Born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, on Portsea Island, England, Charles Dickens was the son of John Dickens, a Naval Pay Office employee, and Elizabeth Barrow, the daughter of the Naval Conductor of Moneys. John Dickens’s largely unsuccessful struggle to gain middle-class respectability was hampered not only by his parents’ career in domestic service but also by the disgrace of his father-in-law, who left the country to avoid the consequences of a petty embezzlement. John Dickens’s life in Portsmouth left a lasting impression on his son, who partially documented it in Our Mutual Friend with Rogue Riderhood’s river activities, and who drew on it in Dombey and Son, in which the running of the river into the ocean represents the passage of life into immortality. John Dickens’s improvidence and inevitable bankruptcy also deeply affected his son. His character is reflected in the impecunious but absurdly hopeful Mr. Micawber and, more abstractly, in Dickens’s ambiguous attitude toward wealth, which he viewed as a highly desirable tool but worthless as a gauge of human value. In Our Mutual Friend, for instance, the novelist equates money with an excremental dust heap, but an inordinate number of his deserving characters also acquire wealth fortuitously: Oliver Twist, the parish boy, finds his near relatives; Nicholas Nickleby becomes clerk to the generous Cheerybles; and Esther Summerson comes under the protection of the well-to-do Jarndyce.
Dickens incorporated childhood associations into his stories as well. His nurse, Mary Weller, by her own dogmatic adherence, inculcated in Dickens a distaste for Chapel Christianity; his childhood love for theatricals blossomed into a lifelong fascination. (In fact, in 1832, only illness prevented him from auditioning at Covent Garden.)
Still, the most significant event of Dickens’s youth was his father’s imprisonment in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison for bankruptcy. Dickens drew on this period of his life in many of his novels, especially David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. John Forster, Dickens’s friend and biographer, records the author’s bitterness at being put to work at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse in order to help pay his father’s debts. Even worse than the degradation of the job for the young Dickens was the feeling that he had been abandoned. His family moved to Marshalsea to be near his father while he lived in a boarding house. While his period of employment in the warehouse could be measured in months, the psychological scars lasted for the rest of Dickens’s life, as can be seen in his novelistic preoccupation with orphans and adopted families. Oliver Twist, Amy Dorrit, Pip, and Little Nell are all abandoned children in some sense, and they are forced into an early adulthood, oftentimes reversing roles with their parents or guardians to become their protectors.
At the age of fifteen, Dickens was apprenticed as a law clerk in Doctor’s Commons, a civil law society. It was certainly the source of his profound dislike of pettifoggery, which is exhibited in the Jarndyce case of Bleak House. He then became a reporter in Parliament, and, at the age of seventeen, fell in love with Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a banking family who discouraged the attentions of the impoverished young man. This experience, as well as his unsuccessful marriage to Catherine Hogarth, daughter of the editor of the Morning Chronicle, likely contributed to Dickens’s alternate idealization of women (such as Dora in David Copperfield) and mockery of their foibles.
At the time of his marriage, Dickens was writing text for a serial of sporting drawings by the popular illustrator Robert Seymour —a work that became Pickwick Papers upon Seymour’s suicide. With its publication, Dickens’s success came quickly. He became editor of Bentley’s Miscellany (1836), and in February 1837, Oliver Twist began to appear, one month after the birth of the first of Dickens’s ten children. Before Oliver Twist had finished its serial run, Dickens had begun Nicholas Nickleby, in which he drew on his dramatic interests to create the Crummles provincial acting company. Then, in 1840, Dickens arranged to edit Master Humphrey’s Clock, which became a vehicle for both The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge (the story of the 1780 Gordon riots). Some of his immense creative energy came from the early happiness of his marriage, but some also from an effort to forget the death of his beloved sister-in-law Mary, who died in his arms when she was seventeen.
This period of activity ended in 1842 with a six-month visit to the United States. In letters, in American Notes, and in Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens reveals his double vision of the country. Welcomed in Boston by such literati as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dickens moved from the cultivated bluestocking milieu into a furious newspaper war over the lack of an international copyright agreement. Dickens came to believe that while democracy did exist in such model factory towns as Lowell, Massachusetts, America’s much-vaunted freedom was an excuse for vulgarity on one hand and hypocrisy on the other. He was appalled at the conditions of slavery in St. Louis and dismayed by the flat stretches of the Great Plains and by the ever-present concern for partisan politics, money, and power. All of these he satirized bitterly in the American section of Martin Chuzzlewit.
At home again, he installed his sister-in-law Georgina in her lifelong role as his housekeeper to counter what he judged to be Catherine’s growing indolence, which was surely symptomatic of their growing disillusionment with each other. Two years later, he began publication of Dombey and Son, his first planned novel. His next, the autobiographical David Copperfield, contains advice by the novel’s heroine, Agnes, that he applied to his own life: “Your growing power and success enlarge your power of doing good.” In March 1850, Dickens founded Household Words, a periodical that featured short stories, serialized novels, poetry, and essays. Here, Dickens published exposés of hospitals, sanitary conditions, political affairs, education, law, and religion, all written in a characteristically fanciful style. In these years, Dickens was engaged in amateur theatricals, partly to raise money to endow an impoverished actors’ home. Between 1852 and 1857, he wrote three novels: Bleak House, his experiment in first-person narration ; Hard Times, an attack on utilitarianism; and Little Dorrit, a semiautobiographical work. Becoming more and more estranged from his wife, he engaged in a strenuous and highly popular series of readings from his works, again bringing his dramatic talent into play. In June 1858, he published a much-criticized apologia for his marital separation; then, chafing at the restrictions imposed on Household Words by the publishers, Edward Chapman and William Hall, Dickens severed the connection and began All the Year Round, a new periodical of the same type.
His liaison with the actress Ellen Ternan, whom he met in 1857 when he was cast opposite her in a Wilkie Collins play, continued throughout the remainder of his life, during which he wrote A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel. He undertook another exhausting series of public readings, his reenactment of Nancy’s murder in Oliver Twist proving the most demanding. In 1867, he left for a successful tour of the United States. He continued public readings until the end of his life.
Dickens died at Gad’s Hill, near Rochester, on June 9, 1870, and is buried in Westminster Abbey. His last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, appeared posthumously.