Yes, sometimes students wonder if the study of the past really has any relevance to the
present, aside from meeting a specific graduation or college degree requirement. Well,
here is a sports card devoted to Charles Dickens which appeared in the 2008 Topps
Allen & Ginter set of cards (#219 of the set)
Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) experienced family privations as he grew up.
His father was a navy pay clerk in Portsmouth, England, but because of debt and
poverty problems, the family moved often. Early in his life, the young boy worked in a
factory making shoe polish. There he experienced first-hand the effects of the Industrial
Revolution. He later became a reporter in London and began to publish literary sketches
in the early 1830s. At the end of 1837 the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
appeared in book form and sealed his literary debut. In the work, Dickens focused on a
stark portrayal of the lower classes. Other important novels followed, usually in
serialized form first: The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1838), The Life and
Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1839), David Copperfield (1849), A Tale of Two
Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860) and A Christmas Carol (1843).
I listed A Christmas Carol last. Even though Dickens over the course of his very prolific
life as a writer published many novels which have since entered the Western canon of
great works, it is his short A Christmas Carol (1843) that has become his most famous
and well-known work--I end up watching some of the many dozens of versions every
Christmas time. I did a quick search on IMDB for movies based on the story and found
over fifty different movies, spanning from 1908 to the present, in all kinds of formats and
with all kinds of story variations, including versions starring the Flintstones, Bugs Bunny,
Mister Magoo (one of my favorites), the Muppets, George C. Scott, etc. I have no idea
of how many times it has appeared in other languages.
Dickens published Hard Times in 1854 as an overt critique of the impact that
industrialization/urbanization was having on England. By that time, he was active in
many social reform issues, such as slum clearance, reform of prostitutes, improvement
of working conditions. In some ways, he was a forerunner of the later writers who were
known as naturalists, such as Émile Zola (1840-1902) in France--read Germinal (1885)
sometime if you dare to sample the despair of nineteenth-century French miners and
their horses.. The naturalists went beyond simply describing the world; they sought to
identify the underlying forces influencing man and the environment. They also sought to
produce an effect.
In other ways, Dickens was firmly in the camp of the realists who had evolved from the
romantic movement. Realism attempted an accurate portrayal of the real world and
focused on a careful use and description of facts. Realists tended to be critics of society
and disdainful of sentiment. "Let's study the hard facts of life," the external world of the
Industrial Revolution, and "let's examine the psychological and social problems of
people." There is no place for sentimentality (or the poetry of the Romantics). With
regard to Dickens and Hard Times, we have a real historical figure grappling with the
impact of a real historical process, the Industrial Revolution, as it unfolded around him,
and he aimed to expose its short-comings in a work of fiction, the novel, to protect the
names of the innocent.
There are quite a lot of very good resources about Dickens online (see below), and his
many works are also available online where you can read them for free. After all, he
wrote in English, and what he wrote then in English is the same English that we use
today. So there is no copyright problem with his works.
Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, with whom he had ten children, but the marriage
failed in the late 1850s. On his death, Dickens was interred in Poet's Corner in
Westminster Abbey.
Some recommended online lectures and websites:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Charles Dickens Biography and Works This particular site links to a number of
very useful articles and reviews of Dickens works and different biographies.
A number of Dickens books are on Google books, including Great Expectations.
As I note, many of his works are online. You can check the wikipedia entry for
some links.
Charles Dickens a short biography.
Dickens is a three-part PBS series devoted to his life and work.
The Charles Dickens Museum is located in his nineteenth-century home. There
is also Dickens Birthplace Museum.
The Dickens Project. is a scholarly site devoted to the study of Dickens. Another
scholarly project, the Victorian Web, has materials dedicated to Dickens.
The Complete Works of Charles Dickens are available online.
Another short biography
A Christmas Carol, the compete text from 1843. There are so many versions to
choose from. I like the Mister Magoo version, or sometimes the one starring the
Muppets.
A Charles Dickens Journal, a timeline of his life
The Dickens Fellowship, an international society dedicated to the study of
Dickens and his writing.
Purchase answer to see full
attachment