THE LITERARY SENSIBILITY of Charles Dickens is possibly the most amply documented literary sensibility in history. Not only did he write fifteen novels, ten of which were eight hundred or more pages long, he also wrote numerous stories, articles, travel pieces, essays, letters, editorial notes, and plays. For his entire literary life, he was observed by relatives, friends, servants, acquaintances, fellow authors, and strangers, who wrote about him in reviews, articles, diaries, letters, biographies, memoirs, and autobiographies. He was relentlessly observed by himself, sometimes sympathetically, sometimes unsympathetically. He was, in short, an object of fascination, a true celebrity (maybe the first true celebrity in the modern sense), a social phenomenon, a figure unique among his contemporaries and yet representative of them, as they themselves understood. Among English writers, Dickens’s only peer, in terms of general fame, worldwide literary stature, and essential Englishness, is William Shakespeare, and the two authors are alike in several ways. Both peopled the imaginative landscape in a manner almost superhuman, pouring forth characters of such number, variety, and vividness that it seems impossible that they could be the products of a single mind. Both depicted English life when English life was at its most interesting and vital, and both seemed to sparkle at the center of that life, in London, though both were also adept at evoking English pastoral scenes. They share another quality, too, and that is that both remain essentially mysterious, Shakespeare in part because so little is known of him outside of his plays, and Dickens in part because everything that is known of him makes him all the more difficult to comprehend.
Biographies of Dickens, long and short, abound. A lifelong friend of his, John Forster, published the first authoritative one shortly after Dickens died. The most recent, by Peter Ackroyd, published in 1990, is more than a thousand pages long. It is, therefore, not the intention of this volume to lay out chronologically everything that we have come to know of Charles Dickens’s life as a result of some 130 years of industrious digging on the part of aficionados and scholars from all parts of the world (though admittedly mostly from England). The Charles Dickens we know is decidedly different from the man his contemporaries knew. For one thing, Dickens did not reveal the details of his painful childhood even to his children, and he did not come to terms with it himself until he chose to revisit his early experiences while writing David Copperfield. He kept other secrets as well. Rather than telling his story chronologically, I will attempt to evoke Dickens as he might have seemed to his contemporary audience, to friends and relatives, to intimate acquaintances, to himself, filling in the background only as he became willing to address it in his work. My purpose here is to avoid the dreary illusion of superiority that comes when critics and biographers purport to know a subject better than (or more truthfully than or more insightfully than) the subject knew himself. Writers and artists are often portrayed as carriers of their own works, rather like carriers of disease, who communicate them to the world at large unconsciously, giving themselves away without design or intention. My own experience as a writer and a reader is quite different. Writing is an act of artistic and moral agency, where choices are made that the author understands, full of implications and revelations that the author also understands. One thing that we know about Dickens from his editorial work is that he had an exceptionally sophisticated understanding of how writing works—of what is appealing and why, of the balance between the artistic and the commercial, of how to create effects, and of the competing claims of morality, aesthetics, and truth in the composition and social function of serious fiction, as well as the other forms of literature that Dickens turned his attention to. We also know that Dickens was quite well aware of the impression he made upon those around him and was adept at manipulating it. Acting was his great avocation from first to last, and he worked as hard at the presentation of his works, and of himself, as he did at his writing and editing.
In addition, I will offer interpretations of almost all of Dickens’s major works. One of the most interesting things about Charles Dickens is the way in which his style and his interest in social themes remained remarkably consistent throughout his career, while his vision shifted and evolved. His Christmas books, for example, offer a different philosophical solution to the dilemmas presented by capitalism than do his great novels of the 1850s, Bleak House and Little Dorrit. Dickens was intently and systematically engaged with the social and economic questions of his time. He passionately sought solutions for such practical issues as public sanitation and relief of want and ignorance; he also pondered death, evil, cruelty, innocence, comfort, pleasure, happiness, and redemption. And he was an endlessly witty man, for whom words were a permanent delight. His novels shaped his life as much as his life shaped his novels, and just as his novels were in part commentary on his life, so his actions, in part, grew out of the way that writing novels gave his feelings and thoughts specific being. To a novelist, his work is not his product but his experience. Over time, his readers are further and further removed from the details of his life, but while they are reading his books, they are in his presence, experiencing his process of thought and imagination as it precipitates inchoate idea to particular word. To me, this is the miracle of literature, that minds can communicate, can meditate upon the same images, across decades, centuries, and miles. Charles Dickens was so thoroughly a novelist that we can hardly know him at all without following him into every novel.
Let us, then, not approach the man himself with a hostile desire to catch him out in self-contradictions and failures of self-knowledge, but rather with a friendly desire to get to know him and to achieve what Victorians might have termed “a growing intimacy.”