4. City Laureate

‘City Laureate’ describes Charles Dickens as our first and best novelist of the city. London in the mid-19th century was the supreme modern urban space and Dickens its chronicler. Dickens took the city for his first subject, and was instantly recognized for his skill in skewering what everyone had seen, but nobody else had consciously noted. Dickens saw himself as the presiding spirit of the city. The first to celebrate the experiences of metropolitan living, he was also first to explore its horrors. To redress some of these evils, Dickens looked to practical solutions. He campaigned for sanitary reforms, which would cleanse the city, and supported ragged schools for the poorest children.

2. Public and private

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in February 1812. ‘Public and private’ describes his early childhood, his first jobs, and his move into writing. His father’s imprisonment for debt when he was just 12 led to the most painful episode of his life. His first sketch appeared in December 1833 and he went on to write many more under the nickname of Boz. He married Catherine Hogarth in 1836 and before he was 30 was one of the most famous men in Britain. By the late 1840s, he felt financially secure and could devote time to social reform issues. His later work and the failure of his marriage are also described.

6. Dickensian

Charles Dickens became an adjective in his own lifetime. By the 1850s, he was ‘Dickenesque’ and ‘Dickensy’; ‘Dickensian’ came in the decade after his death. Contradictions beset the many connotations of ‘Dickensian’: on one hand conviviality and good cheer; on the other oppression, injustice, poverty, and urban squalor. The meanings accruing around ‘Dickensian’ also have to do with his manner of writing, increasingly pejorative as Victorian fiction fell out of fashion. But Dickensian energy is something that always attracts. Dickens has been and always will be bigger than his books, as their spirits overflow into the conduits of communal affect.

3. Character and plot

Characters are what Charles Dickens is famous for. They crowd and flock through his novels, roughly 2,000 named characters, and multitudes more unnamed. The original illustrations by George Cruikshank and Hablot K. Browne, crammed with people, convey the sense of plenitude. ‘Character and plot’ describes the creation of some of Dickens’s characters, many of whom have achieved the fictional gold standard of life beyond the page, populating the empire of the collective imaginary. On the other hand, Dickens’s characterization has been targeted for criticism, as have his plots. His characters are condemned as caricatures with no inner life, his plots as improbable and impossible to follow.

1. More

Charles Dickens’s first two novels—The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club and Oliver Twist—were published in monthly instalments, usually of two or three chapters at a time, beginning in 1836. Charles Dickens was also editing a new monthly magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, and writing for theatre at this time. He was the talk of the town, his name everywhere. ‘More’ explains how contradiction and opposition fired Dickens’s imagination and were characteristics running throughout his writing. Oliver was a great success with many versions and manifestations. There were numerous translations and the invention of cinema at the end of the 19th century saw film versions, followed by adaptations for television, musicals, and theatre.

5. Radical Dickens

Charles Dickens was a life-long radical. According to Forster, it was Dickens’s childhood experiences that instilled ‘the hatred of oppression, the revolt against abuse of power, and the war with injustice under every form.’ Dickens would unfailingly take the side of the poor and the underdog. His vision darkened with age, but although his focus changed, the radicalism never left him. ‘Radical Dickens’ outlines his early targets and sledge-hammer blows through a variety of media. Throughout the 1850s, his magazine, Household Words, addressed important and controversial issues: factory conditions, slum housing, public health and hygiene, women’s employment, education, emigration, crime and prison discipline, and government bureaucracy and administration.