Overview

As any account of his life makes clear, what most characterizes Charles Dickens is the amount of work he produced and the fact that all of it was originally written for serial publication-a demanding way to publish. To keep up with the demand, Dickens was writing constantly. Although audiences followed Dickens' work as closely as they follow television soap operas today, identifying with his characters as if they were real people and eagerly awaiting each new installment, the fact that Dickens had to keep writing continuously to meet the demands of serialization has made many academic critics scorn his work as popular melodrama catering to the tastes of the masses. Yet the widespread popularity of Dickens, which continues unabated into the late twentieth century, cannot be accounted for so simply. In spite of the fact that Dickens cranked out novel after novel, as if he were a one-man literary factory, he impresses even skeptics as a masterful storyteller and a genius at characterization. Many critics have tried to account for what might be called the mystery of Dickens: his amazing aptitude for visualizing scenes in concrete detail, his ability to control and develop highly elaborate plots, and most of all, his puzzling method of creating characters that, even as they are obviously caricatures, seem somehow more real in their fictionality than most realistic characters are. Simply to name such characters as Mr. Pickwick, Scrooge, Fagin, and Mr. Micawber is to conjure up images that are destined to remain memorable. The fact that Dickens' novels have been so easily adapted to film has added to the almost hallucinatory way with which his works are imprinted on the mind of twentieth century readers and viewers. Such scenes as Oliver in the workhouse asking for more gruel, Sydney Carton on the scaffold in A Tale of Two Cities, saying what a far, far better thing he does, and Miss Havisham in her decayed wedding dress in Great Expectations, have become part of the mind and memory of millions of Dickens' admirers. Dickens drew his inspiration primarily from three sources. First, much of his writing is autobiographical. One can see the deserted, poverty-stricken child in Oliver Twist, the aspiring young writer in David Copperfield, and the misguided young man in Pip. Second, Dickens wrote about the many social and technological elements of Victorian society. Bleak House is a compendium of Dickens' knowledge about the complexities of the law courts, just as Martin Chuzzlewit is a satiric overview of Victorian (and American) social absurdities. In such works as Hard Times, Dickens focused on the deficiencies of Utilitarian philosophy of the period, and in Little Dorrit, he turned his attention to the bureaucracy of the business world. Finally, Dickens' fiction developed out of the same source from which all fiction ultimately springs, that is, the many conventions of fiction itself. In spite of the fact that Dickens was not highly educated, he was well-read, especially in the wellspring works of storytelling and character-making such as The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, and Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), as well as the masterworks of the novel's beginning in the eighteenth century, such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), and Tobias Smollett's Roderick Random (1748). Thus, in spite of the fact that Dickens' characters seem so very real when the reader remembers them, they seem real precisely because they are so artificial; that is, they are pure fictional creations who can exist only in Dickens' imaginative world.

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