Erik Visits a Non-American Grave, Part 2,002

This is the grave of Charles Dickens.

Lot to say here, so I will make this kind of general and people can work it out in comments.

Dickens was born in 1812 in Portsmouth, Hampshire, at a time of massive change in England. This was the era of the Industrial Revolution and the solidifying of class in that society and while Dickens certainly didn’t see through all of this in the ways of Marx and Engels, he spent his life addressing it in literature in ways that make him among the most important commenters of that time and place, even outside of his literary skills. Poverty was something that Dickens had personal understanding of. He didn’t start off that way. His father was a clerk in the Royal Navy Pay Office, a solidly middle class kind of job. Things were pretty great as a kid. He read a ton, saw circuses and theater, and lived the life of a smart kid. But then in 1822, things started to fall apart. Creditors hounded his father and finally in 1824, he was thrown into debtors’ prison. This forced the young Charles into the workforce, while his mother and younger siblings lived in the prison with his father. He got a job in a boot-blacking factory, which does not sound like good work to me.

Now, the debtors prison thing didn’t last long because Dickens’ grandmother died and left her son a bunch of money. But then his mother wanted him to remain in the bootblacking factory, thinking work was good for a kid in a family that was downwardly mobile. He never forgave his mother for this and in fact, it turned him into a misogynist who believed that women needed to submit to their husbands.

Finally, after three years, Dickens went back to school and back on a track of success. He worked as a clerk for law firms, then as a journalist, and he was starting to write. The man wrote obsessively. He submitted his first story in 1833 and it didn’t take long before he was publishing all over the place. Then in 1836 he published The Pickwick Papers in installments, which lasted for about 18 months and the British reading public salivating over what was next month’s installment. He understood the cliff hanger and this made him a sensation. As an obsessive workaholic, Dickens immediately transitioned from finishing Pickwick to writing Oliver Twist, also published as a serial between 1837 and 1839 before being condensed into a three-volume novel. This set up a lot of Dickens themes–an orphan, a workhouse, and a redemption narrative that didn’t exactly make everything OK but gave the reader a sense of an ending that left them wanting the next Dickens.

Dickens kept up the serialized publications for awhile longer, including Nicholas Nickelby and then some works seen as more minor such as The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge. Among his biggest fans was Queen Victoria, who read everything he wrote.

Dickens was no proto-communist, but he was angry about his past and about the conditions of the British working class. The man loathed the Tories deeply. He supported working class rights. He also saw the United States as a potential alternative and began visiting the country in 1842. He was enormously popular over here, much more than he thought he’d be and it kind of blew his mind. He became a cultural interpreter of the U.S. in England (which was read in the U.S. as well and no one could be more cranky about discussions of their nation than early 19th century Americans) and a major political commenter within the U.S. He could make a lot of money on speaking tours too, which didn’t hurt. He supported parliamentary reforms and considered running for Parliament himself as a Liberal, but chose not to. He often supported his friends though in their campaigns. He was a big Garibaldi guy. But he wasn’t perfect. He could be as much of an imperialist as any other Brit of his era, talking of his desire to exterminate the Indian race after the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

Workhouses, debtors’ prison, child labor, these were things Dickens hated. However, he trusted no one politically at all and saw Parliament as inherently corrupted. And he didn’t trust radical parties either, figuring they would also become corrupted. So it was hard for him to take too much concrete action and he figured his fiction was more powerful politically than any actual political action. He was probably right about that too. On women’s rights though, he was always pretty bad. Hardly uncommon for a man of his age, even reformers, as we can see with the widespread dismissal of women’s suffrage among American reformer men (and more than a few women; Mother Jones always had contempt for women’s suffrage).

Dickens returned home in 1843 and immediately wrote A Christmas Carol and then followed it with a series of other Christmas themed pieces. Martin Chuzzlewit came next and this is a good time to remind ourselves of the delightful ridiculousness of Dickens-named characters. He began spending a lot of time in France in these years and his writing slowed down a little bit, but he was still super productive. He started writing David Copperfield in 1849 and there was little editing in the Dickens world so that began to appear shortly after and went into the next year. Bleak House came in 1852-53. Then there was Hard Times in 1854, which was my first introduction to Dickens, back in college.

Then came A Tale of Two Cities in 1859 and Great Expectations in 1861. Now that I think of it, I think I had to read an excerpt of the latter in high school, but let’s be clear, I did not go to a high school where reading was something that happened much in English classes; even in our utterly worthless AP classes, there were spelling quizzes and basically no one took the exam. It wasn’t until college that I understood what reading really meant.

What Dickens did not have was a particularly long life. His health began getting bad by the early 1860s. He did a second big tour of the U.S. just after the Civil War and was seen as a hero, which he loved. But he was struggling even to eat solid food by the end of the tour. He knew he didn’t have long to go, so he did a big last farewell tour of public readings in 1868 and 1869, but he couldn’t make it through the whole thing. He wanted to keep writing and started a book titled The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He did not finish it. He did a few last readings in 1870, appeared with the Prince and Princess of Wales at a banquet, and had a stroke in June 1870. It wasn’t his first stroke either. He died a day later, at the age of 58.

Charles Dickens is buried in Westminster Abbey, London, England.

There’s a ton more to say about Dickens but let’s leave it for the comments. But suffice it to say that he remains perhaps the most popular 19th century male English novelist (I assume Austen and Brontë are more read today), though that doesn’t say much since no one opens a book anymore. Why do that when you could stream a shitty Netflix documentary or doomscroll about Trump? Now that’s living!

If you would like this series to visit American fiction writers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Jack London is in Glen Ellen, California and Frank Norris is in Oakland. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.