Biographical Notes: Dickens had 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, where for several months John and all the family but Charles were imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtor's prison.  While his family lived in the prison and for several months 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 six-month period in the blacking factory.  After intermittent schooling, Dickens was apprenticed as a law clerk.  He learned shorthand and became a reporter of court proceedings; later he became a parliamentary reporter.  He also published a series of fictional sketches (Sketches by Boz, 1836-37) which  were 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 world's most popular novelist.  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, critics have tried to condemn Dickens as a "mere entertainer"—not someone to be regarded as a serious literary artist by scholars and serious readers.  In part, the sheer persistence of Dickens's popularity—he still sells well in commercial bookstores, and of course he figures prominently on the college syllabus—this persistent popularity is reinforced by some scholars who see Dickens as a great natural genius and conscious artist in fiction despite his undeniable commercialism.  [Consistently the 20th century has determined that popularity is the "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 measure of critical respectability 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 his peculiarly "Dickensian" language and wildly eccentric characters, others are not.  Those who believe that art must always be serious and preferably "realistically negative" or pessimistic; or that "real art" must be too complex for non-academic readers to enjoy—well, . . . these people don't think much of Dickens.

Dickens under fire: frequent criticisms
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.
Too sentimental—too often overtly appealing to the emotions: tears, anger, laughter.
Too sensational—novels depict unrealistic extremes in life.
Too melodramatic—good characters are too good, bad characters are too "bad."
Too much coincidence in his intricate plots—plots are not plausible, sometimes not neatly unified, characters introduced "as needed."
Characters are not realistic, especially women and the more eccentric minor characters.
His books are too openly polemical—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 as bound books, Dickens's novels were published in weekly or monthly installments, often in Dickens's own magazines (Household Words until 1859, subsequently All the Year Round.  Hard Times was published serially in weekly installments in Household Words).  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 extravagantly eccentric characters.  Often, readers had to keep up with a dizzying array of characters in the novels over a period of 18 or 19 months: the more outlandish the characters, the easier they were to recall.

Comedic techniques
Influenced  largely by the popular theater of his day, Dickens's two main strategies of humor are caricature and farce, two forms of exaggeration.  Typically, his comic characters are given specific exaggerated traits or speech-characteristics ("tags") that by force of repetition may be funny (e.g. Bounderby's boastfulness and Gradgrind's obsession with "facts" in Hard Times].  Farce involves exaggeration not of characteristics but of action (Bitzer's definition of "horse," e.g., in Hard Times).

Social criticism
Through satire, irony, and outright didacticism and rhetorical declamation, most of Dickens's novels take aim at particular aspects or institutions of Victorian society: workhouse reforms in Oliver Twist, Chancery courts in Bleak House, prisons in Little Dorrit, America in Martin Chuzzlewit, and Utilitarianism in Hard Times, for instance.  

Themes and motifs to consider in Hard Times:
 Utilitarianism--"eminent practicality"
 The costs of utilitarianism: emotion, imagination, "diversion"
 Family/family responsibility
 Marriage/relations between men and women
 Labor problems: labor unions vs. other solutions?
 Politics and Parliament
 "Me first: the algebra of number 1"
 Melodrama: extremes of good and evil; sentimentality
 Class differences/social structure
 "Civilization" vs. animal instinct

Form more on Dickens, see:
 http://lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Dickens.html

202 main page

Teaching history

Chip's Home