English novelist and social critic (–)
"Dickens" and "Dickensian" redirect here. For the television series, see Dickensian (TV series). For other uses, see Dickens (disambiguation).
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February – 9 June ) was an English novelist, journalist, short story writer and social critic. He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.[1] His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.[2][3]
Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school at age 12 to work in a boot-blacking factory when his father John was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. After three years, he returned to school before beginning his literary career as a journalist. Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years; wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and nonfiction articles; lectured and performed readings extensively; was a tireless letter writer; and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education and other social reforms.
Dickens's literary success began with the serial publication of The Pickwick Papers, a publishing phenomenon—thanks largely to the introduction of the character Sam Weller in the fourth episode—that sparked Pickwick merchandise and spin-offs. Within a few years, Dickens had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire and keen observation of character and society. His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.[4][5]Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense.[6] The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback.[5] For example, when his wife's chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her own disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features.[7] His plots were carefully constructed and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives.[8] Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.[9]
His novella A Christmas Carol remains especially popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every creative medium. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His novel Bleak House, a satire on the judicial system, helped support a reformist movement that culminated in the s legal reform in England. A Tale of Two Cities (set in London and Paris) is regarded as his best-known work of historical fiction. The most famous celebrity of his era, he undertook, in response to public demand, a series of public reading tours in the later part of his career.[10] The term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social or working conditions, or comically repulsive characters.[11][12]
Main article: Dickens family
Charles Dickens was born on 7 February at 1 Mile End Terrace (now Commercial Road), Landport in Portsea Island (Portsmouth), Hampshire, the second of eight children of Elizabeth Dickens (née Barrow; –) and John Dickens (–). His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office and was temporarily stationed in the district. He asked Christopher Huffam,[14] rigger to His Majesty's Navy, gentleman and head of an established firm, to act as godfather to Charles. Huffam is thought to be the inspiration for Paul Dombey, the owner of a shipping company in Dickens's novel Dombey and Son ().[14]
In January , John Dickens was called back to London, and the family moved to Norfolk Street, Fitzrovia.[15] When Charles was four, they relocated to Sheerness and thence to Chatham, Kent, where he spent his formative years until the age of His early life seems to have been idyllic, though he thought himself a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy".[16]
Charles spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, including the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding, as well as Robinson Crusoe and Gil Blas. He read and re-read The Arabian Nights and the Collected Farces of Elizabeth Inchbald.[17] At the age of seven, he first saw Joseph Grimaldi—the father of modern clowning—perform at the Star Theatre in Rochester, Kent.[18] He later imitated Grimaldi's clowning on several occasions, and would also edit the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi.[19][nb 1] He retained poignant memories of childhood, helped by an excellent memory of people and events, which he used in his writing.[22] His father's brief work as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office afforded him a few years of private education, first at a dame school and then at a school run by William Giles, a dissenter, in Chatham.[23]
This period came to an end in June , when John Dickens was recalled to Navy Pay Office headquarters at Somerset House and the family (except for Charles, who stayed behind to finish his final term at school) moved to Camden Town in London.[25] The family had left Kent amidst rapidly mounting debts and, living beyond his means,[26] John Dickens was forced by his creditors into the Marshalseadebtors' prison in Southwark, London in 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 College Place, Camden Town.[27] Mrs Roylance was "a reduced impoverished old lady, long known to our family", whom Dickens later immortalised, "with a few alterations and embellishments", as "Mrs Pipchin" in Dombey and Son. Later, he lived in a back-attic in the house of an agent for the Insolvent Court, Archibald Russell, "a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman with a quiet old wife" and lame son, in Lant Street in Southwark.[28] They provided the inspiration for the Garlands in The Old Curiosity Shop.[29]
On Sundays—with his sister Frances, free from her studies at the Royal Academy of Music—he spent the day at the Marshalsea.[30] Dickens later used the prison as a setting in Little Dorrit. To pay for his board and to help his family, 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. He later wrote that he wondered "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age".[31] As he recalled to John Forster (from Life of Charles Dickens):
The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.[31]
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. Small audiences gathered and watched them at work—in Dickens's biographer Simon Callow's estimation, the public display was "a new refinement added to his misery".[32]
A few months after his imprisonment, John Dickens's mother, Elizabeth Dickens, died and bequeathed him £ 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 the Marshalsea,[33] 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.[34]
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:[35] "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!"[36]
Dickens was eventually sent to the Wellington House Academy in Camden Town, where he remained until March , having spent about two years there. He did not consider it to be a good school: "Much of the haphazard, desultory teaching, poor discipline punctuated by the headmaster's sadistic brutality, the seedy ushers and general run-down atmosphere, are embodied in Mr Creakle's Establishment in David Copperfield."[36]
Dickens worked at the law office of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn, as a junior clerk from May to November He was a gifted mimic and impersonated those around him: clients, lawyers and clerks. Captivated with London's theatre scene, he went to theatres obsessively: he claimed that for at least three years he went to the theatre every day.[37] His favourite actor was Charles Mathews and Dickens learnt his "monopolylogues" (farces in which Mathews played every character) by heart.[38] Then, having learned Gurney's system of shorthand in his spare time, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant relative, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at Doctors' Commons and Dickens was able to share his box there to report the legal proceedings for nearly four years.[39][40]
In , Dickens met his first love, Maria Beadnell, thought to have been the model for the character Dora in David Copperfield. Maria's parents disapproved of the courtship and ended the relationship by sending her to school in Paris.[41]
In , at the age of 20, Dickens was energetic and increasingly self-confident.[42] He enjoyed mimicry and popular entertainment, lacked a clear, specific sense of what he wanted to become, and yet knew he wanted fame. Drawn to the theatre—he became an early member of the Garrick Club[43]—he landed an acting audition at Covent Garden, where the manager George Bartley and the actor Charles Kemble were to see him. Dickens prepared meticulously and decided to imitate the comedian Charles Mathews, but ultimately he missed the audition because of a cold. Before another opportunity arose, he had set out on his career as a writer.[44]
In , Dickens submitted his first story, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", to the London periodical Monthly Magazine.[45] His uncle William Barrow offered him a job on The Mirror of Parliament and he worked in the House of Commons for the first time early in He rented rooms at Furnival's Inn and worked as a political journalist, reporting on Parliamentary debates, and he travelled across Britain to cover election campaigns for the Morning Chronicle.[46]
His journalism, in the form of sketches in periodicals, formed his first collection of pieces, published in Sketches by Boz—Boz being a family nickname he employed as a pseudonym for some years.[47][48] Dickens apparently adopted it from the nickname 'Moses', which he had given to his youngest brother Augustus Dickens, after a character in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. When pronounced by anyone with a head cold, "Moses" became "Boses"—later shortened to Boz.[48][49] Dickens's own name was considered "queer" by a contemporary critic, who wrote in "Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations." Dickens contributed to and edited journals throughout his literary career.[45] In January , the Morning Chronicle launched an evening edition, under the editorship of the Chronicle's music critic, George Hogarth. Hogarth invited him to contribute Street Sketches and Dickens became a regular visitor to his Fulham house—excited by Hogarth's friendship with Walter Scott (whom Dickens greatly admired) and enjoying the company of Hogarth's three daughters: Georgina, Mary and year-old Catherine.[50]
Dickens made rapid progress both professionally and socially. He began a friendship with William Harrison Ainsworth, the author of the highwayman novel Rookwood (), whose bachelor salon in Harrow Road had become the meeting place for a set that included Daniel Maclise, Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and George Cruikshank. All these became his friends and collaborators, with the exception of Disraeli, and he met his first publisher, John Macrone, at the house.[52] The success of Sketches by Boz led to a proposal from publishers Chapman and Hall for Dickens to supply text to match Robert Seymour's engraved illustrations in a monthly letterpress. Seymour committed suicide after the second instalment and Dickens, who wanted to write a connected series of sketches, hired "Phiz" to provide the engravings (which were reduced from four to two per instalment) for the story. The resulting story became The Pickwick Papers and, although the first few episodes were not successful, the introduction of the Cockney character Sam Weller in the fourth episode (the first to be illustrated by Phiz) marked a sharp climb in its popularity.[53] The final instalment sold 40, copies.[45] On the impact of the character, The Paris Review stated, "arguably the most historic bump in English publishing is the Sam Weller Bump."[51] A publishing phenomenon, John Sutherland, Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, called The Pickwick Papers "[t]he most important single novel of the Victorian era".[54] The unprecedented success led to numerous spin-offs and merchandise including Pickwick cigars, playing cards, china figurines, Sam Weller puzzles, Weller boot polish and joke books.[51]
The Sam Weller Bump testifies not merely to Dickens's comic genius but to his acumen as an "authorpreneur", a portmanteau he inhabited long before The Economist took it up. For a writer who made his reputation crusading against the squalor of the Industrial Revolution, Dickens was a creature of capitalism; he used everything from the powerful new printing presses to the enhanced advertising revenues to the expansion of railroads to sell more books. Dickens ensured that his books were available in cheap bindings for the lower orders as well as in morocco-and-gilt for people of quality; his ideal readership included everyone from the pickpockets who read Oliver Twist to Queen Victoria, who found it "exceedingly interesting".
—&#;How The Pickwick Papers Launched Charles Dickens's Career, The Paris Review.[51]
On its impact on mass culture, Nicholas Dames in The Atlantic writes, "'Literature' is not a big enough category for Pickwick. It defined its own, a new one that we have learned to call 'entertainment'."[55] In November , Dickens accepted the position of editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a position he held for three years, until he fell out with the owner.[56] In , as he finished the last instalments of The Pickwick Papers, he began writing the beginning instalments of Oliver Twist—writing as many as 90 pages a month—while continuing work on Bentley's and also writing four plays, the production of which he oversaw. Oliver Twist, published in , became one of Dickens's better known stories and was the first Victorian novel with a child protagonist.[57]
On 2 April , after a one-year engagement, and between episodes two and three of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (–), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle.[58] They were married in St Luke's Church, Chelsea, London.[59] After a brief honeymoon in Chalk in Kent, the couple returned to lodgings at Furnival's Inn.[60] The first of their ten children, Charles, was born in January and a few months later the family set up home in Bloomsbury at 48 Doughty Street, London (on which Charles had a three-year lease at £80 a year) from 25 March until December [58][61] Dickens's younger brother Frederick and Catherine's year-old sister Mary Hogarth moved in with them. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in Unusually for Dickens, as a consequence of his shock, he stopped working, and he and Catherine stayed at a little farm on Hampstead Heath for a fortnight. Dickens idealised Mary; the character he fashioned after her, Rose Maylie, he found he could not now kill, as he had planned, in his fiction,[62] and, according to Ackroyd, he drew on memories of her for his later descriptions of Little Nell and Florence Dombey.[63] His grief was so great that he was unable to meet the deadline for the June instalment of The Pickwick Papers and had to cancel the Oliver Twist instalment that month as well.[57] The time in Hampstead was the occasion for a growing bond between Dickens and John Forster to develop; Forster soon became his unofficial business manager and the first to read his work.[64]
His success as a novelist continued. The young Queen Victoria read both Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers, staying up until midnight to discuss them.[66]Nicholas Nickleby (–39), The Old Curiosity Shop (–41) and, finally, his first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty, as part of the Master Humphrey's Clock series (–41), were all published in monthly instalments before being made into books.[67] Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd has called Barnaby Rudge "one of Dickens's most neglected, but most rewarding, novels".[68] The poet Edgar Allan Poe read Barnaby Rudge, and the talking raven that featured in the novel inspired in part Poe's poem "The Raven".[69]
In the midst of all his activity during this period, there was discontent with his publishers and John Macrone was bought off, while Richard Bentley signed over all his rights in Oliver Twist. Other signs of a certain restlessness and discontent emerged; in Broadstairs he flirted with Eleanor Picken, the young fiancée of his solicitor's best friend and one night grabbed her and ran with her down to the sea. He declared they were both to drown there in the "sad sea waves". She finally got free, and afterwards kept her distance. In June , he precipitously set out on a two-month tour of Scotland and then, in September , telegraphed Forster that he had decided to go to America.[70] His weekly periodical Master Humphrey's Clock ended, though Dickens was still keen on the idea of the weekly magazine, an appreciation that had begun with his childhood reading of Samuel Johnson's The Idler and the 18th-century magazines Tatler and The Spectator.[71]
Dickens was perturbed by the return to power of the Tories, whom he described as "people whom, politically, I despise and abhor."[72] He had been tempted to stand for the Liberals in Reading, but decided against it due to financial straits.[72] He wrote three anti-Tory verse satires ("The Fine Old English Gentleman", "The Quack Doctor's Proclamation", and "Subjects for Painters") which were published in The Examiner.[73]
On 22 January , Dickens and his wife arrived in Boston, Massachusetts, aboard the RMS Britannia during their first trip to the United States and Canada.[74] At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, joined the Dickens household, now living at Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone to care for the young family they had left behind.[75] She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser and friend until Dickens's death in [76] Dickens modelled the character of Agnes Wickfield after Georgina and Mary.[77]
He described his impressions in a travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation. In Notes, Dickens includes a powerful condemnation of slavery which he had attacked as early as The Pickwick Papers, correlating the emancipation of the poor in England with the abolition of slavery abroad[78] citing newspaper accounts of runaway slaves disfigured by their masters. In spite of the abolitionist sentiments gleaned from his trip to America, some modern commentators have pointed out inconsistencies in Dickens's views on racial inequality. For instance, he has been criticised for his subsequent acquiescence in Governor Eyre's harsh crackdown during the s Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and his failure to join other British progressives in condemning it.[79] From Richmond, Virginia, Dickens returned to Washington, D.C., and started a trek westward, with brief pauses in Cincinnati and Louisville, to St. Louis, Missouri. While there, he expressed a desire to see an American prairie before returning east. A group of 13 men then set out with Dickens to visit Looking Glass Prairie, a trip 30 miles into Illinois.
During his American visit, Dickens spent a month in New York City, giving lectures, raising the question of international copyright laws and the pirating of his work in America.[80][81] He persuaded a group of 25 writers, headed by Washington Irving, to sign a petition for him to take to Congress, but the press were generally hostile to this, saying that he should be grateful for his popularity and that it was mercenary to complain about his work being pirated.[82]
The popularity he gained caused a shift in his self-perception according to critic Kate Flint, who writes that he "found himself a cultural commodity, and its circulation had passed out his control", causing him to become interested in and delve into themes of public and personal personas in the next novels.[83] She writes that he assumed a role of "influential commentator", publicly and in his fiction, evident in his next few books.[83] His trip to the US ended with a trip to Canada—Niagara Falls, Toronto, Kingston and Montreal—where he appeared on stage in light comedies.[84]
Soon after his return to England, Dickens began work on the first of his Christmas stories, A Christmas Carol, written in , which was followed by The Chimes in and The Cricket on the Hearth in Of these, A Christmas Carol was most popular and, tapping into an old tradition, did much to promote a renewed enthusiasm for the joys of Christmas in Britain and America.[86] The seeds for the story became planted in Dickens's mind during a trip to Manchester to witness the conditions of the manufacturing workers there. This, along with scenes he had recently witnessed at the Field Lane Ragged School, caused Dickens to resolve to "strike a sledge hammer blow" for the poor. As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He later wrote that as the tale unfolded he "wept and laughed, and wept again" as he "walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed".[87]
After living briefly in Italy (), Dickens travelled to Switzerland (), where he began work on Dombey and Son (–48). This and David Copperfield (–50) mark a significant artistic break in Dickens's career as his novels became more serious in theme and more carefully planned than his early works.
At about this time, he was made aware of a large embezzlement at the firm where his brother, Augustus, worked (John Chapman & Co). It had been carried out by Thomas Powell, a clerk, who was on friendly terms with Dickens and who had acted as mentor to Augustus when he started work. Powell was also an author and poet and knew many of the famous writers of the day. After further fraudulent activities, Powell fled to New York and published a book called The Living Authors of England with a chapter on Charles Dickens, who was not amused by what Powell had written. One item that seemed to have annoyed him was the assertion that he had based the character of Paul Dombey (Dombey and Son) on Thomas Chapman, one of the principal partners at John Chapman & Co. Dickens immediately sent a letter to Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the New York literary magazine The Knickerbocker, saying that Powell was a forger and thief. Clark published the letter in the New-York Tribune and several other papers picked up on the story. Powell began proceedings to sue these publications and Clark was arrested. Dickens, realising that he had acted in haste, contacted John Chapman & Co to seek written confirmation of Powell's guilt. Dickens did receive a reply confirming Powell's embezzlement, but once the directors realised this information might have to be produced in court, they refused to make further disclosures. Owing to the difficulties of providing evidence in America to support his accusations, Dickens eventually made a private settlement with Powell out of court.[88]
Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens in May about setting up a home for the redemption of fallen women of the working class. Coutts envisioned a home that would replace the punitive regimes of existing institutions with a reformative environment conducive to education and proficiency in domestic household chores. After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named Urania Cottage, in the Lime Grove area of Shepherd's Bush, which he managed for ten years,[89] setting the house rules, reviewing the accounts and interviewing prospective residents.[90] Emigration and marriage were central to Dickens's agenda for the women on leaving Urania Cottage, from which it is estimated that about women graduated between and [91]
As a young man, Dickens expressed a distaste for certain aspects of organised religion. In , in a pamphlet titled Sunday Under Three Heads, he defended the people's right to pleasure, opposing a plan to prohibit games on Sundays. "Look into your churches—diminished congregations and scanty attendance. People have grown sullen and obstinate, and are becoming disgusted with the faith which condemns them to such a day as this, once in every seven. They display their feeling by staying away [from church]. Turn into the streets [on a Sunday] and mark the rigid gloom that reigns over everything around."[92][93]
Dickens honoured the figure of Jesus Christ.[94] He is regarded as a professing Christian.[95] His son, Henry Fielding Dickens, described him as someone who "possessed deep religious convictions". In the early s, he had shown an interest in Unitarian Christianity and Robert Browning remarked that "Mr Dickens is an enlightened Unitarian."[96] Professor Gary Colledge has written that he "never strayed from his attachment to popular lay Anglicanism".[97] Dickens authored a work called The Life of Our Lord (), a book about the life of Christ, written with the purpose of sharing his faith with his children and family.[98][99] In a scene from David Copperfield, Dickens echoed Geoffrey Chaucer's use of Luke from Troilus and Criseyde (Dickens held a copy in his library), with G. K. Chesterton writing, "among the great canonical English authors, Chaucer and Dickens have the most in common."[]
Dickens disapproved of Roman Catholicism and 19th-century evangelicalism, seeing both as extremes of Christianity and likely to limit personal expression, and was critical of what he saw as the hypocrisy of religious institutions and philosophies like spiritualism, all of which he considered deviations from the true spirit of Christianity, as shown in the book he wrote for his family in [][] While Dickens advocated equal rights for Catholics in England, he strongly disliked how individual civil liberties were often threatened in countries where Catholicism predominated and referred to the Catholic Church as "that curse upon the world."[] Dickens also rejected the Evangelical conviction that the Bible was the infallible word of God. His ideas on Biblical interpretation were similar to the Liberal Anglican Arthur Penrhyn Stanley's doctrine of "progressive revelation".[]Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky referred to Dickens as "that great Christian writer".[][]
In December , Dickens took up the editorship of the London-based Daily News, a liberal paper through which Dickens hoped to advocate, in his own words, "the Principles of Progress and Improvement, of Education and Civil and Religious Liberty and Equal Legislation."[] Among the other contributors Dickens chose to write for the paper were the radical economist Thomas Hodgskin and the social reformer Douglas William Jerrold, who frequently attacked the Corn Laws.[][] Dickens lasted only ten weeks on the job before resigning due to a combination of exhaustion and frustration with one of the paper's co-owners.[]
A Francophile, Dickens often holidayed in France and, in a speech delivered in Paris in in French, called the French "the first people in the universe".[] During his visit to Paris, Dickens met the French literati Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Eugène Scribe, Théophile Gautier, François-René de Chateaubriand and Eugène Sue.[] In early , Dickens started to write David Copperfield. It was published between and In Dickens's biography, Life of Charles Dickens (), John Forster wrote of David Copperfield, "underneath the fiction lay something of the author's life".[] It was Dickens's personal favourite among his novels, as he wrote in the preface to the edition.[] His collection of letters, of which more than 14, are known, covered a wide range of subject-matter. Letters during this period included a correspondence with Mary Tyler, dated 6 November , on the comedic merits of Punch and Judy, a puppet show dominated by the anarchic clowning of Mr. Punch, and his review of the Great Exhibition, the first in a series of world's fairs, which he attended at Hyde Park, London in []
In November , Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he wrote Bleak House (–53), Hard Times () and Little Dorrit ().[] It was here that he indulged in the amateur theatricals described in Forster's Life of Charles Dickens.[] During this period, he worked closely with the novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins. In , his income from writing allowed him to buy Gads Hill Place in Higham, Kent. As a child, Dickens had walked past the house and dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 and this literary connection pleased him.[]
During this time Dickens was also the publisher, editor and a major contributor to the journals Household Words (–) and All the Year Round (–), with both titles deriving from a Shakespearean quotation.[] The journals contained a mix of fiction and non-fiction, and dealt with aspects in the culture. For example, the latter included Dickens' assessment of Madame Tussauds, a wax museum established in Baker Street in , which he called "something more than an exhibition, it is an institution."[] In , at the behest of Sir John Franklin's widow Lady Jane, Dickens viciously attacked Arctic explorer John Rae in Household Words for his report to the Admiralty, based on interviews with local Inuit, that the members of Franklin's lost expedition had resorted to cannibalism. These attacks would later be expanded on his play The Frozen Deep, which satirises Rae and the Inuit. Twentieth-century archaeology work in King William Island later confirmed that the members of the Franklin expedition resorted to cannibalism.[]
In , when Dickens's good friend and Liberal MP Austen Henry Layard formed an Administrative Reform Association to demand significant reforms of Parliament, Dickens joined and volunteered his resources in support of Layard's cause.[] With the exception of Lord John Russell, who was the only leading politician in whom Dickens had any faith and to whom he later dedicated A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens believed that the political aristocracy and their incompetence were the death of England.[][] When he and Layard were accused of fomenting class conflict, Dickens replied that the classes were already in opposition and the fault was with the aristocratic class. Dickens used his pulpit in Household Words to champion the Reform Association.[] He also commented on foreign affairs, declaring his support for Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, helping raise funds for their campaigns and stating that "a united Italy would be of vast importance to the peace of the world, and would be a rock in Louis Napoleon's way," and that "I feel for Italy almost as if I were an Italian born."[][][] Dickens also published dozens of writings in Household Words supporting vaccination, including multiple laudations for vaccine pioneer Edward Jenner.[]
Following the Indian Mutiny of , Dickens joined in the widespread criticism of the East India Company for its role in the event, but reserved his fury for Indians, wishing that he was the commander-in-chief in India so that he would be able to "do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested."[]
In , Dickens hired professional actresses for The Frozen Deep, which he and his protégéWilkie Collins had written. Dickens fell in love with one of the actresses, Ellen Ternan, and this passion was to last the rest of his life.[] In , when Dickens was 45 and Ternan 18, divorce would have been scandalous for someone of his fame. After publicly accusing Catherine of not loving their children and suffering from "a mental disorder"—statements that disgusted his contemporaries, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning[]—Dickens attempted to have Catherine institutionalised.[] When his scheme failed, they separated. Catherine left, never to see her husband again, taking with her one child. Her sister Georgina, who stayed at Gads Hill, raised the other children.[76]
During this period, whilst pondering a project to give public readings for his own profit, 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 on 3 April 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