Three Ghost Stories

- By Charles Dickens
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English novelist and social critic (1812–1870) "Dickens" and "Dickensian" redirect here. For the television series, see Dickensian (TV series). For other uses, see Dickens (disambiguation). Charles DickensPortrait by Jeremiah Gurney, c. 1867–1868BornCharles John Huffam Dickens(1812-02-07)7 February 1812Portsmouth, Hampshire, EnglandDied9 June 1870(1870-06-09) (aged 58)Higham, Kent, EnglandResting placePoets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, England51°29′57″N 0°7′39″W / 51.49917°N 0.12750°W / 51.49917; -0.12750OccupationNovelistNotable worksThe Pickwick PapersOliver TwistNicholas NicklebyA Christmas CarolDavid CopperfieldBleak HouseLittle DorritA Tale of Two CitiesGreat ExpectationsSpouse Catherine Thomson Hogarth ​ ​(m. 1836; sep. 1858)​PartnerEllen Ternan (1857–1870, his death)ChildrenCharles Dickens Jr.Mary DickensKate PeruginiWalter Landor DickensFrancis DickensAlfred D'Orsay Tennyson DickensSydney Smith Haldimand DickensHenry Fielding DickensDora Annie DickensEdward DickensSignature Charles John Huffam Dickens (/ˈdɪkɪnz/; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English novelist and social critic who created some of the world'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 an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms. Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 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 1843 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 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities (set in London and Paris) is 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] Early life[edit] Main article: Dickens family Charles Dickens's birthplace, 393 Commercial Road, Portsmouth 2 Ordnance Terrace, Chatham, Dickens's home 1817 – May 1821[13] Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 at 1 Mile End Terrace (now 393 Commercial Road), Landport in Portsea Island (Portsmouth), Hampshire, the second of eight children of Elizabeth Dickens (née Barrow; 1789–1863) and John Dickens (1785–1851). 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 (1848).[14] In January 1815, 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 11. 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] Illustration by Fred Bernard of Dickens at work in a shoe-blacking factory after his father had been sent to the Marshalsea, published in the 1892 edition of Forster's Life of Charles Dickens[24] This period came to an end in June 1822, 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 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.[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] The Marshalsea around 1897, after it had closed. Dickens based several of his characters on the experience of seeing his father in the debtors' prison, most notably Amy Dorrit from Little Dorrit. A few months after his imprisonment, John Dickens's mother, 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 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 1827, 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 1827 to November 1828. He was a gifted mimic and impersonated those around him: clients, lawyers and clerks. He went to theatres obsessively: he claimed that for at least three years he went to the theatre every day. His favourite actor was Charles Mathews and Dickens learnt his "monopolylogues" (farces in which Mathews played every character) by heart.[37] 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.[38][39] This education was to inform works such as Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son and especially Bleak House, whose vivid portrayal of the machinations and bureaucracy of the legal system did much to enlighten the general public and served as a vehicle for dissemination of Dickens's own views regarding, particularly, the heavy burden on the poor who were forced by circumstances to "go to law". In 1830, 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.[40] Career[edit] Journalism and writing[edit] Catherine Hogarth Dickens by Samuel Laurence (1838). She met the author in 1834, and they became engaged the following year before marrying in April 1836. In 1832, at the age of 20, Dickens was energetic and increasingly self-confident.[41] 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[42] – 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.[43] In 1833, Dickens submitted his first story, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", to the London periodical Monthly Magazine.[44] 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 1832. 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.[45] Frontispiece, Sketches by Boz—Boz being a family nickname—written by Dickens with illustrations by George Cruikshank, 1837 His journalism, in the form of sketches in periodicals, formed his first collection of pieces, published in 1836: Sketches by Boz – Boz being a family nickname he employed as a pseudonym for some years.[46][47] 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.[47][48] Dickens's own name was considered "queer" by a contemporary critic, who wrote in 1849: "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.[44] In January 1835, 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 19-year-old Catherine.[49] The wise-cracking, warm-hearted servant Sam Weller from The Pickwick Papers—a publishing phenomenon that sparked numerous spin-offs and Pickwick merchandise—made the 24-year-old Dickens famous.[50] Dickens made rapid progress both professionally and socially. He began a friendship with William Harrison Ainsworth, the author of the highwayman novel Rookwood (1834), 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.[51] 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.[52] The final instalment sold 40,000 copies.[44] On the impact of the character, The Paris Review stated, "arguably the most historic bump in English publishing is the Sam Weller Bump."[50] A publishing phenomenon, John Sutherland called The Pickwick Papers "[t]he most important single novel of the Victorian era".[53] 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.[50] 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.[50] 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'."[54] In November 1836, Dickens accepted the position of editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a position he held for three years, until he fell out with the owner.[55] In 1836, 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 1838, became one of Dickens's better known stories and was the first Victorian novel with a child protagonist.[56] Young Charles Dickens by Daniel Maclise, 1839 On 2 April 1836, after a one-year engagement, and between episodes two and three of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1815–1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle.[57] They were married in St Luke's Church,[58] Chelsea, London. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk in Kent, the couple returned to lodgings at Furnival's Inn.[59] The first of their ten children, Charles, was born in January 1837 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 1837 until December 1839.[57][60] Dickens's younger brother Frederick and Catherine's 17-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 1837. 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,[61] and, according to Ackroyd, he drew on memories of her for his later descriptions of Little Nell and Florence Dombey.[62] 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.[56] 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.[63] Barnaby Rudge was Dickens's first popular failure but the character of Dolly Varden, "pretty, witty, sexy, became central to numerous theatrical adaptations"[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.[65] Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and, finally, his first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty, as part of the Master Humphrey's Clock series (1840–41), were all published in monthly instalments before being made into books.[66] 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 1841, he precipitously set out on a two-month tour of Scotland and then, in September 1841, telegraphed Forster that he had decided to go to America.[67] Master Humphrey's Clock was shut down, though Dickens was still keen on the idea of the weekly magazine, a form he liked, an appreciation that had begun with his childhood reading of the 18th-century magazines Tatler and The Spectator. Dickens was perturbed by the return to power of the Tories, whom he described as "people whom, politically, I despise and abhor."[68] He had been tempted to stand for the Liberals in Reading, but decided against it due to financial straits.[68] 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.[69] First visit to the United States[edit] On 22 January 1842, Dickens and his wife arrived in Boston, Massachusetts, aboard the RMS Britannia during their first trip to the United States and Canada.[70] 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.[71] She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser and friend until Dickens's death in 1870.[72] Dickens modelled the character of Agnes Wickfield after Georgina and Mary.[73] Sketch of Dickens in 1842 during his first American tour. Sketch of Dickens's sister Fanny, bottom left 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[74] 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 1860s Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and his failure to join other British progressives in condemning it.[75] 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.[76][77] 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.[78] 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.[79] She writes that he assumed a role of "influential commentator", publicly and in his fiction, evident in his next few books.[79] His trip to the U.S. ended with a trip to Canada – Niagara Falls, Toronto, Kingston and Montreal – where he appeared on stage in light comedies.[80] Return to England[edit] Dickens's portrait by Margaret Gillies, 1843. Painted during the period when he was writing A Christmas Carol, it was in the Royal Academy of Arts' 1844 summer exhibition. After viewing it there, Elizabeth Barrett Browning said that it showed Dickens with "the dust and mud of humanity about him, notwithstanding those eagle eyes".[81] Soon after his return to England, Dickens began work on the first of his Christmas stories, A Christmas Carol, written in 1843, which was followed by The Chimes in 1844 and The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845. 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.[82] 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".[83] After living briefly in Italy (1844), Dickens travelled to Switzerland (1846), where he began work on Dombey and Son (1846–48). This and David Copperfield (1849–50) 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.[84] Philanthropy[edit] Dickens presiding over a charity meeting to discuss the future of the College of God's Gift; from The Illustrated London News, March 1856 Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens in May 1846 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,[85] setting the house rules, reviewing the accounts and interviewing prospective residents.[86] 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.[87] Religious views[edit] As a young man, Dickens expressed a distaste for certain aspects of organised religion. In 1836, 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."[88][89] Portrait of Dickens, c. 1850, National Library of Wales Dickens honoured the figure of Jesus Christ.[90] He is regarded as a professing Christian.[91] His son, Henry Fielding Dickens, described him as someone who "possessed deep religious convictions". In the early 1840s, he had shown an interest in Unitarian Christianity and Robert Browning remarked that "Mr Dickens is an enlightened Unitarian."[92] Professor Gary Colledge has written that he "never strayed from his attachment to popular lay Anglicanism".[93] Dickens authored a work called The Life of Our Lord (1846), a book about the life of Christ, written with the purpose of sharing his faith with his children and family.[94][95] In a scene from David Copperfield, Dickens echoed Geoffrey Chaucer's use of Luke 23:34 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."[96] 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 1846.[97][98] 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."[97] 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".[97] Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky referred to Dickens as "that great Christian writer".[99][100] Middle years[edit] In December 1845, 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."[101] 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.[101][102] 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.[101] David reaches Canterbury, from David Copperfield. The character incorporates many elements of Dickens's own life. Artwork by Frank Reynolds. A Francophile, Dickens often holidayed in France and, in a speech delivered in Paris in 1846 in French, called the French "the first people in the universe".[103] 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.[103] In early 1849, Dickens started to write David Copperfield. It was published between 1849 and 1850. In Dickens's biography, Life of Charles Dickens (1872), John Forster wrote of David Copperfield, "underneath the fiction lay something of the author's life".[104] It was Dickens's personal favourite among his novels, as he wrote in the author's preface to the 1867 edition of the novel.[105] In late November 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he wrote Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1856).[106] It was here that he indulged in the amateur theatricals described in Forster's Life of Charles Dickens.[107] During this period, he worked closely with the novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins. In 1856, 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.[108] Commemorative blue plaque in Tavistock Square, London where Dickens lived between 1851 and 1860 During this time Dickens was also the publisher, editor and a major contributor to the journals Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1858–1870).[109] In 1854, 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 1856 play The Frozen Deep, which satirizes Rae and the Inuit. 20th century archaeology work in King William Island later confirmed that the members of the Franklin expedition resorted to cannibalism.[110] In 1855, 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.[111] 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.[111][112] 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.[112] 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."[113][114][115] Dickens also published dozens of writings in Household Words supporting vaccination, including multiple laudations for vaccine pioneer Edward Jenner.[116] Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857, 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."[117] Actress Ellen Ternan (pictured in 1858) drew the attention of Dickens after he saw her on stage in 1857 In 1857, Dickens hired professional actresses for The Frozen Deep, which he and his protégé Wilkie 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.[118] In 1858, 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 –[119] Dickens attempted to have Catherine institutionalized.[120] 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.[72] 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 1852 was considered by the hospital's founders to have been the catalyst for the hospital's success.[121] 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.[122] 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.[123][124][125] Dickens at his desk, 1858 After separating from Catherine,[126] Dickens undertook a series of popular and remunerative reading tours which, together with his journalism, were to absorb most of his creative energies for the next decade, in which he was to write only two novels.[127] His first reading tour, lasting from April 1858 to February 1859, consisted of 129 appearances in 49 towns throughout England, Scotland and Ireland.[128] Dickens's continued fascination with the theatrical world was written into the theatre scenes in Nicholas Nickleby, and he found an outlet in public readings. In 1866, he undertook a series of public readings in England and Scotland, with more the following year in England and Ireland.[129] Dickens was a regular patron at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub in Fleet Street, London. He included the venue in A Tale of Two Cities. Other works soon followed, including A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861), which were resounding successes. Set in London and Paris, A Tale of Two Cities is his best-known work of historical fiction and includes the famous opening sentence that begins with "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." It is regularly touted as one of the best-selling novels of all time.[130][131] Themes in Great Expectations include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil.[132] In early September 1860, in a field behind Gads Hill, Dickens made a bonfire of most of his correspondence; he spared only letters on business matters. Since Ellen Ternan also destroyed all of his letters to her,[133] the extent of the affair between the two remains speculative.[134] In the 1930s, Thomas Wright recounted that Ternan had unburdened herself to a Canon Benham and gave currency to rumours they had been lovers.[135] Dickens's daughter, Kate Perugini, stated that the two had a son who died in infancy to biographer Gladys Storey in an interview before the former's death in 1929. Storey published her account in Dickens and Daughter,[136][137] though no contemporary evidence was given. On his death, Dickens settled an annuity on Ternan which made her financially independent. Claire Tomalin's book The Invisible Woman argues that Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life. The book was subsequently turned into a play, Little Nell, by Simon Gray, and a 2013 film. During the same period Dickens furthered his interest in the paranormal becoming one of the early members of The Ghost Club.[138] In June 1862, he was offered £10,000 for a reading tour of Australia.[139] He was enthusiastic, and even planned a travel book, The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down, but ultimately decided against the tour.[140] Two of his sons, Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, migrated to Australia, Edward becoming a member of the Parliament of New South Wales as Member for Wilcannia between 1889 and 1894.[141][142] Later life[edit] Aftermath of the Staplehurst rail crash in 1865 On 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris with Ellen Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash in Kent. The train's first seven carriages plunged off a cast iron bridge that was under repair and ten passengers were killed.[143] The only first-class carriage to remain on the track—which was left hanging precariously off the bridge—was the one in which Dickens was travelling.[144] For three hours before rescuers arrived, Dickens tended and comforted the wounded and the dying with a flask of brandy and a hat refreshed with water.[144] Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it.[145] Dickens later used the experience of the crash as material for his short ghost story, "The Signal-Man", in which the central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail crash. He also based the story on several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash in Sussex of 1861. Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquest to avoid disclosing that he had been travelling with Ternan and her mother, which would have caused a scandal.[146] After the crash, Dickens was nervous when travelling by train and would use alternative means when available.[147] In 1868 he wrote, "I have sudden vague rushes of terror, even when riding in a hansom cab, which are perfectly unreasonable but quite insurmountable." Dickens's son, Henry, recalled, "I have seen him sometimes in a railway carriage when there was a slight jolt. When this happened he was almost in a state of panic and gripped the seat with both hands."[147] Second visit to the United States[edit] Crowd of spectators buying tickets for a Dickens reading at Steinway Hall, New York City in 1867 While he contemplated a second visit to the United States, the outbreak of the Civil War in America in 1861 delayed his plans. On 9 November 1867, over two years after the war, Dickens set sail from Liverpool for his second American reading tour. Landing in Boston, he devoted the rest of the month to a round of dinners with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his American publisher, James T. Fields. In early December, the readings began. He performed 76 readings, netting £19,000, from December 1867 to April 1868.[148] Dickens shuttled between Boston and New York, where he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall. Although he had started to suffer from what he called the "true American catarrh", he kept to a schedule that would have challenged a much younger man, even managing to squeeze in some sleighing in Central Park.[149] During his travels, he saw a change in the people and the circumstances of America. His final appearance was at a banquet the American Press held in his honour at Delmonico's on 18 April, when he promised never to denounce America again. By the end of the tour Dickens could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. On 23 April he boarded the Cunard liner Russia to return to Britain,[150] barely escaping a federal tax lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.[151] Farewell readings[edit] Poster promoting a reading by Dickens in Nottingham dated 4 February 1869, two months before he had a mild stroke In 1868–69, Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" in England, Scotland and Ireland, beginning on 6 October. He managed, of a contracted 100 readings, to give 75 in the provinces, with a further 12 in London.[148] As he pressed on he was affected by giddiness and fits of paralysis. He had a stroke on 18 April 1869 in Chester.[152] He collapsed on 22 April 1869, at Preston, Lancashire; on doctor's advice, the tour was cancelled.[153] After further provincial readings were cancelled, he began work on his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It was fashionable in the 1860s to 'do the slums' and, in company, Dickens visited opium dens in Shadwell, where he witnessed an elderly addict called "Laskar Sal", who formed the model for "Opium Sal" in Edwin Drood.[154] After Dickens regained enough strength, he arranged, with medical approval, for a final series of readings to partly make up to his sponsors what they had lost due to his illness. There were 12 performances, on 11 January to 15 March 1870; the last at 8:00pm at St. James's Hall, London. Though in grave health by then, 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, paying a special tribute on the death of his friend, illustrator Daniel Maclise.[155] Death[edit] Samuel Luke Fildes – The Empty Chair. Fildes was illustrating Edwin Drood at the time of Dickens's death. The engraving shows Dickens's empty chair in his study at Gads Hill Place. It appeared in the Christmas 1870 edition of The Graphic and thousands of prints of it were sold.[156]Dickens's grave in Westminster AbbeyA 1905 transcribed copy of the death certificate of Charles Dickens On 8 June 1870, Dickens had another stroke at his home after a full day's work on Edwin Drood. He never regained consciousness. The next day, he died at Gads Hill Place. Biographer Claire Tomalin has suggested Dickens was actually in Peckham when he had had the stroke and his mistress Ellen Ternan and her maids had him taken back to Gads Hill so that the public would not know the truth about their relationship.[157] Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner",[158] 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.[159] A letter from Dickens to the Clerk of the Privy Council in March indicates he'd been offered and accepted a baronetcy, which was not gazetted before his death.[160] His last words were "On the ground" in response to his sister-in-law Georgina's request that he lie down.[161][nb 2] On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens was buried in the Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley delivered a memorial elegy, lauding "the genial and loving humorist whom we now mourn", for showing by his own example "that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be innocent". Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the novelist's grave, Stanley assured those present that "the spot would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue."[162] In his will, drafted more than a year before his death, Dickens left the care of his £80,000 estate (£8,143,500 in 2021)[163] to his long-time colleague John Forster and his "best and truest friend" Georgina Hogarth who, along with Dickens's two sons, also received a tax-free sum of £8,000 (equivalent to £814,000 in 2021).[163] He confirmed his wife Catherine's annual allowance of £600 (£61,100 in 2021)[163]. He bequeathed £19 19s (£2,000 in 2021)[163] to each servant in his employment at the time of his death.[164] Literary style[edit] Dickens's approach to the novel is influenced by various things, including the picaresque novel tradition,[165] melodrama[166] and the novel of sensibility.[167] According to Ackroyd, other than these, perhaps the most important literary influence on him was derived from the fables of The Arabian Nights.[168] Satire and irony are central to the picaresque novel.[169] Comedy is also an aspect of the British picaresque novel tradition of Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett. Fielding's Tom Jones was a major influence on the 19th-century novelist including Dickens, who read it in his youth[170] and named a son Henry Fielding Dickens after him.[171][172] Influenced by Gothic fiction—a literary genre that began with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole—Dickens incorporated Gothic imagery, settings and plot devices in his works.[173] Victorian gothic moved from castles and abbeys into contemporary urban environments: in particular London, such as Dickens's Oliver Twist and Bleak House. The jilted bride Miss Havisham from Great Expectations is one of Dickens's best-known gothic creations; living in a ruined mansion, her bridal gown effectively doubles as her funeral shroud.[174] No other writer had such a profound influence on Dickens as William Shakespeare. On Dickens's veneration of Shakespeare, Alfred Harbage wrote in A Kind of Power: The Shakespeare-Dickens Analogy (1975) that "No one is better qualified to recognise literary genius than a literary genius".[175] Regarding Shakespeare as "the great master" whose plays "were an unspeakable source of delight", Dickens's lifelong affinity with the playwright included seeing theatrical productions of his plays in London and putting on amateur dramatics with friends in his early years.[175] In 1838, Dickens travelled to Stratford-upon-Avon and visited the house in which Shakespeare was born, leaving his autograph in the visitors' book. Dickens would draw on this experience in his next work, Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), expressing the strength of feeling experienced by visitors to Shakespeare's birthplace: the character Mrs Wititterly states, "I don't know how it is, but after you've seen the place and written your name in the little book, somehow or other you seem to be inspired; it kindles up quite a fire within one."[176] The Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist. His dialect is rooted in Cockney English. Dickens's writing style is marked by a profuse linguistic creativity.[177] Satire, flourishing in his gift for caricature, is his forte. An early reviewer compared him to Hogarth for his keen practical sense of the ludicrous side of life, though his acclaimed mastery of varieties of class idiom may in fact mirror the conventions of contemporary popular theatre.[178] Dickens worked intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that would reverberate with associations for his readers and assist the development of motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an "allegorical impetus" to the novels' meanings.[177] To cite one of numerous examples, the name Mr Murdstone in David Copperfield conjures up twin allusions to murder and stony coldness.[179] His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery – he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator" – are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy. On his ability to elicit a response from his works, English screenwriter Sarah Phelps writes, "He knew how to work an audience and how to get them laughing their heads off one minute or on the edge of their seats and holding their breath the next. The other thing about Dickens is that he loved telling stories and he loved his characters, even those horrible, mean-spirited ones."[180] The author worked closely with his illustrators, supplying them with a summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them. He briefed the illustrator on plans for each month's instalment so that work could begin before he wrote them. Marcus Stone, illustrator of Our Mutual Friend, recalled that the author was always "ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ... life-history of the creations of his fancy".[181] Dickens employs Cockney English in many of his works, denoting working-class Londoners. Cockney grammar appears in terms such as ain't, and consonants in words are frequently omitted, as in 'ere (here) and wot (what).[182] An example of this usage is in Oliver Twist. The Artful Dodger uses cockney slang which is juxtaposed with Oliver's 'proper' English, when the Dodger repeats Oliver saying "seven" with "sivin".[183] Characters[edit] Dickens's Dream by Robert William Buss, portraying Dickens at his desk at Gads Hill Place surrounded by many of his characters Dickens's biographer Claire Tomalin regards him as the greatest creator of character in English fiction after Shakespeare.[184] 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 and Bob Cratchit (A Christmas Carol); Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin and Bill Sikes (Oliver Twist); Pip, Miss Havisham, Estella, and Abel Magwitch (Great Expectations); Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay and Madame Defarge (A Tale of Two Cities); David Copperfield, Uriah Heep and Mr Micawber (David Copperfield); Daniel Quilp and Nell Trent (The Old Curiosity Shop), Samuel Pickwick and Sam Weller (The Pickwick Papers); and Wackford Squeers (Nicholas Nickleby) are so well known as to be part and parcel of popular culture, and in some cases have passed into ordinary language: a scrooge, for example, is a miser or someone who dislikes Christmas festivity.[185] Illustration of London Bridge (from the 1914 book In Dickens's London) which Nancy crossed in Oliver Twist His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. "Gamp" became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs Gamp, and "Pickwickian", "Pecksniffian" and "Gradgrind" all entered dictionaries due to Dickens's original portraits of such characters who were, respectively, quixotic, hypocritical and vapidly factual. The character that made Dickens famous, Sam Weller became known for his Wellerisms—one-liners that turn proverbs on their heads.[50] Many were drawn from real life: Mrs Nickleby is based on his mother, although she did not recognise herself in the portrait,[186] just as Mr Micawber is constructed from aspects of his father's 'rhetorical exuberance';[187] Harold Skimpole in Bleak House is based on James Henry Leigh Hunt; his wife's dwarfish chiropodist recognised herself in Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield.[188] Perhaps Dickens's impressions on his meeting with Hans Christian Andersen informed the delineation of Uriah Heep (a term synonymous with sycophant).[189] Virginia Woolf maintained that "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens" as he produces "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks".[190] T. S. Eliot wrote that Dickens "excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings".[191] One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself.[192] Dickens described London as a magic lantern, inspiring the places and people in many of his novels.[193] From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital – Dickens's London – are described over the course of his body of work.[193] Walking the streets (particularly around London) formed an integral part of his writing life, stoking his creativity. Dickens was known to regularly walk at least a dozen miles (19 km) per day, and once wrote, "If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish."[194] Autobiographical elements[edit] An original illustration by Phiz from the novel David Copperfield, which is widely regarded as Dickens's most autobiographical work Authors frequently draw their portraits of characters from people they have known in real life. David Copperfield is regarded by many as a veiled autobiography of Dickens. The scenes of interminable court cases and legal arguments in Bleak House reflect Dickens's experiences as a law clerk and court reporter, and in particular his direct experience of the law's procedural delay during 1844 when he sued publishers in Chancery for breach of copyright.[195] Dickens's father was sent to prison for debt, and this became a common theme in many of his books, with the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit resulting from Dickens's own experiences of the institution.[196] Lucy Stroughill, a childhood sweetheart, may have affected several of Dickens's portraits of girls such as Little Em'ly in David Copperfield and Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities.[197][nb 3] Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew the details of his early life until six years after his death, when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated. Though Skimpole brutally sends up Leigh Hunt, some critics have detected in his portrait features of Dickens's own character, which he sought to exorcise by self-parody.[198] Episodic writing[edit] Advertisement for Great Expectations, serialised in the weekly literary magazine All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861. The advert contains the plot device "to be continued". A pioneer of the serial publication of narrative fiction, Dickens wrote most of his major novels in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as Master Humphrey's Clock and Household Words, later reprinted in book form.[4][5] These instalments made the stories affordable and accessible, with the audience more evenly distributed across income levels than previous.[199] His instalment format inspired a narrative that he would explore and develop throughout his career, and the regular cliffhangers made each new episode widely anticipated.[6][199] When The Old Curiosity Shop was being serialised, American fans waited at the docks in New York harbour, shouting out to the crew of an incoming British ship, "Is little Nell dead?"[200] Dickens was able to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end. Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers and friends. His friend Forster had a significant hand in reviewing his drafts, an influence that went beyond matters of punctuation; he toned down melodramatic and sensationalist exaggerations, cut long passages (such as the episode of Quilp's drowning in The Old Curiosity Shop), and made suggestions about plot and character. It was he who suggested that Charley Bates should be redeemed in Oliver Twist. Dickens had not thought of killing Little Nell and it was Forster who advised him to entertain this possibility as necessary to his conception of the heroine.[201] At the helm in popularising cliffhangers and serial publications in Victorian literature,[202] Dickens's influence can also be seen in television soap operas and film series, with The Guardian stating that "the DNA of Dickens's busy, episodic storytelling, delivered in instalments and rife with cliffhangers and diversions, is traceable in everything."[203] His serialisation of his novels also drew comments from other writers. In Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Wrecker, Captain Nares, investigating an abandoned ship, remarked: "See! They were writing up the log," said Nares, pointing to the ink-bottle. "Caught napping, as usual. I wonder if there ever was a captain yet that lost a ship with his log-book up to date? He generally has about a month to fill up on a clean break, like Charles Dickens and his serial novels."[204] Social commentary[edit] Nurse Sarah Gamp (left) from Martin Chuzzlewit became a stereotype of untrained and incompetent nurses of the early Victorian era, before the reforms of Florence Nightingale. Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. Simon Callow states, "From the moment he started to write, he spoke for the people, and the people loved him for it."[205] He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. In a New York address, he expressed his belief that "Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen".[206] Dickens's second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime: it challenged middle class polemics about criminals, making impossible any pretence to ignorance about what poverty entailed.[207][208] At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged within society. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues – such as sanitation and the workhouse – but his fiction probably demonstrated its greatest prowess in changing public opinion in regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and oppression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of this condition is in Hard Times (1854), Dickens's only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In this work, he uses vitriol and satire to illustrate how this marginalised social stratum was termed "Hands" by the factory owners; that is, not really "people" but rather only appendages of the machines they operated. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address such problems of class oppression. For example, the prison scenes in The Pickwick Papers are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. Karl Marx asserted that Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together".[209] George Bernard Shaw even remarked that Great Expectations was more seditious than Marx's Das Kapital.[209] The exceptional popularity of Dickens's novels, even those with socially oppositional themes (Bleak House, 1853; Little Dorrit, 1857; Our Mutual Friend, 1865), not only underscored his ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also ensured that the Victorian public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored. It has been argued that his technique of flooding his narratives with an 'unruly superfluity of material' that, in the gradual dénouement, yields up an unsuspected order, influenced the organisation of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.[210] Literary techniques[edit] Dickens is often described as using idealised characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and the ugly social truths he reveals. The story of Nell Trent in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was received as extremely moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde. "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell", he said in a famous remark, "without dissolving into tears ... of laughter."[211][212] G. K. Chesterton stated, "It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell, that I object to", arguing that the maudlin effect of his description of her life owed much to the gregarious nature of Dickens's grief, his "despotic" use of people's feelings to move them to tears in works like this.[213] Less fortunate characters, such as Tiny Tim (held aloft by Bob Cratchit), are often used by Dickens in sentimental ways. The question as to whether Dickens belongs to the tradition of the sentimental novel is debatable. Valerie Purton, in her book Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition, sees him continuing aspects of this tradition, and argues that his "sentimental scenes and characters [are] as crucial to the overall power of the novels as his darker or comic figures and scenes", and that "Dombey and Son is [ ... ] Dickens's greatest triumph in the sentimentalist tradition".[214] The Encyclopædia Britannica online comments that, despite "patches of emotional excess", such as the reported death of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843), "Dickens cannot really be termed a sentimental novelist".[215] In Oliver Twist, Dickens provides readers with an idealised portrait of a boy so inherently and unrealistically good that his values are never subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a gang of young pickpockets. While later novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit), this idealism serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant social commentary. Dickens's fiction, reflecting what he believed to be true of his own life, makes frequent use of coincidence, either for comic effect or to emphasise the idea of providence.[216] For example, Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper-class family that rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group. Such coincidences are a staple of 18th-century picaresque novels, such as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, which Dickens enjoyed reading as a youth.[217] Reputation[edit] Dickens's portrait (top left), in between Shakespeare and Tennyson, on a stained glass window at the Ottawa Public Library, Ottawa, Canada Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time,[218] and remains one of the best-known and most-read of English authors. His works have never gone out of print,[219] and have been adapted continually for the screen since the invention of cinema,[220] with at least 200 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens's works documented.[221] Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime – early productions included The Haunted Man which was performed in the West End's Adelphi Theatre in 1848 – and, as early as 1901, the British silent film Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost was made by Walter R. Booth.[222] Contemporaries such as publisher Edward Lloyd cashed in on Dickens's popularity with cheap imitations of his novels, resulting in his own popular 'penny dreadfuls'.[223] Dickens created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest British novelist of the Victorian era.[1] From the beginning of his career in the 1830s, his achievements in English literature were compared to those of Shakespeare.[175] Dickens's literary reputation, however, began to decline with the publication of Bleak House in 1852–53. Philip Collins calls Bleak House "a crucial item in the history of Dickens's reputation. Reviewers and literary figures during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, saw a 'drear decline' in Dickens, from a writer of 'bright sunny comedy ... to dark and serious social' commentary".[224] The Spectator called Bleak House "a heavy book to read through at once ... dull and wearisome as a serial"; Richard Simpson, in The Rambler, characterised Hard Times as "this dreary framework"; Fraser's Magazine thought Little Dorrit "decidedly the worst of his novels".[225] All the same, despite these "increasing reservations amongst reviewers and the chattering classes, 'the public never deserted its favourite'". Dickens's popular reputation remained unchanged, sales continued to rise, and Household Words and later All the Year Round were highly successful.[225] "Charles Dickens as he appears when reading." Wood engraving from Harper's Weekly, 7 December 1867. Author David Lodge called Dickens the "first writer to be an object of unrelenting public interest and adulation".[226] As his career progressed, Dickens's fame and the demand for his public readings were unparalleled. In 1868 The Times wrote, "Amid all the variety of 'readings', those of Mr Charles Dickens stand alone."[10] A Dickens biographer, Edgar Johnson, wrote in the 1950s: "It was [always] more than a reading; it was an extraordinary exhibition of acting that seized upon its auditors with a mesmeric possession."[10] Juliet John backed the claim for Dickens "to be called the first self-made global media star of the age of mass culture."[226] Comparing his reception at public readings to those of a contemporary pop star, The Guardian states, "People sometimes fainted at his shows. His performances even saw the rise of that modern phenomenon, the 'speculator' or ticket tout (scalpers) – the ones in New York City escaped detection by borrowing respectable-looking hats from the waiters in nearby restaurants."[227] "Dickens's vocal impersonations of his own characters gave this truth a theatrical form: the public reading tour. No other Victorian could match him for celebrity, earnings, and sheer vocal artistry. The Victorians craved the author's multiple voices: between 1853 and his death in 1870, Dickens performed about 470 times." —Peter Garratt in The Guardian on Dickens's fame and the demand for his public readings[10] Among fellow writers, there was a range of opinions on Dickens. Poet laureate, William Wordsworth (1770–1850), thought him a "very talkative, vulgar young person", adding he had not read a line of his work, while novelist George Meredith (1828–1909), found Dickens "intellectually lacking".[228] In 1888, Leslie Stephen commented in the Dictionary of National Biography that "if literary fame could be safely measured by popularity with the half-educated, Dickens must claim the highest position among English novelists".[229] Anthony Trollope's Autobiography famously declared Thackeray, not Dickens, to be the greatest novelist of the age. However, both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were admirers. Dostoyevsky commented: "We understand Dickens in Russia, I am convinced, almost as well as the English, perhaps even with all the nuances. It may well be that we love him no less than his compatriots do. And yet how original is Dickens, and how very English!"[230] Tolstoy referred to David Copperfield as his favourite book, and he later adopted the novel as "a model for his own autobiographical reflections".[231] French writer Jules Verne called Dickens his favourite writer, writing his novels "stand alone, dwarfing all others by their amazing power and felicity of expression".[232] Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was inspired by Dickens's novels in several of his paintings, such as Vincent's Chair, and in an 1889 letter to his sister stated that reading Dickens, especially A Christmas Carol, was one of the things that was keeping him from committing suicide.[233] Oscar Wilde generally disparaged his depiction of character, while admiring his gift for caricature.[234] Henry James denied him a premier position, calling him "the greatest of superficial novelists": Dickens failed to endow his characters with psychological depth, and the novels, "loose baggy monsters",[235] betrayed a "cavalier organisation".[236] Joseph Conrad described his own childhood in bleak Dickensian terms, noting he had "an intense and unreasoning affection" for Bleak House dating back to his boyhood. The novel influenced his own gloomy portrait of London in The Secret Agent (1907).[231] Virginia Woolf had a love-hate relationship with Dickens, finding his novels "mesmerizing" while reproving him for his sentimentalism and a commonplace style.[237] Around 1940–41, the attitude of the literary critics began to warm towards Dickens – led by George Orwell in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (March 1940), Edmund Wilson in The Wound and the Bow (1941) and Humphry House in Dickens and His World.[238] However, even in 1948, F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition, asserted that "the adult mind doesn't as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness"; Dickens was indeed a great genius, "but the genius was that of a great entertainer",[239] though he later changed his opinion with Dickens the Novelist (1970, with Q. D. (Queenie) Leavis): "Our purpose", they wrote, "is to enforce as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers".[240] In 1944, Soviet film director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein wrote an essay on Dickens's influence on cinema, such as cross-cutting – where two stories run alongside each other, as seen in novels such as Oliver Twist.[241] In the 1950s, "a substantial reassessment and re-editing of the works began, and critics found his finest artistry and greatest depth to be in the later novels: Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations – and (less unanimously) in Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend".[242] Dickens was a favourite author of Roald Dahl; the best-selling children's author would include three of Dickens's novels among those read by the title character in his 1988 novel Matilda.[243] In 2005 Paul McCartney, an avid reader of Dickens, named Nicholas Nickleby his favourite novel. On Dickens he states, "I like the world that he takes me to. I like his words; I like the language", adding, "A lot of my stuff – it's kind of Dickensian."[244] Screenwriter Jonathan Nolan's screenplay for The Dark Knight Rises (2012) was inspired by A Tale of Two Cities, with Nolan calling the depiction of Paris in the novel "one of the most harrowing portraits of a relatable, recognisable civilisation that completely folded to pieces".[245] On 7 February 2012, the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, Philip Womack wrote in The Telegraph: "Today there is no escaping Charles Dickens. Not that there has ever been much chance of that before. He has a deep, peculiar hold upon us".[246] Legacy[edit] Dickens and Little Nell statue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and works exist in many places with which Dickens was associated. These include the Charles Dickens Museum in London, the historic home where he wrote Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby; and the Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth, the house in which he was born. The original manuscripts of many of his novels, as well as printers' proofs, first editions, and illustrations from the collection of Dickens's friend John Forster are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum.[247] Dickens's will stipulated that no memorial be erected in his honour; nonetheless, a life-size bronze statue of Dickens entitled Dickens and Little Nell, cast in 1890 by Francis Edwin Elwell, stands in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Another life-size statue of Dickens is located at Centennial Park in Sydney, Australia.[248] In 1960 a bas-relief sculpture of Dickens, notably featuring characters from his books, was commissioned from sculptor Estcourt J Clack to adorn the office building built on the site of his former home at 1 Devonshire Terrace, London.[249] In 2014, a life-size statue was unveiled near his birthplace in Portsmouth on the 202nd anniversary of his birth; this was supported by his great-great-grandsons, Ian and Gerald Dickens.[250][251] A Christmas Carol significantly influenced the modern celebration of Christmas in many countries A Christmas Carol is most probably 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.[252] 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.[253] Its archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) entered into Western cultural consciousness. "Merry Christmas", a prominent phrase from the tale, was popularised following the appearance of the story.[254] The term Scrooge became a synonym for miser, and his exclamation "Bah! Humbug!'", a dismissal of the festive spirit, likewise gained currency as an idiom.[255] The Victorian era novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called the book "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness".[252] Statue of Dickens in his birthplace Portsmouth, Hampshire Dickens was commemorated on the Series E £10 note issued by the Bank of England that circulated between 1992 and 2003. His portrait appeared on the reverse of the note accompanied by a scene from The Pickwick Papers. The Charles Dickens School is a high school in Broadstairs, Kent. A theme park, Dickens World, standing in part on the site of the former naval dockyard where Dickens's father once worked in the Navy Pay Office, opened in Chatham in 2007. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens in 2012, the Museum of London held the UK's first major exhibition on the author in 40 years.[256] In 2002, Dickens was number 41 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.[257] American literary critic Harold Bloom placed Dickens among the greatest Western writers of all time.[258] In the 2003 UK survey The Big Read carried out by the BBC, five of Dickens's books were named in the Top 100.[259] Actors who have portrayed Dickens on screen include Anthony Hopkins, Derek Jacobi, Simon Callow, Dan Stevens and Ralph Fiennes, the latter playing the author in The Invisible Woman (2013) which depicts Dickens's alleged secret love affair with Ellen Ternan which lasted for thirteen years until his death in 1870.[260] Soviet postage stamp commemorating Dickens Dickens and his publications have appeared on a number of postage stamps in countries including: the United Kingdom (1970, 1993, 2011 and 2012 issued by the Royal Mail—their 2012 collection marked the bicentenary of Dickens's birth),[261] the Soviet Union (1962), Antigua, Barbuda, Botswana, Cameroon, Dubai, Fujairah, St Lucia and Turks and Caicos Islands (1970), St Vincent (1987), Nevis (2007), Alderney, Gibraltar, Jersey and Pitcairn Islands (2012), Austria (2013), and Mozambique (2014).[262] In 1976, a crater on the planet Mercury was named in his honour.[263] In November 2018 it was reported that a previously lost portrait of a 31-year-old Dickens, by Margaret Gillies, had been found in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Gillies was an early supporter of women's suffrage and had painted the portrait in late 1843 when Dickens, aged 31, wrote A Christmas Carol. It was exhibited, to acclaim, at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1844.[81] The Charles Dickens Museum is reported to have paid £180,000 for the portrait.[264] Works[edit] Main article: Charles Dickens bibliography Dickens published well over a dozen major novels and novellas, a large number of short stories, including a number of Christmas-themed stories, a handful of plays, and several non-fiction books. Novels and novellas[edit] Dickens's novels and novellas were initially serialised in weekly and monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats. The Pickwick Papers (The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club; monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837).[265] Novel. Oliver Twist (The Adventures of Oliver Twist; monthly serial in Bentley's Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839). Novel. Nicholas Nickleby (The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby; monthly serial, April 1838 to October 1839). Novel. The Old Curiosity Shop (weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, April 1840 to November 1841). Novel. Barnaby Rudge (Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty; weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, February to November 1841). Novel. A Christmas Carol (A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost-story of Christmas; 1843). Novella. Martin Chuzzlewit (The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit; monthly serial, January 1843 to July 1844). Novel. The Chimes (The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In; 1844). Novella. The Cricket on the Hearth (The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home; 1845). Novella. The Battle of Life (The Battle of Life: A Love Story; 1846). Novella. Dombey and Son (Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation; monthly serial, October 1846 to April 1848). Novel. The Haunted Man (The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain: A Fancy for Christmas-time; 1848). Novella. David Copperfield (The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery [Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account]; monthly serial, May 1849 to November 1850). Novel. Bleak House (monthly serial, March 1852 to September 1853). Novel. Hard Times (Hard Times: For These Times; weekly serial in Household Words, 1 April 1854, to 12 August 1854). Novel. Little Dorrit (monthly serial, December 1855 to June 1857). Novel. A Tale of Two Cities (weekly serial in All the Year Round, 30 April 1859, to 26 November 1859). Novel. Great Expectations (weekly serial in All the Year Round, 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861). Novel. Our Mutual Friend (monthly serial, May 1864 to November 1865). Novel. The Mystery of Edwin Drood (monthly serial, April 1870 to September 1870), novel left unfinished due to Dickens's death. See also[edit] List of Dickensian characters Racism in the work of Charles Dickens Charles Dickens bibliography The Fraud by Zadie Smith Notes[edit] ^ John Forster quotes an unpublished letter in which Dickens responds to the accusation that he must not have seen Grimaldi in person: "Now, Sir, although I was brought up from remote country parts in the dark ages of 1819 and 1820 to behold the splendour of Christmas pantomimes and the humour of Joe, in whose honour I am informed I clapped my hands with great precocity, and although I even saw him act in the remote times of 1823 ... I am willing ... to concede that I had not arrived at man's estate when Grimaldi left the stage".[19] When Dickens arrived in America for the first time in 1842, he stayed at the Tremont House, America's "pioneer first-class hotel". Dickens "bounded into the Tremont's foyer shouting out 'Here we are!', Grimaldi's famous catch-phrase and as such entirely appropriate for a great and cherished entertainer making his entrance upon a new stage."[20] Later, Dickens was known to imitate Grimaldi's clowning on several occasions.[21] ^ A contemporary obituary in The Times, alleged that Dickens's last words were: "Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of Art." Reprinted from The Times, London, August 1870 in Bidwell 1870, p. 223. ^ Slater also detects Ellen Ternan in the portrayal of Lucie Manette. References[edit] ^ a b Black 2007, p. 735. ^ Mazzeno 2008, p. 76. ^ Chesterton 2005, pp. 100–126. ^ a b Grossman 2012, p. 54 ^ a b c Lodge 2002, p. 118. ^ a b "Tune in next week". The New Yorker. 2 December 2017. Archived from the original on 1 December 2017. 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"'In the Natural Course of Physical Things': Ghosts and Science in Charles Dickens's All the Year Round". In Henson, Louise; Cantor, Geoffrey; Dawson, Gowan; Noakes, Richard; Shuttleworth, Sally; Topham, Jonathan R (eds.). Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media. Ashgate Publishing. pp. 113–124. ISBN 978-0-7546-3574-1. Archived from the original on 30 October 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015. Hobsbaum, Philip (1998) [1972]. A reader's guide to Charles Dickens. Syracuse University Press. p. 270. ISBN 978-0-8156-0475-4. Hughes, William Richard (1891). A week's tramp in Dickens-Land: together with personal reminiscences of the 'Inimitable Boz'. Oxford: Chapman & Hall. Hutton, Ronald (2001). The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-285448-3. Archived from the original on 22 September 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015. Jackson, Kenneth T (1995). The Encyclopedia of New York City. New York Historical Society. 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The American Scholar. 39 (4). Lodge, David (2002). Consciousness and the Novel. Harvard, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 118. ISBN 978-0-674-00949-3. Marlow, James E. (1994). Charles Dickens: The Uses of Time. Susquehanna University Press. ISBN 978-0-945636-48-9. Archived from the original on 26 October 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015. Mazzeno, Laurence W (2008). The Dickens industry: critical perspectives 1836–2005. Studies in European and American literature and culture. Literary criticism in perspective. Camden House. ISBN 978-1-57113-317-5. Archived from the original on 23 September 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015. Mee, Jon (2010). The Cambridge Introduction to Charles Dickens. Cambridge Introductions to Literature. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-67634-2. Archived from the original on 22 October 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015. Moore, Grace (2004). Dickens and Empire:Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens. Ashgate Publishing. 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Pope-Hennessy, Una (1945). Charles Dickens 1812–1870. Chatto and Windus. Raina, Badri (1986). Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth. University of Wisconsin Press. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-299-10610-2. Robinson, David J. (2005). Disordered personalities (3 ed.). Rapid Psychler Press. ISBN 978-1-894328-09-8. Archived from the original on 20 September 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015. Sasaki, Toru (2011). "Modern screen adaptations". In Ledger, Sally; Furneaux, Holly (eds.). Dickens in Context. Cambridge University Press. pp. 67–73. ISBN 978-0-521-88700-7. Archived from the original on 19 September 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015. Schlicke, Paul, ed. (1999). Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-866213-6. Slater, Michael (1983). Dickens and Women. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-1180-7. Archived from the original on 18 October 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015. Slater, Michael (2009). Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing. 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ISBN 978-0-19-926140-6. Archived from the original on 19 November 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2016. Bradbury, Nicola, Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (St. Martin's Press, 1990) ISBN 978-0312056582 Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert, "Becoming Dickens 'The Invention of a Novelist'", London: Harvard University Press, 2011 Gold, David L (2009). González, Félix Rodríquez; Buades, Antonio Lillo (eds.). Studies in Etymology and Etiology: With Emphasis on Germanic, Jewish, Romance and Slavic Languages. Universidad de Alicante. ISBN 978-84-7908-517-9. Archived from the original on 19 November 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2016. Hart, Christopher (20 May 2007). "What, the Dickens World?". The Sunday Times. UK. Archived from the original on 5 July 2008. Retrieved 21 April 2012. Heller, Deborah (1990). "The Outcast as Villain and Victim: Jews in Dickens Oliver Twist and Our Mutual Friend". In Cohen, Derek; Heller, Deborah (eds.). Jewish Presences in English Literature. McGill-Queen's Press. pp. 40–60. ISBN 978-0-7735-0781-4. Archived from the original on 26 September 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015. Jarvie, Paul A (2005). Ready to Trample on All Human Law: Finance Capitalism in the Fiction of Charles Dickens. Studies in Major Literary Authors. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-97524-7. Johnson, Edgar, Charles Dickens: his tragedy and triumph, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952. In two volumes. Joshi, Prithi (2011). "Race". In Ledger, Sally; Furneaux, Holly (eds.). Dickens in Context. Cambridge University Press. pp. 292–300. ISBN 978-0-521-88700-7. Archived from the original on 19 November 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2016. Kaplan, Fred (1988). Dickens: A Biography. William Morrow & Company. ISBN 978-0-688-04341-4. Levine, Gary Martin (2003). The merchant of modernism: the economic Jew in Anglo-American Literature, 1864–1939. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-94109-9. Archived from the original on 23 September 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015. Mackenzie, Robery Shelton (1870). Life of Charles Dickens. by R. Shelton Mackenzie. With Personal Recollections and Anecdotes; – Letters by 'Boz', Never Before Published; – And ... Prose and Verse. With Portrait and Autograph. Philadelphia: T B Peterson & Brothers. ISBN 978-1-4255-5680-8. Retrieved 10 June 2012. Manning, Mick & Granström, Brita, Charles Dickens: Scenes From An Extraordinary Life, Frances Lincoln Children's Books, 2011. Mendelsohn, Ezra (1996). Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts. Studies in Contemporary Jewry. Vol. 12. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-511203-0. Archived from the original on 23 September 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015. Meckier, Jerome (2002). Dickens's Great Expectations: Misnar's Pavilion Versus Cinderella. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-813-12228-1. Moore, Grace (2002). "Reappraising Dickens's 'Noble Savage'". The Dickensian. 98 (458): 236–243. Nayder, Lillian (2002). Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship. Cornell University Press. p. 96. ISBN 978-0-8014-3925-4. Dickens, Charles (1978). "Introduction". In Patten, Robert L. (ed.). The Pickwick Papers. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-415-22233-4. Archived from the original on 30 October 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015. Pointer, Michael (1996). Charles Dickens on the screen: the film, television, and video adaptations. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-2960-2. Archived from the original on 26 September 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015. Pope-Hennessy, Una (2007). Charles Dickens. Hennessy Press. ISBN 978-1-4067-5783-5. Slater, Michael (2011) [2004]. "Dickens, Charles John Huffam". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/7599. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) Waller, John O. (July 1960). "Charles Dickens and the American Civil War". Studies in Philology. 57 (3): 535–548. JSTOR 4173318. Waller, Philip J (2006). Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain, 1870–1918. Oxford University Press. p. 194. ISBN 978-0-19-820677-4. External links[edit] Charles Dickens at Wikipedia's sister projects Definitions from WiktionaryMedia from CommonsQuotations from WikiquoteTexts from WikisourceData from Wikidata Library resources about Charles Dickens Resources in your library Resources in other libraries By Charles Dickens Online books Resources in your library Resources in other libraries Works[edit] Charles Dickens's works on Bookwise Works by Charles Dickens in eBook form at Standard Ebooks Works by Charles Dickens at Project Gutenberg Works by Charles Dickens at Faded Page (Canada) Works by or about Charles Dickens at Internet Archive Works by Charles Dickens at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) Online books, and library resources in your library and in other libraries by Charles Dickens Charles Dickens Archived 24 June 2021 at the Wayback Machine at the British Library Organisations and portals[edit] "Archival material relating to Charles Dickens". UK National Archives. Portraits of Charles Dickens at the National Portrait Gallery, London Charles Dickens on the Archives Hub Archival material at Leeds University Library The Dickens Fellowship, an international society dedicated to the study of Dickens and his Writings Correspondence of Charles Dickens, with related papers, ca. 1834–1955 Finding aid to Charles Dickens papers at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Museums[edit] Dickens Museum Situated in a former Dickens House, 48 Doughty Street, London, WC1 Dickens Birthplace Museum Archived 9 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine Old Commercial Road, Portsmouth Victoria and Albert Museum The V&A's collections relating to Dickens Other[edit] Dickens on In Our Time at the BBC Charles Dickens's Traveling Kit From the John Davis Batchelder Collection at the Library of Congress Charles Dickens's Walking Stick From the John Davis Batchelder Collection at the Library of Congress Charles Dickens Collection: First editions of Charles Dickens's works included in the Leonard Kebler gift (dispersed in the Division's collection). From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress Media offices Preceded byNew position Editor of the Daily News 1846 Succeeded byJohn Forster vteCharles Dickens Bibliography Novels The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–1837) Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress (1837–1839) Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839) The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841) Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty (1841) The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844) Dombey and Son (1846–1848) David Copperfield (1849–1850) Bleak House (1852–1853) Hard Times: For These Times (1854) Little Dorrit (1855–1857) A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Great Expectations (1860–1861) Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865) The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) Christmas books A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (1843) The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In (1844) The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home (1845) The Battle of Life: A Love Story (1846) The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, A Fancy for Christmas-Time (1848) Short stories To Be Read at Dusk (1852) "The Long Voyage" (1853) "The Signal-Man" (1866) "The Trial for Murder" (1865) Short story collections Sketches by "Boz," Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People (1833–1836) The Mudfog Papers (1837–1838) Master Humphrey's Clock (1840–1841) Non-fiction American Notes for General Circulation (1842) Pictures from Italy (1846) The Life of Our Lord (1846–1849) A Child's History of England (1851–1853) The Uncommercial Traveller (1860–1861) Letters (1821–1870) Plays The Frozen Deep (1856) No Thoroughfare (1867) Journalism Bentley's Miscellany (1836–1838) Master Humphrey's Clock (1840–1841) The Daily News (1846–1870) Household Words (1850–1859) All the Year Round (1859–1870) Collaborations "A House to Let" (1858) "The Haunted House" (1859) "A Message from the Sea" (1860) "Mugby Junction" (1866) No Thoroughfare (1867) FamilyParents John Dickens Elizabeth Dickens Brothers Frederick Dickens Alfred Lamert Dickens Augustus Dickens Partners Catherine Dickens (wife) Ellen Ternan (mistress) Children Charles Dickens Jr. Mary Dickens Kate Perugini Walter Landor Dickens Francis Dickens Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens Henry Fielding Dickens Dora Annie Dickens Edward Dickens Related Epitaph of Charles Irving Thornton Bleak House Tavistock House Gads Hill Place Grip (raven) Dickens fair Dickens and Little Nell (statue) Charles Dickens in His Study (1859 painting) Dickens of London (1976 miniseries) Dickens in America (2005 documentary) The Invisible Woman (2013 film) Dickensian (2015 TV series) The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017 film) Category Works by Charles Dickens vteCharles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (1836)Characters Samuel Pickwick Sam Weller Alfred Jingle Nathaniel Winkle Augustus Snodgrass Tracy Tupman Mrs Bardell Tony Weller Mr Wardle Places Goswell Street Bath Ipswich Fleet Prison Adaptations Samuel Weller, or, The Pickwickians (1837) Pickwick (1889) 1913 film 1921 film 1952 film 1963 musical 1969 TV film 1985 TV series 1985 film Other "If I Ruled the World" George and Vulture vteCharles Dickens's Oliver TwistCharacters Oliver Twist Bill Sikes Fagin Mr Brownlow Nancy Rose Maylie Monks The Artful Dodger Charley Bates Mr Sowerberry Mr. Bumble Film adaptations Oliver Twist (1909) Oliver Twist (1912) Oliver Twist (1912) Oliver Twist (1916) Oliver Twist (1919) Oliver Twist (1922) Oliver Twist (1933) Oliver Twist (1948) Oliver! (1968) Oliver Twist (1974) Las Aventuras de Oliver Twist (1987) Oliver Twist (2005) Film retellings Manik (1961) Chitti Tammudu (1962) Oliver & Company (1988) Twisted (1996) Twist (2003) Boy Called Twist (2004) Twist (2021) TV adaptations Oliver Twist (1962 TV serial) Oliver Twist (1982 American-British TV film) Oliver Twist (1982 Australian TV film) Oliver Twist (1985 TV serial) Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist (1996 TV series) Oliver Twist (1997 TV film) Oliver Twist (1999 TV series) Oliver Twist (2007 TV series) Play Oliver! (1960) Songs "As Long as He Needs Me" "Consider Yourself" "Food, Glorious Food" "I'd Do Anything" "Oliver!" "Oom-Pah-Pah" "Where Is Love?" "You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two" "Be Back Soon" Related Oliver! (soundtrack to the 1968 film) Escape of the Artful Dodger (2001 TV series retelling) Fagin the Jew (2003 graphic novel) Oliver and the Artful Dodger (1972 TV film) I'd Do Anything (2008 TV series) Dodger (2022 TV series) The Artful Dodger (2023 TV series) vteCharles Dickens's Nicholas NicklebyFilms Nicholas Nickleby (1912) The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1947) The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (2001) Nicholas Nickleby (2002) Television Nicholas Nickleby (1957) The Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1958) Nicholas Nickleby (1968) Nicholas Nickleby (1977) The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1982) Related The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (play) Smike (musical) vteCharles Dickens's The Old Curiosity ShopCharacters Nell Trent Sampson Brass Master Humphrey Quilp Dick Swiveller Films 1911 1914 1921 1934 Mister Quilp (1975) 1984 Television 1979–80 2007 Related Dickens and Little Nell statue vteCharles Dickens's A Christmas CarolCharacters Ebenezer Scrooge Bob Cratchit Mr. Fezziwig Tiny Tim Jacob Marley Ghost of Christmas Past Ghost of Christmas Present Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come Films Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost (1901) A Christmas Carol (1908) A Christmas Carol (1910) Scrooge (1913) The Right to Be Happy (1916) Scrooge (1935) A Christmas Carol (1938) Scrooge (1951) It's Never Too Late (1953) A Christmas Carol (1960) Scrooge (1970) A Christmas Carol (1971) An American Christmas Carol (1979) Mickey's Christmas Carol (1983) Scrooged (1988) The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) A Christmas Carol (1997) Christmas Carol: The Movie (2001) A Carol Christmas (2003) Springtime with Roo (2004) Chasing Christmas (2005) A Christmas Carol (2006) An American Carol (2008) Barbie in a Christmas Carol (2008) Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009) A Christmas Carol (2009) The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol (2011) Scrooge & Marley (2012) A Christmas Carol (2020) Spirited (2022) Scrooge: A Christmas Carol (2022) Television The Christmas Carol (1949) A Christmas Carol (1954) Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962) Carol for Another Christmas (1964) A Special Sesame Street Christmas (1978) The Stingiest Man in Town (1978) Bugs Bunny's Christmas Carol (1979) Rich Little's Christmas Carol (1979) A Christmas Carol (1982) A Christmas Carol (1984) Blackadder's Christmas Carol (1988) A Flintstones Christmas Carol (1994) Ebbie (1995) Ms. Scrooge (1997) An All Dogs Christmas Carol (1998) Ebenezer (1998) A Christmas Carol (1999) A Diva's Christmas Carol (2000) A Christmas Carol (2000) A Christmas Carol (2004) An Easter Carol (2004) Karroll's Christmas (2004) Bah, Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas (2006) Nan's Christmas Carol (2009) "A Christmas Carol" (Doctor Who) (2010) It's Christmas, Carol! (2012) Kelly Clarkson's Cautionary Christmas Music Tale (2013) A Hearth's Warming Tail (2016) A Christmas Carol (2019) Musicals Scrooge (1992) A Christmas Carol (1994) Mrs. Bob Cratchit's Wild Christmas Binge (2002) Plays A Christmas Carol; or, Past, Present, and Future (1844) A Christmas Carol (1988) Fellow Passengers (2004) A Klingon Christmas Carol (2007) A Christmas Carol (2017) A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story (2021) Soundtracks A Christmas Carol (2009) Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol (2011) Other Adaptations of A Christmas Carol Batman: Noël (comic) "Green Chri$tma$" (single) The Misadventures of the Wholesome Twins (2005 musical) The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017 film) Ebenezer and the Invisible World (video game) Related John Leech (illustrator) List of Christmas films vteCharles Dickens's Dombey and SonFilm Dombey and Son (1917) Rich Man's Folly (1931) TV Dombey and Son (1969) Dombey and Son (1983) vteCharles Dickens's David CopperfieldCharacters David Copperfield Mr. Dick Uriah Heep Wilkins Micawber Edward Murdstone Peggotty Dora Spenlow James Steerforth Betsey Trotwood Agnes Wickfield Film 1911 film 1913 film 1922 film 1935 film The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019 film) Television 1956 serial 1966 serial 1969 film 1974 serial 1986 serial 1993 film 1999 film 2000 film Micawber (2001 series) Other Copperfield (musical) vteCharles Dickens's Bleak HouseFilms The Death of Poor Joe (1901) Bleak House (1920) Television Bleak House (1959) Bleak House (1985) Bleak House (2005) Related Jarndyce and Jarndyce vteCharles Dickens's Hard TimesCharacters Gradgrind Film Hard Times (1915) Hard Times (1988) Television Hard Times (1977) vteCharles Dickens's Little DorritAdaptations Little Dorrit (1920) Little Dorrit (1924) Little Dorrit (1934) Little Dorrit (1987) Little Dorrit (2008) Literature The Great Fire of London Related Little Dorrit's Playground Shut up vteCharles Dickens's A Tale of Two CitiesCharacters Sydney Carton Lucie Manette Charles Darnay Alexandre Manette Monsieur Ernest Defarge Madame Thérèse Defarge Jarvis Lorry Miss Pross Marquis St. Evrémonde John Barsad Jerry Cruncher Stryver The Seamstress Film A Tale of Two Cities (1911) A Tale of Two Cities (1917) A Tale of Two Cities (1922) The Only Way (1927) A Tale of Two Cities (1935) A Tale of Two Cities (1958) A Tale of Two Cities (1980) Musicals Two Cities (2006) A Tale of Two Cities (2007) Television A Tale of Two Cities (1965) A Tale of Two Cities (1980) A Tale of Two Cities (1989) vteCharles Dickens's Great ExpectationsCharacters Philip "Pip" Pirrip Estella Compeyson Miss Havisham Arthur Havisham Abel Magwitch John Wemmick Films 1917 1934 1946 An Orphan's Tragedy (1955 film) 1974 1998 1999 2012 Fitoor (2016) TV series 1967 1981 1989 2011 2023 Other adaptations 1975 musical Miss Havisham's Fire (1979 opera) "Pip" (2000 South Park retelling) Related Great Expectations: The Untold Story Eliza Emily Donnithorne vteCharles Dickens's Our Mutual FriendTelevision 1958 1976 1998 Related "Jenny Wren" (song) vteCharles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin DroodFilm and television The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935 film) The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1993 film) The Mystery of Edwin Drood (2012 TV miniseries) Stage The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1985 musical) Attempted continuations By T.P. James (1873) The D Case (1989 humorous literary critique) Related The Last Dickens (2009 novel) Authority control databases International FAST ISNI 2 VIAF 2 WorldCat National Norway Chile Spain France BnF data Argentina 2 Catalonia Germany Italy Israel Finland Belgium United States 2 Sweden Latvia Japan Czech Republic Australia Greece Korea Romania Croatia Netherlands Poland Portugal Russia Vatican Academics International Plant Names Index Artists KulturNav MusicBrainz Te Papa (New Zealand) ULAN People Australia Netherlands Deutsche Biographie Trove 2 Other RISM SNAC IdRef
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange sort. Almost all men are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a listener's internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller, who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a sea-serpent, would have no fear of mentioning it; but the same traveller, having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before he would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which such subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequence is, that the general stock of experience in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect.
In what I am going to relate, I have no intention of setting up, opposing, or supporting, any theory whatever. I know the history of the Bookseller of Berlin, I have studied the case of the wife of a late Astronomer Royal as related by Sir David Brewster, and I have followed the minutest details of a much more remarkable case of Spectral Illusion occurring within my private circle of friends. It may be necessary to state as to this last, that the sufferer (a lady) was in no degree, however distant, related to me. A mistaken assumption on that head might suggest an explanation of a part of my own case,- but only a part,-which would be wholly without foundation. It cannot be referred to my inheritance of any developed peculiarity, nor had I ever before any at all similar experience, nor have I ever had any at all similar experience since.
It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain murder was committed in England, which attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of murderers as they rise in succession to their atrocious eminence, and I would bury the memory of this particular brute, if I could, as his body was buried, in Newgate Jail. I purposely abstain from giving any direct clue to the criminal's individuality.
When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell-or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicion fell-on the man who was afterwards brought to trial. As no reference was at that time made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description of him can at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered.
Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a flash-rush-flow-I do not know what to call it,-no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive,-in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief, observed the absence of the dead body from the bed.
It was in no romantic place that I had this curious sensation, but in chambers in Piccadilly, very near to the corner of St. James's Street. It was entirely new to me. I was in my easy-chair at the moment, and the sensation was accompanied with a peculiar shiver which started the chair from its position. (But it is to be noted that the chair ran easily on castors.) I went to one of the windows (there are two in the room, and the room is on the second floor) to refresh my eyes with the moving objects down in Piccadilly. It was a bright autumn morning, and the street was sparkling and cheerful. The wind was high. As I looked out, it brought down from the Park a quantity of fallen leaves, which a gust took, and whirled into a spiral pillar. As the pillar fell and the leaves dispersed, I saw two men on the opposite side of the way, going from West to East. They were one behind the other. The foremost man often looked back over his shoulder. The second man followed him, at a distance of some thirty paces, with his right hand menacingly raised. First, the singularity and steadiness of this threatening gesture in so public a thoroughfare attracted my attention; and next, the more remarkable circumstance that nobody heeded it. Both men threaded their way among the other passengers with a smoothness hardly consistent even with the action of walking on a pavement; and no single creature, that I could see, gave them place, touched them, or looked after them. In passing before my windows, they both stared up at me. I saw their two faces very distinctly, and I knew that I could recognise them anywhere. Not that I had consciously noticed anything very remarkable in either face, except that the man who went first had an unusually lowering appearance, and that the face of the man who followed him was of the colour of impure wax.
I am a bachelor, and my valet and his wife constitute my whole establishment. My occupation is in a certain Branch Bank, and I wish that my duties as head of a Department were as light as they are popularly supposed to be. They kept me in town that autumn, when I stood in need of change. I was not ill, but I was not well. My reader is to make the most that can be reasonably made of my feeling jaded, having a depressing sense upon me of a monotonous life, and being "slightly dyspeptic." I am assured by my renowned doctor that my real state of health at that time justifies no stronger description, and I quote his own from his written answer to my request for it.
As the circumstances of the murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger and stronger possession of the public mind, I kept them away from mine by knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the universal excitement. But I knew that a verdict of Wilful Murder had been found against the suspected murderer, and that he had been committed to Newgate for trial. I also knew that his trial had been postponed over one Sessions of the Central Criminal Court, on the ground of general prejudice and want of time for the preparation of the defence. I may further have known, but I believe I did not, when, or about when, the Sessions to which his trial stood postponed would come on.
My sitting-room, bedroom, and dressing-room, are all on one floor. With the last there is no communication but through the bedroom. True, there is a door in it, once communicating with the staircase; but a part of the fitting of my bath has been-and had then been for some years-fixed across it. At the same period, and as a part of the same arrangement,-the door had been nailed up and canvased over. I was standing in my bedroom late one night, giving some directions to my servant before he went to bed. My face was towards the only available door of communication with the dressing-room, and it was closed. My servant's back was towards that door. While I was speaking to him, I saw it open, and a man look in, who very earnestly and mysteriously beckoned to me. That man was the man who had gone second of the two along Piccadilly, and whose face was of the colour of impure wax. The figure, having beckoned, drew back, and closed the door. With no longer pause than was made by my crossing the bedroom, I opened the dressing-room door, and looked in. I had a lighted candle already in my hand. I felt no inward expectation of seeing the figure in the dressing-room, and I did not see it there. Conscious that my servant stood amazed, I turned round to him, and said: "Derrick, could you believe that in my cool senses I fancied I saw a -" As I there laid my hand upon his breast, with a sudden start he trembled violently, and said, "O Lord, yes, sir! A dead man beckoning!" Now I do not believe that this John Derrick, my trusty and attached servant for more than twenty years, had any impression whatever of having seen any such figure, until I touched him. The change in him was so startling, when I touched him, that I fully believe he derived his impression in some occult manner from me at that instant.
I bade John Derrick bring some brandy, and I gave him a dram, and was glad to take one myself. Of what had preceded that night's phenomenon, I told him not a single word. Reflecting on it, I was absolutely certain that I had never seen that face before, except on the one occasion in Piccadilly. Comparing its expression when beckoning at the door with its expression when it had stared up at me as I stood at my window, I came to the conclusion that on the first occasion it had sought to fasten itself upon my memory, and that on the second occasion it had made sure of being immediately remembered. I was not very comfortable that night, though I felt a certainty, difficult to explain, that the figure would not return. At daylight I fell into a heavy sleep, from which I was awakened by John Derrick's coming to my bedside with a paper in his hand. This paper, it appeared, had been the subject of an altercation at the door between its bearer and my servant. It was a summons to me to serve upon a Jury at the forthcoming Sessions of the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. I had never before been summoned on such a Jury, as John Derrick well knew. He believed-I am not certain at this hour whether with reason or otherwise-that that class of Jurors were customarily chosen on a lower qualification than mine, and he had at first refused to accept the summons. The man who served it had taken the matter very coolly. He had said that my attendance or non-attendance was nothing to him; there the summons was; and I should deal with it at my own peril, and not at his. For a day or two I was undecided whether to respond to this call, or take no notice of it. I was not conscious of the slightest mysterious bias, influence, or attraction, one way or other. Of that I am as strictly sure as of every other statement that I make here. Ultimately I decided, as a break in the monotony of my life, that I would go.
The appointed morning was a raw morning in the month of November. There was a dense brown fog in Piccadilly, and it became positively black and in the last degree oppressive East of Temple Bar. I found the passages and staircases of the Court-House flaringly lighted with gas, and the Court itself similarly illuminated. I think that, until I was conducted by officers into the Old Court and saw its crowded state, I did not know that the Murderer was to be tried that day. I think that, until I was so helped into the Old Court with considerable difficulty, I did not know into which of the two Courts sitting my summons would take me. But this must not be received as a positive assertion, for I am not completely satisfied in my mind on either point.
I took my seat in the place appropriated to Jurors in waiting, and I looked about the Court as well as I could through the cloud of fog and breath that was heavy in it. I noticed the black vapour hanging like a murky curtain outside the great windows, and I noticed the stifled sound of wheels on the straw or tan that was littered in the street; also, the hum of the people gathered there, which a shrill whistle, or a louder song or hail than the rest, occasionally pierced. Soon afterwards the Judges, two in number, entered, and took their seats. The buzz in the Court was awfully hushed. The direction was given to put the Murderer to the bar. He appeared there. And in that same instant I recognised in him the first of the two men who had gone down Piccadilly.
If my name had been called then, I doubt if I could have answered to it audibly. But it was called about sixth or eighth in the panel, and I was by that time able to say, "Here!" Now, observe. As I stepped into the box, the prisoner, who had been looking on attentively, but with no sign of concern, became violently agitated, and beckoned to his attorney. The prisoner's wish to challenge me was so manifest, that it occasioned a pause, during which the attorney, with his hand upon the dock, whispered with his client, and shook his head. I afterwards had it from that gentleman, that the prisoner's first affrighted words to him were, "At all hazards, challenge that man!" But that, as he would give no reason for it, and admitted that he had not even known my name until he heard it called and I appeared, it was not done. Both on the ground already explained, that I wish to avoid reviving the unwholesome memory of that Murderer, and also because a detailed account of his long trial is by no means indispensable to my narrative, I shall confine myself closely to such incidents in the ten days and nights during which we, the Jury, were kept together, as directly bear on my own curious personal experience. It is in that, and not in the Murderer, that I seek to interest my reader. It is to that, and not to a page of the Newgate Calendar, that I beg attention. I was chosen Foreman of the Jury. On the second morning of the trial, after evidence had been taken for two hours (I heard the church clocks strike), happening to cast my eyes over my brother jurymen, I found an inexplicable difficulty in counting them. I counted them several times, yet always with the same difficulty. In short, I made them one too many. I touched the brother jurymen whose place was next me, and I whispered to him, "Oblige me by counting us." He looked surprised by the request, but turned his head and counted. "Why," says he, suddenly, "we are Thirt-; but no, it's not possible. No. We are twelve."
According to my counting that day, we were always right in detail, but in the gross we were always one too many. There was no appearance-no figure-to account for it; but I had now an inward foreshadowing of the figure that was surely coming. The Jury were housed at the London Tavern. We all slept in one large room on separate tables, and we were constantly in the charge and under the eye of the officer sworn to hold us in safe-keeping. I see no reason for suppressing the real name of that officer. He was intelligent, highly polite, and obliging, and (I was glad to hear) much respected in the City. He had an agreeable presence, good eyes, enviable black whiskers, and a fine sonorous voice. His name was Mr. Harker. When we turned into our twelve beds at night, Mr. Harker's bed was drawn across the door. On the night of the second day, not being disposed to lie down, and seeing Mr. Harker sitting on his bed, I went and sat beside him, and offered him a pinch of snuff. As Mr. Harker's hand touched mine in taking it from my box, a peculiar shiver crossed him, and he said, "Who is this?" Following Mr. Harker's eyes, and looking along the room, I saw again the figure I expected,-the second of the two men who had gone down Piccadilly. I rose, and advanced a few steps; then stopped, and looked round at Mr. Harker. He was quite unconcerned, laughed, and said in a pleasant way, "I thought for a moment we had a thirteenth juryman, without a bed. But I see it is the moonlight." Making no revelation to Mr. Harker, but inviting him to take a walk with me to the end of the room, I watched what the figure did. It stood for a few moments by the bedside of each of my eleven brother jurymen, close to the pillow. It always went to the right-hand side of the bed, and always passed out crossing the foot of the next bed. It seemed, from the action of the head, merely to look down pensively at each recumbent figure. It took no notice of me, or of my bed, which was that nearest to Mr. Harker's. It seemed to go out where the moonlight came in, through a high window, as by an aërial flight of stairs. Next morning at breakfast, it appeared that everybody present had dreamed of the murdered man last night, except myself and Mr. Harker. I now felt as convinced that the second man who had gone down Piccadilly was the murdered man (so to speak), as if it had been borne into my comprehension by his immediate testimony. But even this took place, and in a manner for which I was not at all prepared.
On the fifth day of the trial, when the case for the prosecution was drawing to a close, a miniature of the murdered man, missing from his bedroom upon the discovery of the deed, and afterwards found in a hiding-place where the Murderer had been seen digging, was put in evidence. Having been identified by the witness under examination, it was handed up to the Bench, and thence handed down to be inspected by the Jury. As an officer in a black gown was making his way with it across to me, the figure of the second man who had gone down Piccadilly impetuously started from the crowd, caught the miniature from the officer, and gave it to me with his own hands, at the same time saying, in a low and hollow tone,-before I saw the miniature, which was in a locket,-"I was younger then, and my face was not then drained of blood." It also came between me and the brother juryman to whom I would have given the miniature, and between him and the brother juryman to whom he would have given it, and so passed it on through the whole of our number, and back into my possession. Not one of them, however, detected this.
At table, and generally when we were shut up together in Mr. Harker's custody, we had from the first naturally discussed the day's proceedings a good deal. On that fifth day, the case for the prosecution being closed, and we having that side of the question in a completed shape before us, our discussion was more animated and serious. Among our number was a vestryman,-the densest idiot I have ever seen at large,-who met the plainest evidence with the most preposterous objections, and who was sided with by two flabby parochial parasites; all the three impanelled from a district so delivered over to Fever that they ought to have been upon their own trial for five hundred Murders. When these mischievous blockheads were at their loudest, which was towards midnight, while some of us were already preparing for bed, I again saw the murdered man. He stood grimly behind them, beckoning to me. On my going towards them, and striking into the conversation, he immediately retired. This was the beginning of a separate series of appearances, confined to that long room in which we were confined. Whenever a knot of my brother jurymen laid their heads together, I saw the head of the murdered man among theirs. Whenever their comparison of notes was going against him, he would solemnly and irresistibly beckon to me.
It will be borne in mind that down to the production of the miniature, on the fifth day of the trial, I had never seen the Appearance in Court. Three changes occurred now that we entered on the case for the defence. Two of them I will mention together, first. The figure was now in Court continually, and it never there addressed itself to me, but always to the person who was speaking at the time. For instance: the throat of the murdered man had been cut straight across. In the opening speech for the defence, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own throat. At that very moment, the figure, with its throat in the dreadful condition referred to (this it had concealed before), stood at the speaker's elbow, motioning across and across its windpipe, now with the right hand, now with the left, vigorously suggesting to the speaker himself the impossibility of such a wound having been self-inflicted by either hand. For another instance: a witness to character, a woman, deposed to the prisoner's being the most amiable of mankind. The figure at that instant stood on the floor before her, looking her full in the face, and pointing out the prisoner's evil countenance with an extended arm and an outstretched finger.
The third change now to be added impressed me strongly as the most marked and striking of all. I do not theorise upon it; I accurately state it, and there leave it. Although the Appearance was not itself perceived by those whom it addressed, its coming close to such persons was invariably attended by some trepidation or disturbance on their part. It seemed to me as if it were prevented, by laws to which I was not amenable, from fully revealing itself to others, and yet as if it could invisibly, dumbly, and darkly overshadow their minds. When the leading counsel for the defence suggested that hypothesis of suicide, and the figure stood at the learned gentleman's elbow, frightfully sawing at its severed throat, it is undeniable that the counsel faltered in his speech, lost for a few seconds the thread of his ingenious discourse, wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, and turned extremely pale. When the witness to character was confronted by the Appearance, her eyes most certainly did follow the direction of its pointed finger, and rest in great hesitation and trouble upon the prisoner's face. Two additional illustrations will suffice. On the eighth day of the trial, after the pause which was every day made early in the afternoon for a few minutes' rest and refreshment, I came back into Court with the rest of the Jury some little time before the return of the Judges. Standing up in the box and looking about me, I thought the figure was not there, until, chancing to raise my eyes to the gallery, I saw it bending forward, and leaning over a very decent woman, as if to assure itself whether the Judges had resumed their seats or not. Immediately afterwards that woman screamed, fainted, and was carried out. So with the venerable, sagacious, and patient Judge who conducted the trial. When the case was over, and he settled himself and his papers to sum up, the murdered man, entering by the Judges' door, advanced to his Lordship's desk, and looked eagerly over his shoulder at the pages of his notes which he was turning. A change came over his Lordship's face; his hand stopped; the peculiar shiver, that I knew so well, passed over him; he faltered, "Excuse me, gentlemen, for a few moments. I am somewhat oppressed by the vitiated air;" and did not recover until he had drunk a glass of water.
Through all the monotony of six of those interminable ten days,-the same Judges and others on the bench, the same Murderer in the dock, the same lawyers at the table, the same tones of question and answer rising to the roof of the court, the same scratching of the Judge's pen, the same ushers going in and out, the same lights kindled at the same hour when there had been any natural light of day, the same foggy curtain outside the great windows when it was foggy, the same rain pattering and dripping when it was rainy, the same footmarks of turnkeys and prisoner day after day on the same sawdust, the same keys locking and unlocking the same heavy doors,-through all the wearisome monotony which made me feel as if I had been Foreman of the Jury for a vast period of time, and Piccadilly had flourished coevally with Babylon, the murdered man never lost one trace of his distinctness in my eyes, nor was he at any moment less distinct than anybody else. I must not omit, as a matter of fact, that I never once saw the Appearance which I call by the name of the murdered man look at the Murderer. Again and again I wondered, "Why does he not?" But he never did.
Nor did he look at me, after the production of the miniature, until the last closing minutes of the trial arrived. We retired to consider, at seven minutes before ten at night. The idiotic vestryman and his two parochial parasites gave us so much trouble that we twice returned into Court to beg to have certain extracts from the Judge's notes re-read. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I believe, had any one in the Court; the dunder-headed triumvirate, having no idea but obstruction, disputed them for that very reason. At length we prevailed, and finally the Jury returned into Court at ten minutes past twelve.
The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the Jury-box, on the other side of the Court. As I took my place, his eyes rested on me with great attention; he seemed satisfied, and slowly shook a great gray veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. As I gave in our verdict, "Guilty," the veil collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty.
The Murderer, being asked by the Judge, according to usage, whether he had anything to say before sentence of Death should be passed upon him, indistinctly muttered something which was described in the leading newspapers of the following day as "a few rambling, incoherent, and half-audible words, in which he was understood to complain that he had not had a fair trial, because the Foreman of the Jury was prepossessed against him." The remarkable declaration that he really made was this: "My Lord, I knew I was a doomed man, when the Foreman of my Jury came into the box. My Lord, I knew he would never let me off, because, before I was taken, he somehow got to my bedside in the night, woke me, and put a rope round my neck."

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Word Lists:

Beckon : make a gesture with the hand, arm, or head to encourage someone to come nearer or follow

Miniature : (especially of a replica of something) of a much smaller size than normal; very small

Coeval : having the same age or date of origin; contemporary

Parochial : relating to a church parish

Triumvirate : (in ancient Rome) a group of three men holding power, in particular (the First Triumvirate) the unofficial coalition of Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus in 60 BC and (the Second Triumvirate) a coalition formed by Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian in 43 BC.

Monotony : lack of variety and interest; tedious repetition and routine

Recumbent : (especially of a person or human figure) lying down

Summons : an order to appear before a judge or magistrate, or the writ containing it

Vitiate : spoil or impair the quality or efficiency of

Singularity : the state, fact, quality, or condition of being singular

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Additional Information:

Rating: C Words in the Passage: 4671 Unique Words: 1,235 Sentences: 201
Noun: 1073 Conjunction: 450 Adverb: 300 Interjection: 5
Adjective: 279 Pronoun: 535 Verb: 826 Preposition: 625
Letter Count: 20,046 Sentiment: Positive / Positive / Positive Tone: Neutral (Slightly Conversational) Difficult Words: 806
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