Charles Dickens: The Life of the Author

On Top of the World: Oliver Twist to Household Words

Dickens followed the triumph of Pickwick with Oliver Twist (1837-39; 1838), the first of its twenty-four monthly installments appearing in the February 1837 issue of Bentley's Miscellany, the new magazine with "Boz" at its helm. With this dark and violent tale of London's criminal demimonde, Dickens issued the first of his vigorous assaults on social injustice. Readers expecting more of the amiable satire and frolicsome good humor that he had lavished on the adventures of Samuel Pickwick and his friends may have been in for a shock, but with Oliver Twist Dickens scored yet another smash and it has remained one of his most widely popular novels--what Angus Wilson has called a "pop masterpiece."

Throughout his career, Dickens--whose reserves of energy only appeared limitless--worked at such a punishing pace that his health was often seriously compromised. Case in point: as he struggled to finish the first installment of Oliver Twist, while simultaneously coping with family obligations and his responsibilities as the Miscellany's editor, he sent Richard Bentley an update on the morning of January 24, 1837:

I have thrown my whole heart and soul into Oliver Twist, and most confidently believe he will make a feature in the work, and be very popular ... I have still a very great deal to do in reading communications, and preparing answers to correspondents; I have done a great deal in altering the papers that will appear, wherever they were weak; and between the one and the other, I really have done, with anxiety and sickness about me, more than nine people out of ten could have performed.

For a good period Dickens worked at Pickwick and Oliver Twist simultaneously; and before Oliver was complete, he had already begun Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39; 1839), a kaleidoscopic and marvelously energetic account of the "Fortunes, Misfortunes, Uprisings, Downfallings, and Complete Career of the Nickleby Family," as edited by "Boz." This was followed by Barnaby Rudge (1841), a historical novel set in London in 1780 during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots, a narrative rich in character and high drama (a work that unaccountably seems to have fallen out of fashion). As many of his contemporaries recognized, Dickens was not like other men. He was, said one, "far beyond the ordinary run of mortals ... charged, so to speak, from head to foot with vitality."

With the huge and varied accomplishment of his first four novels, the world began to listen to Dickens in wonder. Here was a young man of the most modest pedigree and education (without Latin or Greek, as once was said), who had the literary world at his feet. He had become truly famous.

How they cheered: Dickens in America
In 1842, Dickens and his wife traveled in America, a nation, we are told, that had been stricken, almost to a man, when the news of the pathetic death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41; 1841) had at last reached its shores. In Boston, New York, Washington, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Richmond and many other oases, savory and not, Dickens was lionized, petted, mobbed, swooned over, gaped at and practically banqueted to death. He also endured countless fulsome toasts on the order of: "The Pilgrims of Genius from other lands, bringing costly gems to enrich the foreign shrine, and gathering wild flowers to adorn the domestic altar, etc. etc."

And in New York City on February 14, 1842, at the spectacular "Boz Ball" held in his honor at the Park Theatre, Dickens escorted the Mayoress in the Grand March which opened the evening; danced quadrilles until he thought he would drop; and, along with the other 3,000 people in attendance, was able to relish a series of twelve tableaux vivants of scenes from his novels, including the always wonderful "Mrs. Bardell faints in Mr. Pickwick's arms."

It was, said a witty man, "the greatest affair in modern times, the fullest libation ever poured upon the altar of the muses, the tallest compliment ever paid to a little man."

Dickens's reception in America was overwhelming: "I can't tell you what they do here to welcome me," Dickens wrote home to his brother Frederick, "or how they cheer and shout on all occasions--in the streets--in the Theatres--within doors--and wherever I go." There were some censorious mutterings about--at least by American lights--his rather foppish appearance, as evidenced by the longish hair, which was "apparently guiltless of all acquaintance with a brush," the profusion of gold watch-chain, and the garishly hued waistcoats. According to one who was there, the bluebloods of Boston's literary establishment did their best to entertain the great man, but "They were not sorry, however, to pass him on to New York, where a banquet which had been prepared with great elaboration was awaiting him." What awaited Dickens, of course, was the soon-to-be-legendary "Boz Ball."

Dickens had arrived in America with the greatest enthusiasm and hopes for the young republic, but his journey ended in disillusionment. He was often shocked by the rude manners, flabby rhetoric and ludicrously excessive boastfulness of Americans, and he found the incessant public spitting (spittoon or no spittoon) loathsome. But more seriously, Dickens dared to raise the issue of international copyright during his travels, and was savagely attacked by much of the press (numerous American newspapers and booksellers, of course, did a flourishing business pirating his writings, often "adjusting" them to suit their purposes).

But he did forge some warm and lasting friendships during the tour, including with such distinguished American admirers as poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Cornelius Felton, a convivial professor of classics at Harvard. With the latter, Dickens got along so famously that one bemused witness reported of the pair that "they have walked, laughed, talked, eaten Oysters and drunk Champagne together until they have almost grown together--in fact nothing but the interference of Madame D prevented their being attached to each other like the Siamese Twins, a volume of Pickwick serving as connecting membrane."

By the end of June, Dickens was back in England, and on October 19 appeared his lively and not exactly reverential American Notes for General Circulation. The New York Herald may have urged its readers: "Don't burst, keep cool--be quiet!"--but the book caused an uproar in America nonetheless. And soon enough the Herald itself joined the fray (after having printed unauthorized excerpts of the offending work, of course): "of all the travelers," it said of Dickens, "that have ever visited this land he appears to have been the most flimsy--the most childish--the most trashy--the most contemptible. He has neither common grammar, sense, arrangement or generalisation ... he seems to be the essence of balderdash, reduced to the last drop of silliness and inanity."

This entertaining brouhaha had no lasting effect on Dickens's popularity with his American public. However, readers on both sides of the Atlantic did react coolly to his next serial, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44; 1844), a novel which boasts some excellently stinging satire (of America) as well as two unforgettable characters, the vile hypocrite Seth Pecksniff, one of Dickens's most hateful creations, and the perfectly awful Mrs. Sairey Gamp, a gin-soaked nurse with a sideline in laying out corpses. A shrewd operator with "a face for all occasions," Mrs. Gamp is also so sublimely the mistress of her own strange vernacular ("Who deniges of it?"), that for many readers, Chuzzlewit is mainly of interest as "the novel that Mrs. Gamp is in."

A new gospel: Dickens and Christmas

In the midst of his labors over Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens found time to write the little tale that is unquestionably his most beloved work, A Christmas Carol. Published on December 17, 1843, this tender fable of spiritual renewal received a rapturous welcome from the public. Readers were moved to tears by the story of the delightfully despicable Scrooge, a heartless old miser who undergoes a miraculous rebirth precisely at Christmas, the only time "in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open up their hearts freely." Dickens's celebration of human kindness, charity, mercy, and joy touched his contemporaries profoundly (writing in 1871, the novelist Margaret Oliphant recalled that it "moved us all in those days as if it had been a new gospel")--and it continues to touch readers around the world, not least because of the countless dramatic adaptations it has inspired.

Dickens was inundated with heartfelt letters from complete strangers, which John Forster read with wonder--they were not at all literary, Forster would write, but "of the simplest domestic kind." And yet even such literary eminences as Francis Jeffrey, critic and founder of the Edinburgh Review, succumbed to the Carol's benevolent philosophy.

	The ghostly little book
	NYPL, Berg Collection
	Explore the manuscript of Dickens's letter to his American friend Cornelius Felton, dated January 2, 1844, in which he writes of the "prodigious" success of his latest work, A Christmas Carol.

" Blessings on your kind heart, my dear Dickens!" Lord Jeffrey wrote. "We are all charmed with your Carol, chiefly, I think, for the genuine goodness which breathes all through it, and is the true inspiring angel by which its genius has been awakened."

The Carol's first readers were moved not only by the tale's verve and sentiment, but also by what was so obviously and appealingly the author's own exhilaration in the telling. In a letter to his American friend Cornelius Felton, dated the day after New Year's in 1844, Dickens writes with merry exuberance of the "Ghostly little book," over which he "wept, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner in the composition." (See adjacent slideshow for the original manuscript of this famous letter.)

No writer is more indelibly associated with the spirit of the Christmas holidays, that season of "hospitality, merriment, and open-heartedness," than Dickens, who cultivated the association assiduously. Four more bestselling Christmas Books followed, but none of these little holiday volumes has enjoyed the enduring popularity of the Carol. After The Haunted Man (1848), the last of the Christmas Books, Dickens marked the holidays with stories that were seasonal in spirit, if not in setting, beginning with "A Christmas Tree" (1850), a radiant meditation on the power of the imagination, or fancy, in which the narrator tells us:

And I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday--the longer, the better--from the great boarding-school, where we are for ever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest. As to going a visiting, where can we not go, if we will; where have we not been, when we would; starting our fancy from our Christmas Tree!

But there was to be no rest for Dickens.

He expands his audience
In 1850, Dickens founded Household Words, a weekly that mixed literature, social commentary and reportage. In 1859, after a fight with his publisher (who had refused to print the public statement Dickens had written about the breakup of his marriage), he began a new magazine, All the Year Round, which, like its predecessor, served as a forum for Dickens the progressive social reformer and Dickens the liberal moralist, and which he would edit until his death in 1870.

	An editor's credo
	No mere utilitarian spirit, no iron binding of the mind to grim realities, will give a harsh tone to our Household Words. In the bosoms of the young and old, of the well-to-do and the poor, we would tenderly cherish that light of Fancy which is inherent in the human breast; which, according to its nurture, burns with an inspiring flame, or sinks into a sullen glare, but which (or woe betide the day!) can never be extinguished. --Charles Dickens, "Address" in the first number of Household Words (March 30, 1850)

Both periodicals were enormously popular, and with their special Extra Christmas Numbers (which were widely imitated), Dickens continued to promulgate his "Carol philosophy" to an enormous audience. As the "conductor" of both magazines, he directly oversaw and often rewrote each and every article, as well as contributing many essays and stories of his own, some of the most interesting of which were collected in Reprinted Pieces (1858) and The Uncommercial Traveller (1861). His contemporaries were understandably amazed and daunted by Dickens's drive and fecundity.

As both an editor and novelist, Dickens had an immediate and unerring sense of his public, and by publishing his novels in inexpensive monthly parts (with hardbound editions to follow), he kept his enormous readership hooked to whatever had just flowed from his pen. It is difficult now to recapture the excitement with which "the new Dickens" was awaited by readers around the world. As a writer for The Daily Telegraph said in 1872, looking back on Dickens's meteoric career: "[H]is current story was really a topic of the day; it seemed something almost akin to politics and news--as if it belonged not so much to literature but to events."

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