Who is Charles Dickens?

By Education @ Hartford Stage

Charles Dickens was, in his own lifetime, a literary superstar—with throngs of fans attending his public readings and lectures and welcomed at towns across the globe (Hartford included) as if he were royalty. “If we see him,” wrote novelist Jane Smiley, “as a man whose work made him rich and famous, as close to a household name as any movie star is today—then we can also see him as the first person to become a ‘name brand.’”

The rise of Charles Dickens to brand name status is a rags-to-riches story. Charles John Huffman Dickens was born February 7, 1812, near Portsmouth, England, the second of John and Elizabeth Dickens’s eight children. His father was employed as a clerk for the Naval Pay Office, requiring the family to move frequently. Despite his job security, John Dickens found it difficult to support his growing family. The family of ten was habitually on the edge of financial ruin as John’s careless spending left them constantly in the clutches of creditors, a crime in Victorian England.

Charles Dickens was an intelligent and naturally inquisitive boy that discovered a love for books during his years at the Chatham School. His delight in education was cut short at the age of 10 when his father was transferred to London and Charles was sent to work at the Warren Blacking Company, putting labels on bottles of shoe polish, to help support the family. Two days after Charles’s twelfth birthday, John’s financial floundering caught up with him. John Dickens and the remaining family members were thrown into a debtor’s prison to work off the huge debt amassed. Abandoned, neglected, and ill-treated by factory overseers, Charles worked 12 to 16 hour days, then trekked three miles to his squalid lodgings in Camden town. These years profoundly influenced Charles’s later writing career; themes of abandonment, abuse, and ignorance permeate his work. The shame of his circumstances and the anger at his lack of education compelled the young Dickens to succeed through hard work and determination. Through his life and work he would be a constant champion of children, the poor and a well-regulated legal system. An unexpected inheritance allowed John Dickens to pay off his debt and Charles was reunited with his family. Charles continued his education at the Wellington House Academy until at age 15, his family could no longer afford his tuition. He began a series of odd jobs, including work as an office boy in a law firm and a stint as a county reporter covering Parliamentary debates for The Morning Chronicle in 1835.

Charles Dickens’s first fictional works to gain notoriety, the satirical Sketches by Boz (1833-35), were presented in serial form, followed by The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), making the 24-year-old Dickens a famous and successful author. With his novel Oliver Twist (1839), Dickens sealed his popularity and announced some of the continuing themes of his work: an indictment of a society that mistreated the poor, a condemnation of the wrongs inflicted on children by adults, and a denunciation of corruption and decay in politics and government.

Of all of Dickens’s works, none has entered the consciousness and become a “brand name” in its own right as A Christmas Carol. Though he was a quite popular author by that time, his publishers were threatening to lower his payment. Concerned over his own financial problems, and trying to avoid having to lease out his London home, Dickens thought he might have hit upon a profitable story with his tale of Ebenezer Scrooge and his nocturnal visitations. He wrote A Christmas Carol after the summer of 1843, which he spent teaching in a program that provided basic instruction to poor children. Barely clothed, hungry and already turning to a life of thievery, these children would inspire a central image in A Christmas Carol: the two children, Ignorance and Want. Dickens announced the story would hit his readers over the head like a “sledge-hammer.” Though only one in ten people in Victorian England could read, legend has it that each person who read A Christmas Carol went out and read it to many other anxious listeners. These retellings became the first adaptations of the beloved story.

This article has been reprinted from the Education @ Hartford Stage Study Guide for A Christmas Carol.