Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens
Introduction
DICKENS was, without exaggeration, a literary giant of epic proportions. Unlike those who must struggle lengthily for recognition, success came to him early at the age of twenty-three, and remained until his premature death at fifty-eight. Even more than a century after his death, his books remain among those most widely read throughout the world.
Born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, Charles Dickens was the second of eight children. His parents, John and Elizabeth, were middle class, genteel, but spectacularly improvident: his father, though respectably employed by the Navy Pay Office, was frequently in debt; his mother was high-spirited yet rather aloof. For a while, the family lived in Chatham, where Dickens had very pleasant experiences, and where he later returned to live at the height of his success.
In 1824, disasters occurred which were to haunt Dickens the rest of his life. His father’s debts suddenly caught up with him and he was thrown into Marshalsea Prison. After selling off everything they could, the family went to live at the prison, to await a more beneficent stroke of fate.
Young Charles, however, had already been found a room elsewhere and employment in Warren’s blacking factory, at the invitation of his cousin James Lamert. There, in a bleak environment, he worked with boys of the lower classes, securing the tops on bottles of blacking and slapping labels on them.
These brushes with dire poverty—his father’s imprisonment and his own apprenticeship—so mortified Dickens that, in later life, he could only bring himself to tell a handful of people about the experience. However, the personal memories which he sought to conceal found their way time and again into his work, where he could make others feel the shame and despair that he had felt.
Soon after his incarceration, his father was released from the Marshalsea. He removed Dickens from the blacking factory and placed him at Wellington House Academy for two years of formal education, during which time Dickens flourished.
After Wellington, Dickens clerked in a law office, but studied shorthand and, a year and a half later, launched his literary career. He started as a freelance journalist, first in the court of Doctors’ Commons, then haunting the House of Parliament for the Morning Chronicle, whose staff he joined in 1834. His articles, Sketches by Boz, were widely admired and later published in book form.
In 1836, he was asked by the publisher Chapman and Hall to write a serial based on a number of sporting plates by Robert Seymour. Thus began The Pickwick Papers, completed in 1837. It also began what was to be Dickens’s lifelong success.
Although it is cynical to imply that one may be well-served by adversity, it often happens that this is the case. Dickens the writer was able to command the unhappy incidents of his childhood into strong and emotional fiction. He used the characters that peopled his own childhood over and over again in various ingenious ways; he cast his mother and father myriad times into as many characters.
He was twenty-three at the time The Pickwick Papers first appeared. That year, he had married Catherine (Kate) Hogarth—the daughter of a colleague—after having ardently but unsuccessfully pursued a young woman named Maria Beadnell three years before. He became quite close to his wife’s family, grieving disconsolately at the death of her sister Mary (which caused him to break a deadline on Oliver Twist) and formed strong ties to her sister Georgina.
Dickens and Kate had ten children. Their firstborn, a son, was named after himself (including his pseudonymous “Boz”). Afterward, he began to name subsequent offspring for the leading figures of the day, such as Henry Fielding, Alfred D’Orsay and Alfred, Lord Tennyson (whom he combined as Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson). While some of his peers found this practice outlandish and risible, others like the novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton (for whom Dickens named his tenth child), were happy to be honored this way.
Dickens and Kate were married for twenty-three years, but separated in 1858. Contributing to the marriage’s dissolution were—on Dickens’s part—overcommitments, an unmanageable temperament, and infidelity with the actress Ellen Ternan; on Kate’s part, a general lassitude and inability to keep up with her vital and energetic husband.