Writes Shahzad Hussain Hamdani
Famed British author Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, on the southern coast of England. He was the second of eight children. His father, John Dickens, was a naval clerk who dreamed of striking it rich. Charles Dickens’ mother, Elizabeth Barrow, aspired to be a teacher and school director. Despite his parents’ best efforts, the family remained poor. Nevertheless, they were happy in the early days. In 1816, they moved to Chatham, Kent, where young Charles and his siblings were free to roam the countryside and explore the old castle at Rochester.
In 1822, the Dickens family moved to Camden Town, a poor neighbourhood in London. By then the family’s financial situation had grown dire, as John Dickens had a dangerous habit of living beyond the family’s means. Eventually, John was sent to prison for debt in 1824, when Charles was just 12 years old.
Following his father’s imprisonment, Charles Dickens was forced to leave school to work at a boot-blacking factory alongside the River Thames. At the rundown, rodent-ridden factory, Dickens earned six shillings a week labelling pots of “blacking,” a substance used to clean fireplaces. It was the best he could do to help support his family. Looking back on the experience, Dickens saw it as the moment he said goodbye to his youthful innocence, stating that he wondered “how [he] could be so easily cast away at such a young age.” He felt abandoned and betrayed by the adults who were supposed to take care of him. These sentiments would later become a recurring theme in his writing.
Much to his relief, Dickens was permitted to go back to school when his father received a family inheritance and used it to pay off his debts. But when Dickens was 15, his education was pulled out from under him once again. In 1827, he had to drop out of school and work as an office boy to contribute to his family’s income. As it turned out, the job became an early launching point for his writing career.
Though he had little formal education, his early impoverishment drove him to succeed. He edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels and hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children’s rights, education, and other social reforms.
Readers like a good story, with interesting characters. Dickens was very clever at making up characters. People all over the world know Oliver Twist, Scrooge and David Copperfield, even if they have not read the books in which these characters appear. Every Write-up of Dickens’ was somewhere reflecting his own life. For example, when his wife’s chiropodist expressed distress at the way; Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her disabilities.
The biggest Example of his own personality through his own pen was “Oliver Twist”. His first novel, Oliver Twist, which followed the life of an orphan living in the streets. Oliver was born in a workhouse in the first half of the nineteenth century. His mother dies during his birth, and he is sent to an orphanage (where he is poorly treated). Along with the other orphans, Oliver is regularly beaten and poorly fed. In a famous episode, he walks up to the the stern authoritarian, Mr. Bumble, and asks for more. For this impertinence, he is put out of the workhouse. He then runs away from the family who take him in. He wants to find his fortune in London. Instead, he falls in with a boy called Jack Dawkins, who is part of a child gang of thieves–run by Fagin. Oliver is brought into the gang and trained as a pickpocket. When he goes out on his first job, he runs away and is nearly sent to prison. However, the kindness of the person who was robbed, saves him from the terrors of the city gaol, and instead he is taken into the philanthropic gentleman’s home. However, as soon as he thinks he is settled, Bill Sikes and Nancy (two members of the gang) take him back. Oliver is once more sent out on a job–this time assisting Sikes on a burglary.
Oliver Twist was enormously influential in bringing to light the atrocious treatment of paupers and orphans in Dickens’s time. The novel is not only a brilliant work of art but also a tremendously important document in social history.
The story was inspired by how Dickens felt as an impoverished child forced to get by on his wits and earn his own keep. Dickens continued showcasing Oliver Twist in the magazines he later edited, including Household Words and All the Year Round, the latter of which he founded. The novel was extremely well received in both England and America; But critics soon followed Charles Dickens’. Dickens was accused of following anti-Semitic stereotypes because of his portrayal of the Jewish character Fagin in Oliver Twist. Paul Vallely writes that Fagin is widely seen as one of the most grotesque Jews in English literature, and the most vivid of Dickens’s 989 characters. Nadia Valdman, who writes about the portrayal of Jews in literature, argues that Fagin’s representation was drawn from the image of the Jew as inherently evil, that the imagery associated him with the Devil, and with beasts.
While the ending years of his life; Dickens’s worked for charitable organizations foreshadowed the Social Gospel. He was critical of any religion that did not seek to relieve poverty. Moreover, he had no patience with those who raised money for foreign evangelism when there was so much suffering at home. He strongly supported the Unitarian health and housing reformer, Southwood Smith. The reform work with which Dickens was most personally involved was Urania Cottage, a home for fallen and other homeless women, funded by his friend, the philanthropist Angela Burdett Coutts. Coutts favoured strict treatment of the inmates, but Dickens insisted they be “tempted to virtue” in an environment more like a household than a prison.
On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home, after a full day’s work on Edwin Drood. He never regained consciousness, and the next day, on 9 June, five years to the day after the Staplehurst rail crash, he died at Gad’s Hill Place. 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.” His last words were: “On the ground”