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Going Mad for Charles Dickens
Two centuries after his birth, the novelist is still wildly popular, as a theme park, a new movie and countless festivals attest
Dickens completed Great Expectations in 1861, when he was at the height of his powers. It’s a mystery story, a psychodrama and a tale of thwarted love. At its center looms the orphaned hero Pip, who escapes poverty thanks to an anonymousbenefactor, worships the beautiful, cold-hearted Estella and emerges, after a series of setbacks, disillusioned but mature. In the scene that Newell is shooting today, Pip arrives by carriage in the fetid heart of London, summoned from his home in the Kent countryside by a mysterious lawyer, Jaggers, who is about to take charge of his life. Newell leans over a monitor as his assistant directorcries, “Roll sound, please!” Pause. “And action.”
Dickens burst onto the London literary scene at age 23, and as the world celebrates his 200th birthday on February 7, “The Inimitable,” as he called himself, is still going strong. The writer who made the wickedness, squalor and corruption of London his own, and populated its teeming cityscape with rogues, waifs, fools and heroes whose verynames—Quilp, Heep, Pickwick, Podsnap, Gradgrind—seem to burst with quirky vitality, remains a towering presence in culture both high and low.
London, the city that inspired his greatest work,
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in a modest four-story house, now the museum. Dickens’ father, John, was a likable spendthrift who worked for the Naval Pay Office; his mother, born Elizabeth Barrow, was thedaughter of another naval employee, Charles Barrow, who fled to France in 1810 to escape prosecution for embezzling. The Dickens family was forced to move frequently to avoid debt collectors and, in 1824, was engulfed by the catastrophe that has entered Dickens lore: John was arrested for nonpayment of debts and jailed at Marshalsea prison in London. He would serve as the model for both thebenevolently feckless Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield and William Dorrit, the self-delusional “Father of the Marshalsea,” in the later novel Little Dorrit.
With his father incarcerated, Charles, a bright and industrious student, was forced to leave school at around age 11 and take a job gluing labels on bottles at a London bootblacking factory. “It was a terrible, terrible humiliation,” Tomalin told me,a trauma that would haunt Dickens for the rest of his life. After John Dickens was released from jail, the son resumed his education; neither parent ever mentioned the episode again. Although Charles immortalized a version of the experience in David Copperfield, he himself disclosed the interlude perhaps only to his wife, and later, to his closest friend, the literary critic and editor JohnForster. Four years after the novelist’s death, Forster revealed the incident in his Life of Charles Dickens.
At 15, with his father again insolvent, Dickens left school and found work as a solicitor’s clerk in London’s Holburn Court. He taught himself shorthand and was hired by his uncle, the editor of a weekly newspaper, to transcribe court proceedings and eventually, debates at the House of Commons,a difficult undertaking that undoubtedly sharpened his observational powers. Soon Dickens was working as a political reporter for the Morning Chronicle and writing fictional sketches for magazines and other publications under the pen name Boz. In November, Dickens quit the newspaper to become a full-time novelist. By then he had married Catherine Hogarth, the pleasant, if rather passive, daughterof a Morning Chronicle music critic.
In the spring of 1837, the newly famous, upwardly mobile Dickens moved into a four-story Georgian town house in the Bloomsbury neighborhood at 48 Doughty Street with his wife, their infant son, Charles Culliford Boz Dickens, and Catherine’s teenage sister, Mary Hogarth.The property since 1925 has been the site of the Charles Dickens Museum, stocked with...