him is well founded. Fagin in *Oliver Twist* is called 'the Jew' hundreds of times, and the portrayal is antisemitic. A Jewish reader, Eliza Davis, wrote to him about it in 1863. Dickens defended himself, then revised later editions to reduce the references, and in *Our Mutual Friend* created Riah, a wholly sympathetic Jewish character — an unusual instance of a writer publicly correcting himself.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, opening sentence, 1859

Why this matters

Dickens demonstrated that fiction could shift public opinion on specific institutions — Chancery, workhouses, private schools — which is why Victorian reformers treated his novels as political events.

You have the novels as campaigns. What would you ask him?

Ask Dickens

• “What was wrong with the Court of Chancery?”
• “What is the Circumlocution Office satirising?”
• “What did you run at Urania Cottage?”
• “How do you answer Eliza Davis about Fagin?”
• “Can a novel actually change a law?”

Chapter 4 · 1858

What he did to his wife, in public

1857 – 1865 · London · Gad's Hill

In 1857 Dickens met Ellen Ternan, an eighteen-year-old actress, while producing a play. He was forty-five. What followed is the least defensible part of his life.

He had a partition built across the marital bedroom. He then separated from Catherine, mother of his ten children, in 1858. She left the family home; only the eldest son went with her, and Dickens's control over the household meant the other children largely remained with him and his sister-in-law Georgina.

Rather than let the separation pass quietly, he published a personal statement in his own magazine and attempted to place another in *The Times*, describing the arrangement as amicable and referring to unnamed slanders. A more damaging letter, in which he suggested Catherine suffered from a mental disorder and had never been suited to the children, was circulated and reached print in America. Contemporary readers were shocked; his publishers objected; the writer William Makepeace Thackeray fell out with him over it.

Catherine kept his letters and asked her daughter to give them to the British Museum so that the world might know he had loved her once.

The relationship with Ternan was concealed for the rest of his life and only pieced together in the twentieth century from his diaries, bank records and her family's accounts.

Meanwhile he had begun public readings from his own works, performing scenes and voices to enormous audiences. The most demanding was the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes, which he performed with such violence that his doctor measured his pulse rising alarmingly and begged him to stop. He would not.

In June 1865 he was in a rail crash at Staplehurst, travelling with Ternan and her mother. He climbed back into the wreckage to help the injured, and then returned for the manuscript in his carriage. He never fully recovered his nerve.

Why this matters

Dickens's treatment of Catherine is a standard case in the argument about separating an author from their work — a writer celebrated for compassion behaving cruelly to the person closest to him.

This is the hardest part of the record. What would you ask him?

Ask Dickens

• “Why did you publish a statement about your marriage?”
• “Why did you conceal Ellen Ternan for twelve years?”
• “Why perform the murder of Nancy when it was destroying you?”
• “What happened at Staplehurst?”
• “Should your conduct change how we read your novels?”

Chapter 5 · Unfinished

A grave he did not want, and characters that outlived him

1866 – 1870 and after · Gad's Hill · Westminster Abbey

Dickens's last completed novel, *Our Mutual Friend* (1865), is a study of money, waste and self-invention built around London's dust heaps and the river. He was working on *The Mystery of Edwin Drood* when he suffered a stroke at Gad's Hill on 8 June 1870 and died the following day, aged fifty-eight. The novel breaks off halfway, and its solution has been argued over ever since.

His will asked for a plain and inexpensive funeral, no public announcement, and burial in a small country churchyard. The nation ignored him. He was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey; the grave was left open for two days and thousands filed past.

His will also stipulated that no monument be raised to him and that he be remembered by his published works alone.

The reach of those works is unusual. Names he invented became common nouns — a Scrooge, a Gradgrind, Micawberish optimism, Dickensian conditions. *A Christmas Carol* substantially reshaped how the English-speaking world observes Christmas, emphasising generosity, family gathering and charity toward the poor.

Criticism of him has been consistent and largely accurate: sentimentality, especially over dying children; women characters who are either angels or grotesques; plots resolved by improbable coincidence and inheritance. His defenders point out that the sentiment was doing work — it made middle-class readers care about people they had been trained to ignore — and that no English novelist has matched his ear for how people speak.

He remains, more than 150 years on, the most widely read English novelist after Shakespeare.

Why this matters

Dickens permanently changed the social vocabulary of English and made poverty a subject the middle-class reading public could not ignore — the clearest demonstration of fiction's public power in the nineteenth century.

You have the whole life. What would you ask him at the end?

Ask Dickens

• “How was Edwin Drood going to end?”
• “Why did you want a plain country burial?”
• “How do you answer the charge of sentimentality?”
• “Why are your women characters so often flat?”
• “What did you want A Christmas Carol to change?”

What Dickens changed

Dickens made the novel a mass medium and used it to force public attention onto workhouses, debtors' prisons, Chancery delays and neglected schools, contributing to legal and social reform. His characters supplied English with a set of common nouns, and A Christmas Carol reshaped the modern celebration of Christmas.

A debate that continues

Critics continue to weigh his sentimentality and thin women characters against his unmatched ear for speech and comic invention, and his treatment of Catherine Dickens has made him a central case in arguments about separating writers from their conduct.

Keep exploring — ask Dickens

• “How did you invent so many distinct voices?”
• “Which of your campaigns do you think actually worked?”
• “What did London look like to you at night?”

Related lives

• George Eliot — Author of Middlemarch
• Jane Austen — Novelist of Manners & Marriage
• Queen Victoria — Queen & Empress of India

Related themes

The Victorian novel · Poverty and social reform · Serial publication and readership