Charles Dickens

Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812 and he had an unhappy childhood because his family was put in the Newsgate debtor’s prison due to his father’s debts when he was twelve years old so Dickens had to work in a shoe blacking factory to support his family. When he realised he had talent for writing he taught himself shorthand and became a parliamentary reporter for the court of justice. Dickens was disgusted by the government and the exploitation of children in the slums and factories. Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Hard Times. Dickens writes books with a happy ending and a moral which is easy to understand. Dickens published his books in monthly instalments in periodicals and he had to grab the attention of the readers so he used lots of cliffhangers. In his books the city is alive and becomes a character, the characters are usually good or evil. Dickens didn’t want to change society and had no political aim in denouncing the Victorian Age but in his books he described the world he saw and gave the characters a happy ending because he believed in kindness.

A Christmas Carol

Dickens conceived the idea in 1843 when he visited a pauper school for his job. He started to write a story which they could enjoy and he wanted to publish it for Christmas. He quickly developed the characters which he said came to his mind begging to come alive on paper and imagining them walking through the streets of London. He wrote feverishly and finished the story in six weeks. He wanted the book to have a beautiful cover but to be inexpensive because it was intended to be read by the lower working class and he also organised public readings in which he would read aloud his story to all the people who did not know how to read. He created a world full of people and became one of the most beloved authors in England.

A Christmas Carol opens on a bleak, cold Christmas Eve in London, seven years after the death of Ebenezer Scrooge's business partner, Jacob Marley. Scrooge, an ageing miser, dislikes Christmas and refuses a dinner invitation from his nephew Fred. He turns away two men seeking a donation to provide food and heating for the poor and only grudgingly allows his overworked, underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchit, Christmas Day off with pay to conform to the social custom. That night Scrooge is visited at home by Marley's ghost, who wanders the Earth entwined by heavy chains and money boxes forged during a lifetime of greed and selfishness. Marley tells Scrooge that he has a single chance to avoid the same fate: he will be visited by three spirits and must listen or be cursed to carry much heavier chains of his own. The first spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Past, takes Scrooge to Christmas scenes of Scrooge's boyhood, reminding him of a time when he was more innocent. The scenes reveal Scrooge's lonely childhood at boarding school, his relationship with his beloved sister Fan, the long-dead mother of Fred, and a Christmas party hosted by his first employer, Mr Fezziwig, who treated him like a son. Scrooge's neglected fiancée Belle is shown ending their relationship, as she realises that he will never love her as much as he loves money. Finally, they visit a now-married Belle with her large, happy family on the Christmas Eve that Marley died. Scrooge, upset by hearing a description of the man that he has become, demands that the ghost remove him from the house. The Ghost of Christmas Present, takes Scrooge to a joyous market with people buying the makings of Christmas dinner and to celebrations of Christmas in a miner's cottage and in a lighthouse. Scrooge and the ghost also visit Fred's Christmas party. A major part of this stave is taken up with Bob Cratchit's family feast and introduces his youngest son, Tiny Tim, a happy boy who is seriously ill. The spirit informs Scrooge that Tiny Tim will die unless the course of events changes. Before disappearing, the spirit shows Scrooge two hideous, emaciated children named Ignorance and Want. He tells Scrooge to beware the former above all and mocks Scrooge's concern for their welfare. Scrooge and Bob Cratchit celebrate Christmas in an illustration from stave five of the original edition, 1843.The third spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, shows Scrooge a Christmas Day in the future. The silent ghost reveals scenes involving the death of a disliked man whose funeral is attended by local businessmen only on condition that lunch is provided. His charwoman, laundress and the local undertaker steal his possessions to sell to a fence. When he asks the spirit to show a single person who feels emotion over his death, he is only given the pleasure of a poor couple who rejoice that his death gives them more time to put their finances in order. When Scrooge asks to see tenderness connected with any death, the ghost shows him Bob Cratchit and his family mourning the death of Tiny Tim. The ghost then allows Scrooge to see a neglected grave, with a tombstone bearing Scrooge's name. Sobbing, Scrooge pledges to change his ways. Scrooge awakens on Christmas morning a changed man. He makes a large donation to the charity he rejected the previous day, anonymously sends a large turkey to the Cratchit home for Christmas dinner and spends the afternoon at Fred's Christmas party. The following day he gives Cratchit an increase in pay, and begins to become a father figure to Tiny Tim. From then on Scrooge treats everyone with kindness, generosity and compassion, embodying the spirit of Christmas.

Oliver Twist (Pag. E41)

Dickens intended Oliver Twist, first published in monthly instalments between February 1837 and April 1839, to show the system's treatment of an innocent child born and raised in the workhouse system, where no 'fault' could be ascribed to the child. He shows the boys neglected, ill-treated, and experiencing hunger so bad that one child threatens to eat one of the others if he isn't better fed. Oliver has the temerity to ask for more food only because the hungry boys had cast lots to decide who would have to do it - and he had drawn the short straw. The description of Oliver's punishments for his request – a natural entreaty from a growing boy – occupies quite a chunk of the following chapter. The sheer brutality of the system is exposed. Oliver is maligned, threatened with being hanged, drawn and quartered; he is starved, caned, and flogged before an audience of paupers, solitarily confined in the dark for days, kicked and cursed, hauled up before a magistrate and sent to work in an undertaker, fed on animal scraps, taunted, and forced to sleep with coffins. The Dickens family had twice lived only doors from a major London workhouse (the Cleveland Street Workhouse), so they had most likely seen and heard of many sorrowful things. The family's lodgings were above a food shop, and it is quite possible that young Dickens felt deeply sensitive about the suffering he knew was going on inside the institution close by. Recent historical research has shown that the picture of the Poor Law that Dickens created in Oliver Twist closely resembles the real thing as it operated inside the workhouse in Cleveland Street. The punishing regime used to discipline Oliver is very like that which prevailed at the time in Cleveland Street. Further material has also come to light which suggests that Dickens used details from the locality of the Cleveland Street Workhouse in his writings, most especially in Oliver Twist. For example, Oliver's cap is described as being of brown cloth – the same as the boys' uniform in the Cleveland Street Workhouse but perhaps the most convincing evidence that Dickens used Cleveland Street in Oliver Twist is that right opposite the Workhouse, was a tallow-chandler's shop selling candles and cheap rushlights made of animal fat (tallow). The signboard outside is likely to have been painted with the proprietor's business and his name. Who was he? A man named Bill Sykes, just the same as the murderer in Oliver Twist. Some of its criminal characters – Fagin, Bill Sikes, the Artful Dodger – have become legends. Dickens saw the pull of crime as a literary genre – his novels benefited from the topic’s wide appeal. And yet he insisted on crime’s seriousness, and saw that thrilling, enticing literature was part of the same world as the misery of real, blighting wrongdoing. In an era of public executions, which he more than once attended, Dickens saw the shadow of the gallows fall over a whole society. Dodger and the other pickpockets, go off to witness (and ‘make pocket-handkerchiefs’ – pick pockets) at the execution of boys like them – boys Fagin has informed on for the reward. When they get back, Fagin asks them ‘whether there had been much of a crowd at the execution that morning’ (ch. 9) – suggesting what may lie in store for Oliver. Fagin, who harrowingly faces the gallows at the end, is early on overheard by Oliver muttering to himself, ‘What a fine thing capital punishment is!’ (ch. 9). He likes it because it’s useful to him – as a threat he holds over his gang, and even a means of profit (he informs his colleagues for money). He spells it out to Noah Claypole that if he breathes a word against the gang, then Fagin will have to blow upon him, (the thieves’ cant phrase for informing on him), for his crime is a capital one. Stealing from Sowerberry ‘would put the cravat round your throat that’s so very easily tied, and so very difficult to unloosen, – in plain English, the halter!’ (ch. 43). In fact, the novel ties together symbolically handkerchiefs criminally picked from pockets, those sported as neckwear, the hempen ‘cravat’ of the hangman and all the various associations with throats or ‘windpipes’ - choking, strangling, clasping, tearing and cutting. Sensational stories of crime and violence filled the pages of the popular press after 1800 with details of juvenile crime appearing in newspapers, broadsides and pamphlets. The activities of so-called ‘lads-men’ were regularly reported. These were criminal bosses who supposedly trained young boys to steal and then later sold on the stolen goods they received from them. Thomas Duggin for example was an infamous ‘thief-trainer’ who worked in London’s notorious St Giles slum in 1817, and as late as 1855 The Times newspaper reported the activities of Charles King, a man who ran a gang of professional pick-pockets. Among King’s gang was a 13-year-old boy named John Reeves, who stole over £100 worth of property in one week alone. Similarly, Isaac ‘Ikey’ Solomon was a well-known receiver of stolen goods in the 1810s and 1820s who was arrested several times, and on one occasion escaped from custody. Solomon gained notoriety for being a trainer of young thieves and was for some time (incorrectly) considered to be the inspiration behind Dickens’s character of Fagin owing to his similar Jewish heritage. ‘Flash-houses’ also received regular attention from the police during the first half of the century. These were pubs or lodging houses where stolen property was ‘fenced’, and were considered by the police and magistrates to be ‘nurseries of crime’.[2] One report in 1817 described flash-houses as containing ‘distinct parties or gangs’ of young boys, while later in 1837 a police witness recalled how one lodging house in London had ‘20 boys and ten girls under the age of 16’ living together, most of whom were ‘encouraged in picking pockets’ by their ‘captain’.

Hard Times (Pag. E54)

• Coketown Pag, E54

• Murdering of the innocents:
  Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of fact and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir -- peremptorily Thomas -- Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. [...]
  In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general. In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words 'boys and girls', for 'sir', Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts.
  [...]
  'Girl number twenty,' said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, 'I don't know that girl. Who is that girl?'
  'Sissy Jupe, sir,' explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.
  'Sissy is not a name,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'Don't call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.'
  'My father calls me Sissy, sir,' returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsey.
  'Then he has no business to do it,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'Tell him he mustn't. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?'
  'He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.'
  Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand.
  "We don't want to know anything about that, here. You mustn't tell us about that, here. Your father breaks horses, does he?'
  'If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring, sir.'
  'You mustn't tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then Describe your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?'
  'Oh yes, sir.'
  'Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier and horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse.'
  (Sissy Jupe was thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)
  'Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!' said Mr. Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. 'Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy's definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours.'
  The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer, perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which, darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely whitewashed room, irradiated Sissy. For, the boys and girls sat on face of the inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up the centre by a narrow interval; and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the other side, came in for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the comer of a row on the other side, a few rows in advance, caught the end. But, whereas the girl was dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun when it shone upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed. His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with something paler than themselves, expressed their form. His short cropped hair might have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead and face. His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.
  'Bitzer,' said Thomas Gradgrind. 'Your definition of a horse.'
  'Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.' Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
  'Now girl number twenty,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'You know what a horse is.'
  She curtseyed again, and would have blushed deeper, if she could have blushed deeper than she had blushed all this time. Bitzer, after rapidly blinking at Thomas Gradgrind with both eyes at once, and so catching the light upon his quivering ends of lashes that they looked like the antennae of busy insects, put his knuckles to his freckled forehead, and sat down again.
  The third gentleman now stepped forth. [...]
  'Very well,' said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms. 'That's a horse. Now, let me ask you girls and boys, Would you paper a room with representations of horses?'
  After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, 'Yes, sir!' Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman's face that Yes was wrong, cried out in chorus, 'No, sir!'-- as the custom is, in these examinations.
  'Of course, No. Why wouldn't you?'
  A pause. One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing, ventured the answer, Because he wouldn't paper a room at all, but would paint it.
  'You must paper it,' said Thomas Gradgrind, 'whether you like it or not. Don't tell us you wouldn't paper it. What do you mean, boy?'
  'I'll explain to you, then,' said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, 'why you wouldn't paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality -- in fact? Do you?'
  'Yes, sir!' from one half. 'No, sir!' from the other.
  'Of course no,' said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. 'Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don't see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don't have in fact. What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact.'
  Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.
  'This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,' said the gentleman. 'Now, I'll try you again. Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?'
  There being a general conviction by this time that 'No, sir!' was always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of No was very strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes; among them Sissy Jupe.
  'Girl number twenty,' said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.
  Sissy blushed, and stood up.
  'So you would carpet your room -- or your husband's room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband -- with representations of flowers, would you,' said the gentleman. 'Why would you?'
  'If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,' returned the girl.
  'And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?'
  'It wouldn't hurt them, sir. They wouldn't crush and wither if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy --'
  'Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn't fancy,' cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. 'That's it! You are never to fancy.'
  'You are not, Cecilia Jupe,' Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, 'to do anything of that kind.'
  'Fact, fact, fact!' said the gentleman. And 'Fact, fact, fact!' repeated Thomas Gradgrind.
  'You are to be in all things regulated and governed,' said the gentleman, 'by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use of ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don't walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don't find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use,' said the gentleman, 'for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.'
  The girl curtseyed, and sat down. She was very young, and she looked as if she were frightened by the matter of fact prospect the world afforded.
  

  Bleak House- Tom-All-Alone’s

  …. Jo lives that is to say Jo has not yet died in a ruinous place known to the like of him by the name of Tom-All-Alone's. It's black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people where the crazy houses were seized upon when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants....now these tumbling tenements contain by night, a swarm of misery. As on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so, these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards and coil themselves to sleep in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in....it's a moot point whether Tom-All-Alone's be uglier by day or by night; but on the argument that the more that is seen of it the more shocking it must be, and that no part of it left to the imagination is at all likely to be made so bad as the reality, day carries it....the day begins to break now and in truth it might be better for the national glory even that the sun should sometimes set upon the British domination that it should ever rise upon so vile a wonder as Tom.

   

  C. Dickens, Bleak House, 1853