I hope you have great expectations for today, because it’s a pip. Even if your house seems bleak in the winter weather, you can always read a tale or two to take your mind out of the city. And as you’ve already guessed (from all those clever hints), it’s the birthday of Charles John Huffam Dickens, who was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, in England in 1812.
Dickens’ second middle name, Huffam, came from his godfather, Christopher Huffam. Later on, he probably used Huffam as the inspiration for Paul Dombey in the 1848 novel Dombey and Son. Dickens had a fairly standard childhood, up to a point. He did a lot of reading, and had a pretty good early education thanks to his father’s job as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. But then the point arrived; his father lost his job and was sentenced to debtors’ prison. He was joined by his wife and the youngest children in the family (don’t ask me; that’s the way they did things), and for a while Charles boarded with a family friend, Elizabeth Roylance. Mrs. Roylance later on became Mrs. Pipchin in Donbey and Son. When he left Mrs. Roylance, he lived with Archibald Russell and his family, who became the Garlands in The Old Curiosity Shop.
On Sundays, Dickens visited his parents at the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, which he used as the setting for Little Dorrit. He left school to work in a warehouse, pasting labels on pots of shoe polish. One of the boys he met there was named Bob Fagin, which Dickens later said “I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.”
Dicken’s experiences in the warehouse and the prison gave him a lot of sympathy for working-class people and the conditions they put up with. And of course he used that part of his life in David Copperfield, which is partly autobiographical. He eventually attended the Wellington House Academy, which became Mr. Creakle’s Establishment in that same book.
He got a job as a junior clerk in the Ellis and Blackmore law firm, where he learned something about the legal system. Those lessons reappeared in Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, and Bleak House. He fell in love with Maria Beadnell, but the romance ended when she went to school in Paris. Nevertheless, she became Dora in David Copperfield.
Dickens started writing when he was about 20, and published his first story, A Dinner at Poplar Walk, in the Monthly Magazine around that time. He also started working as a journalist, reporting on Parliament, elections, and other topics. He used the pen name “Boz” for a while, and published a collection of his articles as his first book, Sketches by Boz. The book sold well, and Dickens started writing stories that were published monthly — and collected in his first fiction book, The Pickwick Papers. The serialized stories became vastly more successful when Dickens introduced the character Sam Weller in the fourth episode; the Paris Review said “arguably the most historic bump in English publishing is the Sam Weller Bump.” Later they added “The Sam Weller Bump testifies not merely to Dickens’ comic genius but to his acument as an ‘autorpreneur’.”
The Paris Review was referring to Dickens’ introduction of pretty modern marketing techniques into his writing career. He published his stories as serial episodes in magazines and closely monitored public reactions — and adapted the stories to emphasize the characters and plots that were most popular. Starting with The Pickwick Papers he marketed story-related merchandise and other spinoffs. And he kept basing everything he wrote on real people, places, and events — although when his wife’s doctor complained that Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed a little too similar for comfort, he added changes to make sure the character wasn’t a carbon copy.
Dickens became so popular that he embarked on lecture tours, which led to his visits to the US in the 1840s. He wrote perhaps his most-adapted work, A Christmas Carol, in 1843, and apparently single-handedly renewed interest in the Christmas holiday in the US and England. At the time Christmas was recognized, but not widely celebrated.
He was about to be made a baronet by the English government in 1870, but he died of a stroke before it was published, or “gazzeted.” Dickens is still regarded as one of the greatest writers in English, and is particularly known for his characters’ odd but memorable names. One possible contribution to that is that his own name, “Dickens,” was at the time also regarded as odd. It’s probably why he used a pen name at the outset of his writing career.
