Charles Dickens, self-made Victorian sensation

More than perhaps any other great figure of English literature, Dickens was a nobody who came from nowhere. He was a self-made man – a jumped-up self-made man in the eyes of some of his envious contemporaries.

Dickens’s father, John, was a naval clerk and the son of domestic servants; but bookish and rather grandiloquent. He liked quoting Shakespeare and is the model for Mr Micawber in David Copperfield. “If I may express myself Shakespeareanly.” That’s John Dickens all over.

Dickens’s father was a financial disaster. He managed to make a career for himself as a clerk in the great age of clerks and this could have led to the Dickens family (Charles was one of eight children) living reasonably comfortably. But Dickens’s dad always spent more money than he had. This led to discomfort and, for the young Dickens, actual shame. In an episode which is now famous but only became known after Dickens had died, Charles was sent to work in a blacking factory at the age of 12, sticking labels on bottles of boot blacking.

To Dickens, this was just devastating. As a boy, he had ambitions of learning and improving himself. Anybody who’s read Great Expectations knows how brilliantly that late Dickens novel taps into that desperate hunger to be a gentleman. This was the end of all his hopes at the time. To Dickens, who is wonderfully alert in his novels to how a short period in childhood can seem like an eternity, it seemed like this was his doom.

Soon after Dickens was sent to the blacking factory, his father was arrested for debt and confined in Marshalsea debtor’s prison, where the young Charles was to visit him. Again, this is a situation Dickens dramatised in one of his novels – Little Dorrit. Amy Dorrit, a child who earns money as a seamstress, is somehow supporting her improvident and irresponsible father who’s imprisoned for debt in the very same prison Dickens’s father was sent to.

Looking back, it seems as though Dickens shows us all that was worst about Victorian society. The word “Dickensian” means all sorts of things. Among other things, it means the workhouse in Oliver Twist, where the poor are confined, not just without mercy but something worse – at the behest of the operatives of charity, who are themselves cruel, oppressive and self-regarding. Then there’s the appalling Yorkshire schools in Nicholas Nickleby, where children, often illegitimate, whose parents don’t care about them, are sent to starve, to be brutalised and, quite often, to die.

We think of Dickens’s representations in Bleak House of both the endless prevarications and injustices of the legal system of his own day and the absolute abjectness of the poor who live in its slums – of their miserable lives and their even more miserable deaths, right next to the powerful and the opulent. Indeed, one of Dickens’s gifts, in novels like Bleak House, is connecting the lives and the stories of the rich and the poor, as if he’s taking his readers and showing them things they might otherwise have been able to ignore.

The paradox is that Dickens was the most popular of all Victorian writers. He was adored by his public, outsold any other author and was the greatest Victorian of the age. The past is more complicated than we sometimes believe.

One of the reasons Dickens was admired was because he made many of his readers (most of whom were middle class but also included those further down the social spectrum) feel like they had social consciences. He made them feel that they cared about their fellow human beings and were alert to the costs of affluence and progress. And so being Victorian didn’t mean that you ignored the darker world that the novelist revealed to you – au contraire. It meant that you wanted them to reveal that world.

It’s quite useful in seeing how incredibly innovative Dickens was to remember the way in which his novels were first published: as serials. Some of them came out weekly, like Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities, but most of them as monthly serials spanning a year and a half or more. Because of this, Dickens had to find ways of ensuring that his readers would hold his stories and his characters in their heads so that each time you met them again, they came alive.

Serialisation was a necessity for Dickens because it was a way of maximising sales. Many of his contemporaries resented him for it. But out of that necessity, Dickens made the most extraordinary creative virtues, such as how he would take a character and capture them in a gesture or habit of speech.

From all the various implications that Dickensian now has, it’s clear that we find it impossible to think of 19th century England without seeing it through Dickens’s eyes. And by “we”, I don’t just mean “we academics” or “we in Britain”, I mean readers everywhere.

This is true, even if we haven’t read the book in question. It’s no accident that one of his most famous works, the novella A Christmas Carol, is probably the most frequently adapted prose narrative in the English language. So, people often know Dickens indirectly, rather than through his works.

Perhaps even more tellingly, I think it’s impossible to think of childhood without thinking of Dickens. One of his many gifts was to be the novelist who first managed to do justice to the mingled terror and absurdity of childhood experiences. Once you’ve read a novel like David Copperfield or Great Expectations, you can never think of your own childhood without Dickens having a part in it.