Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Some notable works: Pickwick Papers (1836-37), Oliver Twist (1837-38), A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855-57), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-61).


Biographical Notes

Dickens spent a happy early childhood near the sea in Chatham, where his father, John,  was a Navy pay office clerk. Following a series of financial setbacks due in large part to John Dickens's extravagance and improvidence, the family ended up in London. For a number of months John and all the family but Charles were imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors' prison.  While his family lived in the prison and after, 12-year-old Charles supported himself and his family by working in a shoe-blacking factory pasting labels on bottles. This early experience with poverty and social degradation had a profound lifelong influence on Dickens, and much of his life and fiction seems a clear reaction against the horrors of this nearly-year-long period in the blacking factory.

After intermittent schooling, Dickens was apprenticed as a law clerk, where one of his responsibilities was shorthand recording of court proceedings, and he later became a parliamentary reporter for the press. He published a series of fictional sketches on typical London scenes and characters (Sketches by Boz, 1836-37) which  was received with enthusiasm. Close after, the overwhelming popularity of The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) quickly established Dickens as a major novelist. From 1837 until his death and beyond, Dickens reigned supreme as the most popular novelist worldwide—and some would say the greatest of his era.

In 1858 Dickens endured scandal when he separated from his wife, Catherine, with whom he had ten children, and set up a house for his 18-year-old mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan. In his final years Dickens gave a series of exhausting public readings, which together with his continued writing and the management of his weekly magazine All the Year Round, led to a fatal stroke in 1870.


Mixed reaction, then and now

From his time to ours, many critics have tried to condemn Dickens as a "mere entertainer"—not someone to be regarded as a serious literary artist.  In part, the sheer persistence of Dickens's popularity—he still sells well in commercial bookstores, and of course he figures prominently on high school and college syllabi—this persistent popularity is reinforced by scholars who see Dickens as a great natural genius and conscious artist in fiction despite his overt commercialism.  [Consistently the 20th century determined that popularity is the "true artist's" greatest nightmare.]  Several decades of renewed attention to the symbolism, the social commentary, and the narrative technique in Dickens's later novels has allowed him a large measure of critical respect he did not enjoy in the first 40 years of the 20th century.  To me, the dispute over Dickens's relative "artistic merit" boils down to each individual's personal reaction to Dickens: some people are charmed by his humor and the peculiarly "Dickensian" language and wildly eccentric characters, others are not. 


Dickens under fire

purple bullet "His books were too popular to be really any good—he catered to the public instead of adhering to a personal sense of artistic integrity."
purple bullet Too sentimental—too often overtly appealing to the emotions: tears, anger, laughter.
purple bullet Too sensational—the novels depict unrealistic extremes.
purple bullet Too melodramatic—good characters are too "good," bad characters are too "bad."
purple bullet Too much coincidence in his intricate plots—plots are not plausible, sometimes not neatly unified, characters introduced "as needed."
purple bullet Characters are not realistic, especially women and the more eccentric minor characters.
purple bullet His books are too openly rhetorical—that is, he often tells the reader what to think instead of allowing the characters and events speak for themselves.


Serial publication

Before they were issued in bound volumes, Dickens's novels were published in weekly or monthly installments, often in Dickens's own magazines (Household Words, 1850-1859, All the Year Round 1859-1895). Domby and Son was first published in nineteen monthly installments running from October 1846 through April 1848. Serial publication explains in part the "cliffhanger" endings to many of Dickens's chapters, and too, it may explain Dickens's tendency to draw such wildly extravagant characters—often readers had to keep up with a dizzying array of characters in the novels over a period of up to a year and a half, and more strikingly individual characters are easier to recall over time.


Comedic techniques

Influenced  largely by the popular theater of his day, Dickens's main strategies of humor are caricature and farce, two forms of exaggeration.  Typically, his comic characters are given specific exaggerated mannerisms or speech-characteristics ("tags") that by force of repetition may be funny (i.e. Mr. Chick's habit of humming or singing at inappropriate times, Captain Cuttles's tendency to misquote or misapply common quotations, Major Bagstock's speaking of himself in ever-varying third person forms, etc.).  Farce involves exaggeration not of characteristics but of action.


Social criticism

Through satire, irony, and outright rhetorical declaration, most of Dickens's novels take aim at particular aspects or institutions of Victorian society: workhouses in Oliver Twist, Chancery courts in Bleak House, prisons and government red tape in Little Dorrit, Utilitarianism in Hard Times, "uncouth Americans" in Martin Chuzzlewit, to name a few.


A few themes, motifs, and features to consider as you read Dombey and Son:

purple bullet Pride and its attendant problems.
purple bullet Characters that are twins, doubles, shadows of other characters.
purple bullet The impact of business pursuits on the family.
purple bullet The orphaned, abandoned, neglected child.
purple bullet The impact of technology and industrialization.
purple bullet Time, change, memory.
purple bullet Dickensian humor: mockery and exaggeration.
purple bullet Symbolism.
purple bullet Guilt and its profound impact.
purple bullet Portrayal of/commentary upon organized religion.
purple bullet Melodrama and sentimentality: mawkish, too-good-to-be-true good characters, exaggeration of malice in "bad" characters.
purple bullet Extravagant characterization: caricatures? Also Dickens's uncanny powers of observation.
purple bullet Overt narrative discourse (authorial intrusion).
purple bullet The inescapable past, and its inevitable impact upon the present.
purple bullet The web-like interconnectedness of all society.
purple bullet Narrative technique: how does Dickens orchestrate multiple plots and subplots and keep readers engaged for so many months as in the original serial publication?

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