13.2. Charles Dickens.

He is generally considered to be one of the greatest English novelists. He was born near Portsea, where his father was a clerk in the Navy Pay office. Charles, the second of eight children was a delicate child, much of his boyhood was spent at home, where he read the novels of Smolett, Fielding and le Sage. The works of these writers were to influence his own novels very deeply.

At an early age he became very fond of the theatre, a fondness that remained with him all his life, and affected his novels to a great extent. In 1823 the Dickens family removed to London, where the father soon drew them into money difficulties. The schooling of Charles was temporarily suspended. The boy for a time worked in a factory while his father in the debtor’s prison. After a year or so financial matters improved; the education of Charles was resumed; then in 1827 he entered the office of an attorney, and in time began an expert shorthand writer.

He began with “Pickwick’s papers” which came out in parts and gave English literature some of its most charming and amusing characters. This novel which was first published by parts in a monthly magazine took London by storm. Everyone waited brearthlessly for the next monthly installment which would relate the adventures of the kindly, naïve Mr. Pickwick and his three friends who formed the Pickwick club. These three absurd gentlemen – Tupman, Snodgrass and Winkle – accompany their leader on a tour of “scientific” investigation and discovery through England. Each of the Pickwickians has his particular pride, as well as his particular folly. One more memorable character of the novel – Mr. Pickwick’s servant Sam Weller, whose broad Cockney dialect produces much of the humour of the stories. Sam Weller keeps Mr. Pickwick out of most of the trouble caused by his own kindness or comfort him with words of wisdom when the trouble has not been avoided.

“It’s over, and can’t be helped, and that’s one consolation as they always says in Turkey, ven they cuts the wrong man’s head off”.

Twice Dickens wrote historical novel, Barnaby Kudge and “A Tale of Two Cities, a story of the French Revolution and of events in London at the same time. Sometimes his novels were written partly with the purpose of improving social conditions.

“David Copperfield” is based on Dicken’s own life, which had a sad beginning. It is one of the most popular of his novels, but it cannot be called cheerful. Nickolas Nicklebey is a tall of a boy who is left poor on his father’s death. he is sent to work in a school, Dotheboys Hall, where the master, squeers treats forty miserable pupil cruelty, and teaches them nothing. Nicholas gives the reader a good deal of pleasure when he gives the criminal squeers a good beating, and then escapes.

All these novels are crowded with characters , either fully developed or drawn by a few quick but sure strokes of the great writer’s pen.

Dickens’s prose varies in quality but he is nearly always readable. In his different novels he describes and attacks many kinds of unpleasant people and places – bad schools, and schoolmasters, government departments, bad prisons, dirty houses. His characters include thieves, murderers, men in debt, stupid and unwashed men and women, hungry children, and those who do their best to deceive the honest. Although many of his scenes are terribly unpleasant, he usually keeps the worst descriptions out of his book; therefore the reader does not throw the book into the fire, but continues to read. Some of his gentler characters are very weak; some of the sad situations that he describes are too miserable to be true. He uses too much black paint. But he wanted to raise kindness and goodness in men’s hearts, and used tears and laughter to reach his aim.

It is very likely that the reputation of dickens will be maintained chiefly as a humourist. His humour is broad, humane and creative. It gives us such real immortals as Mr. Pickwick, Mrs, Gamp, Mr. Micawber, Sam Weller – typical inhabitants of the Dickensian sphere. Dickens’s humour is not very subtle, but it goes deep, and in expression it is free and vivacious. His satire is apt to develop into mere burlesque, as it does when he deals with Mr. Stiggins and Bumble. as for his pathos in its day it had an appeal that appears amazing to a later generation, whom it strikes as cheap and maudlin. His devices are often third-rate as when they depend upon such themes as the death of little children, which he describes in detail.

Lecture 13.