Dickens Part III

Dickens became increasingly successful as a writer, and his work became more complex than the simpler stories like Pickwick.   He was a hard worker, and edited journals as well as writing.  He worked well within the Victorian style of publishing, of instalments of a story in a magazine.  His books were long, full of thrilling incident and cliff hangers.  When Elizabeth Gaskell became a professional writer, she was a lot less comfortable with the demands of writing for magazines, of dragging out the story, and of inserting thrills and cliff hangers- like a modern TV soap opera.  Mrs. Gaskell found this difficult, and she and Dickens clashed at times over how she wrote her novels.

He and Catherine produced a large family of children, which meant that he was under pressure to provide for them. His wife was not a very clever woman and as time went by, she and Dickens grew apart.   In 1842, he and Catherine had visited America, where Dickens found that the new republic was not to his taste -In spite of his usually radical views.   He condemned slavery, but was in many ways conservative, as he grew older, and more “pro-British”.  For example in the 1860s’ (unlike other progressive writers) he did not condemn the Governor of Jamaica, Eyre, in his harsh crackdown on Jamaicans during the Morant Bay Rebellion.

He also annoyed Americans by complaining that his works were being sold in pirated editions in America, thus robbing him of income.

His sister in law Georgina Hogarth, moved into the Dickens house after the American visit, to help Catherine with running the household and managing her large family. 

Dickens was always working very hard, involved in charities and urging reform of laws that bore heavily on the poor.  With the philanthropist millionairess, Angela Burdett Coutts, he set up a reformatory for “fallen women”, which was meant to be less harsh than the ones in existence and which was to help penitent girls who had been seduced or been prostitutes, to a new way of life.  As well as involvement in charities, Dickens was an ardent amateur actor.  He loved plays and had wanted to act as a boy.   He was putting on a performance of the play “The Frozen Deep” a play he had co-written with Willkie Collins, in 1857.  One of the actresses he hired was Ellen Ternan…She was only 18 and he was 45, but he fell deeply in love with her, and his wife found out about the relationship.