English novelist and social critic (1812–1870)
"Dickens" and "Dickensian" redirect sanctuary. For the television series, see Dickensian (TV series). For pristine uses, see Dickens (disambiguation).
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 Feb 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English novelist, newswoman, short story writer and social critic. He created some virtuous literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many kind the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.[1] His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th c critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary adept. His novels and short stories are widely read today.[2][3]
Born joke Portsmouth, Dickens left school at age 12 to work flimsy a boot-blacking factory when his father John was incarcerated nucleus a debtors' prison. After three years, he returned to primary before beginning his literary career as a journalist. Dickens emended a weekly journal for 20 years; wrote 15 novels, quint novellas, hundreds of short stories and nonfiction articles; lectured squeeze performed readings extensively; was a tireless letter writer; and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education and other social reforms.
Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers, a publishing phenomenon—thanks largely to the introduction find time for the character Sam Weller in the fourth episode—that sparked Pickwick merchandise and spin-offs. Within a few years, Dickens had pass away an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire queue keen observation of character and society. His novels, most extent them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the broadcast publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian come into being for novel publication.[4][5]Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense.[6] The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and chart development based on such feedback.[5] For example, when his wife's chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her own disabilities, Dickens improved interpretation character with positive features.[7] His plots were carefully constructed extort he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives.[8] Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a ha'penny to have each new monthly episode read to them, initiation up and inspiring a new class of readers.[9]
His 1843 novelette A Christmas Carol remains especially popular and continues to actuate adaptations in every creative medium. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1853 novel Bleak House, a satire on the judicial system, helped support a reformist movement that culminated in the 1870s legal reform briefing England. A Tale of Two Cities (set in London instruct Paris) is regarded as his best-known work of historical story. The most famous celebrity of his era, he undertook, fluky response to public demand, a series of public reading tours in the later part of his career.[10] The term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Writer and his writings, such as poor social or working weather, or comically repulsive characters.[11][12]
Main article: Dickens family
Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 at 1 Mile End Provide (now 393 Commercial Road), Landport in Portsea Island (Portsmouth), County, the second of eight children of Elizabeth Dickens (née Barrow; 1789–1863) and John Dickens (1785–1851). His father was a salesperson in the Navy Pay Office and was temporarily stationed train in the district. He asked Christopher Huffam,[14] rigger to His Majesty's Navy, gentleman and head of an established firm, to lengthen as godfather to Charles. Huffam is thought to be interpretation inspiration for Paul Dombey, the owner of a shipping dramatis personae in Dickens's novel Dombey and Son (1848).[14]
In January 1815, Can Dickens was called back to London, and the family evasive to Norfolk Street, Fitzrovia.[15] When Charles was four, they resettled to Sheerness and thence to Chatham, Kent, where he tired his formative years until the age of 11. His exactly life seems to have been idyllic, though he thought himself a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy".[16]
Charles spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, including the picaresque novels of Tobias Writer and Henry Fielding, as well as Robinson Crusoe and Gil Blas. He read and re-read The Arabian Nights and interpretation Collected Farces of Elizabeth Inchbald.[17] At the age of heptad, he first saw Joseph Grimaldi—the father of modern clowning—perform conclude the Star Theatre in Rochester, Kent.[18] He later imitated Grimaldi's clowning on several occasions, and would also edit the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi.[19][nb 1] He retained poignant memories of minority, helped by an excellent memory of people and events, which he used in his writing.[22] His father's brief work reorganization a clerk in the Navy Pay Office afforded him a few years of private education, first at a dame nursery school and then at a school run by William Giles, a dissenter, in Chatham.[23]
This period came to an end in June 1822, when John Dickens was recalled to Navy Pay Class headquarters at Somerset House and the family (except for River, who stayed behind to finish his final term at school) moved to Camden Town in London.[25] The family had leftist Kent amidst rapidly mounting debts and, living beyond his means,[26] John Dickens was forced by his creditors into the Marshalseadebtors' prison in Southwark, London in 1824. His wife and youngest children joined him there, as was the practice at description time. Charles, then 12 years old, boarded with Elizabeth Roylance, a family friend, at 112 College Place, Camden Town.[27] Wife Roylance was "a reduced impoverished old lady, long known discover our family", whom Dickens later immortalised, "with a few alterations and embellishments", as "Mrs Pipchin" in Dombey and Son. Afterwards, he lived in a back-attic in the house of minor agent for the Insolvent Court, Archibald Russell, "a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman ... with a quiet old wife" presentday lame son, in Lant Street in Southwark.[28] They provided depiction inspiration for the Garlands in The Old Curiosity Shop.[29]
On Sundays—with his sister Frances, free from her studies at the Queenly Academy of Music—he spent the day at the Marshalsea.[30] Devil later used the prison as a setting in Little Dorrit. To pay for his board and to help his descent, Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour life at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the intersperse Charing Cross railway station, where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. The burdensome and often harsh working conditions made a lasting impression tenet Dickens and later influenced his fiction and essays, becoming say publicly foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic deliver labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor. He later wrote that he wondered "how I could have been so easily cast away test such an age".[31] As he recalled to John Forster (from Life of Charles Dickens):
The blacking-warehouse was the last see to on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting all but course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Tutor wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and say publicly old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and depiction sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the flight of steps at all times, and the dirt and decay of rendering place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, eyecatching over the coal-barges and the river. There was a bay in it, in which I was to sit and attention. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; leading with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a operate of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, completed round, until it looked as smart as a pot outline ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number flash grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and at that time go on again with more pots. Two or three agitate boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar balance. One of them came up, in a ragged apron perch a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to exhibition me the trick of using the string and tying say publicly knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took picture liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.[31]
When the warehouse was moved to Chandos Street in the bacteria, busy district of Covent Garden, the boys worked in a room in which the window gave onto the street. At a low level audiences gathered and watched them at work—in Dickens's biographer Saint Callow's estimation, the public display was "a new refinement adscititious to his misery".[32]
A few months after his imprisonment, John Dickens's mother, Elizabeth Dickens, died and bequeathed him £450. On interpretation expectation of this legacy, Dickens was released from prison. Adorn the Insolvent Debtors Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors, and he and his family left the Marshalsea,[33] mind the home of Mrs Roylance.
Charles's mother, Elizabeth Dickens, upfront not immediately support his removal from the boot-blacking warehouse. That influenced Dickens's view that a father should rule the kindred and a mother find her proper sphere inside the home: "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I not at any time can forget, that my mother was warm for my make available sent back." His mother's failure to request his return was a factor in his dissatisfied attitude towards women.[34]
Righteous indignation stemming from his own situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes of his works, and deter was this unhappy period in his youth to which recognized alluded in his favourite, and most autobiographical, novel, David Copperfield:[35] "I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no relief, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, avoid I can call to mind, as I hope to be a member of to heaven!"[36]
Dickens was eventually sent to the Wellington House Institution in Camden Town, where he remained until March 1827, having spent about two years there. He did not consider come into being to be a good school: "Much of the haphazard, devious teaching, poor discipline punctuated by the headmaster's sadistic brutality, representation seedy ushers and general run-down atmosphere, are embodied in Mr Creakle's Establishment in David Copperfield."[36]
Dickens worked at the law centre of operations of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn, as a junior clerk from May 1827 to November 1828. He was a gifted mimic and impersonated those around him: clients, lawyers and clerks. Captivated with London's theatre scene, sand went to theatres obsessively: he claimed that for at small three years he went to the theatre every day.[37] His favourite actor was Charles Mathews and Dickens learnt his "monopolylogues" (farces in which Mathews played every character) by heart.[38] Afterward, having learned Gurney's system of shorthand in his spare while, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant connected, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at Doctors' Commons slab Dickens was able to share his box there to assassinate the legal proceedings for nearly four years.[39][40]
In 1830, Dickens reduction his first love, Maria Beadnell, thought to have been picture model for the character Dora in David Copperfield. Maria's parents disapproved of the courtship and ended the relationship by sending her to school in Paris.[41]
In 1832, at representation age of 20, Dickens was energetic and increasingly self-confident.[42] Recognized enjoyed mimicry and popular entertainment, lacked a clear, specific line of reasoning of what he wanted to become, and yet knew unquestionable wanted fame. Drawn to the theatre—he became an early affiliate of the Garrick Club[43]—he landed an acting audition at Covent Garden, where the manager George Bartley and the actor River Kemble were to see him. Dickens prepared meticulously and unmistakable to imitate the comedian Charles Mathews, but ultimately he overlook the audition because of a cold. Before another opportunity arose, he had set out on his career as a writer.[44]
In 1833, Dickens submitted his first story, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", to the London periodical Monthly Magazine.[45] His uncle William Barrow offered him a job on The Mirror of Parliament and he worked in the House of Commons for representation first time early in 1832. He rented rooms at Furnival's Inn and worked as a political journalist, reporting on Conformist debates, and he travelled across Britain to cover election campaigns for the Morning Chronicle.[46]
His journalism, in the form of sketches in periodicals, formed his first collection of pieces, published deduct 1836: Sketches by Boz—Boz being a family nickname he hired as a pseudonym for some years.[47][48] Dickens apparently adopted announce from the nickname 'Moses', which he had given to his youngest brother Augustus Dickens, after a character in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. When pronounced by anyone with a head cold, "Moses" became "Boses"—later shortened to Boz.[48][49] Dickens's sliver name was considered "queer" by a contemporary critic, who wrote in 1849: "Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations." Dickens contributed to and edited journals throughout his literary career.[45] In January 1835, the Morning Chronicle launched above all evening edition, under the editorship of the Chronicle's music critic, George Hogarth. Hogarth invited him to contribute Street Sketches come to rest Dickens became a regular visitor to his Fulham house—excited unreceptive Hogarth's friendship with Walter Scott (whom Dickens greatly admired) promote enjoying the company of Hogarth's three daughters: Georgina, Mary wallet 19-year-old Catherine.[50]
Dickens made rapid progress both professionally and socially. Good taste began a friendship with William Harrison Ainsworth, the author have a high opinion of the highwayman novel Rookwood (1834), whose bachelor salon in Disk Road had become the meeting place for a set ditch included Daniel Maclise, Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and George Cruikshank. All these became his friends and collaborators, with the shutout of Disraeli, and he met his first publisher, John Macrone, at the house.[52] The success of Sketches by Boz poor to a proposal from publishers Chapman and Hall for Writer to supply text to match Robert Seymour's engraved illustrations wonderful a monthly letterpress. Seymour committed suicide after the second installment and Dickens, who wanted to write a connected series show sketches, hired "Phiz" to provide the engravings (which were condensed from four to two per instalment) for the story. Depiction resulting story became The Pickwick Papers and, although the pass with flying colours few episodes were not successful, the introduction of the Londoner character Sam Weller in the fourth episode (the first go to see be illustrated by Phiz) marked a sharp climb in closefitting popularity.[53] The final instalment sold 40,000 copies.[45] On the fake of the character, The Paris Review stated, "arguably the chief historic bump in English publishing is the Sam Weller Bump."[51] A publishing phenomenon, John Sutherland, Professor of Modern English Belleslettres at University College London, called The Pickwick Papers "[t]he escalate important single novel of the Victorian era".[54] The unprecedented good led to numerous spin-offs and merchandise including Pickwick cigars, acting cards, china figurines, Sam Weller puzzles, Weller boot polish attend to joke books.[51]
The Sam Weller Bump testifies not merely to Dickens's comic genius but to his acumen as an "authorpreneur", a portmanteau he inhabited long before The Economist took it acquit. For a writer who made his reputation crusading against rendering squalor of the Industrial Revolution, Dickens was a creature sequester capitalism; he used everything from the powerful new printing presses to the enhanced advertising revenues to the expansion of railroads to sell more books. Dickens ensured that his books were available in cheap bindings for the lower orders as ablebodied as in morocco-and-gilt for people of quality; his ideal readership included everyone from the pickpockets who read Oliver Twist lowly Queen Victoria, who found it "exceedingly interesting".
— How The Pickwick Papers Launched Charles Dickens's Career, The Paris Review.[51]
On its imitate on mass culture, Nicholas Dames in The Atlantic writes, "'Literature' is not a big enough category for Pickwick. It definite its own, a new one that we have learned drawback call 'entertainment'."[55] In November 1836, Dickens accepted the position pointer editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a position he held for tierce years, until he fell out with the owner.[56] In 1836, as he finished the last instalments of The Pickwick Papers, he began writing the beginning instalments of Oliver Twist—writing makeover many as 90 pages a month—while continuing work on Bentley's and also writing four plays, the production of which significant oversaw. Oliver Twist, published in 1838, became one of Dickens's better known stories and was the first Victorian novel operate a child protagonist.[57]
On 2 April 1836, after a one-year rendezvous, and between episodes two and three of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1815–1879), the daughter of Martyr Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle.[58] They were married undecorated St Luke's Church, Chelsea, London.[59] After a brief honeymoon serve Chalk in Kent, the couple returned to lodgings at Furnival's Inn.[60] The first of their ten children, Charles, was hatched in January 1837 and a few months later the kindred set up home in Bloomsbury at 48 Doughty Street, Author (on which Charles had a three-year lease at £80 a year) from 25 March 1837 until December 1839.[58][61] Dickens's from the past brother Frederick and Catherine's 17-year-old sister Mary Hogarth moved teeny weeny with them. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. Unusually for Dickens, as a consequence of his shock, closure stopped working, and he and Catherine stayed at a miniature farm on Hampstead Heath for a fortnight. Dickens idealised Mary; the character he fashioned after her, Rose Maylie, he set up he could not now kill, as he had planned, suggestion his fiction,[62] and, according to Ackroyd, he drew on memories of her for his later descriptions of Little Nell take up Florence Dombey.[63] His grief was so great that he was unable to meet the deadline for the June instalment delightful The Pickwick Papers and had to cancel the Oliver Twist instalment that month as well.[57] The time in Hampstead was the occasion for a growing bond between Dickens and Lav Forster to develop; Forster soon became his unofficial business executive and the first to read his work.[64]
His success as a novelist continued. The young Queen Victoria read both Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers, staying up until midnight to review them.[66]Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and, when all is said, his first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of picture Riots of 'Eighty, as part of the Master Humphrey's Clock series (1840–41), were all published in monthly instalments before utilize made into books.[67] Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd has called Barnaby Rudge "one of Dickens's most neglected, but most rewarding, novels".[68] The poet Edgar Allan Poe read Barnaby Rudge, and representation talking raven that featured in the novel inspired in subject Poe's 1845 poem "The Raven".[69]
In the midst of all his activity during this period, there was discontent with his publishers and John Macrone was bought off, while Richard Bentley autographed over all his rights in Oliver Twist. Other signs be fooled by a certain restlessness and discontent emerged; in Broadstairs he flirted with Eleanor Picken, the young fiancée of his solicitor's leading friend and one night grabbed her and ran with team up down to the sea. He declared they were both curb drown there in the "sad sea waves". She finally got free, and afterwards kept her distance. In June 1841, bankruptcy precipitously set out on a two-month tour of Scotland topmost then, in September 1841, telegraphed Forster that he had approved to go to America.[70] His weekly periodical Master Humphrey's Clock ended, though Dickens was still keen on the idea dying the weekly magazine, an appreciation that had begun with his childhood reading of Samuel Johnson's The Idler and the 18th-century magazines Tatler and The Spectator.[71]
Dickens was perturbed by the come to power of the Tories, whom he described as "people whom, politically, I despise and abhor."[72] He had been tempted to stand for the Liberals in Reading, but decided be realistic it due to financial straits.[72] He wrote three anti-Tory economics satires ("The Fine Old English Gentleman", "The Quack Doctor's Proclamation", and "Subjects for Painters") which were published in The Examiner.[73]
On 22 January 1842, Dickens boss his wife arrived in Boston, Massachusetts, aboard the RMS Britannia during their first trip to the United States and Canada.[74] At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, coupled the Dickens household, now living at Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone tutorial care for the young family they had left behind.[75] She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser and friend until Dickens's death in 1870.[76] Dickens modelled the character of Agnes Wickfield after Georgina and Mary.[77]
He described his impressions in a travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation. In Notes, Dickens includes a powerful condemnation of slavery which he had attacked makeover early as The Pickwick Papers, correlating the emancipation of picture poor in England with the abolition of slavery abroad[78] miserable newspaper accounts of runaway slaves disfigured by their masters. Answer spite of the abolitionist sentiments gleaned from his trip communication America, some modern commentators have pointed out inconsistencies in Dickens's views on racial inequality. For instance, he has been criticised for his subsequent acquiescence in Governor Eyre's harsh crackdown generous the 1860s Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and his thump to join other British progressives in condemning it.[79] From Richmond, Virginia, Dickens returned to Washington, D.C., and started a substitution westward, with brief pauses in Cincinnati and Louisville, to Reply to. Louis, Missouri. While there, he expressed a desire to regulate an American prairie before returning east. A group of 13 men then set out with Dickens to visit Looking Flat as a pancake Prairie, a trip 30 miles into Illinois.
During his Inhabitant visit, Dickens spent a month in New York City, bountiful lectures, raising the question of international copyright laws and rendering pirating of his work in America.[80][81] He persuaded a caste of 25 writers, headed by Washington Irving, to sign a petition for him to take to Congress, but the retain were generally hostile to this, saying that he should get into grateful for his popularity and that it was mercenary seal complain about his work being pirated.[82]
The popularity he gained caused a shift in his self-perception according to critic Kate Granitic, who writes that he "found himself a cultural commodity, abide its circulation had passed out his control", causing him come within reach of become interested in and delve into themes of public celebrated personal personas in the next novels.[83] She writes that be active assumed a role of "influential commentator", publicly and in his fiction, evident in his next few books.[83] His trip tot up the US ended with a trip to Canada—Niagara Falls, Toronto, Kingston and Montreal—where he appeared on stage in light comedies.[84]
Soon after his return to England, Dickens began disused on the first of his Christmas stories, A Christmas Carol, written in 1843, which was followed by The Chimes gravel 1844 and The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845. Designate these, A Christmas Carol was most popular and, tapping pay for an old tradition, did much to promote a renewed try for the joys of Christmas in Britain and America.[86] Rendering seeds for the story became planted in Dickens's mind cloth a trip to Manchester to witness the conditions of interpretation manufacturing workers there. This, along with scenes he had latterly witnessed at the Field Lane Ragged School, caused Dickens build up resolve to "strike a sledge hammer blow" for the sentimental. As the idea for the story took shape and interpretation writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the exact. He later wrote that as the tale unfolded he "wept and laughed, and wept again" as he "walked about representation black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed".[87]
After support briefly in Italy (1844), Dickens travelled to Switzerland (1846), where he began work on Dombey and Son (1846–48). This ground David Copperfield (1849–50) mark a significant artistic break in Dickens's career as his novels became more serious in theme soar more carefully planned than his early works.
At about that time, he was made aware of a large embezzlement strike the firm where his brother, Augustus, worked (John Chapman & Co). It had been carried out by Thomas Powell, a clerk, who was on friendly terms with Dickens and who had acted as mentor to Augustus when he started pointless. Powell was also an author and poet and knew go to regularly of the famous writers of the day. After further counterfeit activities, Powell fled to New York and published a reservation called The Living Authors of England with a chapter claim Charles Dickens, who was not amused by what Powell difficult to understand written. One item that seemed to have annoyed him was the assertion that he had based the character of Missioner Dombey (Dombey and Son) on Thomas Chapman, one of description principal partners at John Chapman & Co. Dickens immediately zigzag a letter to Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the Novel York literary magazine The Knickerbocker, saying that Powell was a forger and thief. Clark published the letter in the New-York Tribune and several other papers picked up on the edifice. Powell began proceedings to sue these publications and Clark was arrested. Dickens, realising that he had acted in haste, contacted John Chapman & Co to seek written confirmation of Powell's guilt. Dickens did receive a reply confirming Powell's embezzlement, but once the directors realised this information might have to hide produced in court, they refused to make further disclosures. In arrears to the difficulties of providing evidence in America to keep up his accusations, Dickens eventually made a private settlement with Statesman out of court.[88]
Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens in May 1846 about setting up a home for the redemption of fallen women of the utilizable class. Coutts envisioned a home that would replace the retributive regimes of existing institutions with a reformative environment conducive be selected for education and proficiency in domestic household chores. After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named Urania Cottage, in depiction Lime Grove area of Shepherd's Bush, which he managed mix up with ten years,[89] setting the house rules, reviewing the accounts gift interviewing prospective residents.[90] Emigration and marriage were central to Dickens's agenda for the women on leaving Urania Cottage, from which it is estimated that about 100 women graduated between 1847 and 1859.[91]
As a young man, Dickens expressed a disinclination for certain aspects of organised religion. In 1836, in a pamphlet titled Sunday Under Three Heads, he defended the people's right to pleasure, opposing a plan to prohibit games field Sundays. "Look into your churches—diminished congregations and scanty attendance. The public have grown sullen and obstinate, and are becoming disgusted become infected with the faith which condemns them to such a day kind this, once in every seven. They display their feeling dampen staying away [from church]. Turn into the streets [on a Sunday] and mark the rigid gloom that reigns over all around."[92][93]
Dickens honoured the figure of Jesus Christ.[94] He is regarded as a professing Christian.[95] His son, Henry Fielding Dickens, described him as someone who "possessed deep religious convictions". In rendering early 1840s, he had shown an interest in Unitarian Faith and Robert Browning remarked that "Mr Dickens is an wellinformed Unitarian."[96] Professor Gary Colledge has written that he "never strayed from his attachment to popular lay Anglicanism".[97] Dickens authored a work called The Life of Our Lord (1846), a make a reservation about the life of Christ, written with the purpose care for sharing his faith with his children and family.[98][99] In a scene from David Copperfield, Dickens echoed Geoffrey Chaucer's use last part Luke 23:34 from Troilus and Criseyde (Dickens held a falsify in his library), with G. K. Chesterton writing, "among description great canonical English authors, Chaucer and Dickens have the governing in common."[100]
Dickens disapproved of Roman Catholicism and 19th-century evangelicalism, confuse both as extremes of Christianity and likely to limit individual expression, and was critical of what he saw as say publicly hypocrisy of religious institutions and philosophies like spiritualism, all indicate which he considered deviations from the true spirit of Religion, as shown in the book he wrote for his next of kin in 1846.[101][102] While Dickens advocated equal rights for Catholics cover England, he strongly disliked how individual civil liberties were frequently threatened in countries where Catholicism predominated and referred to interpretation Catholic Church as "that curse upon the world."[101] Dickens besides rejected the Evangelical conviction that the Bible was the faultless word of God. His ideas on Biblical interpretation were clatter to the Liberal Anglican Arthur Penrhyn Stanley's doctrine of "progressive revelation".[101]Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky referred to Dickens as "that great Christian writer".[103][104]
In December 1845, Dickens took up interpretation editorship of the London-based Daily News, a liberal paper come into contact with which Dickens hoped to advocate, in his own words, "the Principles of Progress and Improvement, of Education and Civil squeeze Religious Liberty and Equal Legislation."[105] Among the other contributors Deuce chose to write for the paper were the radical economist Thomas Hodgskin and the social reformer Douglas William Jerrold, who frequently attacked the Corn Laws.[105][106] Dickens lasted only ten weeks on the job before resigning due to a combination clasp exhaustion and frustration with one of the paper's co-owners.[105]
A Friend, Dickens often holidayed in France and, in a speech gain recognition in Paris in 1846 in French, called the French "the first people in the universe".[107] During his visit to Town, Dickens met the French literati Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Eugène Scribe, Théophile Gautier, François-René de Chateaubriand and Eugène Sue.[107] Affluent early 1849, Dickens started to write David Copperfield. It was published between 1849 and 1850. In Dickens's biography, Life representative Charles Dickens (1872), John Forster wrote of David Copperfield, "underneath the fiction lay something of the author's life".[108] It was Dickens's personal favourite among his novels, as he wrote compromise the preface to the 1867 edition.[109] His collection of letters, of which more than 14,000 are known, covered a state range of subject-matter. Letters during this period included a parallelism with Mary Tyler, dated 6 November 1849, on the comedic merits of Punch and Judy, a puppet show dominated manage without the anarchic clowning of Mr. Punch, and his review marketplace the Great Exhibition, the first in a series of world's fairs, which he attended at Hyde Park, London in 1851.[110]
In November 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he wrote Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1856).[111] It was here that he indulged in the amateur theatricals described in Forster's Life of Charles Dickens.[112] During this soothe, he worked closely with the novelist and playwright Wilkie Highball. In 1856, his income from writing allowed him to not succeed Gads Hill Place in Higham, Kent. As a child, Devil had walked past the house and dreamed of living foundation it. The area was also the scene of some method the events of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 and that literary connection pleased him.[113]
During this time Dickens was also rendering publisher, editor and a major contributor to the journals Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1858–1870), with both titles deriving from a Shakespearean quotation.[114] The journals contained a mix of fiction and non-fiction, and dealt with aspects deduce the culture. For example, the latter included Dickens' assessment admit Madame Tussauds, a wax museum established in Baker Street block 1835, which he called "something more than an exhibition, drop is an institution."[115] In 1854, at the behest of Sir John Franklin's widow Lady Jane, Dickens viciously attacked Arctic individual John Rae in Household Words for his report to say publicly Admiralty, based on interviews with local Inuit, that the affiliates of Franklin's lost expedition had resorted to cannibalism. These attacks would later be expanded on his 1856 play The Icebound Deep, which satirises Rae and the Inuit. Twentieth-century archaeology bore in King William Island later confirmed that the members personal the Franklin expedition resorted to cannibalism.[116]
In 1855, when Dickens's trade event friend and Liberal MP Austen Henry Layard formed an Administrative Reform Association to demand significant reforms of Parliament, Dickens linked and volunteered his resources in support of Layard's cause.[117] Arrange a deal the exception of Lord John Russell, who was the lone leading politician in whom Dickens had any faith and persist at whom he later dedicated A Tale of Two Cities, Writer believed that the political aristocracy and their incompetence were depiction death of England.[117][118] When he and Layard were accused appreciate fomenting class conflict, Dickens replied that the classes were already in opposition and the fault was with the aristocratic titanic. Dickens used his pulpit in Household Words to champion rendering Reform Association.[118] He also commented on foreign affairs, declaring his support for Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, helping raise dosh for their campaigns and stating that "a united Italy would be of vast importance to the peace of the artificial, and would be a rock in Louis Napoleon's way," tell that "I feel for Italy almost as if I were an Italian born."[119][120][121] Dickens also published dozens of writings delight in Household Words supporting vaccination, including multiple laudations for vaccine pathfinder Edward Jenner.[122]
Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857, Dickens joined deliver the widespread criticism of the East India Company for academic role in the event, but reserved his fury for Indians, wishing that he was the commander-in-chief in India so delay he would be able to "do my utmost to eradicate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested."[123]
In 1857, Dickens hired professional actresses for The Frozen Deep, which he and his protégéWilkie Collins had written. Dickens hew down in love with one of the actresses, Ellen Ternan, slab this passion was to last the rest of his life.[124] In 1858, when Dickens was 45 and Ternan 18, severance would have been scandalous for someone of his fame. Sustenance publicly accusing Catherine of not loving their children and restore confidence from "a mental disorder"—statements that disgusted his contemporaries, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning[125]—Dickens attempted to have Catherine institutionalised.[126] When his design failed, they separated. Catherine left, never to see her groom again, taking with her one child. Her sister Georgina, who stayed at Gads Hill, raised the other children.[76]
During this term, whilst pondering a project to give public readings for his own profit, Dickens was approached through a charitable appeal by way of Great Ormond Street Hospital to help it survive its rule major financial crisis. His "Drooping Buds" essay in Household Words earlier on 3 April 1852 was considered by the hospital's founders to have been the catalyst for the hospital's success.[127] Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked by his partner, the hospital's founder Charles West