Charles Dickens - The Greatest Storyteller Documentary

It is the 9th of June 1865. A Steam train  is traveling through the picturesque Kent  

countryside in south-eastern England  on its way towards London. Suddenly,  

near Staplehurst, whilst passing over a  viaduct, numerous carriages derail and are  

violently thrown into the dry riverbed of  the River Beult below, killing ten people.  

Workmen removed track on the bridge, thinking no  trains were due. The survivors scramble to help  

those in need and amongst them is a famous  writer in his mid-fifties. In the chaos,  

he remembers that he has left the manuscript of  his most recent work inside his carriage. After  

returning for it, he emerges from the wreckage,  with a copy of Our Mutual Friend in his hand,  

which unbeknownst to him will be the last  book, one of history’s most famous authors,  

will ever publish. His name? Charles Dickens….The  greatest novelist of the Victorian era.  

The man known to history as  Charles Dickens was born on  

the 7th of February 1812 in Portsmouth in  the county of Hampshire in England.  

His father John Dickens was born in 1785 to  Elizabeth Dickens, a housekeeper to John Crewe,  

a wealthy landowner and Whig politician. Despite  his modest parentage, John lived in a house that  

was frequented by some of the leading Whig  politicians of the day, including the fiery  

liberal orator Charles James Fox and the statesman  and political theorist Edmund Burke. In April  

1805, John was appointed to the Navy Pay Office  during Britain’s war with Napoleonic France.  

By the time of his son Charles’s birth, he was  working in the Portsmouth dockyard as a clerk.  

John considered himself a man of culture and owned  a large collection of books but had a habit of  

living beyond his means and getting into debt,  the consequences of which had a great impact on  

the upbringing of young Charles. Charles’s mother  was Elizabeth Barrow, a sister of Thomas Barrow,  

John’s colleague at the Navy Pay Office. The  couple married in June 1809. The Barrows were  

a cultured family and Elizabeth’s other brothers  John and Edward were both writers and journalists  

who would go on to support their nephew Charles  in his early forays into the literary world. In  

August 1810 John and Elizabeth had their first  child, a daughter named Frances or Fanny. Charles  

was their second child, and the couple would go on  to have six more, of whom two died in infancy.  

The Dickens family was already in financial  difficulty and moved house twice before John  

was recalled to the main Navy Pay Office  at Somerset House in London and took the  

family to the capital. Following the end of the  Napoleonic Wars in 1815, John Dickens was sent to  

Kent in late 1816. At around the time of Charles’s  fifth birthday, the family lived in Chatham near  

Rochester. In between the usual childhood games,  Charles was taught to read by his mother. This  

allowed him to raid his father’s library, which  included Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Henry  

Fielding’s Tom Jones, and the Arabian Nights,  the collection of Middle Eastern folk tales  

that became a particular favourite. Charles later  recalled being lonely and frequently ill, and he  

turned to reading when he was not well enough to  play with the local boys. Charles enjoyed singing  

comic songs with his elder sister Fanny, who would  become a professional musician, and the pair often  

visited the theatre. These experiences inspired  Charles to write a tragic play of his own,  

Misnar, the Sultan of India, when he was a boy  of around eight years old, though the manuscript  

is lost. Charles and Fanny were initially sent to  a dame school run by local women, but later they  

were sent to a school run by William Giles, who  considered Charles a promising student.  

In 1821, while taking Charles and Fanny on a  walk, John Dickens pointed out Gad’s Hill on  

the Rochester to Gravesend Road, once a haunt of  robbers and mentioned by Shakespeare in Henry IV,  

Part 1 as the place where Sir John  Falstaff organises a highway robbery.  

The nine-year-old Charles looked up at the brick  mansion that stood on top of the hill and informed  

his father that he would like to live there,  to which the latter said that he might do so  

if he worked hard enough. In June 1822, Charles’s  dreams of Gad’s Hill had to be set aside when his  

father was once again recalled to Somerset  House, and the family moved to Camden Town,  

a new suburb in the northwest of an ever expanding  London, by that time the largest city in the  

world. Charles soon began making regular visits  to his uncle Thomas Barrow, who had fallen out  

with his father when John was unable to pay back  a £200 loan. Barrow lived at Gerrard Street in  

Soho above a bookshop, whose owner Mrs Manson  allowed the boy to borrow her books. Among the  

books that influenced Charles was Dance of  Death, a collection of prints by Renaissance  

artist Hans Holbein depicting rich and poor in  skeletal form as equals in the face of death.  

Charles was disappointed that he could not  continue his education and instead spent much  

of his time in the house helping his mother look  after his younger siblings. He amused himself by  

writing detailed descriptions of people he met  while wandering about the city. In April 1823,  

his sister Fanny was accepted into the Royal  Academy of Music at a fee of thirty-eight  

guineas a year, a fact that must have exacerbated  Charles’s disappointment that his education was  

being neglected. That autumn, as the family  finances continued to deteriorate, Charles’s  

mother Elizabeth attempted to set up a school of  her own to teach local children. Although Charles  

helped his mother advertise the venture, there was  no interest at all, and the scheme was abandoned.  

John Dickens’s creditors continued to knock  on his door, and in February 1824 he was  

arrested for non-payment of debt. He was taken  to Marshalsea debtors’ prison in Southwark. His  

father’s absence left the twelve-year-old Charles  as the man of the family, forced to take the  

family’s possessions to the pawnbroker, parting  with his precious books in the process.  

Charles was soon forced to work at Warren’s  Blacking Warehouse near Charing Cross, earning  

six shillings a week for placing lids onto pots  of shoe polish and labelling them. He was moved  

by the kindness of the older boys who helped him,  including a lad called Bob Fagin, whose name stuck  

in his head. Charles’s mother decided to join  her husband at Marshalsea, and Charles moved into  

lodgings close to the prison so he could join his  family for dinner. In April 1824, John Dickens’s  

mother Elizabeth died in her eighties, leaving  her son £450. This enabled John to be discharged  

from debtors’ prison in May, and the family soon  moved to north London. While Charles continued  

to work in the blacking factory, he resented  his sister’s success at the Academy of Music,  

where she won a silver medal and was given the  opportunity to perform in front of members of the  

royal family at a prize-giving ceremony. In March  1825, after his father was pensioned off by the  

Pay Office, Charles was allowed to quit his job.  While his mother wanted him to continue working,  

John agreed to send Charles to Wellington  House Academy, where he was taught Latin,  

mathematics, and English. In addition to  his studies, he helped to stage theatrical  

performances at school and joined a classmate  in putting together a rudimentary newspaper.  

In the spring of 1827, soon after his fifteenth  birthday, Charles was obliged to leave school as  

his father could no longer pay the fees. At the  same time, the family was once again forced to  

move. Charles once again had to find work and his  mother helped him find a job as a clerk at the law  

firm Ellis & Blackmore at Gray’s Inn near Holborn.  The young man amused and impressed his colleagues  

with his art of mimicry and his ability to recite  long passages from Shakespeare and joined them on  

trips to the theatre. In November 1828 he moved on  to Charles Molloy’s law office in nearby Chancery  

Lane, continuing to gain insights into the legal  profession that confirmed his view that lawyers  

purposely complicated matters to enrich themselves  at the expense of the poor. That same year,  

John Dickens began working as a parliamentary  reporter for his brother-in-law John Barrow’s  

nascent newspaper, Mirror of Parliament. Charles  was inspired to learn shorthand and left Molloy’s  

office in 1829 to work as a court reporter. In May 1830, he met the twenty-year-old Maria  

Beadnell, the daughter of a City banker, and  soon fell in love with her. Although Maria seemed  

receptive, her parents did not consider Charles an  acceptable suitor, and the latter was motivated to  

improve his station by working as a freelance  parliamentary reporter for his uncle’s paper.  

He did an impressive job and was hired as a  staff reporter for the Mirror in Parliament by  

early 1832. He may have covered the debates  on Whig Prime Minister Earl Grey’s Reform  

Bill to expand the voter franchise and updated  parliamentary constituency boundaries to account  

for the enlarged electorate, which was adopted  as the Reform Act of 1832. Although Charles was a  

supporter of liberal reforms he was not impressed  by the speeches made in the House of Commons and  

believed that politicians were turning a blind eye  to the poverty and penury around them in London.  

He continued to court Maria Beadnell,  who was sent away to Paris for a year,  

and upon her return, she informed Dickens at his  twenty-first birthday party in February 1833 that  

she was not interested in marriage. During these years Dickens staged amateur  

dramatic performances at his house with a cast  of family and friends and he also continued to  

write sketches based on his daily observations in  London. These sketches, as they were termed, were  

impressionist and observational written accounts  of British society, a format which was popular  

in the nineteenth century. One of these, his  sketch “A Dinner at Poplar Walk”, was published  

anonymously in the December 1833 issue of the  Monthly Magazine. He continued to offer sketches  

to the publication, and in August he adopted the  penname “Boz,” inspired by the nickname “Moses”  

he gave his younger brother Augustus, a name he  struggled to pronounce while afflicted with one  

of his frequent colds. Although he was taking  the first steps in a career that would make  

him the best-known novelist in nineteenth-century  England, these initial contributions were unpaid,  

and Dickens continued to work as a parliamentary  reporter and was given a permanent job in August  

1834 at the Morning Chronicle. In addition to  covering House of Commons debates and political  

meetings around the country, Dickens wrote  sketches for the paper under the name “Boz.”  

In late 1834 Dickens moved into his own rented  apartment at Furnival’s Inn on Holborn, where  

he lived with his younger brother Frederick. In January 1835, the Morning Chronicle launched a  

sister publication, the Evening Chronicle, edited  by George Hogarth, a Scottish lawyer and advisor  

to the novelist Walter Scott. Hogarth frequently  invited Dickens to his house in Fulham. There,  

Charles met his employer’s nineteen-year-old  daughter Catherine and the couple were engaged  

within a few months. Dickens was soon engaged  as the Morning Chronicle’s theatre reviewer,  

and the increasingly busy schedule often made  him ill. Nevertheless, he had enough time to  

put together a collection of his sketches  after meeting the historical fiction writer  

Harrison Ainsworth, who encouraged him to get  in touch with the publisher John Macrone and the  

illustrator George Cruikshank. In October, he  was given access to Newgate Prison, giving him  

material for his sketch A Visit to Newgate, where  he described the imagined dreams of a prisoner in  

his cell awaiting hanging the following morning.  Two volumes of sketches were duly published  

in February and August 1836 under the title  Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-day Life,  

and Every-day People. They were well received,  and in his review for the Evening Chronicle  

George Hogarth praised the author as “a close  and acute observer of character and manners.”  

Within a month of the publication of the first  volume of his sketches, Dickens was approached  

by William Hall of Chapman & Hall, with whom he  agreed to write monthly sketches illustrated by  

the young artist Robert Seymour at a rate of  £14 each. He soon got to work writing about  

the adventures of Mr Pickwick, a jovial retired  businessman. By the time he married Catherine  

Hogarth on the 2nd of April, two instalments  of what became The Pickwick Papers were already  

in print, and he continued to write the third  while on their honeymoon in Kent. Dickens did  

not entirely neglect his new wife, and Catherine  was soon pregnant with the first of their ten  

children, three girls and seven boys. Worryingly,  The Pickwick Papers were not selling well and for  

the fourth instalment in June, Dickens introduced  the cockney Sam Weller as Pickwick’s servant,  

leading to a sharp increase in its popularity,  enjoyed by both rich and poor. Thereafter  

Dickens’s popularity as a writer increased and  he received more and more commissions to produce  

novels, articles for monthly magazines like  Bentley’s Miscellany and to write comic operas.  

Then, in February 1837, he began writing his novel  Oliver Twist, which was serialised in Bentley’s  

Miscellany across twenty-four issues. For the  next ten months, aside from commissioning other  

writers for the Miscellany, Dickens had to divide  his time between the comedy of Pickwick and the  

realist portrayal of the grim existence of English  child labourers in Oliver Twist.  

Around this time Dickens and his family moved to a  large three-storey house at No. 48, Doughty Street  

near King’s Cross in London, now the Charles  Dickens Museum. Catherine’s seventeen-year-old  

sister Mary Hogarth moved in to help with the  household chores. Dickens was particularly fond of  

his sister-in-law and had her read his drafts of  Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. One night, after  

the three visited the theatre in the evening,  Mary suddenly collapsed in her room. Despite the  

intervention of doctors, she died at around three  o’clock the following afternoon in Dickens’s arms.  

The tragedy left Charles bereft and unable  to work, forcing him to inform his publishers  

that he had to postpone the next instalments of  Pickwick and Oliver. While grieving his loss,  

Dickens developed a close friendship with  the literary critic John Forster. In addition  

to providing Dickens with companionship  during Catherine’s frequent pregnancies,  

Forster gave the author advice on his drafts  and helped him manage his relationship with his  

publishers, securing terms for the copyright  on Dickens’s novels to revert to the author  

after three years. While some of Dickens’s  publishers resented these renegotiations,  

Chapman & Hall kept Dickens happy by paying him  bonuses on the back of Pickwick’s success.  

Forster soon introduced Dickens to his  friends, including the actor William Macready,  

the young writer William Makepeace  Thackeray and the artist Daniel Maclise,  

expanding Dicken’s literary circle. In June 1837,  the elderly King William IV died childless and  

was succeeded by his eighteen-year-old niece,  Queen Victoria. Dickens would soon become the  

leading writer of the Victorian Age in Britain  and is synonymous with Victorian culture today.  

After renegotiating the terms of his contract  with Bentley with Forster’s assistance,  

Dickens agreed to edit the memoirs of the late  Joseph Grimaldi, the comic actor who popularised  

the clown and served as an early inspiration to  Dickens as a child. After finishing Pickwick,  

Dickens signed an agreement in November  with Chapman & Hall for Nicholas Nickleby,  

a novel following the adventures of the  title character as he seeks to make a living  

for his family, satirising the draconian  conditions of a Yorkshire boarding school,  

where Nicholas ends up beating up the sadistic  headmaster Mr Squeers. Nickleby was another  

success and was being adapted for the stage before  the final instalments were even published.  

In the late 1830s, as the serialised publication  of it was coming to an end, Dickens agreed to  

prepare Oliver Twist for publication in book form.  One of the most influential novels of the age,  

Oliver Twist is a dark satire of the Victorian  workhouse, where the orphaned Oliver is lured  

into the criminal underworld as a pickpocket by  Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger. In his quest  

to escape from the clutches of the criminal  mastermind Fagin, Oliver is aided by Nancy,  

a prostitute and lover of the burglar Bill  Sikes. While the Artful Dodger is arrested  

and deported to Australia, he mocks the court at  his trial and leaves with a smile on his face.  

Sikes fears Nancy has betrayed him and murders  her, shortly before accidentally hanging himself  

while escaping from a mob, while Fagin is arrested  and executed by hanging. The book was published  

by Bentley and sold well, with Queen Victoria  finding it, quote, “excessively interesting.”  

In March 1839, Dickens bought a cottage near  Exeter for his parents in order to keep his father  

away from London. Dickens himself liked to be away  from London, spending four months in the quaint  

village of Petersham west of London before moving  his family to Broadstairs in Kent in September,  

in large part because being away from the smog and  fumes of industrial London was beneficial for his  

perennially poor health and respiratory problem.  Around this time, he finished Nicholas Nickleby,  

which was published in October 1839. Meanwhile,  Catherine gave birth to a daughter named Kate,  

prompting the family to move to larger premises in  London at No. 1 Devonshire Terrace near Regent’s  

Park, where they would live on and off for the  next decade. Here Dickens hoped to take a break  

from writing novels and conceived of a magazine  of assorted short stories by himself and others.  

Although the first issue in April 1840 sold 70,000  copies, the readership soon dropped off, and he  

decided he needed to give his readers another  serialised novel, this one entitled The Old  

Curiosity Shop. The story focuses on the plight  of a thirteen-year-old orphan named Nell Trent,  

whose grandfather attempts to provide for her  by gambling, only to lose what money he had,  

leaving him heavily indebted to the villainous  hunchback Daniel Quilp. Nell manages to take  

her grandfather to safety in a remote Midlands  village but dies of exhaustion shortly after  

their arrival. Immediately thereafter, Dickens who  was a workaholic who produced an enormous body of  

work in the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s and 1860s, decided  to continue work on Barnaby Rudge. An historical  

novel set during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of  1780, it is one of Dickens’s less popular novels,  

and critics recognised it wasn’t his best  work. Dickens also realised he needed a  

break and took a year’s sabbatical, one of  his few sustained breaks during his life.  

After celebrating Christmas with their family,  Charles and his wife left their four children  

behind in London with governesses and set off for  a tour of the United States in January 1842, where  

Dickens had acquired a minor celebrity status by  the early 1840s. The couple arrived in Boston,  

where Dickens met with the poet Henry Wadsworth  Longfellow and was shown round the city by the  

young Senator Charles Sumner, an anti-slavery  champion in Congress. News of the couple’s arrival  

on American shores inspired a mob of American  fans demanding their attention. After journeying  

through New England, Dickens arrived in New York  on the 13th of February 1842, and the following  

evening New Yorkers held a magnificent ball in  his honour attended by 3,000 guests. On the 18th,  

Dickens met the writer Washington Irving and  persuaded him to organise a petition to Congress  

signed by twenty-five American writers on the  issue of copyright in American publishing, an  

issue which Dickens was concerned with, believing  he was not being properly remunerated for the  

publication of his work in America. After befriending Edgar Allen Poe in Philadelphia,  

Dickens travelled on to Washington, where he  met President John Tyler, whom he regarded as  

gentlemanly but uninteresting. He was equally  unimpressed by Congress but wrote to Sumner  

praising the qualities of Kentucky Senator Henry  Clay, who was among the few legislators to support  

him on the copyright issue. After proceeding  to Richmond, Virginia, where he witnessed the  

inhumanity of slave-owning society, he decided  to turn back to the capital and head west to St  

Louis, stopping by at Pittsburgh, Cincinnati,  and Louisville on the way. After returning  

to Cincinnati they headed north to Buffalo and  Niagara Falls en route for Canada, where Dickens  

visited Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec. After a  few days in New York, they left America on the  

7th of June and arrived back in England by the end  of the month. Dickens spent the summer writing up  

his American experiences and published American  Notes for General Circulation later that year.  

Although it sold well in America, the author’s  opposition to slavery and other criticisms of  

American manners contributed to a decline in his  popularity in some sections of society there.  

Dickens’s contempt for the United States was  channelled into his next novel, Martin Chuzzlewit,  

which he began writing for Chapman & Hall in  January 1843. While the novel included a couple  

of great villains, notably the title character’s  uncle, Jonas Chuzzlewit, and his cousin Seth  

Pecksniff, a fraudulent architect, Chuzzlewit  was something of a flop, selling around 20,000  

copies compared to a peak of 100,000 for The Old  Curiosity Shop. Dickens was hurt when Chapman  

& Hall suggested reducing his payments and asked  Forster to look for another publisher. Around this  

time, Dickens began a philanthropic partnership  with his friend Angela Burdett Coutts, inheritor  

of Coutts Bank, supporting Ragged Schools for  poor children. While Dickens was considering  

another lengthy break, this time on the European  continent, in October 1843 he conceived of a plan  

to write a short book for Christmas. Published  on the 19th of December, A Christmas Carol was  

the first and best-known of Dickens’s Christmas  stories, describing the ghostly apparitions which  

appear to the miserly Ebeneezer Scrooge and  eventually force him to embrace the Christmas  

spirit of charity and goodwill. It is one  of Dickens’s best-loved novels today.  

Although A Christmas Carol sold well and is  now understood to have actually influenced many  

modern, western Christmas traditions, such was  its popularity, the expense of producing the book  

with expensive paper and coloured illustrations  meant that it did not solve Dickens’s financial  

woes. After the final instalment of Chuzzlewit was  published in June 1844, Dickens broke away from  

Chapman & Hall and signed an agreement with  Bradbury & Evans, who paid him £2,000 for a  

quarter share of everything he wrote for the next  eight years. This allowed him to take his whole  

family to Italy, arriving in Genoa in mid-July  after travelling through France. After moving into  

the magnificent Palazzo Peschiere in September,  Dickens worked on his second Christmas tale,  

The Chimes, another attack on the political and  social establishment’s treatment of the poor.  

He made a brief trip to London in late November  and early December to read the story to his  

friends before returning to Genoa in time for  Christmas. Dickens travelled throughout Italy  

in 1845 and compiled his recollections in  Pictures from Italy, a series of essays  

including a vivid account of Venice, detailed  descriptions of Easter festivities in Rome,  

and an account of his ascent to the edge of the  crater of Mount Vesuvius through snow and ice.  

After returning to London in July, Dickens,  Forster, and a group of friends worked to put  

on a play, putting on a public performance  of Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour on  

the 20th of September, and a couple more  private charity performances in November.  

Dickens had an opportunity to pursue his ambitions  of being an actor and continued to put on such  

performances for the next twelve years. Though  they were well-attended and received praise from  

members of the acting profession, it seems the  audience was motivated by curiosity to see the  

famous author on stage, rather than attending for  the sake of seeing the play as a whole. During the  

summer, Bradbury & Evans informed Dickens of  a project to set up a new Liberal newspaper,  

the Daily News, and Dickens agreed to edit it  for £2,000 a year. He hired the social reformer  

Douglas Jerrold to write political pieces,  sent his uncle John Barrow to report on the  

Anglo-Sikh War in the Punjab, and engaged his  father-in-law George Hogarth as music critic.  

Rather surprisingly, he turned to his father to  manage the reporters, and, even more surprisingly,  

John Dickens did a good job. The Daily News  launched on the 21st of January 1846. The key  

political issue of the day was the debate over  the Corn Laws, which placed duties on imported  

corn to protect farmers at the expense of higher  prices for the people. Soon the Conservative  

Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel declared that  he was in favour of repealing the Corn Laws,  

a decision that would split his party. Dickens took his family to Switzerland in June  

1846, before relocating to Paris in the late  autumn. Spending the Christmas and New Year  

season here, he met such literary luminaries as  Alexandre Dumas, François-René de Chateaubriand,  

and Victor Hugo in the French capital. During  this time Dickens began work on Dombey and Son.  

The story revolves around Paul Dombey, the owner  of a shipping firm who desperately seeks a son  

and heir for his business. Having already given  him a six-year-old daughter, Florence, Dombey’s  

wife dies after giving birth to a son, also  named Paul. The elder Dombey neglects Florence,  

who is comforted by the kindly Polly Toodle, the  baby’s wet-nurse. When Polly is dismissed after  

allowing Florence to get lost in Camden Town,  little Paul gets sick and is taken with his sister  

to the autocratic Mrs Pipchin in Brighton. Paul is  then sent to a draconian school where his health  

continues to deteriorate, eventually leading to  his death. Dombey further neglects Florence and  

marries for a second time to Edith, who later runs  off. Florence marries Dombey’s employee Walter,  

who eventually manages to arrange a reconciliation  between father and daughter before Dombey’s death.  

Though contemporaries were critical of the  quality of the second half of the novel,  

completed in April 1848, Dombey and  Son has been praised as a critique of  

the social problems of the day and was one of  Dickens’s best-selling novels.  

Dickens had moved back to London by March  1847. In the year that followed his social  

conscience was on display as he set up a  shelter for homeless women after acquiring  

Urania Cottage in Shepherd’s Bush. Dickens  would manage the shelter for the next decade.  

Women who came here were clothed, fed,  and taught to read and write. In 1848,  

after Forster published a biography of the  eighteenth-century writer Oliver Goldsmith,  

Dickens asked his friend to be his biographer  and began sharing more details of his early life.  

The year saw a wave of liberal revolutions  spread throughout Europe, overthrowing King  

Louis-Philippe in France and destabilising  the monarchies in Prussia, Austria, and the  

Italian principalities. Dickens was tempted by an  invitation to stand as a radical Liberal Member of  

Parliament in London, but decided against it when  he realised he would not have time to write.  

The following year Dickens began work on  what would be one of his most iconic novels,  

David Copperfield, a semi-autobiographical work  describing a young boy separated from his mother  

and punished by his stepfather. The story is  told from David’s first-person perspective,  

allowing Dickens to describe David’s evolution as  he develops an infatuation with James Steerforth,  

an older boy at his boarding school. Dickens  channels his parents in the characters of Mrs  

and Mr Micawber, David’s kindly landlord who is  prone to getting himself into financial trouble  

and is sent to debtors’ prison, much as Charles’s  father had. After Micawber’s imprisonment David  

lodges with Mr Wickfield and his daughter  Agnes, who falls in love with David while  

seeking to escape the attentions of Wickfield’s  villainous clerk, Uriah Heep. David then falls  

in love with the pretty Dora Spenlow, inspired  by his youthful courtship of Maria Beadnell,  

but she then dies and David marries Agnes. David Copperfield was serialised by  

Bradbury & Evans between May 1849 and November  1850 and became Dickens’s best-known novel,  

as well as his personal favourite. By that time,  Dickens was in his late thirties, a successful  

and at last financially secure writer who had  already written such masterpieces as Oliver Twist,  

The Old Curiosity Shop, and A Christmas Carol.  He was associated with the social reform movement  

and had established a refuge for fallen women,  and at home he was the father of eight children,  

the eldest of which, thirteen-year-old Charles,  was due to start at Eton in January 1850. In  

March 1850, Dickens launched a new periodical,  Household Words, aimed at social improvement.  

Though the articles were to be published  anonymously, the writer Elizabeth Gaskell became  

a frequent contributor, while Dickens himself  wrote articles about public health, education,  

and housing. In the meantime, his expanding social  circle included Lord John Russell, Liberal Prime  

Minister between 1846 and 1852, who became one  of the few politicians Dickens admired. In 1851,  

Dickens befriended the young Wilkie Collins, who  would later become a collaborator.  

On the 31st of March 1851, John Dickens died at  the age of sixty-five, a loss that his son mourned  

deeply, despite his father’s wayward finances  and the troubles it had caused the family over  

many years. There was further anguish when a  fortnight later, Dickens’s daughter Dora died  

suddenly at nine months old. The family tragedies  prevented him from working on another novel,  

though he did have time to write A Child’s History  of England, covering the history of England from  

ancient times to the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  In December 1851, he began work on Bleak House,  

a satire on the legal profession, which Dickens  had come to detest. The plot revolves around a  

legal case, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, which runs for  decades with multiple claimants contesting a will  

which only ends when the entire estate has been  absorbed by legal costs, rendering any further  

litigation pointless. Although the novel was  poorly received by critics, Dickens managed to  

sell around 40,000 copies every month from March  1852 to September 1853, and in all Dickens made  

£11,000 from the book. He followed up with Hard  Times, an unusually short novel by Dickens’s  

standards, published between April and August  1854 in twenty weekly instalments of Household  

Words in an effort to boost circulation of the  periodical. Set in Coketown, a fictional northern  

mill town based on Preston in Lancashire, the  novel critiques industrialisation while also  

channelling Dickens’s message that education is  not best provided through formulaic cramming of  

facts, but through humour and entertainment.  While the strict class teacher Mr Gradgrind’s  

draconian ways cause his own children to rebel  against him, the story’s heroine Cecilia Jupe,  

a circus girl, serves to remind Gradgrind  that life is about creativity and amusement.  

Although Catherine had given birth to a tenth  child and seventh son named Edward in March 1852,  

Dickens’s relationship with his wife deteriorated  over the course of the decade. Dickens had  

confided to his friends his fears that he  and his wife had incompatible personalities.  

While he seemed to appreciate the stability and  domesticity that Catherine brought to the family,  

Dickens enjoyed being outdoors on long walks  and adventures with his male friends while  

Catherine preferred to stay at home. As a famous  author, Dickens had no shortage of female admirers  

and he was not unaccustomed to flirting with  them, which inspired jealousy in his wife.  

In September, Dickens took his family to  Boulogne in France, where they witnessed  

the French preparations for the Crimean War,  prompted by the British and French desire to  

curb Russian ambitions in the Balkans in  southeast Europe and the Black Sea. While  

Dickens had generally refrained from commenting on  international affairs, reports of bungled military  

leadership and poorly-equipped soldiers prompted  him to write articles criticising the government  

in Household Words. He was also inspired to  write a novel mocking the government under the  

title “Nobody’s Fault,” but by September 1855 he  decided to change it to Little Dorrit, the first  

instalment of which appeared in December. The  title character, twenty-two-year-old Amy Dorrit,  

is the youngest daughter of William Dorrit, a  debt prisoner at Marshalsea, and has spent her  

whole life in the prison. Amy is devoted to her  father and does everything she could to help him  

financially, a situation that Dickens himself  was familiar with. Much of the story focuses on  

Amy’s relationship with the businessman Arthur  Clennam, a sentimental middle-aged man, before  

William Dorrit comes into a large inheritance  and pays his way out of prison. Thereafter the  

key theme is how the Dorrits respond to  their changed financial situation.  

While writing Little Dorrit, Dickens had been  searching for a house in Kent. He saw that the  

mansion at Gad’s Hill was for sale and found that  it was owned by the writer Eliza Lynn Linton,  

a contributor to Household Words, and by March  1856, Dickens bought the house for £1,700,  

though it would be more than a year until he  moved in. The previous October, he had gone with  

his sister-in-law Georgina to find an apartment  in Paris on the Champs-Elysées, and during his  

stay in Paris he negotiated an agreement with the  publishing firm Hachette to produce a collection  

of all his novels translated into French. While  spending increasing amounts of his time in France,  

in the latter half of 1856, Dickens occupied  himself with staging a production of a play at  

Tavistock House to mark his eldest son Charles’s  twentieth birthday in January 1857. The spectacle  

was to be The Frozen Deep, a tragedy by his friend  Wilkie Collins inspired by Sir John Franklin’s  

doomed expedition to discover the fabled Northwest  Passage in North America in 1845. The show was  

staged on four occasions to packed audiences and  it was revived in July for a performance in front  

of Queen Victoria. In late August, Dickens agreed  to stage it in Manchester to raise money for the  

family of his late friend Douglas Jerrold.  Among the players on stage were the veteran  

actress Frances Ternan and her two daughters  Maria and Ellen, also known as Nelly.  

Dickens’s meeting with the Ternans proved a major  turning point in his life. He desired to make the  

eighteen-year-old Ellen his mistress and began  sleeping separately from his wife at Tavistock  

House. The emotional turmoil hindered his ability  to write, and Dickens began holding paid readings  

of his work, which were well-attended. By the  middle of 1858 he and Catherine had effectively  

separated, and the latter was obliged to move in  with her elderly parents. While his eldest son  

Charles sided with his mother, Georgina Hogarth  remained loyal to Dickens and distanced herself  

from her family. Rumours consequently abounded  that Dickens was not only having an affair with  

a young actress, but also his sister-in-law. In an effort to justify himself, Dickens wrote  

a letter published in the New York Tribune on the  16th of August 1858 and soon reprinted in English  

papers, in which he claimed that Catherine was  mentally ill, that the marriage had been unhappy  

for many years, and it was only Georgina that  prevented an earlier separation. At the same time,  

he denied having an affair with Nelly Ternan  without naming her, though he continued to  

act as a benefactor for her family. Thackeray  and Elizabeth Gaskell were among the friends  

who criticised Dickens for sharing details of his  private life. With his social circle divided and  

old friends deserting him, Dickens sought relief  from his adoring audiences at public readings,  

and in August 1858 he embarked a tour of  Scotland and Ireland to give eighty-five  

readings. When Bradbury & Evans refused  to print a personal statement from Dickens  

about his marriage in Punch magazine, Dickens  instructed Forster to wind down the relationship,  

leading to the closure of Household Words at  the end of May 1859. Dickens decided to launch  

a new magazine himself which he hoped to call  Household Harmony, but Forster cautioned that  

it may draw attention to the disharmony in  Dickens’s own household, and the periodical  

was instead called All the Year Round. Dickens continued to provide financial  

support to the Ternans and paid for Ellen and her  sisters Fanny and Maria to move into a large house  

at Houghton Place near Mornington Crescent in  March 1859. Dickens was hard at work managing the  

launch of All the Year Round, the first edition  of which appeared on the 30th of April 1859.  

This first edition included the initial instalment  of Dickens’s latest novel entitled A Tale of Two  

Cities. It would become his most popular novel  yet. Set in London and Paris, the novel follows  

three French families in the late eighteenth  century as the country descends into the French  

Revolution of 1789. The famous opening lines “It  was the best of times, it was the worst of times,  

it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of  foolishness” introduced the contrast between the  

glamorous lives of the aristocracy and the poverty  of the lower classes before the Revolution.  

Dickens’s usual themes of crime, cruelty,  injustice, and deceit are found throughout the  

novel, which ends with the climactic execution  at the guillotine of the English lawyer Sydney  

Carton, who nobly sacrifices himself by taking the  place of his French love rival, proclaiming that,  

quote, “It is a far, far better thing that I do,  than I have ever done; it is a far, far better  

rest that I go to than I have ever known.” A Tale of Two Cities ran weekly between April  

and November 1859. Thereafter, in 1860, the  forty-eight-year-old Dickens entered the  

final decade of his life, much of which was spent  giving readings and writing journalistic articles  

for his periodical. In October 1860 he started  work on another of his most canonical novels,  

Great Expectations. The story is narrated  by Pip, a young orphan who grows up with  

his bad-tempered adult sister and her husband  Joe. A few years later, Pip is taken to the  

eccentric Miss Havisham, who has allowed her fine  house to decay and continues to wear her wedding  

dress after being jilted at the altar many, many  years earlier. Pip falls in love with her adopted  

daughter Estella, who responds coldly. Pip’s  fortunes are transformed when a lawyer informs  

him that an anonymous benefactor has given him a  large sum of money, following which Pip goes to  

London to train as a lawyer. There he confides to  a friend, Herbert Pocket, that he wishes to marry  

Estella. Pip later learns that his mysterious  benefactor was not Miss Havisham as he had been  

led to believe, but Abel Magwitch, a convict he  encountered as a child who had made a fortune  

after being transported to Australia, a revelation  that leads Pip to stop taking Magwitch’s money.  

Pip sees Miss Havisham and Estella and declares  his love, only for the latter to inform him that  

she is planning to marry someone else. In a  further meeting with Miss Havisham, the latter  

tells Pip her life history and how she raised  Estella to take advantage of men, but as Pip  

is taking his leave her dress catches on fire and  he is unable to save her. Pip eventually realises  

that Estella is the daughter of Magwitch, who  has been fatally injured during a botched attempt  

to slip back to Australia. Pip joins Herbert  Pocket at a ship-broking firm in Egypt before  

returning to England where he meets Estella.  The ending is left deliberately ambiguous,  

with the reader left wondering what will come  of Pip and Estella’s relationship.  

Dickens had been suffering from ill health  as he wrote these two great novels. His  

love for Ellen remained unconsummated,  prompting him to seek alternative remedies,  

and his letters to his doctor suggested that  he was being afflicted by venereal disease,  

and he also faced a painful bout of rheumatism in  the latter half of 1860 during a particularly cold  

winter. He continued to be estranged from many  of his friends, though he retained the unwavering  

loyalty of Forster. As if to rid the ghosts of  his past, in September 1860 he burned thousands  

of the letters he had received over the years in a  bonfire at Gad’s Hill without consulting Forster,  

his appointed biographer. Although he was no  longer managing the women’s refuge he had set up  

years earlier, Dickens was financially supporting  the households of three women, his elderly mother,  

his estranged wife, and the Ternans at Houghton  Place. In 1862, the Russian novelist Fyodor  

Dostoevsky met Dickens at the offices of his  magazine at Wellington Street in Covent Garden.  

Dostoevsky recalled that Dickens told him that  his characters were based on two parts of his  

personality, and while he aspired to follow the  example of his good and virtuous characters,  

he more frequently behaved  as one of his villains.  

Whatever Dickens’s own moral failings might  have been, he continued to give readings  

around the country to large audiences,  boasting to Forster that he was earning  

up to £190 a night in London. Dickens had  been considering a second visit to America,  

but with the outbreak of the American Civil War  in April 1861 he set aside the idea. He continued  

to visit the theatre and spared no effort in  promoting the Ternan sisters, Fanny and Maria,  

though Ellen herself had stopped performing. For  the next few years Dickens was often in France,  

crossing the Channel on almost seventy occasions  between 1862 and 1865. The journalist Claire  

Tomalin, who has written biographies of both  Dickens and Ellen, argues that the relationship  

had been consummated and Dickens set Ellen  up in Paris to hide her pregnancy. Though  

Nelly later destroyed all her correspondence  with Dickens, there is circumstantial evidence  

suggesting that she gave birth to a son in  early 1863 who died in the spring of 1865.  

Death seemed to stalk Dickens, as his mother and  mother-in-law died within weeks of each other in  

1863. In February 1864, he learned of the death  of his second son Walter, who had been serving  

with the Indian Army since 1857. Dickens did  no readings for the year, preferring to work  

on his latest novel, Our Mutual Friend, a satire  on the importance of money in London in the 1860s,  

published by his old publishers Chapman & Hall in  nineteen instalments between May 1864 and November  

1865. On the 9th of June 1865, while Dickens  was returning from Paris to England with Ellen,  

their train derailed at a railway bridge  under repair near Staplehurst in Kent,  

with the leading carriages crashing into the river  below. While their first-class carriage remained  

on the track, Dickens was badly shaken and helped  the injured and dying victims before returning to  

the carriage to retrieve the manuscript of the  latest instalment of Our Mutual Friend.  

Although Our Mutual Friend was not as popular  as many of his previous novels, with the final  

instalment selling fewer than 20,000 copies,  it attracted advertisers and allowed the author  

to share a modest profit with his publishers.  Dickens continued to spend time with the Ternans  

and put up Nelly in a cottage in Slough, renting  another nearby for himself under the name Charles  

Tringham. In July 1866 he agreed to publish Fanny  Ternan’s debut novel Aunt Margaret’s Trouble,  

shortly before her marriage to Thomas Trollope,  the brother of the author Anthony Trollope.  

The same year, Dickens resumed his reading  tours which were organised by George Dolby, an  

unemployed theatre manager who soon became a close  friend. A three-month tour of northern England and  

Scotland in the spring of 1866 was followed by  a trip to Ireland and Wales at the beginning of  

the following year, but the most ambitious item  on the agenda was a return to the United States.  

Despite his increasingly poor health, these  reading tours enabled Dickens to make good money  

to support his large number of dependents. Though  Nelly hoped to accompany Dickens to America,  

it was impossible to find a respectable  explanation for her presence, and instead  

she went with her mother to Italy to join her  sister Fanny and her husband in Florence.  

In early November 1867, Dickens left  Liverpool and arrived in Boston ten days  

later on the 19th. After meeting old friends  including Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson,  

the readings began on the 2nd of December,  attracting lines of people stretching for  

miles hoping to watch the great author perform,  failing to be kept away even by the snowstorms  

which struck New York that winter. The cold  weather caused Dickens to suffer from one of his  

habitual colds which he struggled to expel, and  he and Dolby decided to cut down the itinerary,  

which originally extended west to Chicago and  north to Canada. On his fifty-sixth birthday,  

on the 7th of February 1868, he met President  Andrew Johnson in Washington but did not leave  

behind any account of their conversation. In a  speech to the New York press on the 18th of April,  

he told the audience that he was impressed by the  transformation in the country since his previous  

visit a quarter-century earlier. Then, after  making £20,000 from the tour, Dickens embarked on  

the return crossing on the 23rd of April, arriving  in Liverpool on the 1st of May. He may have spent  

a week in Slough with Nelly, who returned  from Italy a week earlier, before a homecoming  

party at Gad’s Hill on the 9th of May. Dickens had been suffering from gout in America,  

and by the time he returned to England he and  Dolby decided to plan a farewell tour beginning in  

October 1868. He was contracted to do one hundred  readings and managed around thirty before the end  

of the year, including visits to Scotland and  Ireland. In January 1869, Dickens introduced a  

new routine dramatizing Nancy’s murder by Sikes  in Oliver Twist, and revelled in the fact that  

his audience was horrified by the performance.  The experience took a toll on Dickens’s own  

health and each performance of the scene left him  paralysed for several minutes before he recovered,  

and on the 18th of April he suffered a stroke in  Chester. Though he soldiered on, by the time he  

reached Preston on the 22nd he was advised by his  doctor to cancel the rest of the tour and taken  

back to London for further examination. Within a  few months he was well enough to take friends on  

walking tours in East London and Kent. In August  he started thinking about a new murder mystery  

novel, and in October he settled on the title The  Mystery of Edwin Drood, scheduled for publication  

in twelve instalments from March 1870. Although Dolby questioned whether his health would  

stand up to it, Dickens insisted on giving a final  series of twelve public readings in London to make  

up for the curtailed farewell tour. The readings  began on the 11th of January 1870. Despite his  

frail health Dickens continued to perform the  Sikes and Nancy scene, even though it took him  

more than ten minutes to recover from the ordeal.  After performing the scene for the last time on  

the 8th of March at his penultimate scheduled  appearance, Dickens went to Buckingham Palace to  

meet Queen Victoria on the 9th of March. The Queen  regretted that she had never heard Dickens read  

from his work, and Dickens told her that he did  not give private readings, but promised to give  

her a specially-bound set of his collected works.  On the 15th of March, he gave his final reading at  

St James’s Hall to an audience of 2,000 people,  with many more turned away at the door, reading  

from A Christmas Carol and Pickwick Papers.  As he left the stage for his final farewell,  

Dickens told his audience to expect the first  instalment of his new novel in two weeks. While he  

continued to work on The Mystery of Edwin Drood,  Dickens greatly lamented the death of his old  

friend Daniel Maclise on the 25th of April, and  gave a moving speech in his memory on the 30th of  

April at the Royal Academy. On the 25th of May he  left for Gad’s Hill, returning to London briefly  

on the 2nd of June, the day his son Charles  took over as editor of All the Year Round.  

On the evening of the 8th of June, Dickens  was feeling unwell at Gad’s Hill and Georgina  

recalled him speaking incoherently as he sought to  continue with his plans to have dinner and to go  

to London. In response to Georgina suggesting  that he lie down, Dickens responded, “Yes,  

on the ground” before collapsing on the dining  room floor. Doctors were summoned and placed him  

on a sofa before pronouncing that he had suffered  a brain haemorrhage and there was nothing more to  

be done. At around six in the evening of the 9th  of June 1870 Charles Dickens died at the age of  

fifty-eight. He was prematurely aged, photos  of him from the 1860s suggesting a man well  

into his sixties. His strenuous work schedule  and touring, poor respiratory health throughout  

his life and also a large alcohol intake over  many years had taken their toll. His final novel  

was left unfinished halfway through, leaving few  clues as to how he intended to finish it, although  

the remaining instalments were published up to  September 1870. A grave was dug for Dickens at  

Rochester Cathedral, but after a Times editorial  calling for the author to be buried at Westminster  

Abbey, Forster and Charles Dickens Jr received  permission from the Dean of the Abbey for him to  

be buried at the famous Poet’s Corner in a simple  ceremony on the 14th of June 1870.  

Charles Dickens is often considered the greatest  English novelist of the Victorian era. He had  

been born into poverty and his early experiences  enabled him to leave behind vivid descriptions of  

the precarious existence of England’s lower  classes in the nineteenth century. Although  

he had begun his career as a parliamentary  reporter and was a supporter of liberal causes,  

Dickens distrusted politicians in Parliament  and preferred to promote his political causes  

through his writing. Dickens was also heavily  involved in his own philanthropic initiatives,  

most notably in setting up and managing  a refuge for women found on the streets.  

However, like many great writers, including his  Russian contemporary and admirer, Leo Tolstoy,  

Dickens often failed to live up to the standard  of morality set by the characters in his novels.  

The author of the noble sentiments found in A Tale  of Two Cities and Great Expectations was also the  

man who callously separated from the mother of  his ten children after more than two decades of  

marriage and criticised her character in public  while pursuing a woman less than half his age.  

Despite the scandal around his personal life,  Dickens remained popular and successful as a  

writer and performer, appealing to a wide  readership that ranged from the urban poor  

to Queen Victoria. His novels, notably Oliver  Twist, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations,  

David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities,  are considered some of the greatest ever  

written in the English language. What do you think of Charles Dickens?  

Did he fail to live according to the values  that he hoped to encourage in others, or was  

he someone who understood the frequent struggles  between noble and base instincts that forms part  

of the human condition and was he successful in  conveying them through his writing, a quality  

that has enabled his novels to retain a sense of  timelessness despite their unfamiliar setting?  

Please let us know in the comment section and in  the meantime, thank you very much for watching.