“Oliver Twist”, ”Great Expectations” or “Our mutual friend” might sound familiar to some of you, these being some of the most famous works of the illustrious Charles Dickens. However, this article is not going to be another literary criticism of the Dickensian creations, but an in-depth analysis of the man behind the genius.
Charles Dickens, in full Charles John Huffam Dickens, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian era, spent a happy childhood in Chatham, an area to which he often reverted in his fiction. But then things started to get messy in the Dickens family because of their low social status, which forced them to move to Camden Town, a poor neighborhood in London. By then, the family’s financial situation had grown dire, as John Dickens, Charles’ father, had a dangerous habit, spending more than he had. This led to multiple unfortunate events, including John’s sentence to prison for debt when Charles was 12 years old.
Following his father’s imprisonment, Dickens was forced to leave school to work at a boot-blacking factory alongside the River Thames. Here, Dickens said goodbye to his youthful innocence and he started to feel abandoned and betrayed by the adults who were supposed to take care of him, a theme frequently found in his writings.
Much to his relief, Dickens was permitted to go back to school when his father received a family inheritance and used it to pay off his debts. But when Dickens was 15, his education was ripped from under him once again. In 1827, he had to drop out of school and work as an office boy to contribute to his family’s income. As it turned out, the job became a launching point for his writing career.
From here, Charles’ life enters a sunny road. Within a year of being hired. Dickens started freelance reporting at the law courts of London. Just a few years later, he was reporting for two major London newspapers. The rest is history, and by the year 1859, he had already become the great writer we know today.
As in any man's life, the love story of Dickens is a sparking one. Soon after his first book, Sketches by Boz was published, he married Catherine Hogarth and the shocking number of 10 children resulted from this marriage. By 1857, when Charles Dickens met the young actress Ellen Ternan, he had been one of England’s most famous men for the past two decades and a happily married man, but things are not going to stay the same. While he was casting actresses for one of his plays, Charles met Nelly, an 18-year-old actress. After that, things deteriorated quickly between Dickens and Catherine. They separated in May 1858, and Catherine moved out of both of the family’s houses. Dickens even used his paternal right to sole custody to cut off contact between her and their younger children.
As rumors flew that Dickens had left his wife for a younger woman, the novelist attempted some damage control, making determined efforts to hide Nelly’s growing importance in his life. In 1859, she moved into a London townhouse bought in her sisters’ names, presumably by Dickens. Nelly soon retired from acting and would remain largely isolated.
In 1863, Dickens experienced a year of tragedy, losing both his mother and his 22-year-old son Walter. His health by this time was beginning to fail, largely thanks to his insistence on overworking himself. He died of a stroke at his London home on 9 June 1870, at age 58, and his last words were: “Be natural my children. For the natural writer has fulfilled all the rules of art.”
Just before his death, Dickens had performed an emotional reading of “Oliver Twist. Friends believed that the strain of this reading brought on his stroke and killed him. We have no way of knowing all the secrets of Dickens's life, but we know this: up until the very end, he gave everything he had to his work.
Editor- Cesara Andronic
Comentarios