7th February is a special day for the worldwide
community of people who are proud to call themselves “Dickensians” (myself
included) because this was the day in 1812 when Charles John Huffam Dickens was
born in Portsmouth.
His father, John Dickens, was a naval pay clerk whose duties
included taking wages to the crews of ships moored in the harbour. The Dickens
family moved with the job, firstly to Chatham in Kent and then to London.
Charles Dickens is therefore regarded as a “London novelist” because that is
where he spent most of his life and all but one of his novels is set wholly or
in part in London (the exception is Hard Times which is set in an imaginary
northern industrial town).
Charles Dickens had some hard times of his own as he was
growing up, mainly due to his father’s inability to manage money and support
his growing family, but he discovered an ability to write amusing and incisive
stories that were soon to prove immensely popular. By the end of his life (he
died in 1870 at the age of 58) he was a wealthy man who was able to buy a
substantial property (Gad’s Hill House) that he had admired while talking walks
as a boy when living in Chatham.
Dickens is renowned for bringing the public’s attention to
many of the evils of his time, particularly those associated with poverty.
Although he sometimes lapsed into sentimentality, his general tone is a
hard-headed one that recognises that good and evil deeds can be committed by
members of all classes of society. Although many of the social problems
mentioned in his novels and stories are only of historical interest today,
Charles Dickens was a master at creating colourful and complex characters (not
just caricatures, which is an accusation often levelled at him) whose failings
and foibles are still very much with us. That is why Charles Dickens was a
writer for all times and not just his own.
There are many fascinating aspects to the life of Charles
Dickens, which I came to appreciate a few years ago when I was asked by the
Dickens Fellowship to compile an index to 31 annual volumes of their journal
“The Dickensian”. This involved me in reading and analysing some 6,000 pages of
text devoted to the life and works of Dickens, so I ended up acquiring quite an
encyclopaedic knowledge!
© John Welford
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