DICKENS 



1789 



DICKENS 



ICKENS, CHARLES (1812- 

 one of the greatest of 



1870), 



English novelists and an educa- 

 tional reformer. His works en- 

 joyed in his own day a popularity unmatched 

 in literary history, and they have continued 

 to give constant exquisite pleasure to millions 

 of readers. He was a creator who brought into 

 life almost countless characters as real as the 

 people who walk the streets, and more real to 

 the minds of his readers than the characters 

 described by historians. He made his charac- 

 ters represent activities in the development of 

 great and much-needed social, educational and 

 industrial reforms. Then, too, he possessed a 

 genuine love for men, a grasp of the humorous 

 and absurd and a knowledge of life among the 

 lower classes which are certain to make him 

 live long after more finished writers have lost 

 their hold on the public. 



Early Years. This man whom royalty de- 

 lighted to honor in his later years had an un- 

 happy and almost sordid youth. At his birth, 

 on February 7, 1812, at Landport, Portsmouth, 

 his family was in fairly-easy circumstances; 

 they remained so for a time after their removal 

 to .Chatham, and finally, in 1821, to London. 

 But the "prodigal father," as Dickens called 

 his parent years later, was a careless, happy-go- 

 lucky man, who at length became so deeply in 

 debt that he was sent to a debtor's prison, 

 the Marshalsea, afterward made famous by 

 Dickens in Little Dorrit. Since a man in a 

 debtor's prison might make himself very com- 

 fortable if he had a little ready money, it is 

 probable that Charles' father had a better 

 time than did Charles, who had been put to 

 work in a blacking warehouse. All day he 

 worked very hard and had but the scantiest 

 food, but he could have borne all that had it 

 not seemed to him that he had come to the 

 end of his dreams of an education and a useful, 

 busy life. For little Charles was very ambi- 

 tious, and he had determined that somehow 

 he was to become a great man. It was far from 

 his thoughts that the very experiences he was 



going through, the very people 

 he was meeting in his unattrac- 

 tive surroundings and storing up 

 in his marvelous memory, would 

 some day be the means of making him great. 



After about a yeaf this wretched life came 

 to an end, and Dickens was able to go to school 

 for two years, after which he entered a law- 

 yer's office. In this position he was little more 

 than an office boy, but he had time to study, 

 and came into contact with people who saw 

 that he was not an ordinary boy. In his spare 

 hours he studied shorthand, and at the age of 

 nineteen became a newspaper reporter in the 

 House of Commons. A little later he began 

 to contribute to the Monthly Magazine and 

 the Evening Chronicle those sketches of Lon- 

 don life known as the Sketches by Boz. So 

 popular were these that publishers bargained 

 for a new series, and in 1836 Pickwick Papers 

 began to appear in monthly numbers. It is 

 difficult to realize the excitement which this 

 loosely- woven sketch, with its world-famous 

 Sam Weller, aroused; and the great popular- 

 ity they won for their author never declined 

 through all the rest of Dickens' life. It was 

 in 1836, too, that he was married to Miss Cath- 

 erine Hogarth. 



His Busy Years. With Oliver Twist, his next 

 work, he introduced a new feature that satire 

 of institutions which actually accomplished 

 results in more than one field. In Oliver 

 Twist it was the abuses of the workhouse sys- 

 tem that were exposed; in Nicholas Nickleby, 

 the management of the cheap boarding schools ; 

 and that Dickens was not hitting beside the 

 mark may be seen from the fact that more 

 than one schoolmaster threatened to sue him 

 for libel, believing himself the man caricatured 

 in the coarse and brutal Squeers. Years later 

 Bleak House protested against the interminable 

 suits in chancery, and Little Dorrit against the 

 evils of the debtor's prison system. 



Meanwhile, in the weekly "Master Hum- 

 phrey's Clock," had appeared The Old Curiosity 

 Shop, with its paragon of children, Little Nell. 



