Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens "More, sir?"1

"I never knew what it was to feel disgust and contempt 'till I travelled in America." - Charles Dickens

And that was said after Charles Dickens had attended a party in his honor in New York where the 3000 guests were served 50,000 oysters, 10,000 sandwiches, 40 hams, 50 turkeys, 12 swans, 350 quarts of jelly and blanc mange, and 300 quarts of ice cream. Charles and his wife entered the ballroom - a converted theater - accompanied by a US Army general and the mayor of New York while the band played Handel's² "See the Conquering Hero Comes". After the party he was a guest of the US Congress and the President of the United States, John Tyler. When asked to come to dinner later at the White House, Charles said he couldn't make it.

All of this - including the snubbing of the President - was part of Charles Dickens' 1842 trip to the United States. By then he was literally the most famous man in the world³ and a true celebrity of popular culture.

Charles Dickens has been likened to today's rock stars. That's true enough. You could pack a theater by having Charles standing on the stage and reading from his books. He also really took in the dough and cleared enormous sums during his tours.

After hearing of the phenomenon that was Charles Dickens, today's readers may be prompted to turn to his books - today all available and in cheap editions - but a first perusal may leave the reader wondering. This, they scratch their heads, was a pop-culture phenomenon?

For one thing the characters' names are so contrived. There's Uriah Heep, of course, but you also have Serjeant Buzfuz, Wackford Squeers, Simon Tappertit, Charity Pecksniff, Rev. Melchisedech Howler, Woolwich Bagnet, Mr. M'Choakumchild, Decimus Tite Barnacle, Uncle Pumblechook, Pleasant Riderhood, and Hiram Grewgious, not to mention Dick Swiveller, and - get this - Master Bates⁴.

We have to admit it. If you read a Charles Dickens novel, the writing can come off a bit stiff, and - dare we say it - even corny. Consider this passage from one of his most famous and most serious books:

"Halloa!" the guard replied.

"What o'clock do you make it, Joe?"

"Ten minutes, good, past eleven."

"My blood!" ejaculated the vexed coachman, "and not atop of Shooter's yet!

"Tst! Yah! Get on with you!"

This got 3000 people cramming into a ballroom and eating 50,000 oysters?

We have to admit it. When kids in middle school get assigned one of Charles's books they face a daunting task. First of all, there's simply the sheer size of those suckers. A modern edition of Great Expectations runs over 500 pages, David Copperfield 700 pages, and Bleak House, 1000. And yet their parents and teachers gripe at them for not getting out and getting more exercise!⁵

Surely the parents say standing arms akimbo, if the Victorians gladly ploughed through the books, then today's kids surely can.

Uh, there's just one thing.

The Victorians didn't plough through the books.

Instead, they took the pages in bite-sized and palatable chunks.

You see, Charles's books were first published as serials. That is, they were issued piecemeal in magazines and newspapers with the chapters usually coming out monthly. So reading the whole book could easily stretch out over a leisurely year and a half. And the bits of the story broke off just at a cliffhanger leaving the readers hankering for more and ensuring that they would buy the next issue.⁶

Ironically Charles had nothing to do with the idea that kicked off his celebrity. Instead, the basic plan came from an artist named Robert Seymour. Robert suggested to the publishing firm of Chapman and Hall that he provide some drawings of Englishmen engaged in popular sports like hunting and fishing. Then they'd dredge up a writer to provide a bit of text for each picture. The publisher's liked the idea and contacted a young political reporter who had recently written a book of short stories titled Sketches of Boz. The writer, of course, was Charles Dickens.

Charles, though, had a better idea. He would provide an actual story, a work of fiction, that would continue issue by issue. Robert would then illustrate the story. For some reason the publishers agreed to the change and out of this agreement came the Pickwick Papers.

The irony is that Robert didn't end up drawing the pictures. Instead ultimately the job went to Hablot Knight Browne, then starting his career as an illustrator. The public loved it and Pickwick Papers became a hit and Charles became a star.

One of the reasons Charles's books were popular is the characters and situations were familiar with the readers and added verisimilitude to the story. Furthermore since the books were issued at such a leisurely pace, reading a Dickens novel was a nice way to relax after a hard day of clerking at your uncle's counting house.

But today Charles's books are literally force fed to the kids. Students are expected take in more in a week than the original audience read in three months - not to mention that the plot points in the novels are rarely those encountered by young modern suburbanites. Certain issues and words in the books are obscure today and require frequent elaboration while in the Victorian Era they were so common that they needed no explanation.

And even when the serials were combined and issued as novels, they were often bought by the same people who were already familiar with the story. So they could frequently dip back into the novel for a refreshing and welcome break.

But most of all during his lifetime the reading of a Charles Dickens novel was completely voluntary. Compulsory reading of Dickens didn't really start much later. In fact, Victorian literature of any kind was not taught at Oxford University until the mid-20th century - mostly thanks to a couple of professors named Ronald and Jack. So to sum up, for the Victorians, reading Charles Dickens was like - yes - like watching television.

So there's plenty of reasons why the books of Charles Dickens shouldn't be popular. But they are, and they keep selling. The reasons why people dip into Dickens is of course as varied as the people. But one group seems to be those who get interested in English history and naturally turn to the books to get a feel of the life and times during the long Victorian Era.

Another factor contributing to the books' continuing popularity is that they are eminently suited for casting as screenplays. Because the plots are so long and involved, scriptwriters can pick and choose what will suit the modern viewer. Today it's probably fair to say that Charles has had more films and television shows based on his books than any other author.⁷ Great Expectations has hit the screens (large and small) at least fifteen times, with something coming out about every six years. Oliver Twist was not only made into movies, but it was a hit musical, both on stage and on film.

But probably the #1 story of Charles that everyone has seen (if not read) is A Christmas Carol, a story that has even infiltrated our language when anyone refers to a miserly stingy curmudgeon as a "Scrooge" and they vent a "Bah! Humbug!" even if in a humorous or satirical manner. A Christmas Carol has appeared in movie theaters and on television in nigh on 50 productions and has starred the likes of Sir Seymour Hicks, George C. Scott, Michael Caine, Jim Carrey, Mr. Magoo, and Fred Flintstone. It has also been performed on stage since the 19th century, and once the casting of Tiny Tim in a production in a Quaint Town in the American Southwest brought cries of astonishment as the audience didn't think such acting was possible.

Charles John Huffam Dickens was not born in 1812 to a poor downtrodden family where he had to work in a shoe-polish factory putting labels on bottles to support his family. He was born in 1812 into a middle class family whose father was thrown into prison for debt so that Charles had to work in a shoe-polish factory putting labels on bottles to support his family. His dad, a clerk, was eventually freed and Charles was able to go back to school. The schooling was brief, though, and Charles - as was Sir Joseph Porter, KCB - became an office boy to an attorney's firm. From there he studied shorthand, a skill that led him not to be Ruler of the Queen's Navy, but to become a reporter covering the debates of Parliament.

The job was actually a good one and by 1836, Charles was on a firm enough financial standing that he could marry Catherine Hogarth. His relative prosperity also meant he had to bail out his dad who was again arrested for debt. His mom and siblings also hit him up for cash now and then and he did come to their aid if somewhat grudgingly.

Charles had some payback in that he modeled some of his characters after his family. In particular his dad served as the prototype for Mr. Micwaber, the financially irresponsible optimist in Oliver Twist who always was hoping that something would turn up. It would have been some source of satisfaction to Charles to see who would end up playing the part in the movies.

As a reporter Charles had developed contacts in the publishing world and in 1836 he published Sketches by Boz, a series of short stories about life in London. First published in the newspapers, they were later issued as a book. It was the popularity of the Sketches which ended up with Charles getting tapped to write what became the Pickwick Papers which in turn became so successful that Charles immediately turned out Olvier Twist and almost instantaneously skyrocketed to being the most popular writer in the English language.

As was true regarding most celebrities, the public wanted to see their hero in the flesh. So Charles began going on tour to give readings. That is, he'd walk on stage and read his books. Of course he had to edit the selections considerably. Ultimately these performances led to his legendary (and lucrative) tour of America.

The Charles Dickens Americans first saw was a far cry from the grizzled droopy eyed figure known from his later photographs. He was a handsome and clean-shaven young man of 30 and a goodly part of the crowds were young ladies who turned out to see him and listen to his dramatic readings.

But despite the nice bit of change picked up from the tours, Charles found himself somewhat underwhelemd by the Land of the Free. His gripes were varied and considerable, and part of the problem was simply the hassles of getting around and being on display constantly. As he wrote to a friend:

If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude.

I am so enclosed and hemmed about with people, that I am exhausted from want of air. I go to church for quiet, and there is a violent rush to the neighborhood of the pew I sit in. I take my seat in a railroad car, and the very conductor won't leave me alone. I can't drink a glass of water without having a hundred people looking down my throat.

But he also had complaints about American modus vivendi. In Philadelphia he noted that the prisoners of Eastern Penitentiary were kept in solitary confinement and he thought this was far from an effective way to rehabilitate prisoners. True, the American model wasn't that different than the way England handled their crooks, but in England there was still the option of shipping the crooks to Australia - "transportation" as it was called - where as Magwitch did in Great Expectations, they might prosper and gain their freedom.

But even American lifestyles didn't impress him and he thought the habits of the people somewhat crass. After visiting the nation's capital he noted:

Washington may be called the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva. The thing itself is an exaggeration of nastiness, which cannot be outdone.

On a more serious note, Charles found that he was traveling in a country that both trumpeted the virtue of liberty and still kept over 15% of its population enslaved. Worse, there were no signs whatsoever that this would change. The decades of 1830 to 1850 had seen the increased use of the mechanical cotton gin and with it the rise of slavery as a profitable enterprise. But in England opposition had grown to the point that in 1833 the Abolition Act had passed Parliament and slavery was to be phased out by 1840. That left only the United States of the modern western countries to continue the practice of this "peculiar institution". For their part Americans were quick to point that England seemed happy enough to import slave-produced cotton for their textile mills.⁸

But what really chaffed Charles's back⁹ was the lack of a reciprocal copyright agreement between the two countries. This complaint - and he wasn't hesitant to let his opinion out - really ticked off the Americans. Huh! Where did this whining Brit get off telling us what laws and treaties we should have?

Of course, the lack of copyright agreements was to the benefit of the   publishers. Why should they pay American writers - like Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, or James Fenimore Cooper - for stories when they could swipe Dickens's latest books and for nothing?

Charles was so disappointed and put off by America and its Americans that he wrote up his impressions in American Notes. Later he painted a decidedly negative picture of the country in the novel Martin Chuzzlewit, which is, we might point out, one of his least known, least read, and least successful of his books. It was, in fact, a commercial failure to the point that the publishers thought about taking 50 pounds a month from Charles to pay for the advance. It was to help square this imbalance that he quickly wrote A Christmas Carol which he figured would sell well.

Naturally such a negative depiction of the country that had given him such a generous welcome - and filled his pockets with the Yankee dollars - produced a backlash by his erstwhile fans. Americans began trashing his sissified clothes and coiffured hair all the while labeling him as "a contemptible Cockney" who was nothing but a "mercenary scoundrel and a "penny-a-line loafer". The criticism found its way into a major forum when James Watson Webb, the editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer spewed that Dickens insulted Americans as "a filthy, gormandizing race" and lambasted him as a product of the London slums, "a low born scullion" and one "who for more than half his life has lived in the stews of London." As far as Americans were concerned, Charles Dickens was a greedy, grasping grump.

But that didn't stop them from reading his books - and not paying him copyright fees. After the Pickwick Papers Charles continued to - and pardon a crass expression - "crank them out". What he cranked included Oliver Twist (1837), Nicholas Nickleby (1838), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), Barnaby Rudge (1841), Master Humphrey's Clock (1841), A Christmas Carol (1843), The Chimes (1844), American Notes (1842), The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), Christmas Books (including A Christmas Carol, 1843), Pictures from Italy (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), Dombey and Son (1846), The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848), David Copperfield (1849), A Child's History of England (1851), Bleak House (1852), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855), The Wreck of the Golden Mary (1856), The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Hunted Down (1859), The Uncommercial Traveller (1860), A Message from the Sea (1860), Great Expectations (1860), Reprinted Pieces (1861), Tom Tiddler's Ground (1861), The Haunted House (1862), Somebody's Luggage (1862), Mrs Lirriper's Lodgings (1863), Mrs Lirriper's Legacy (1864), Our Mutual Friends (1864), Doctor Marigold (1865), The Trial for Murder (1865), Mugby Junction (1866), The Signal Man (1866), No Thoroughfare (1867), and the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). There were also some manuscripts that were completed by other writers and published posthumously.

Twenty-five years after his visit to America, in 1868, Charles returned. To his surprise he found America a far more congenial country than in the earlier decades. For one thing, slavery had been abolished and in an era before urban decay, the cities had grown and matured into places suitable for congenial living. As before, he gave readings and took in a lot of cash.

Some in attendance, though, found the experience a bit less than hoped for. Charles's enunciation wasn't clear and his reading far from dynamic. As one observer put it:

I was a good deal disappointed in Mr. Dickens' reading. I will go further and say, a great deal disappointed. The Herald and Tribune critics must have been carried away by their imaginations when they wrote their extravagant praises of it.

So wrote Mark Twain. But of course, by then, Charles was not in great shape and his managers were worried that they might have to cancel some of his appearances. In his 50's Charles was by no means an old man¹⁰. But it is true that the habits of wealthy Victorians were not necessarily those to admit to health. For his part Charles drank Scotch whiskey and gin and rum punches, and as did most Victoria men, he smoked strong and ample cigars.

And we must admit he seems to have dallied about. He had married Catherine in 1836 and ultimately they had 10 kids. But in 1857 Charles went to a play and saw Ellen Ternan - "Nelly" to her friends" - appear on stage. Although some defenders of Charles's character say we don't know if they were actually mending the kettle, it's undeniable that Charles and Nelly got quite friendly. At least friendly enough that a year after they met Charles and Catherine formally separated after more than 20 years of marriage. This separation may, just may have been prompted by Catherine accidentally opening a package that contained both a gold bracelet and a note to Nelly from Charles.

And although some like to think "nothing has been proven", it is true that Charles diverted a portion of his by-then substantial income to keep Nelly set up in her own apartment and paid her living expenses. Although this could simply be an older man looking after the welfare of a young lady 16 years his junior, it is - if we may paraphrase Arlo Guthrie - not very likely and we don't expect it. So although Charles wasn't quite as bad as the American inventor and painter Samuel Finley Breese Morse, we do have to concede he could still be a jerk.

And Nelly? Well, after Charles died in 1870 she destroyed all their letters - a strange thing to do if they had proof that Charles and Nelly were just friends. Six years later she married George Wharton Robinson. George, we understand, had no idea she was 12 years older than he was (he thought she was two years younger) nor did he know that she and Charles had been good friends. Nelly died in 1914.

And there's one last point we must bring up. On his American tours, Charles never got out of the American Northeast. His plans to go to Chicago and St. Louis had to be scotched.

So no, Charles Dickens never went to Virginia City at the invitation of Ben "Pa" Cartwright even though in the Bonanza episode "A Passion for Justice", Charles (Jonathan Harris, "Dr. Zachary Smith" of Lost in Space) comes to town to give readings (since he had a beard and from other timeline hints of the series, this must have been in his 1868 tour). But while reading an excerpt of Oliver Twist one of the audience tips the hand to Charles that they knew the book already. It seems that the local printer had been pirating the book - which as we pointed out was perfectly legal in a day without copyright agreements - and distributing the work to the good citizens of Virginia City. Miffed, Charles went to the printer to complain but found that the whole place had been trashed. Naturally he was suspected of being the culprit and was arrested. But Ben, as always, came through and the truth came out.

References

Charles Dickens, Claire Tomalin, Viking, Penguin, 2011.

"Dickens: A Brief Biography", David Cody, Victorian Web.

Dickens: His Character, Comedy, and Career, Hesketh Pearson, Harper and Brothers, 1949.

Innocent Abroad : Charles Dickens's American Engagements, Jerome Meckier, 1990.

"Charles Dickens' Show-Stealing Entrance to Serial Fiction", Kristin Masters. March 31, 2014.

"Revealed: The Dark Side of Charles Dickens", Luke Heighton, The Sun, April 5, 2016.

"The Dark Side of Dickens", Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic, May 2010.

"When Charles Dickens Fell Out with America", BBC, February 14, 2012

"Charles Dickens Had Serious Beef with America and Its Bad Manners And How it Led to His Writing A Christmas Carol", Samantha Silva, Literary HubDecember 21, 2017.

"Victorian Food Picture Gallery", History Cookbook.

"Charles Dickens' Tour of America, as Described in American Notes", Tolstoy Therapy, January 25, 2013.

"The Great Dickens", Mark Twain, Newspaper Articles of Mark Twain: 1861 - 1881, Librivox.

"The Great Dickens", Mark Twain, Mark Twain Quotes.

"15 Dickens Characters With Really Silly Names", Londonist.

Do We Really Live Longer Than Ever Before?", Amanda Ruggeri, October 2, 2018.

Amadeus, Peter Schaffer, Andre Deutsch, 1980.

The Inklings: C S Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends, Humphrey Carpenter, George Allen & Unwin / Houghton-Mifflin (1978).

"Eating and Drinking With Charles Dickens", Tori Avey, PBS, December 20, 2012

"A Passion for Justice", Lorne Greene (actor), Pernell Roberts (actor), Dan Blocker (actor), Michael Landon (actor), Jonathan Harris (guest actor), Murray Golden (director), Peter Packer (scriptwriter), David Dortort (producer), Bonanza, September 29, 1963, Internet Movie Data Base.

"An Unsuitable and Degraded Diet? Part Three: Victorian Consumption Patterns and Their Health Benefits", Judith Rowbotham and Paul Clayton, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Volume 101, Issue 9, 2008.

"The Bases of Paleodemography", J. Lawrence Angel, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Volume 30, Issue 3, 1969.