About The Author
CHARLES DICKENS (1812-70)
On a pier in New York Harbor in 1841 a crowd watched a tall sailing ship from England being towed to the pierhead. There was no ocean communication cable as yet and the ship brought the latest news. A question was yelled from the pier to the ship: "Is Little Nell dead?" Little Nell was the heroine in a serial called Old Curiosity Shop. The latest installment was on the ship, and the people were anxious to learn how the story came out. The author who could stir people to such excitement was Charles Dickens, then a young man of 29.
The next year, on his visit to America, he received a reception second only to that of Lafayette in 1824. Six years before, with his Pickwick Papers, he had become the world's most celebrated writer.
Charles Dickens was born on Feb. 7, 1812, in Portsmouth. His father, John Dickens, was a minor clerk in the navy offices, a friendly man with a large family (Charles was the second of eight children) and only a moderate income. The family drifted from one poor home in London to another, each shabbier than thelast. Presently John Dickens ended up in the Marshalsea Prison for debt and took his wife and younger children with him. Meanwhile young Charles worked in a ramshackle warehouse, lived in a garret, visited his family in prison on Sundays, and felt that his life was shattered before it had begun. For a fictionalized account of his early life, read David Copperfield.
Then a timely inheritance restored the family to something like comfortable means, and Charles had a few quiet years at a private school. Later he immortalized his father, for whom he always had a great love, as Mr. Micawber. When his own rising fortune and fame gave him control of a great newspaper, he put his father on the staff to preside over the dispatches and bought him a small country house. Dickens' mother, unsympathetic and unconscious of his genius, meant less to him; she begrudged his leaving work to go to school. He made her immortal as Mrs. Nickleby.
Dickens made his own career. A few years of secondary school was his basic education. He never attended college. His real education came from his reading and observation and daily experience. Except for the English novels of the 18th century, he knew little of great literature. Of history and foreign politics, he knew practically nothing. His novels all deal with his own day and his own environment, except for his two historical novels--A Tale of Two Cities and Barnaby Rudge--and these were set in the recent past of the French Revolution and the Gordon Riots.
The qualities that made up Dickens' genius did not depend on formal education for development. Dickens had a reporter's eye for the details of daily life and a mimic's ear for the subtleties of common speech. Further, he had the artist's ability to select what he needed from these raw materials of observation and to shape them into works of enduring merit.
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