DICKENS, Charles
British novelist (1812-1870)
In his early 20s Dickens worked as a journalist, writing reports of law court proceedings and Parliamentary debates, and short essays on the life and manners of the time (later collected as Sketches by Boz). It was not until the success of his first novel Pickwick Papers, when he was 25, that he made writing a full-time career. He composed large parts of his novels in dialogue, and was proud of his gift for showing character through speech alone; he also gave his minor characters (pot-boys, shop-customers, carters, oystermen, toddlers) turns of speech or physical eccentricities to make them instantly memorable -- another theatrical technique. This character-vividness is matched by a sustained commentary on human nature and society: Dickens consistently savaged the humbug and petty-mindedness of the middle classes who bought his books, and said that human happiness comes not from law, religion, politics or social structures but from gratuitous, individual acts of kindness. In his later books, notably Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, savagery predominated over sentimentality to an extent rivalled only in Zola.
DAVID COPPERFIELD (1849) Dickens' own favourite among his novels, this tells the story (in the first person, as if an autobiography) of a boy growing up: his unhappy childhood and adolescence, his first jobs and first loveaffair, and the way he finally transmutes his experience into fiction and becomes a writer. As often in Dickens' books, subsidiary characters seem to steal the show: the grim Murdstones, the optimistic Micawbers, salt-of-the-earth Peggotty, feckless Steerforth and above all the viperish hypocrite Uriah Heep. But the book's chief interest is the developing character of Copperfield himself. Apparently passive, at other people's mercy, he learns and grows by each experience, maturing before our eyes.
Dickens' novels, in order of publication, are Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend and Edwin Drood. His shorter works include A Christmas Carol, A Child's History of England and three collections of articles, Sketches by Boz, American Notes and The Uncommercial Traveller.
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Nicholas Nickleby
Oliver Twist
To David Copperfield : see also pathway
Novels of 'growing up', using a biographical framework to give a picture (documentary, satirical or both at once) of society : Henry Fielding, Tom Jones James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
To Dickens' more savage social novels : Mrs Gaskell, North and South John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath Patrick White, Riders in the Chariot
To his more relaxed tableaux of human life : H.G. Wells, Kipps Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis Tobias Smollett , The Adventures of Roderick Random George Gissing, The Nether World
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