(wiki) Charles Dickens 03

Reputation

Dickens's portrait (top left), in between Shakespeare and Tennyson, on a stained glass window at the Ottawa Public Library, Ottawa, Canada

Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time,[211] and remains one of the best-known and most-read of English authors. His works have never gone out of print,[212] and have been adapted continually for the screen since the invention of cinema,[213] with at least 200 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens's works documented.[214] Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime – early productions included The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain which was performed in the West End's Adelphi Theatre in 1848 – and, as early as 1901, the British silent film Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost was made by Walter R. Booth.[215] Contemporaries such as publisher Edward Lloyd cashed in on Dickens's popularity with cheap imitations of his novels, resulting in his own popular 'penny dreadfuls'.[216]

From the beginning of his career in the 1830s, Dickens's achievements in English literature were compared to those of Shakespeare.[168] Dickens created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest British novelist of the Victorian era.[1] His literary reputation, however began to decline with the publication of Bleak House in 1852–53. Philip Collins calls Bleak House 'a crucial item in the history of Dickens's reputation. Reviewers and literary figures during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, saw a "drear decline" in Dickens, from a writer of "bright sunny comedy ... to dark and serious social" commentary.[217] The Spectator called Bleak House "a heavy book to read through at once ... dull and wearisome as a serial"; Richard Simpson, in The Rambler, characterised Hard Times as "this dreary framework"; Fraser's Magazine thought Little Dorrit "decidedly the worst of his novels".[218] All the same, despite these "increasing reservations amongst reviewers and the chattering classes, 'the public never deserted its favourite'". Dickens's popular reputation remained unchanged, sales continued to rise, and Household Words and later All the Year Round were highly successful.[218]

"Charles Dickens as he appears when reading." Wood engraving from Harper's Weekly, 7 December 1867. Author David Lodge called Dickens the "first writer to be an object of unrelenting public interest and adulation".[219]

As his career progressed, Dickens's fame and the demand for his public readings were unparalleled. In 1868 The Times wrote, "Amid all the variety of 'readings', those of Mr Charles Dickens stand alone."[10] A Dickens biographer, Edgar Johnson, wrote in the 1950s: "It was [always] more than a reading; it was an extraordinary exhibition of acting that seized upon its auditors with a mesmeric possession."[10] Juliet John backed the claim for Dickens "to be called the first self-made global media star of the age of mass culture."[219] Comparing his reception at public readings to those of a contemporary pop star, The Guardian states, "People sometimes fainted at his shows. His performances even saw the rise of that modern phenomenon, the 'speculator' or ticket tout (scalpers) – the ones in New York City escaped detection by borrowing respectable-looking hats from the waiters in nearby restaurants."[220]

"Dickens's vocal impersonations of his own characters gave this truth a theatrical form: the public reading tour. No other Victorian could match him for celebrity, earnings, and sheer vocal artistry. The Victorians craved the author's multiple voices: between 1853 and his death in 1870, Dickens performed about 470 times."

—Peter Garratt in The Guardian on Dickens's fame and the demand for his public readings[10]

Among fellow writers, there was a range of opinions on Dickens. Poet laureate, William Wordsworth (1770–1850), thought him a "very talkative, vulgar young person", adding he had not read a line of his work, while novelist George Meredith (1828–1909), found Dickens "intellectually lacking".[221] In 1888 Leslie Stephen commented in the Dictionary of National Biography that "if literary fame could be safely measured by popularity with the half-educated, Dickens must claim the highest position among English novelists".[222] Anthony Trollope's Autobiography famously declared Thackeray, not Dickens, to be the greatest novelist of the age. However, both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were admirers. Dostoyevsky commented: "We understand Dickens in Russia, I am convinced, almost as well as the English, perhaps even with all the nuances. It may well be that we love him no less than his compatriots do. And yet how original is Dickens, and how very English!"[223] Tolstoy referred to David Copperfield as his favourite book, and he later adopted the novel as "a model for his own autobiographical reflections".[224] French writer Jules Verne called Dickens his favourite writer, writing his novels "stand alone, dwarfing all others by their amazing power and felicity of expression".[225] Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was inspired by Dickens's novels in several of his paintings like Vincent's Chair and in an 1889 letter to his sister stated that reading Dickens, especially A Christmas Carol, was one of the things that was keeping him from committing suicide.[226] Oscar Wilde generally disparaged his depiction of character, while admiring his gift for caricature.[227] Henry James denied him a premier position, calling him "the greatest of superficial novelists": Dickens failed to endow his characters with psychological depth, and the novels, "loose baggy monsters",[228] betrayed a "cavalier organisation".[229] Joseph Conrad described his own childhood in bleak Dickensian terms, noting he had "an intense and unreasoning affection" for Bleak House dating back to his boyhood. The novel influenced his own gloomy portrait of London in The Secret Agent (1907).[224] Virginia Woolf had a love-hate relationship with Dickens, finding his novels "mesmerizing" while reproving him for his sentimentalism and a commonplace style.[230]

Around 1940–41, the attitude of the literary critics began to warm towards Dickens – led by George Orwell in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (March 1940), Edmund Wilson in The Wound and the Bow (1941) and Humphry House in Dickens and his World.[231] However, even in 1948, F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition, asserted that "the adult mind doesn't as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness"; Dickens was indeed a great genius, "but the genius was that of a great entertainer",[232] though he later changed his opinion with Dickens the Novelist (1970, with Q. D. (Queenie) Leavis): "Our purpose", they wrote, "is to enforce as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers".[233] In 1944, Soviet film director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein wrote an essay on Dickens's influence on cinema, such as cross-cutting – where two stories run alongside each other, as seen in novels such as Oliver Twist.[234]

In the 1950s, "a substantial reassessment and re-editing of the works began, and critics found his finest artistry and greatest depth to be in the later novels: Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations – and (less unanimously) in Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend".[235] Dickens was a favourite author of Roald Dahl; the best-selling children's author would include three of Dickens's novels among those read by the title character in his 1988 novel Matilda.[236] An avid reader of Dickens, in 2005, Paul McCartney named Nicholas Nickleby his favourite novel. On Dickens he states, "I like the world that he takes me to. I like his words; I like the language", adding, "A lot of my stuff – it's kind of Dickensian."[237] Screenwriter Jonathan Nolan's screenplay for The Dark Knight Rises (2012) was inspired by A Tale of Two Cities, with Nolan calling the depiction of Paris in the novel "one of the most harrowing portraits of a relatable, recognisable civilisation that completely folded to pieces".[238] On 7 February 2012, the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, Philip Womack wrote in The Telegraph: "Today there is no escaping Charles Dickens. Not that there has ever been much chance of that before. He has a deep, peculiar hold upon us".[239]

Influence and legacy

Dickens and Little Nell statue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and works exist in many places with which Dickens was associated. These include the Charles Dickens Museum in London, the historic home where he wrote Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby; and the Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth, the house in which he was born. The original manuscripts of many of his novels, as well as printers' proofs, first editions, and illustrations from the collection of Dickens's friend John Forster are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum.[240] Dickens's will stipulated that no memorial be erected in his honour; nonetheless, a life-size bronze statue of Dickens entitled Dickens and Little Nell, cast in 1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell, stands in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Another life-size statue of Dickens is located at Centennial Park, Sydney, Australia.[241] In 1960 a bas-relief sculpture of Dickens, notably featuring characters from his books, was commissioned from sculptor Estcourt J Clack to adorn the office building built on the site of his former home at 1 Devonshire Terrace, London.[242][243] In 2014, a life-size statue was unveiled near his birthplace in Portsmouth on the 202nd anniversary of his birth; this was supported by the author's great-great-grandsons, Ian and Gerald Dickens.[244][245]

A Christmas Carol significantly influenced the modern celebration of Christmas in many countries

A Christmas Carol is most probably his best-known story, with frequent new adaptations. It is also the most-filmed of Dickens's stories, with many versions dating from the early years of cinema.[246] According to the historian Ronald Hutton, the current state of the observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by A Christmas Carol. Dickens catalysed the emerging Christmas as a family-centred festival of generosity, in contrast to the dwindling community-based and church-centred observations, as new middle-class expectations arose.[247] Its archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) entered into Western cultural consciousness. "Merry Christmas", a prominent phrase from the tale, was popularised following the appearance of the story.[248] The term Scrooge became a synonym for miser, and his exclamation "Bah! Humbug!'", a dismissal of the festive spirit, likewise gained currency as an idiom.[249] The Victorian era novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called the book "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness".[246]

Dickens was commemorated on the Series E £10 note issued by the Bank of England that circulated between 1992 and 2003. His portrait appeared on the reverse of the note accompanied by a scene from The Pickwick Papers. The Charles Dickens School is a high school in Broadstairs, Kent. A theme park, Dickens World, standing in part on the site of the former naval dockyard where Dickens's father once worked in the Navy Pay Office, opened in Chatham in 2007. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens in 2012, the Museum of London held the UK's first major exhibition on the author in 40 years.[250] In 2002, Dickens was number 41 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.[251] American literary critic Harold Bloom placed Dickens among the greatest Western writers of all time.[252] In the 2003 UK survey The Big Read carried out by the BBC, five of Dickens's books were named in the Top 100.[253]

Actors who have portrayed Dickens on screen include Anthony Hopkins, Derek Jacobi, Simon Callow and Ralph Fiennes, the latter playing the author in The Invisible Woman (2013) which depicts Dickens's secret love affair with Ellen Ternan which lasted for thirteen years until his death in 1870.[254]

Dickens and his publications have appeared on a number of postage stamps in countries including: the United Kingdom (1970, 1993, 2011 and 2012), the Soviet Union (1962), Antigua, Barbuda, Botswana, Cameroon, Dubai, Fujairah, St Christopher, Nevis and Anguilla, St Helena, St Lucia and Turks and Caicos Islands (1970), St Vincent (1987), Nevis (2007), Alderney, Gibraltar, Jersey and Pitcairn Islands (2012), Austria (2013), and Mozambique (2014).[255] In 1976, a crater on the planet Mercury was named in his honour.[256]

In November 2018 it was reported that a previously lost portrait of a 31-year-old Dickens, by Margaret Gillies, had been found in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Gillies was an early supporter of women's suffrage and had painted the portrait in late 1843 when Dickens, aged 31, wrote A Christmas Carol. It was exhibited, to acclaim, at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1844.[80] The Charles Dickens Museum is reported to have paid £180,000 for the portrait.[257]

Works

Main article: Charles Dickens bibliography

Dickens published well over a dozen major novels and novellas, a large number of short stories, including a number of Christmas-themed stories, a handful of plays, and several non-fiction books. Dickens's novels were initially serialised in weekly and monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats.

• The Pickwick Papers (The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club; monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837)[258]
• Oliver Twist (The Adventures of Oliver Twist; monthly serial in Bentley's Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839)
• Nicholas Nickleby (The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby; monthly serial, April 1838 to October 1839)
• The Old Curiosity Shop (weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, April 1840 to November 1841)
• Barnaby Rudge (Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty; weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, February to November 1841)
• A Christmas Carol (A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost-story of Christmas; 1843)
• Martin Chuzzlewit (The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit; monthly serial, January 1843 to July 1844)
• The Chimes (The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In; 1844)
• The Cricket on the Hearth (The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home; 1845)
• The Battle of Life (The Battle of Life: A Love Story; 1846)
• Dombey and Son (Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation; monthly serial, October 1846 to April 1848)
• The Haunted Man (The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain: A Fancy for Christmas-time; 1848)
• David Copperfield (The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery [Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account]; monthly serial, May 1849 to November 1850)
• Bleak House (monthly serial, March 1852 to September 1853)
• Hard Times (Hard Times: For These Times; weekly serial in Household Words, 1 April 1854, to 12 August 1854)
• Little Dorrit (monthly serial, December 1855 to June 1857)
• A Tale of Two Cities (weekly serial in All the Year Round, 30 April 1859, to 26 November 1859)
• Great Expectations (weekly serial in All the Year Round, 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861)
• Our Mutual Friend (monthly serial, May 1864 to November 1865)
• The Signal-Man (1866), first published as part of the Mugby Junction collection in the 1866 Christmas edition of All the Year Round.
• The Mystery of Edwin Drood (monthly serial, April 1870 to September 1870), left unfinished due to Dickens's death

See also

• List of Dickensian characters
• Racism in the work of Charles Dickens
• Charles Dickens bibliography
• The Fraud by Zadie Smith

Notes

1. John Forster quotes an unpublished letter in which Dickens responds to the accusation that he must not have seen Grimaldi in person: "Now, Sir, although I was brought up from remote country parts in the dark ages of 1819 and 1820 to behold the splendour of Christmas pantomimes and the humour of Joe, in whose honour I am informed I clapped my hands with great precocity, and although I even saw him act in the remote times of 1823... I am willing... to concede that I had not arrived at man's estate when Grimaldi left the stage".[19] When Dickens arrived in America for the first time in 1842, he stayed at the Tremont House, America's "pioneer first-class hotel". Dickens "bounded into the Tremont's foyer shouting out 'Here we are!', Grimaldi's famous catch-phrase and as such entirely appropriate for a great and cherished entertainer making his entrance upon a new stage."[20] Later, Dickens was known to imitate Grimaldi's clowning on several occasions.[21]

2. A contemporary obituary in The Times, alleged that Dickens's last words were: "Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of Art." Reprinted from The Times, London, August 1870 in Bidwell 1870, p.223.

3.Slater also detects Ellen Ternan in the portrayal of Lucie Manette.