Charles Dickens

Dickens, Charles 

Born Feb. 7, 1812, in Landport, near Portsmouth; died June 9, 1870, in Gad’s Hill. English writer.

Charles Dickens was the son of a port official. As a boy, Dickens worked to support his family, because his father was financially ruined and confined to debtors’ prison. Later he became a parliamentary stenographer and newspaper reporter. Dickens’ first work, Sketches by Boz (1836), revealed his penchant for realistic satire and his life-loving humor and sentimental ardor, which stemmed from social compassion. The novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837) is a comic epic whose central figure is the magnanimous eccentric Mr. Pickwick, a naïve, touching benefactor of mankind.

Subsequently, Dickens began to write works in the style of critical realism. The novel The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1938) was written in response to the Poor Laws, which condemned unemployed and poor people to death by starvation in the workhouses. Dickens embodied his indignation at the intolerable conditions of existence of the masses in this story of a boy born in an almshouse and condemned to scrabble about the gloomy slums of London. At the end of the novel, however, the traditional moral scheme prevails, and a benefactor, a personification of the “good” capitalist, triumphs. The novel The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1839) emphasized descriptions of the terrifying methods of school upbringing for children and exposéd the power of “evil money.” However, at the end of the novel the fictitious, compromising social force of “good money” triumphs again. In Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), which was written after Dickens’ first visit to America, the basis of the plot is a critical description of not only American reality but also English bourgeois society, as personified by Pecksniff and the Chuzzlewits. Dickens was especially indignant over Negro slavery in the southern states.

With the passing years Dickens became convinced that the positive tendencies in contemporary society, which were manifested in the moral superiority of the poor over the rich, were concentrated only among the oppressed masses. A sentimental mood was expressed particularly in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and the Christmas books (1843-46), in which the author used the fairy tale as a foundation.

Two of Dickens’ novels that are popular with young readers mark the transition from his early works to a mature, realistic creative art. The central figure in Dombey and Son (1848) is a cruel property owner. David Copperfield (1850)—a Bildungsroman —traces the life of its hero, which is reminiscent of Dickens’ own.

The failures of the Chartist movement in Great Britain and the halfway results of the revolutions of 1848 on the Continent facilitated the revelation of the exploitative essence of the capitalist system. By this time Dickens had penetrated more deeply into bourgeois society and had perceived it as a uniform system of evil. He turned away from the novel of adventure that he had previously favored and made the transition to the novel of social problems. The action was no longer modeled on the biographical novel but consisted of a complex interweaving of several plot lines. An example of this structure is the novel Bleak House (1853), in which the action revolves around a court case that lasts for several years. Conceived as a satire on bourgeois legal procedures, Bleak House grew into a symbol of the senselessness of human existence when confronted with soulless paper laws that destroy normal human relations, as embodied in such characters as Jarndyce, Esther, and Ada.

In the novel Hard Times (1854) the place of action is the monstrous fictitious city of Coketown. Dickens created unsurpassed satirically grotesque figures of bourgeois businessmen, for whom “facts and figures” are the only realities. Although he did not show an understanding of the necessity for a revolutionary struggle by the workers, the author’s sympathies are consistently on the side of the oppressed. Little Dorrit (1857) depicts the gloomy debtors’ prison of Marshalsea, where Dickens’ father had been confined at one time. Another sphere of action in the novel centers on government institutions in bourgeois Britain, which Dickens satirically immortalized in the Circumlocution Office. Dickens gave a symbolically generalized description of the sinister legalities of the capitalist system, which transform the individual human being into a toy of hostile forces unknown to him.

Somewhat unique among Dickens’ mature works is the historical novel about the Great French Revolution A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Depicting the poverty and lack of rights of the masses, Dickens expressed great indignation at their oppressors and voiced the opinion that the revolution had been inevitable. Nevertheless, he condemned the harsh actions of the people from the viewpoint of the Christian ideal. Dickens’ last novels, Great Expectations (1861), Our Mutual Friend (1865), and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished, 1870), combine elements of the detective and criminal genres with profound treatment of social problems.

Dickens’ achieved worldwide fame immediately after the publication of his first few books. In Russia his works were very influential beginning in the 1840’s. The opinions of V. G. Belinskii, N. G. Chernyshevskii, A. N. Ostrovskii, I. A. Goncharov, V. G. Korolenko, L. N. Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoevsky, and M. Gorky concerning Dickens’ novels emphasized above all their remarkable humor, democratic sentiments, and humanism. Continuing these 19th-century tendencies, Soviet literary criticism has analyzed Dickens’ realistic manner, his satirical exposé of social conditions, and his sympathy for the common people.

WORKS

The Complete Works, vols. 1–30. London [1900].
Works, vols. 1–23. Bloomsbury, 1937–38.
The Letters, vols. 1–3. Bloomsbury, 1938.
In Russian translation:
Poln. sobr. soch., vols. 1–10. St. Petersburg, 1892–97.
Sobr. soch., vols. 1–35. St. Petersburg, 1896–99.
Sobr. soch., vols. 1–33. St. Petersburg [1905-09]
Poln. sobr. soch., books 1–49. St. Petersburg, 1909–10.
Sobr. soch., vols. 1–30. Moscow, 1957–63.

REFERENCES

Marx, K., and F. Engels. Ob iskusstve, vol. 1. Moscow, 1967. Pages 447, 487.
Alekseev, M. P. “Belinskii i Dikkens.” In the collection Venok Belinskomu. [Moscow] 1924.
Lunacharskii, A., and R. Shor. Dikkens. Moscow-Leningrad, 1931.
Ivasheva, V. V. Tvorchestvo Dikkensa. Moscow, 1954.
Nersesova, M. A. Tvorchestvo Ch. Dikkensa. Moscow, 1957.
Katarskii, I. M. Dikkens v Rossii. Moscow, 1966.
Sil’man T. Dikkens: Ocherki tvorchestva. Leningrad, 1970.
Charl’z Dikkens: Ukazatel’ vazhneishei literatury na russkom iazyke (1838-1945). Introduction by M. P. Alekseev. Leningrad, 1946.
Charl’z Dikkens: Bibliografiia russkikh perevodov i kriticheskoi literatury na russkom iazyke, 1838–1960. Compiled by Iu. V. Fridlender and I. M. Katarskii. Moscow, 1962.
Chesterton, G. K. Dikkens. Leningrad, 1929.
Forster, J. The Life of Charles Dickens, vols. 1–3. London, 1872–74.
Hay ward, A. L. The Dickens Encyclopaedia. London-New York, 1924.
Jackson, T. A. Charles Dickens: The Progress of a Radical. London, 1937.
Johnson, E. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, vols. 1–2. New York, 1952.
Engel, M. The Maturity of Dickens. Cambridge, Mass., 1959.
Dickens: Modern Judgments. Edited by A. E. Dyson. [London, 1968.]
Manning, S. B. Dickens as Satirist. New Haven-London, 1971.
Wilson, A. The World of Charles Dickens. London [1970].

T. I. SIL’MAN