“Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many — not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”
Charles Dickens
Good morning peeps, meditation done.
Quote for the day:
“Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many — not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens created some of the world’s best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.
Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children’s rights, education, and other social reforms.
His father John Dickens was forced by his creditors into the Marshalsea debtors’ prison in Southwark, London in 1824. His wife and youngest children joined him there, as was the practice at the time. Charles, then 12 years old, boarded with Elizabeth Roylance, a family friend, at 112 College Place, Camden Town, whom Dickens later immortalised, “with a few alterations and embellishments”, as “Mrs. Pipchin” in Dombey and Son.
Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station, where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. The strenuous and often harsh working conditions made a lasting impression on Dickens and later influenced his fiction and essays, becoming the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor.
When the warehouse was moved to Chandos Street in the smart, busy district of Covent Garden the boys worked in a room in which the window gave onto the street and little audiences gathered and watched them at work — in Dickens biographer Simon Callow’s (who I worked with in Carmen Jones at the Old Vic) estimation, the public display was “a new refinement added to his misery”.
A few months after his imprisonment, John Dickens’s paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Dickens, died and bequeathed him £450. On the expectation of this legacy, Dickens was released from prison. Under the Insolvent Debtors Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors, and he and his family left Marshalsea, for the home of Mrs Roylance.
Charles’s mother, Elizabeth Dickens, did not immediately support his removal from the boot-blacking warehouse. This influenced Dickens’s view that a father should rule the family, and a mother find her proper sphere inside the home:
“I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back”.
His mother’s failure to request his return was a factor in his dissatisfied attitude towards women.
Righteous indignation stemming from his own situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes of his works, and it was this unhappy period in his youth to which he alluded in his favourite, and most autobiographical, novel, David Copperfield:
“I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!”
His novels, most published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.
Masses of the illiterate poor chipped in half pennies to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.
Dickens was regarded as the literary colossus of his age. His 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, remains popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted, and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities, set in London and Paris, is his best-known work of historical fiction. Dickens’s creative genius has been praised by fellow writers — from Leo Tolstoy to George Orwell and G. K. Chesterton — for its realism, comedy, prose style, unique characterisations, and social criticism.
Dickens’s biographer Claire Tomalin regards him as the greatest creator of character in English fiction after Shakespeare. Dickensian characters, are amongst the most memorable in English literature, especially so because of their typically whimsical names.
The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Bill Sikes, Pip, Miss Havisham, Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay, David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber, Abel Magwitch, Daniel Quilp, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers, and Uriah Heep are so well known as to be part and parcel of British culture, and in some cases have passed into ordinary language: a scrooge, for example, is a miser.
A Christmas Carol is most likely 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. 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. Its archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) entered into Western cultural consciousness. A prominent phrase from the tale, “Merry Christmas”, was popularised following the appearance of the story.The term Scrooge became a synonym for miser, and his dismissive exclamation ‘Bah! Humbug!’ likewise gained currency as an idiom.
In May 1846 Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens about setting up a home for the redemption of fallen women of the working class. After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named “Urania Cottage”, in the Lime Grove section of Shepherds Bush, which he managed for ten years, setting the house rules, reviewing the accounts and interviewing prospective residents. Emigration and marriage were central to Dickens’s agenda for the women on leaving Urania Cottage, from which it is estimated that about 100 women graduated between 1847 and 1859.
Dickens was approached through a charitable appeal by Great Ormond Street Hospital, to help it survive its first major financial crisis. His ‘Drooping Buds’ essay in Household Words earlier in 3 April 1852 was considered by the hospital’s founders to have been the catalyst for the hospital’s success. Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked by his friend, the hospital’s founder Charles West, to preside over the appeal, and he threw himself into the task, heart and soul. Dickens’s public readings secured sufficient funds for an endowment to put the hospital on a sound financial footing — one reading on 9 February 1858 alone raised £3,000.
Between 1868 and 1869, Dickens gave a series of “farewell readings” in England, Scotland, and Ireland, beginning on 6 October. He managed, of a contracted 100 readings, to deliver 75 in the provinces, with a further 12 in London. As he pressed on he was affected by giddiness and fits of paralysis and collapsed on 22 April 1869, at Preston in Lancashire, and on doctor’s advice, the tour was cancelled.
After Dickens had regained sufficient strength, he arranged, with medical approval, for a final series of readings to partially make up to his sponsors what they had lost due to his illness. There were to be 12 performances, running between 11 January and 15 March 1870, the last at 8:00 pm at St. James’s Hall in London. Although in grave health by this time, he read A Christmas Carol and The Trial from Pickwick. On 2 May, he made his last public appearance at a Royal Academy Banquet in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home after a full day’s work on Edwin Drood. He never regained consciousness, and the next day, he died at Gad’s Hill Place. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral “in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner,” he was laid to rest in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.
A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads:
“To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England’s most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England’s greatest writers is lost to the world.”
Dicken’s childhood was by no means easy, in fact it was anything but, but it proved a catalyst for his phenominal workload, source of his characters and inspiration for the quality of his works, which he used to strive for reform and cause change to the conditions and end the poverty in which the poor and under classes were forced to live. With the fruits of success he gained from his work, he did indeed count his blessings and gave back not just money, but buildings and a great legacy to help the poor and under privilledged
There cannot be many people in the world today who have not been touched, affected and inspired by the works and characters of Charles Dickens?
Have a superb Saturday peeps and a wonderful weekend.
Breathe, Believe and Achieve
Be Happy, Healthy and Wise
Keep on Winning, Smiling and Living the Dream
Namaste
Steve Agyei
Founder of Beyond Lifestyle Secrets
Author of Celebrity Training Secrets
