Charles Dickens

A public writer with a memory of insecurity

Charles Dickens joined fiction to journalism and a sustained concern with poverty and unequal power. As a child of twelve, he worked in a boot-polish factory while his father was imprisoned for debt. The experience belongs to the background of a career repeatedly attentive to children's dependence on adult decisions and to the humiliation institutions can impose on vulnerable people.

At Doughty Street in London, where he lived from 1837 to 1839, he completed The Pickwick Papers and wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. His career continued until his death in 1870. These early successes already show the range that makes him difficult to confine to a single tone: comedy, pathos, social anger and suspense can occupy the same fictional world.

A society encountered in its particulars

A Dickens institution often becomes visible through an encounter: a request for assistance, an unpaid obligation, a form to complete or an explanation delivered by someone with the power to delay. The comedy can arise from the mismatch between an institution's official purpose and the practical experience of the person who needs it. Attend to the language that makes an absurd arrangement sound perfectly reasonable.

His memorable characters are also memorable talkers. Repeated phrases, elaborate politeness and verbal tics can establish how someone expects to be treated. Rather than treating such speech as decoration, ask what social work it performs. A characteristic expression may demand obedience, evade responsibility or protect a fragile claim to status.

Different doors into the novels

A Christmas Carol offers a compact beginning. Its journeys through time let readers compare how the same life appears through memory, present consequence and anticipated future. Read the changes in Scrooge's attention as closely as the supernatural events: what becomes visible to him that was already present in the world?

Great Expectations and David Copperfield turn toward the telling of a life. Compare a young person's interpretation of an encounter with the older narrator's account. Money, admiration and shame can reshape recollection. The question is not only what happened but how someone becomes able to describe it differently.

A Tale of Two Cities connects private loyalties with revolutionary upheaval. Bleak House and Little Dorrit provide other approaches to the reach of institutions into domestic experience. Read a large novel by following one connection at a time—an obligation, a rumour or a payment—rather than expecting to hold every relationship in mind immediately.

Let comedy and distress remain connected

Choose a comic description and ask what makes it funny. Is a person compared with an object, an official phrase repeated too faithfully or an ordinary action made ceremonious? Then ask whose difficulty the joke makes visible. The formal pleasure of a sentence can be one way the writing directs attention toward a serious imbalance.

For a second reading, track an object or obligation as it crosses households. Dickens's crowded worlds become easier to navigate when you watch what circulates through them. A seemingly incidental encounter can acquire a new significance later; returning to it shows how the novel has taught you to recognise a connection.

Leave room, too, for disagreement with the narrator's judgments. Feeling strongly with a scene and examining how that feeling was produced are compatible activities. His prose rewards both the immediate response and the slower attention that follows it.