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Unit 11: Charles Dickens—Great Expectations

As a young boy, Charles Dickens was exposed to many artistic and literary works that allowed Notes
his imagination to grow and develop considerably. He was greatly influenced by the stories
his nursemaid used to tell him and by his many visits to the theater. Additionally, Dickens
loved to read. Among his favorite works were Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Tom
Jones by Henry Fielding, and Arabian Nights, all of which were picaresque novels composed
of a series of loosely linked adventures. This format no doubt played a part in Dickens’ idea
to serialize his future works.
Dickens was able to leave the blacking factory after his father’s release from prison, and he
continued his education at the Wellington House Academy. Although he had little formal
schooling, Dickens was able to teach himself shorthand and launch a career as a journalist. At
the age of sixteen, Dickens got himself a job as a court reporter, and shortly thereafter he
joined the staff of A Mirror of Parliament, a newspaper that reported on the decisions of
Parliament. During this time Charles continued to read voraciously at the British Library, and
he experimented with acting and stage-managing amateur theatricals. His experience acting
would affect his work throughout his life—he was known to act out characters he was writing
in the mirror and then describe himself as the character in prose in his novels.
Fast becoming disillusioned with politics, Dickens developed an interest in social reform and
began contributing to the True Sun, a radical newspaper. Although his main avenue of work
would consist of writing novels, Dickens continued his journalistic work until the end of his
life, editing The Daily News, Household Words, and All the Year Round. His connections to
various magazines and newspapers as a political journalist gave him the opportunity to begin
publishing his own fiction at the beginning of his career.

Notes Charles Dickens would go on to write fifteen novels. A final one, The Mystery of
Edwin Drood, was left unfinished upon his death.

While he published several sketches in magazines, it was not until he serialized The Pickwick
Papers over 1836-37 that he experienced true success. A publishing phenomenon, The Pickwick
Papers was published in monthly installments and sold over forty thousand copies of each
issue. Dickens was the first person to make this serialization of novels profitable and was able
to expand his audience to include those who could not normally afford such literary works.
Within a few years, he was regarded as one of the most successful authors of his time, with
approximately one out of every ten people in Victorian England avidly reading and following
his writings. In 1836 Dickens also married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a fellow co-
worker at his newspaper. The couple had ten children before their separation in 1858.

Task Write an essay on the Biography of Charles Dickens.

Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby followed in monthly installments, and both reflected
Dickens’ understanding of the lower classes as well as his comic genius. In 1843, Dickens
published one of his most famous works, A Christmas Carol. His disenchantment with the
world’s economic drives is clear in this work; he blames much of society’s ills on people’s
obsession with earning money and acquiring status based on money.
His travels abroad in the 1840s, first to America and then through Europe, marked the beginning
of a new stage in Dickens’ life. His writings became longer and more serious. In David Copperfield
(1849-50), readers find the same flawed world that Dickens discovered as a young boy.

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