Dickens Part II

Dickens had a troubled boyhood, due to his father’s financial problems.  John Dickens was sent to move to the Marshalsea Debtors prison in 1824, because of his debts.  As was the custom, his wife and family moved in with him.  Charles was forced to leave school and get a job in a blacking factory, which he hated. He was humiliated by having to take a menial job and be put on the level of working class boys. He wasn’t in the factory long and he met a boy called Bob Fagin, who protected and helped him, but so terrible was the experience to him, that he ended up giving the name Fagin to the “villain” of Oliver Twist.  After a while, John Dickens inherited some money which gave him the ability to pay off his debts, but the trauma to his son Charles was terrible.  He never told his family of his time in the factory.

After his time in the factory, he returned to school but his mother, he afterwards remembered angrily, had wanted him to go on earning.   After leaving school, he found a clerical job in a law office but he became a shorthand reporter for Parliament. He  was a hard working reliable fast and good at the job.  He reported on parliamentary debates.  Then he began to write fiction and his first work to appear was “Sketches by Boz”…published in 1836.  At that stage, he met the Hogarth family, was invited to their house and fall in love with Catherine, one of the daughters.  Her father George was a music critic for a newspaper.

Charles got a job as editor of Bentley’s Miscellany.

   His next novel, appearing in serial form, was the Pickwick Papers.  While working on this, he married Catherine, and they moved to a house in Bloomsbury.  He was very fond of his wife’s younger sister Mary, who moved into their house to help Catherine with her housekeeping, during her pregnancy.  Mary was young and unspoilt by marriage, and Dickens idealised her, though he still loved his wife.  And then she collapsed one evening and died in his arms.  He was so shattered by his grief that he had to stop working on Oliver Twst,  the novel he was writing at the time.  He based the character Rose Maylie on Mary, and also many other “pure young girls” in his fiction, sexless and greatly idealised, owed something to his dead sister in law.