On the bicentenary of Charles Dickens (1812-1870), the great Victorian novelist who wrote several unforgettable masterpieces out of ‘modern’ cruelties, Agenda finds out why the man and his work remain relevant even today

Dickens, the writer couldn’t forget his social obligations     

Priyadarshi Dutta

While going to workplace on Tuesday morning, I came across two slum children merrily travelling in a bus. Apparently they do not attend any school. No unusual sighting in a city, it evoked in me a strange empathy. The day was February 7 — the bicentenary of Charles Dickens, whose writing is permeated with a deep sense of sympathy for childhood. Those two chums and tens of millions like them will possibly never know about Dickens, let alone his masterpieces — Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Hard Times, Dombey and Son, among others. So, what can be the best tribute to this great Victorian novelist? We can perhaps pay homage to him by declaring February 7 as the new “Children Day”.

Troubled Childhood

Dickens’ own perturbed childhood cast a long shadow on his writings. It is strewn across David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, Oliver Twist, etc. He was born on February 7, 1812, at Landport in south England. His father John Dickens, a navy pay office clerk, then earned a fairly comfortable salary of £200 per annum. But in a deeply class-consciousness British society, he could not get over the stigma of being the son of a late Stewart father and a surviving housekeeper mother. John Dickens was shunned by his well-heeled in-laws — Barrows.

It was, however, in London (John Dickens’ job being transferable) that the family fortunes apparently nosedived, leading to his confinement in the Marshalsea debt-prison. His impoverished family, except Charles, joined him there. Charles, aged 12, worked in a factory where he had to screw bottle caps and paste labels.

From Boz to Boss

Charles Dickens forayed into writing in December 1833 under the pet name Boz. He worked as a parliamentary reporter then. Though his serialised Sketches by Boz were eminently forgettable, the name stuck to him. His literary success came in 1836 with The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club serialised in The Times. The Pickwick firmly positioned him as an author. Writing became his fulltime profession.

The book continued to sell throughout his lifetime, with every successful book creating fresh demand of Pickwick. Between 1837 and 1841, prior to his first American sojourn, he wrote Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Old Curiosity Shop and Barnby Rudge. By 30, he was recognised as a major writer in the English-speaking world.

In America

Dickens  toured the US in 1841 to be overwhelmed by the scale of welcome. He realised that Americans welcomed him more as a “moral force” than a writer. Daniel Webster announced that Dickens had “done more to ameliorate the condition of English poor than all the statesmen of Great Britain had sent to Parliament”. But he chose to sour the trip by broaching the issue of international copyright. He claimed that British authors were losing huge royalty figures due to thriving book piracy trade in the US. His righteous stance cut little ice with American readership, habituated to cheap pirated editions.

America, the dreamland of democrats, disillusioned him in several other ways too. He sighed, “If I had been born here and had written my books in this country... it is my solemn belief that I should have lived and died poor, unnoticed and a ‘black sheep’ to boot.”

Age of Maturity

Post-America Dickens delivered his memorable Christmas books — A Christmas Carol (1843), The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) and The Battle of Life (1846). The era between 1849 and 1861 was the most mature phase in his literary life. He serialised David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, among others. He also took to editing a journal, All the Year Round, in which his two classics — A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1860-61) — appeared. The acme was reached with Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865). He left Edwin Drood unfinished at the time of his death in 1870.

A Tale of Two Cities is exceptional in the sense that it dealt with a major historical event — the French Revolution, especially the Reign of Terror in 1792. His sympathy clearly lay with the masses, thus justifying the revolution more than his friend Thomas Carlyle, the historian of French Revolution, did.

Always a Reformer

No doubt, Dickens’ novels have their shortcomings. They are voluminous, a Victorian flaw. Their plots have been criticised for lacking an organic unity. Also, Dickens had no aptitude to write a proper ‘love story’ — the soul of good novels. But he redeemed novels from rich men’s mansions and villas, and brought it to streets, schools, courts, prisons, casinos, factories among common men where real action was. He was an urbanite, a Londoner to be precise, in an era when Industrial Revolution was overhauling the English society.

In Hard Times we encounter the issue of labour unions and industrial unrest. In Bleak House he describes the functioning of law courts. In Oliver Twist he describes cruel orphanages and organised criminal gangs. In David Copperfield, he describes the abuse in boarding schoolings. His novels describe 28 schools in all, mainly to expose the defects of contemporary education system. Dickens is thus no less a reformer, whose ideas reached to millions of people in a fictionalised form.

He unearthed Victorian Britain’s dark underbelly

 Tarun Kumar Kapoor

The yearning for change that one witnesses in India today reminds one of Victorian England of the 1830s and the 1840s. The seamy side of public discourse has strange parallels: In India, the cacophony of corruption has brought forth a civil society-driven tirade for change and reforms. In Victorian Britain, the problem was overwhelmingly economic. The colonial dividend perhaps was still not substantial. Lacklustre harvests created bread crises that got compounded with failure of the cotton crop in America.

Several factories in and around Manchester closed down, adding to the woes of the British working class. On the intellectual front, however, Britain was full of icons: It had several Utilitarians forwarding their hedonistic doctrines. And, there were political economists — Adam Smith and David Ricardo were already there, while Malthus added a new feather with his essay on population; John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hill Green were busy crafting Britain’s so-called liberal fabric and Thomas Carlyle was the conservative conscience of England. But there was one man who stood out —  Charles Dickens. His fictional endeavours left an immutable imprint on the social discourse of that era.

Dickens’ origins were insignificant. His grandfather was a butler, and his father a clerk at the Naval Pay office where he committed a theft. In A Passage in the Life of Mr Watkins Tottle, the harmless Tottle is arrested for debt, as Dickens’s father was — and whose experiences in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison are remembered in Little Dorrit.

Young Charles was determined to make it big. He worked as a solicitor’s clerk, a shorthand parliamentary reporter and a journalist. Righteous anger stemming from his own wretched conditions became major themes of his literary works. It was this unhappy period in his youth to which he alluded in many of his novels, particularly David Copperfield.

As a young man Dickens would often think of becoming a professional actor. But the reality of life made him a child labourer. “I might easily have been... a little robber or a little vagabond,” he once said while remembering his childhood days.

Dickens’ views regarding his childhood were often coloured by indignation and self-pity, but his retrospective sense of risk was justified. His earlier stories were carefully adapted to please their likely readers. They were predominantly miniature urban dramas, as his characters tried — and often failed — to improve their socio-economic standing.

Dickens’ sympathy for the wretched and disdain for the affluent were well-depicted in most of his novels. Few had given such strong individual voices to workhouse children, abused schoolboys, wretched clerks, toiling kitchen maids and harassed prostitutes — all symbols of agony and suffering in Victorian Britain.

Through Oliver Twist, he asserts that workhouses were essentially prisons where men and women were segregated, put to work at unpleasant tasks, and subjected to harsh discipline — all in return for a place to sleep and “three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays”. None could mingle indignation and sorrow with the high-spirited laughter as Dickens had done.

Returning from his immensely successful tour of America in June 1842, Dickens sensed both pessimism and unease that Britain had undergone on account of failing harvests that had brought hundreds of rural folks into the cities. Malthus’ essay on population with its prediction of asymmetrical and exponential growth of population vis-à-vis limited resources had painted a picture of hopelessness.

Dickens, however, had other ideas. He started in 1843 to churn out a story of a rich miser’s change of heart — a tale that he thought would be capable of “20-times the force” of a political pamphlet. Thus was born A Christmas Carol, which was an attack on Malthus and his ilk.

Instead of a rocky, barren, overpopulated island where food is scarce, the England of this story is a vast granary where the shelves are overflowing, the bins are bottomless, and the barrels never run dry. Six thousand copies of the novel were sold between the publication date of December 19 and Christmas Eve, and the tale would stay in print for the rest of Dickens’ life. His positive depiction of the poor earned him the satirical label of “Mr Sentiment”.

Dickens never imagined that the world could get along without the calculating science of economics. Instead, he hoped to convert political economists — as the Ghost of Christmas Future had converted Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. He wanted people to stop treating poverty as a natural phenomenon.

When he launched his popular weekly, Household Words, he did so with a plea to economists to humanise their discipline. “Political economy is a mere skeleton unless it has a little human covering, and filling out, a little human bloom upon it, and a little human warmth in it,” he wrote in his essay. Dickens’ views remain relevant today. More so in India.

Best Books

David Copperfield (1850)

His most autobiographical novel, it talks about a boy overcoming adversity to become a writer

Little Dorrit (1857)

Exploring the psychology of confinement, the novel tells the story of a man imprisoned for debt..

Little Dorrit (1857)

Exploring the psychology of confinement, the novel tells the story of a man imprisoned for debt.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Dickens' take on the French Revolution, the book remains a page-turner despite having a predictable ending.

Great Expectations (1861)

It talks about the adventures of Pip, an orphan who ends up inheriting a mysterious fortune.

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