This Day in Literary History (Birth of Charles Dickens, Psychologically Wounded Novelist)

February 7, 1812 – The novelist Charles Dickens was born on a Friday, “and it is a most astonishing coincidence,” he later recalled, “that I have never in my life—whatever projects I may have determined on otherwise—never begun a book, or begun anything of importance to me, but it has been on a Friday.”

The birthplace of the future author was Portsmouth – in his words from an 1838 letter, “an English seaport town principally remarkable for mud, Jews and sailors.” 

His father’s work soon took the family to London, and Dickens would only return to the town where he was born a few times in adult life, and only once in his fiction (a brief section of Nicholas Nickleby).

From his mother, Elizabeth Dickens, the young boy gained a lifetime flair for the dramatic, evidenced in a remarkable gift for mimicry; from his father, he received something even more valuable for a writer – a raw wound that endlessly fed his art.

Forget about the 10 children he sired by wife Catherine Hogarth—Charles Dickens’ true progeny can be glimpsed not just in novelists who followed his standard but in Sean O’Casey, Frank McCourt, and other memoirists who never forgot their childhood pain and humiliation.

Twenty years ago, the Folio Society—an English publisher of classic or rare books, beautifully illustrated and bound—released My Early Times, an ingenious attempt to recreate a project that Dickens abandoned at least twice in his life—his autobiography.

Dickens first laid aside his memoir in 1849, finding it too difficult to address his youthful unrequited love for Maria Beadnell. Instead, he folded the best passages into David Copperfield—a natural development, given that the novel was written in the first person. At some point, he apparently confined the aborted autobiography to the flames.

His devoted sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth related that Dickens thought of taking up the task again in the 1860s, but he died in 1870 before he could really do anything about it.

Using bits and pieces of scattered reminiscences by the novelist over the years – essays in magazines he founded, Household Words and All the Year Round, speeches, and stray passages salvaged by Dickens’ friend and biographer John Forster--the Folio Society put together a vivid volume of piquant memories in My Early Times.

A Navy Pay Office clerk, John Dickens eventually, like his son, became a reporter. But in the years between he was one of the most spectacularly improvident parents in the history of literature. 

Squandering the family’s modest wealth in an attempt to live up to the station he thought they deserved, John was clapped into debtors’ prison at Marshalsea.

The family’s financial state was so dire that 12-year-old Charles was compelled to work in a blacking warehouse, where he pasted labels on bottles. Even at this age, he felt – knew – he was special. 

You can practically hear the agony, then, when he discusses why this new employment dismayed him so much:

“It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school.”

The memory of the warehouse – “a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats”—still haunted him decades later.

John Dickens’ plight also moved his son—perhaps almost as much as his own. 

On the first Sunday after being taken to the prison, a tearful John told Charles “that if a man had twenty pounds a year, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched.”

John Dickens inspired two characters in his son’s major novels, both tossed into debtors’ prison—jovial, optimistic (“Something will turn up”) Micawber in David Copperfield, and William Dorrit, the depressed and devastated patriarch of Little Dorrit.

The father cut off from his family and the son deprived of learning were both condemned to places as dark spiritually as mentally. 

For that reason, I believe it is a mistake to say, as some have, that later novels such as Hard Times and even A Tale of Two Cities are uncharacteristic of his earlier fiction.

Never mind the short length and (in the case of A Tale of Two Cities) the historical setting of these two books. As much as the rest of his fiction, both concentrate powerfully on confinement, both real and symbolic.

Dr. Manette in A Tale of Two Cities endures 18 years of harrowing imprisonment because of the aristocratic Evremonde family. 

In Hard Times, Louisa Gradgrind ends up in a loveless marriage to Josiah Bounderby in what may be the most psychologically complex portrait Dickens ever drew of a couple (a situation mirroring his own growing estrangement from his wife).

It’s hard to imagine such narrow physical and mental horizons if the Dickens family had managed to spend more of their lives in a seaport town like Portsmouth -- or if John Dickens had managed to stay out of prison. 

Maybe instead of the great urban novelist he became, Dickens, rather than Joseph Conrad, might have become the grand literary master of the sea.