Portrait Of Charles Dickens is a painting by William Powell Frith
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Have you wondered how our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens, is holding up after all these years?
2020 marked the 150th year of his death. The celebrated Victorian novelist died on June 9, 1870 after suffering a brain aneurysm. He was 58, leaving his final novel, Edwin Drood unfinished.
The Dickens canon includes: 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles. Dickens also lectured and performed readings extensively (including the United States), while championing children's rights, education, penal reform, legal reform, sanitation, and public health.
As the conventions of society advance in the 21st century, some iconic historical figures once widely admired have fallen into disgrace to the point of having their memorials and statutes removed or destroyed for not clinging to 21st century progressive thinking in previous centuries.
In the United States, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and third U.S. President, Thomas Jefferson; along with the original liberal lion, Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, have been scorned for their ownership of slaves.
Across the Atlantic, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890-1896, Cecil Rhodes is despised for his imperialism and colonization; and may have paved the way for Apartheid in South Africa. In his will, he left sizeable fortunes to Oxford University to establish the Rhodes scholarships to provide places at Oxford for students from the United States, the British colonies, and Germany. Former president Bill Clinton, United States Ambassador Susan Rice, and U.S. Senator Cory Booker, among others, were recipients of Rhodes benevolence.
And in June of this year, the British Bulldog, Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square in London was sprayed over for a couple of days with the phrase “Churchill was a racist.” Many argue Churchill was unsympathetic to Blacks and their struggles for equality. He was also known to have expressed some grotesque racial epithets about not only Blacks, but people from India.
So, as one of the finest English novelists in British literature is being lionized and honored 150 years after his death, I wondered if there are any shocking occurrences of Dickens past that were swept under the rug and only recently have come to light?
Robert L. Patten, Professor (Emeritus) of Humanities and English at Rice University, observed that “Dickens could be vicious, breaking with friends, colleagues, and some of his children—he told one son that it would have been better if his brother had never lived.” “There were times,’’ Patten explained, “especially after the first Indian uprising and the massacre at Cawnpore, when he could be deeply, terribly racist. But his efforts, in periodicals as well as fictions, in speeches as well as philanthropy, to help the poor, the suffering, the abused, the uneducated, to better lives, was massive, sustained, and immensely influential.”
Carolyn Oulton, Director of the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers at Canterbury Christ Church University (Canterbury, Kent, England), said that “people feel disappointed by his [Dicken's] personal failings in ways that they wouldn't in relation to other writers. They also make excuses for him - the endless speculation about whether Ellen Ternan was really his mistress - in ways that would be unthinkable and possibly unnecessary with regard to his contemporaries.”
Dickens marriage to Catherine Hogarth (April, 1836) became irrevocably disrupted when Ellen Ternan, an 18-year-old actress, met Dickens in August, 1857, when he was 45. She eventually became the novelist’s mistress. Catherine and Charles had 10 children together; Catherine also suffered two miscarriages. At the urging of her mother, Catherine Hogarth left Dickens in 1858 as the two of them drifted apart and increasingly became incompatible. Their separation was highly publicized and splashed across British newspapers.
Oulton points out that Dickens was capable of cruelty, but also great loyalty. “He worked relentlessly to make money for relations who had very little claim on him but also cast people off easily if they offended him. He made some dreadful comments about women (most Victorians did), but he also showed them a lot of professional respect. “
In commemorating 150 years since Charles Dickens death, Professor Oulton has mapped the different places the English novelist travelled through London, including the places where he wrote certain novels, such as David Copperfield and Great Expectations.
One critical chapter of Dickens life that remains untarnished 150 years after his death, was his vigorous agitation for improvements in the quality of life for the poor and less fortunate.
He experienced poverty at a young age. His family’s financial plight forced them to move to a poor era of London, Camden Town. At age 12, with his father experiencing mounting debts, the young Dickens was plucked from school and forced to work at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, a factory which specialized in “blacking,’’ or shoe polish.
‘Please sir, may I have some more?’ James Mahoney’s illustration for chapter one of Dickens’s ‘Adventures of Oliver Twist.’ (Image: Public domain)
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As he progressed into adulthood and began his writing career, Dickens walked his talk.
The trials and tribulations of his impoverished childhood found its voice in many of his novels, including The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, and David Copperfield. Oliver Twist, Dickens second novel, is especially renowned for illustrating the harsh life and squalor of the slums of an orphan (Oliver Twist) trying to make his way through the mean streets of London.
Dickens additionally exposed the punishing brutality at an English boys’ school in Nicholas Nickleby (published in 1838). His father served time for debt at the Marshalesa Prison. The humiliation of a debtor’s prison found expression in Little Dorrit.
Remarkably, 150 years after his death, the legacy of Charles Dickens still lives on in the 21st century.
To underscore Dickens staying power in the 21st century, Robert L. Patten informed me that on the 200th anniversary of his birth, in 2012, “worldwide celebrations organized by the British Council and the Charles Dickens Museum reached an audience of over 60 million. More new copies of A Christmas Carol were sold that year in Italy than in the United Kingdom.”
Professor Patten has written extensively on Dickens, including authoring the books: "Charles Dickens and His Publishers," and "Charles Dickens and 'Boz': The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author."
George H. Ford, Professor of English at the University of Rochester, once wrote that “since the 1950s, Dickens reputation has risen to great heights, so high that recently there have been more written him each year than about any other author in the English language except Shakespeare.”
What’s more, in any movie database you’ll find at least fifty adaptations based on the books written by Charles Dickens.
Malcolm Andrews, Emeritus Professor of Victorian and Visual Studies in the School of English at the University of Kent (Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom), informs me that “the Dickens Fellowship (founded in 1902), to which I belong and whose journal I edit) has branches all over the world.” “Not surprising,’’ Andrew said, “since he himself was/is an inspiration for fellowship: so much of his work was a mission to bring people together, to dissolve class divisions, to reunite families (hence his special concentration on Christmas), and to rejuvenate people's imaginations. On the latter note, one of my favorite quotations of his is this -- about his hoped-for legacy:”
“'I hope I have done my part to make the rising generation "more childish," in rendering them a little more imaginative, a little more gentle, and a little less conceited and hard, than they would have been without me. I desire to do nothing better.”
As much as the literature of Dickens is still highly revered, Charlie Tyson PhD student in English at Harvard University, cautions, however, that Dickens novels have lost a little steam in college classrooms, mostly because his novels run so long, as many as 800 pages in some cases.
“Teachers,” Tyson tells me, “usually select Hard Times (well worth reading, but not Dickens's best) or Great Expectations. Last year I taught a seminar on "The Queer Bildungsroman" (a Bildungsroman is a coming-of-age novel) in which we read David Copperfield in full; my students loved it, but spending 25% of our semester on a single novel was something of a risk.”
Tyson additionally thinks writers like George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, among the Victorian novelists, packs more of a philosophical punch and exhibit more artistic control than Dickens. Still, Tyson contends Dickens “remains one of the best entry points into the classic phase of the English novel. He is especially good to read when you are a child, because he specializes in injustices and cruelties administered to children.”
Thankfully, Charles Dickens has held up reasonably well 150 years after his death. He’s still taught widely in college classrooms both in the United and Britain. His quotes from a Christmas Carol are still widely invoked around the holidays, especially “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.”
And his character flaws are largely dismissed as the antiquated spirit of the age in Victorian society.
Further, during a time when vast amounts of people are experiencing job losses, mounting debt, and financial hardship since COVID-19 ruthlessly struck the world, Dickens novels about suffering, stresses of the less fortunate, while attacking privilege, snobbery, and injustice--rings as true today as it did in the 19th century.
One of the most tender lines about Dickens and his legacy came from an 1870 New York Times obituary of the English writer and social critic.”
“It is the accidents of life which decide the fate of men. In the lonely places of the earth his books have been unfailing solace to many an exile, and they have shed hope and light in many a sick room, and comforted a many an afflicted heart.”
--Bill Lucey
November 15, 2020
