David
Copperfield's life mirrors much of Dickens'life .
Dickens
had begun writing an autobiography in the late 1840s that he shared with his
friend and future biographer, John Forster (Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 22). He
found the writing too painful and opted instead to work his story into the
fictional account of David Copperfield, which he later described as his
personal favorite among his novels (David Copperfield, p. xii). The story was
serialized from May 1849 until November 1850. During the writing of Copperfield
the tireless Dickens began another venture, a weekly magazine called Household
Words. Charles worked as editor as well as contributor with additional pieces
supplied by other writers. Also during the writing of Copperfield Catherine
gave birth to a daughter, named for David Copperfield's wife Dora (Slater,
2009, p. 312). Dora, sickly from birth, died at 8 months old (Ackroyd, 1990, p.
627-628).
Dickens
followed David Copperfield with what many consider one of his finest novels,
Bleak House (Davis, 1999, p. 35). Dickens used his previous experience as a
court reporter to tell the story of a prolonged case in the Courts of Chancery.
During the writing of Bleak House Catherine gave birth to a son, Edward (1852),
nicknamed Plorn. Edward would be last of Charles and Catherine's children and
the family moved again, this time to Tavistock House. Following Bleak House
Dickens serialized his next book, Hard Times, in his weekly magazine, Household
Words. Following Hard Times Dickens returned to the painful childhood memory of
his father's imprisonment for debt with the story of Little Dorrit. Amy
Dorrit's father, William, was a prisoner in the Marshalsea debtor's prison and
Amy was born there.
Philanthropy
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 working
class. Coutts envisioned a home that would replace the punitive regimes of
existing institutions with a reformative environment conducive to education and
proficiency in domestic household chores. After initially resisting, Dickens
eventually founded the home, named Urania Cottage, in the Lime Grove area of
Shepherd's Bush, which he managed for ten years, setting the house rules,
reviewing the accounts and interviewing prospective residents. 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.
Religious
views
As
a young man, Dickens expressed a distaste 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 on Sundays.
"Look into your churches – diminished congregations and scanty attendance.
People have grown sullen and obstinate, and are becoming disgusted with the
faith which condemns them to such a day as this, once in every seven. They
display their feeling by staying away [from church]. Turn into the streets [on
a Sunday] and mark the rigid gloom that reigns over everything around."
Dickens
honoured the figure of Jesus Christ. He is regarded as a professing
Christian. His son, Henry Fielding Dickens, described him as someone who
"possessed deep religious convictions". In the early 1840s, he had
shown an interest in Unitarian Christianity and Robert Browning remarked that
"Mr. Dickens is an enlightened Unitarian." Professor Gary Colledge
has written that he "never strayed from his attachment to popular lay
Anglicanism". Dickens authored a work called The Life of Our Lord
(1846), a book about the life of Christ, written with the purpose of sharing
his faith with his children and family. In a scene from David
Copperfield, Dickens echoed Geoffrey Chaucer's use of Luke 23:34 from Troilus
and Criseyde (Dickens held a copy in his library), with G. K. Chesterton
writing, "among the great canonical English authors, Chaucer and Dickens
have the most in common."
Dickens
disapproved of Roman Catholicism and 19th-century evangelicalism, seeing both
as extremes of Christianity and likely to limit personal expression, and was
critical of what he saw as the hypocrisy of religious institutions and
philosophies like spiritualism, all of which he considered deviations from the
true spirit of Christianity, as shown in the book he wrote for his family in
1846. While Dickens advocated equal rights for Catholics in England, he
strongly disliked how individual civil liberties were often threatened in
countries where Catholicism predominated and referred to the Catholic Church as
"that curse upon the world." Dickens also rejected the Evangelical
conviction that the Bible was the infallible word of God. His ideas on Biblical
interpretation were similar to the Liberal Anglican Arthur Penrhyn Stanley's doctrine
of "progressive revelation". Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky
referred to Dickens as "that great Christian writer".
Middle
years
In
December 1845, Dickens took up the editorship of the London-based Daily News, a
liberal paper through which Dickens hoped to advocate, in his own words,
"the Principles of Progress and Improvement, of Education and Civil and
Religious Liberty and Equal Legislation." Among the other contributors
Dickens 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. Dickens lasted only ten weeks on the job before resigning due to a
combination of exhaustion and frustration with one of the paper's co-owners.
A
Francophile, Dickens often holidayed in France and, in a speech delivered in
Paris in 1846 in French, called the French "the first people in the
universe".[102] During his visit to Paris, Dickens met the French literati
Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Eugène Scribe, Théophile Gautier, François-René
de Chateaubriand and Eugène Sue. In early 1849, Dickens started to write David
Copperfield. It was published between 1849 and 1850. In Dickens's biography,
Life of Charles Dickens (1872), John Forster wrote of David Copperfield, "underneath
the fiction lay something of the author's life". It was Dickens's personal
favourite among his novels, as he wrote in the author's preface to the 1867
edition of the novel.
In
late November 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he wrote Bleak
House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1856). It was here that
he indulged in the amateur theatricals described in Forster's Life of Charles
Dickens. During this period, he worked closely with the novelist and
playwright Wilkie Collins. In 1856, his income from writing allowed him to buy
Gads Hill Place in Higham, Kent. As a child, Dickens had walked past the house
and dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events
of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 and this literary connection pleased
him.
During
this time Dickens was also the publisher, editor and a major contributor to the
journals Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1858–1870).[108]
In 1854, at the behest of Sir John Franklin's widow Lady Jane, Dickens
viciously attacked Arctic explorer John Rae in Household Words for his report
to the Admiralty, based on interviews with local Inuit, that the members of
Franklin's lost expedition had resorted to cannibalism. These attacks would later
be expanded on his 1856 play The Frozen Deep, which satirizes Rae and the
Inuit. 20th century archaeology work in King William Island later confirmed
that the members of the Franklin expedition resorted to cannibalism.
In
1855, when Dickens's good friend and Liberal MP Austen Henry Layard formed an
Administrative Reform Association to demand significant reforms of Parliament,
Dickens joined and volunteered his resources in support of Layard's cause. With
the exception of Lord John Russell, who was the only leading politician in whom
Dickens had any faith and to whom he later dedicated A Tale of Two Cities,
Dickens believed that the political aristocracy and their incompetence were the
death of England. When he and Layard were accused of fomenting class conflict,
Dickens replied that the classes were already in opposition and the fault was
with the aristocratic class. Dickens used his pulpit in Household Words to
champion the Reform Association. He also commented on foreign affairs,
declaring his support for Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, helping
raise funds for their campaigns and stating that "a united Italy would be
of vast importance to the peace of the world, and would be a rock in Louis
Napoleon's way," and that "I feel for Italy almost as if I were an
Italian born." Dickens also published dozens of writings in
Household Words supporting vaccination, including multiple laudations for
vaccine pioneer Edward Jenner.
Following
the Indian Mutiny of 1857, Dickens joined in the widespread criticism of the
East India Company for its role in the event, but reserved his fury for
Indians, wishing that he was the commander-in-chief in India so that he would
be able to "do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of
the late cruelties rested."
In
1857, Dickens hired professional actresses for The Frozen Deep, which he and
his protégé Wilkie Collins had written. Dickens fell in love with one of the
actresses, Ellen Ternan, and this passion was to last the rest of his
life. In 1858, when Dickens was 45 and Ternan 18, divorce would have been
scandalous for someone of his fame. After publicly accusing Catherine of not
loving their children and suffering from "a mental disorder" –
statements that disgusted his contemporaries, including Elizabeth Barrett
Browning – Dickens attempted to have Catherine institutionalized. When his scheme failed, they separated. Catherine left, never to see her husband
again, taking with her one child. Her sister Georgina, who stayed at Gads Hill,
raised the other children.
During
this period, whilst pondering a project to give public readings for his own
profit, Dickens was approached through a charitable appeal by Great Ormond
Street Hospital to help it survive its first 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. Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked
by his friend, the hospital's founder Charles West, to preside over the appeal,
and he threw himself into the task, heart and soul. Dickens's public
readings secured sufficient funds for an endowment to put the hospital on a
sound financial footing; one reading on 9 February 1858 alone raised £3,000.
After
separating from Catherine, Dickens undertook a series of popular and
remunerative reading tours which, together with his journalism, were to absorb
most of his creative energies for the next decade, in which he was to write
only two novels. His first reading tour, lasting from April 1858 to February
1859, consisted of 129 appearances in 49 towns throughout England, Scotland and
Ireland. Dickens's continued fascination with the theatrical world was written
into the theatre scenes in Nicholas Nickleby, and he found an outlet in public
readings. In 1866, he undertook a series of public readings in England and
Scotland, with more the following year in England and Ireland.
Other
works soon followed, including A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great
Expectations (1861), which were resounding successes. Set in London and Paris,
A Tale of Two Cities is his best-known work of historical fiction and includes
the famous opening sentence that begins with "It was the best of times, it
was the worst of times." It is regularly touted as one of the best-selling
novels of all time. Themes in Great Expectations include wealth and poverty,
love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil.
In
early September 1860, in a field behind Gads Hill, Dickens made a bonfire of
most of his correspondence; he spared only letters on business matters. Since
Ellen Ternan also destroyed all of his letters to her, the extent of the affair
between the two remains speculative. In the 1930s, Thomas Wright recounted that
Ternan had unburdened herself to a Canon Benham and gave currency to rumours
they had been lovers. Dickens's daughter, Kate Perugini, stated that the two
had a son who died in infancy to biographer Gladys Storey in an interview
before the former's death in 1929. Storey published her account in Dickens and
Daughter, though no contemporary evidence was given. On his death, Dickens
settled an annuity on Ternan which made her financially independent. Claire
Tomalin's book The Invisible Woman argues that Ternan lived with Dickens
secretly for the last 13 years of his life. The book was subsequently turned
into a play, Little Nell, by Simon Gray, and a 2013 film. During the same period
Dickens furthered his interest in the paranormal becoming one of the early
members of The Ghost Club.
In
June 1862, he was offered £10,000 for a reading tour of Australia. He was
enthusiastic, and even planned a travel book, The Uncommercial Traveller Upside
Down, but ultimately decided against the tour. Two of his sons, Alfred D'Orsay
Tennyson Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, migrated to Australia,
Edward becoming a member of the Parliament of New South Wales as Member for
Wilcannia between 1889 and 1894.
Later
life
On
9 June 1865, while returning from Paris with Ellen Ternan, Dickens was involved
in the Staplehurst rail crash in Kent. The train's first seven carriages
plunged off a cast iron bridge that was under repair and ten passengers were
killed. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track—which was left
hanging precariously off the bridge—was the one in which Dickens was
travelling. For three hours before rescuers arrived, Dickens tended and
comforted the wounded and the dying with a flask of brandy and a hat refreshed
with water. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our
Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it.
Dickens
later used the experience of the crash as material for his short ghost story,
"The Signal-Man", in which the central character has a premonition of
his own death in a rail crash. He also based the story on several previous rail
accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash in Sussex of 1861. Dickens
managed to avoid an appearance at the inquest to avoid disclosing that he had
been travelling with Ternan and her mother, which would have caused a scandal.
After the crash, Dickens was nervous when travelling by train and would use
alternative means when available. In 1868 he wrote, "I have sudden vague
rushes of terror, even when riding in a hansom cab, which are perfectly
unreasonable but quite insurmountable." Dickens's son, Henry, recalled,
"I have seen him sometimes in a railway carriage when there was a slight
jolt. When this happened he was almost in a state of panic and gripped the seat
with both hands."
Second
visit to the United States
While
he contemplated a second visit to the United States, the outbreak of the Civil
War in America in 1861 delayed his plans. On 9 November 1867, over two years
after the war, Dickens set sail from Liverpool for his second American reading
tour. Landing in Boston, he devoted the rest of the month to a round of dinners
with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his
American publisher, James T. Fields. In early December, the readings began. He
performed 76 readings, netting £19,000, from December 1867 to April 1868.
Dickens shuttled between Boston and New York, where he gave 22 readings at
Steinway Hall. Although he had started to suffer from what he called the
"true American catarrh", he kept to a schedule that would have
challenged a much younger man, even managing to squeeze in some sleighing in
Central Park.
During
his travels, he saw a change in the people and the circumstances of America.
His final appearance was at a banquet the American Press held in his honour at
Delmonico's on 18 April, when he promised never to denounce America again. By
the end of the tour Dickens could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on
champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. On 23 April he boarded the Cunard liner
Russia to return to Britain,] barely escaping a federal tax lien against the
proceeds of his lecture tour.
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