The name Charles Dickens is synonymous with the Victorian Age, and so it should be: his writing has come to define the grotesque squalor and indomitable exuberance of the city of London and its people during that time. He was born February 7, 1812, in the closing stages of the Napoleonic Wars, and his biography reflects the spirit of the 19th century that would emerge after Waterloo. England in the mid-1800s suffered tremendous growing pains—more precisely paroxysms—while it coped with the harrowing effects of industrialization and rapid urbanization. These were the peak years of Britain&#8217;s global empire, the one upon which, historians claimed, the sun never set. All this was buttressed by a pervasive social conservatism, the tone for which Queen Victoria herself had helped set. Victoria was famously buttoned-up (the passion for her husband notwithstanding), and she lent a spirit of moral conservatism to 19th-century British social mores.
This atmosphere, pervasive across class lines, was set in counterpoint to the effects, both cultural and political, of the French Revolution. The political tumult, cultural outcry, and egregious bloodshed occasioned by 1789 and the subsequent terror were still in living memory for many Britons at the time of Victoria&#8217;s ascension. English Romanticism flowed in many respects from a common source as the French Revolution. It was a wish for direct action and collaboration—with nature, God, spirit, polity, capital, you name it. It was an age, both politically and artistically, of revolution, if not of reform. The spirit of romanticism produced many effects in the latter 19th century, including a burgeoning spirit of nationalism, and, concurrently, far-left political ideologies. The 19th century was, after all, the period that birthed socialist and communist ideologies and parties. Indeed, to demonstrate how interpenetrated these worlds of ideas were, we may note that Karl Marx himself had taken up residence in London in the mid-19th century, and likely attended the Great Exhibition of 1851.
The throes of urban life among the lower classes was a topic that Dickens knew personally. His family&#8217;s impecunious past had forced him into cruel work at a blacking factory while he was still a boy. He reported on the brutal realities of working-class conditions in the magazines he founded and edited; he also wrote passionately about these issues in his novels, especially in Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and Hard Times. Yet despite his driving moral sentiments, Dickens remained fundamentally a comic novelist, one whose work affirms what is best in individuals even while condemning the effects of an ultimately immoral (or at least, willfully blind) society.
Reading Dickens is to encounter the most exuberant human portrait artist in the English language. There is a preternatural vividness in the characters who appear on his pages, and those characters have the uncanny ability to shape the contours of his fiction, much in the way the mass of a celestial body shape may shape the field of gravity. Moreover, the fact that used that linguistic fire to ignite the moral sentiments of his readership, to appeal to their common humanity on behalf of the downtrodden (and especially on the behalf of orphaned children) leaves his readers with an abiding sense of possibility, of the hope for personal, moral, and spiritual growth for our society. He allows us to do this by giving us a story that allows us to laugh and to cry, and to laugh again.
Along with Cervantes and Tolstoy, Dickens is the most impactful (and certainly most widely-read) novelist in world history. The creator of Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge, David Copperfield, and Esther Summerson—among hundreds of other delectable, innocent, grotesque, indelible characters—his inviting, moralizing, welcoming, homespun, stately, athletic, urban, rustic and altogether wondrous storytelling is permanently lodged in the Anglophonic imagination. We know Dickens grew up poor (his father was sent to debtors&#8217; prison); we know he excelled from young manhood at the writing serialized, pot-boiler novels; we know he had ambitions to be a father: he made a home for a long shelf full of books (at least twenty) and a large houseful of children (he fathered ten).
Even at the onset of his career, at age twenty-four, Dickens had a fatherly largesse, and he was consummate if an occasionally didactic host. No expense was spared, no course untasted; and yet, &#8220;rich but not gaudy&#8221; seems an apt epithet. Dickens was the bard of the orphan. Perhaps this is because, during his own father&#8217;s years of penury, Dickens had moonlighted as an orphan himself, working from age ten in a blacking factory to support his hard-strapped family. He would return briefly to school, but in a real and moving way, from his childhood till his very last day, Charles Dickens would never stop working. A fierce, almost incredible spirit of industriousness drove his career, which we can characterize by his protective love for the sanctity of childhood. Dickens felt that society had failed when it failed its children, a theme he memorialized in virtually each of his novels, from Oliver Twist to Hard Times to Bleak House to David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Dickens&#8217; art is outsized, and it remains so a hundred and fifty years after his death. His plots are ruthless and meandering and fierce; his vocabulary is exacting, and his ear for dialect presents a rich sonic pageant; his characterizations are florabundant, filled with every mask of human sympathy and woe.
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