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Authors: Charles Dickens
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It was the publication of
Pickwick Papers
(1836-1837) that catapulted the twenty-five-year-old author to national renown. Dickens wrote with unequaled speed and often worked on several novels at a time, publishing them first in monthly installments and then as books. His early novels
Oliver Twist
(1837—1838),
Nicholas Nickleby
(1838-1839),
The Old Curiosity Shop
(1840-1841),
and A Christmas Carol
(1843) solidified his enormous, ongoing popularity. As Dickens matured, his social criticism became increasingly biting, his humor dark, and his view of poverty darker still.
David Copperfield
(1849-1850),
Bleak
House (1852-1853),
Hard Times
(1854),
A Tale of Two Cities
(1859),
Great Expectations
(1860-1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) are the great works of his masterful and prolific later period.
Pickwick Papers
(1836-1837) that catapulted the twenty-five-year-old author to national renown. Dickens wrote with unequaled speed and often worked on several novels at a time, publishing them first in monthly installments and then as books. His early novels
Oliver Twist
(1837—1838),
Nicholas Nickleby
(1838-1839),
The Old Curiosity Shop
(1840-1841),
and A Christmas Carol
(1843) solidified his enormous, ongoing popularity. As Dickens matured, his social criticism became increasingly biting, his humor dark, and his view of poverty darker still.
David Copperfield
(1849-1850),
Bleak
House (1852-1853),
Hard Times
(1854),
A Tale of Two Cities
(1859),
Great Expectations
(1860-1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) are the great works of his masterful and prolific later period.
In 1858 Dickens’s twenty-three-year marriage to Catherine Hogarth dissolved when he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, a young actress. The last years of his life were filled with intense activity: writing, managing amateur theatricals, and undertaking several reading tours that reinforced the public’s favorable view of his work but took an enormous toll on his health. Working feverishly to the last, Dickens collapsed and died on June 9, 1870, leaving
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
uncompleted.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
uncompleted.
Oliver claimed by his Affectionate Friends
THE WORLD OF CHARLES DICKENS AND OLIVER TWIST
| 1811 | Jane Austen publishes Sense and Sensibility, arguably the first modern English novel. |
| 1812 | Charles John Huffam Dickens is born at Portsmouth to John and Elizabeth (nee Barrow) Dickens. The government orders a group of Luddites, an organized band of laborers opposed to the industrialized machinery that threatens to replace them, to be shot down. |
| 1817 | The Dickens family moves to Chatham, in Kent. Dickens be gins reading the books in his father’s library; his favorites include the works of Miguel de Cervantes, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett. |
| 1822 | The Dickens family moves again, this time to Camden, in North London. Dickens quickly and fastidiously learns the landscape of London, an invaluable resource for his later writing. |
| 1824 | Charles is sent to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory, a manufacturer of boot-blacking. His father is arrested for debt and imprisoned for three months, and while the rest of the family stays with John Dickens in prison, Charles lodges elsewhere and continues pasting labels onto bottles of blacking at Warren’s. |
| 1825 | John Dickens retires on a naval pension, and Charles attends Wellington House Academy, a private school where he wins a prize in Latin. |
| 1827 | Dickens becomes a clerk in a solicitor’s office. |
| 1829 | After learning shorthand, he establishes himself as a reporter for the law courts, Parliament, and various London newspapers. He meets Maria Beadnell and falls in love with her. |
| 1831 | Dickens joins the journalistic staff of the Mirror of Parliament: he transcribes speeches by the members of Parliament on such topics as factory conditions, penal reform, education reform, the Poor Law Commission, and the First Reform Bill of 1832. |
| 1833 | After four arduous years, Dickens’s affair with Beadnell dissolves in the face of her family’s disapproval. He publishes his first story, “A Dinner at Poplar Walk,” in the Monthly Magazine. The British Parliament passes the Factory Act, which regulates child labor and forces children to attend school until age thirteen. |
| 1834 | Dickens becomes a journalist for the Morning Chronicle, a job that requires frequent travel and attendance at political meetings. He continues to publish stories and sketches in periodicals. The Poor Law Amendment Act ends out-of-door relief (aid given to the poor in their own homes) and compels those in need of assistance to enter workhouses, where conditions are very harsh. |
| 1835 | Dickens becomes engaged to Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle. |
| 1836 | Dickens writes in several different genres and achieves significant literary success. Adopting the pseudonym “Boz,” based on his pronunciation as a young child of Moses as “Boses,” Dickens publishes in volume form Sketches by Boz, a collection of his earlier writings. He marries Catherine Hogarth; the couple eventually has ten children. Dickens becomes intensely and unceasingly prolific, continuing to write feverishly throughout his life. Pickwick Papers, his first novel, brings him instant popular success; it also sets the precedent of serialization that he will follow for nearly all of his novels. He meets his future biographer John Forster. |
| 1837 | Victoria is crowned queen. Dickens becomes the editor of Bentley’s Miscellany and begins publishing installments of his novel Oliver Twist in the journal. |
| 1838 | Oliver Twist is published in three volumes, while the serial publication in Bentley’s continues. The novel was extremely popular, and three dramatic versions were produced in London theaters in the winter of 1838-1839. |
| 1839 | Nicholas Nickleby is published. Because of tension with Richard Bentley, Dickens resigns his editorship and devotes himself fully to writing. The Dickens family moves to Devonshire Terrace. |
| 1840 | Dickens establishes his own weekly miscellany, Master Humphrey’s Clock, and writes all the content himself. After eighteen months, sales fall off, and he is forced to abandon the periodical. To generate capital, he quickly begins serial publication of The Old Curiosity Shop. |
| 1841 | Dickens publishes Barnaby Rudge. He publicly denounces the child-labor laws and abysmal factory conditions of the times; he lambastes the Tories, who oppose humane labor laws. |
| 1842 | Accompanied by Catherine, an exhausted Dickens travels to America, where he is lionized. His popularity there falters upon the publication of American Notes, a chronicle that records his negative reactions to the United States. |
| 1843 | Dickens publishes the most famous and best-loved of his annual Christmas books, A Christmas Carol, which had taken him only a matter of weeks to write. |
| 1844 | The Dickens family relocates to Genoa, Italy, where they remain for a year. |
| 1846 | Dickens signs on as the first editor of the Daily News but soon leaves because of disagreements with the publishers. The family moves to Switzerland, then Paris, and remains abroad for six months. |
| 1847 | Upon his return to London, Dickens helps Miss Burdett Coutts start a home for reformed prostitutes, which he later runs. William Makepeace Thackeray begins publishing Vanity Fair in monthly parts. |
| 1848 | Dombey and Son, published in one volume, heralds Dickens’s more mature and decidedly dark period, which over the next two decades yields such major works as David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. Dickens begins to run a private theater, in which he acts and performs for charity. His company of amateurs includes painter Augustus Egg, who depicts scenes from novels by Sir Walter Scott, Thackeray, and other writers. |
| 1850 | Realism becomes a conscious agenda among artists working in media such as painting, literature, and theater. Dickens establishes his magazine Household Words, which is succeeded by the end of the decade by his publication All the Year Round. |
| 1851 | Dickens’s father dies. The author meets landscape painter Wilkie Collins, who has a gift for mystery writing and whom Dickens admires greatly. Dickens’s theater troupe performs before Queen Victoria. |
| 1857 | Dickens’s marriage becomes increasingly strained. The Frozen Deep, a melodrama written jointly by Dickens and Collins, stars Dickens and the enchanting actress Ellen Ternan, with whom he falls in love. Ternan, twenty-seven years Dickens’s junior, haunts the author’s fiction from this time on. Dickens tours Switzerland and Italy with Collins and Egg. |
| 1858 | Dickens embarks on an exhausting series of public readings, which earn him money but take a toll on his physical health. He and Catherine separate. |
| 1860 | Dickens settles in rural Gadshill, his residence for the rest of his life. |
| 1861 | Great Expectations is published in three volumes. Dickens begins a second series of public readings that lasts two years. |
| 1863 | Dickens’s mother dies, followed by his son Walter’s death in India. After quarreling with Thackeray, Dickens reconciles with him just before Thackeray’s death. The world’s first subway, the Metropolitan Railway, opens in London. |
| 1865 | A shaken Dickens survives a disastrous train accident after he returns from France with Ellen Ternan, who is rumored to be his mistress. |
| 1867 | Dickens journeys again to America, where he reads publicly in Boston, New York, and Washington. |
| 1868 | After returning to England, Dickens continues to give public readings despite his declining health. |
| 1870 | Dickens begins his last series of readings in London. He publishes six parts of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but the novel’s composition is halted by his sudden death in June. Charles Dickens is buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. |
INTRODUCTION
Second novels separate the sheep from the goats, the possessors of enduring talent from the mere purveyors of flash-in-the-pan literary sensation. Many writers embark on a second novel with a good deal of trepidation, especially if their first book has achieved the kind of instant acclaim awarded to Charles Dickens’s
Pickwick Papers.
If Dickens experienced any such anxiety when he set out to write
Oliver Twist,
he countered it with his lifelong drug of choice, a frenetic and compulsive productivity. Appearing in monthly installments, the usual mode of publication for novels until late in the nineteenth century,
Oliver Twist
was mostly written in tandem with other projects. When the first two chapters were published in
Bentley’s Miscellany
in February 1837, Dickens was still writing
Pickwick Papers
as a serial for Chapman and Hall. With
Pickwick Papers
completed in November 1837, the twenty-five-year-old Dickens devoted himself to
Oliver Twist
for a mere four months before beginning a third novel,
Nicholas Nickleby. Oliver Twist
was finished and published in three volumes in November 1838, while the serial version in
Bentley’s
still had five months to run. This frenzied pace of production was halted only once, in June 1837, when the intensity of his grief over the sudden death of his seventeen-year-old sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, forced Dickens to postpone that month’s installments of both
Pickwick Papers
and
Oliver Twist.
Mary Hogarth is memorialized as Rose Maylie in
Oliver Twist.
Pickwick Papers.
If Dickens experienced any such anxiety when he set out to write
Oliver Twist,
he countered it with his lifelong drug of choice, a frenetic and compulsive productivity. Appearing in monthly installments, the usual mode of publication for novels until late in the nineteenth century,
Oliver Twist
was mostly written in tandem with other projects. When the first two chapters were published in
Bentley’s Miscellany
in February 1837, Dickens was still writing
Pickwick Papers
as a serial for Chapman and Hall. With
Pickwick Papers
completed in November 1837, the twenty-five-year-old Dickens devoted himself to
Oliver Twist
for a mere four months before beginning a third novel,
Nicholas Nickleby. Oliver Twist
was finished and published in three volumes in November 1838, while the serial version in
Bentley’s
still had five months to run. This frenzied pace of production was halted only once, in June 1837, when the intensity of his grief over the sudden death of his seventeen-year-old sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, forced Dickens to postpone that month’s installments of both
Pickwick Papers
and
Oliver Twist.
Mary Hogarth is memorialized as Rose Maylie in
Oliver Twist.
Where many young writers would have been tempted to stay with a winning formula, Dickens’s second novel was a total departure from the timeless comedic world of
Pickwick Papers.
The first three installments of
Oliver Twist
employed ferocious satire to address a contemporary social evil, the sufferings of the poor in the new workhouses mandated by the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. Then, with the introduction of Fagin and his gang of juvenile pickpockets in the fourth installment, Dickens’s readers found themselves plunged into London’s criminal underworld. The novel’s final installment contained a gruesome murder, a manhunt, and a hanging. While a few readers, such as the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, were shocked by Dickens’s turn to such sordid subject matter, many more, including nineteen-year-old Queen Victoria, were enthralled.
Pickwick Papers.
The first three installments of
Oliver Twist
employed ferocious satire to address a contemporary social evil, the sufferings of the poor in the new workhouses mandated by the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. Then, with the introduction of Fagin and his gang of juvenile pickpockets in the fourth installment, Dickens’s readers found themselves plunged into London’s criminal underworld. The novel’s final installment contained a gruesome murder, a manhunt, and a hanging. While a few readers, such as the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, were shocked by Dickens’s turn to such sordid subject matter, many more, including nineteen-year-old Queen Victoria, were enthralled.
Oliver Twist
was every bit as popular as
Pickwick Papers.
Three dramatizations played in London theaters during the winter of 1838—1839. Perfectly complemented by George Cruikshank’s quirky illustrations, the novel was in a third edition by 1841, and even spawned an imitation, Thomas Prest’s
Oliver Twiss.
It remained a best-seller through Dickens’s lifetime and beyond. The penny edition of 1871 sold 150,000 copies in three weeks. During the last decade of his life, Dickens toured England, Ireland, and America, giving public readings of favorite sections from his novels. “Sikes and Nancy,” based on chapter XLVII of
Oliver Twist,
was a particular favorite of both author and audience. While Dickens’s rendition of Nancy’s brutal murder sent audiences into fits of screaming and fainting, a physician waited backstage to monitor the ailing author’s pulse rate. Dickens’s friend and biographer John Forster speculated that the energy and fervor with which Dickens threw himself into these performances may have contributed to his early death from heart disease in 1870.
was every bit as popular as
Pickwick Papers.
Three dramatizations played in London theaters during the winter of 1838—1839. Perfectly complemented by George Cruikshank’s quirky illustrations, the novel was in a third edition by 1841, and even spawned an imitation, Thomas Prest’s
Oliver Twiss.
It remained a best-seller through Dickens’s lifetime and beyond. The penny edition of 1871 sold 150,000 copies in three weeks. During the last decade of his life, Dickens toured England, Ireland, and America, giving public readings of favorite sections from his novels. “Sikes and Nancy,” based on chapter XLVII of
Oliver Twist,
was a particular favorite of both author and audience. While Dickens’s rendition of Nancy’s brutal murder sent audiences into fits of screaming and fainting, a physician waited backstage to monitor the ailing author’s pulse rate. Dickens’s friend and biographer John Forster speculated that the energy and fervor with which Dickens threw himself into these performances may have contributed to his early death from heart disease in 1870.
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