106-] English Literature

106-] English Literature

Charles Dickens 

Farewell readings

In 1868–69, Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" in England, Scotland and Ireland, beginning on 6 October. He managed, of a contracted 100 readings, to give 75 in the provinces, with a further 12 in London. As he pressed on he was affected by giddiness and fits of paralysis. He had a stroke on 18 April 1869 in Chester. He collapsed on 22 April 1869, at Preston, Lancashire; on doctor's advice, the tour was cancelled. After further provincial readings were cancelled, he began work on his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It was fashionable in the 1860s to 'do the slums' and, in company, Dickens visited opium dens in Shadwell, where he witnessed an elderly addict called "Laskar Sal", who formed the model for "Opium Sal" in Edwin Drood.]

After Dickens regained enough strength, he arranged, with medical approval, for a final series of readings to partly make up to his sponsors what they had lost due to his illness. There were 12 performances, on 11 January to 15 March 1870; the last at 8:00pm at St. James's Hall, London. Though in grave health by then , he read A Christmas Carol and The Trial from Pickwick. On 2 May, he made his last public appearance at a Royal Academy banquet in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, paying a special tribute on the death of his friend, illustrator Daniel Maclise.

Death

Charles Dickens died an old man of 57, worn out with work and travel, on June 9, 1870. He wished to be buried, without fanfare, in a small cemetery in Rochester, Kent, but the Nation would not allow it. He was laid to rest in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, the flowers from thousands of mourners overflowing the open grave. Among the more beautiful bouquets were many simple clusters of wildflowers, wrapped in rags.

On 8 June 1870, Dickens had another stroke at his home after a full day's work on Edwin Drood. He never regained consciousness. The next day, he died at Gads Hill Place. Biographer Claire Tomalin has suggested Dickens was actually in Peckham when he had had the stroke and his mistress Ellen Ternan and her maids had him taken back to Gads Hill so that the public would not know the truth about their relationship.] Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner", he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads:

To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world.

A letter from Dickens to the Clerk of the Privy Council in March indicates he'd been offered and accepted a baronetcy, which was not gazetted before his death. His last words were "On the ground" in response to his sister-in-law Georgina's request that he lie down. On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens was buried in the Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley delivered a memorial elegy, lauding "the genial and loving humorist whom we now mourn", for showing by his own example "that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be innocent". Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the novelist's grave, Stanley assured those present that "the spot would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue."

In his will, drafted more than a year before his death, Dickens left the care of his £80,000 estate (£8,143,500 in 2021) to his long-time colleague John Forster and his "best and truest friend" Georgina Hogarth who, along with Dickens's two sons, also received a tax-free sum of £8,000 (equivalent to £814,000 in 2021). He confirmed his wife Catherine's annual allowance of £600 (£61,100 in 2021). He bequeathed £19 19s (£2,000 in 2021) to each servant in his employment at the time of his death.

Literary style

Dickens's approach to the novel is influenced by various things, including the picaresque novel tradition, melodrama and the novel of sensibility. According to Ackroyd, other than these, perhaps the most important literary influence on him was derived from the fables of The Arabian Nights. Satire and irony are central to the picaresque novel. Comedy is also an aspect of the British picaresque novel tradition of Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett. Fielding's Tom Jones was a major influence on the 19th-century novelist including Dickens, who read it in his youth and named a son Henry Fielding Dickens after him. Influenced by Gothic fiction—a literary genre that began with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole—Dickens incorporated Gothic imagery, settings and plot devices in his works. Victorian gothic moved from castles and abbeys into contemporary urban environments: in particular London, such as Dickens's Oliver Twist and Bleak House. The jilted bride Miss Havisham from Great Expectations is one of Dickens's best-known gothic creations; living in a ruined mansion, her bridal gown effectively doubles as her funeral shroud.

No other writer had such a profound influence on Dickens as William Shakespeare. On Dickens's veneration of Shakespeare, Alfred Harbage wrote in A Kind of Power: The Shakespeare-Dickens Analogy (1975) that "No one is better qualified to recognise literary genius than a literary genius". Regarding Shakespeare as "the great master" whose plays "were an unspeakable source of delight", Dickens's lifelong affinity with the playwright included seeing theatrical productions of his plays in London and putting on amateur dramatics with friends in his early years. In 1838, Dickens travelled to Stratford-upon-Avon and visited the house in which Shakespeare was born, leaving his autograph in the visitors' book. Dickens would draw on this experience in his next work, Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), expressing the strength of feeling experienced by visitors to Shakespeare's birthplace: the character Mrs Wititterly states, "I don't know how it is, but after you've seen the place and written your name in the little book, somehow or other you seem to be inspired; it kindles up quite a fire within one."

Dickens's writing style is marked by a profuse linguistic creativity. Satire, flourishing in his gift for caricature, is his forte. An early reviewer compared him to Hogarth for his keen practical sense of the ludicrous side of life, though his acclaimed mastery of varieties of class idiom may in fact mirror the conventions of contemporary popular theatre. Dickens worked intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that would reverberate with associations for his readers and assist the development of motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an "allegorical impetus" to the novels' meanings. To cite one of numerous examples, the name Mr Murdstone in David Copperfield conjures up twin allusions to murder and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery – he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator" – are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy. On his ability to elicit a response from his works, English screenwriter Sarah Phelps writes, "He knew how to work an audience and how to get them laughing their heads off one minute or on the edge of their seats and holding their breath the next. The other thing about Dickens is that he loved telling stories and he loved his characters, even those horrible, mean-spirited ones."

The author worked closely with his illustrators, supplying them with a summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them. He briefed the illustrator on plans for each month's instalment so that work could begin before he wrote them. Marcus Stone, illustrator of Our Mutual Friend, recalled that the author was always "ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ... life-history of the creations of his fancy". Dickens employs Cockney English in many of his works, denoting working-class Londoners. Cockney grammar appears in terms such as ain't, and consonants in words are frequently omitted, as in 'ere (here) and wot (what). An example of this usage is in Oliver Twist. The Artful Dodger uses cockney slang which is juxtaposed with Oliver's 'proper' English, when the Dodger repeats Oliver saying "seven" with "sivin".

Characters

Dickens's biographer Claire Tomalin regards him as the greatest creator of character in English fiction after Shakespeare. Dickensian characters are amongst the most memorable in English literature, especially so because of their typically whimsical names. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley and Bob Cratchit (A Christmas Carol); Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin and Bill Sikes (Oliver Twist); Pip, Miss Havisham and Abel Magwitch (Great Expectations); Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay and Madame Defarge (A Tale of Two Cities); David Copperfield, Uriah Heep and Mr Micawber (David Copperfield); Daniel Quilp and Nell Trent (The Old Curiosity Shop), Samuel Pickwick and Sam Weller (The Pickwick Papers); and Wackford Squeers (Nicholas Nickleby) are so well known as to be part and parcel of popular culture, and in some cases have passed into ordinary language: a scrooge, for example, is a miser or someone who dislikes Christmas festivity.

His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. "Gamp" became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs Gamp, and "Pickwickian", "Pecksniffian" and "Gradgrind" all entered dictionaries due to Dickens's original portraits of such characters who were, respectively, quixotic, hypocritical and vapidly factual. The character that made Dickens famous, Sam Weller became known for his Wellerisms—one-liners that turned proverbs on their heads. Many were drawn from real life: Mrs Nickleby is based on his mother, although she did not recognise herself in the portrait, just as Mr Micawber is constructed from aspects of his father's 'rhetorical exuberance';[186] Harold Skimpole in Bleak House is based on James Henry Leigh Hunt; his wife's dwarfish chiropodist recognised herself in Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield. Perhaps Dickens's impressions on his meeting with Hans Christian Andersen informed the delineation of Uriah Heep (a term synonymous with sycophant).

Virginia Woolf maintained that "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens" as he produces "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks". T. S. Eliot wrote that Dickens "excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings". One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. Dickens described London as a magic lantern, inspiring the places and people in many of his novels. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital – Dickens's London – are described over the course of his body of work. Walking the streets (particularly around London) formed an integral part of his writing life, stoking his creativity. Dickens was known to regularly walk at least a dozen miles (19 km) per day, and once wrote, "If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish."

Autobiographical elements

Authors frequently draw their portraits of characters from people they have known in real life. David Copperfield is regarded by many as a veiled autobiography of Dickens. The scenes of interminable court cases and legal arguments in Bleak House reflect Dickens's experiences as a law clerk and court reporter, and in particular his direct experience of the law's procedural delay during 1844 when he sued publishers in Chancery for breach of copyright. Dickens's father was sent to prison for debt, and this became a common theme in many of his books, with the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit resulting from Dickens's own experiences of the institution. Lucy Stroughill, a childhood sweetheart, may have affected several of Dickens's portraits of girls such as Little Em'ly in David Copperfield and Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities.

Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew the details of his early life until six years after his death, when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated. Though Skimpole brutally sends up Leigh Hunt, some critics have detected in his portrait features of Dickens's own character, which he sought to exorcise by self-parody.