A Christmas Carol

♦ About the Author ♦

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsea, England, on February 7, 1812. His father, John Dickens, consistently lived beyond his means, and the family's standard of living declined steadily throughout Charles's childhood. His father was finally sent to the Marshalsea Prison for debt in 1824, and Dickens was forced to work in a shoe-blacking factory. Later in life, Dickens refused to talk about the five months he spent performing menial labor. His first biographer, John Forster, learned about it accidentally.

Following his father's release from prison, Dickens was sent to a private school, Wellington House Academy, for a year or two, but his formal education ended in 1827, when he went to work as a clerk in a law office. Neither clerking nor the law appealed to him, so he decided to become a reporter. In preparation for this work, Dickens taught himself shorthand. By 1832 he was working for two newspapers, the True Son and the Mirror of Parliament,

and as a reporter in the House of Commons, Long before his work on the newspapers, teachers and friends had noticed his amazing powers of observation. His knowledge of the streets of London and the characters inhabiting them impressed even his fellow reporters,

In 1833 his first published piece, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk," appeared in Monthly magazine. This sketch combined closely observed facts with fictional touches and was soon followed by a number of similar writings. In August

1833 he began signing his articles in the Monthly as "Boz," an affectionate name he coined for his younger brother. In

1834  he joined the staff of the Morning Chronicle, which began publishing his London Street Scenes on September 26, In 1836 Dickens's collected sketches plus some new material were published as Sketches by Boz. Dickens's first book proved enormously popular, and by 1837, it had gone into its fourth edition.

On April 2, 1836, he began a series that would establish him as the outstanding writer of humorous fiction of

Charles Dickens

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Illustration by J. Landseer for A Christmas Carol by

Charles Dickens. Oxford University Press: London.

A Christmas Carol first published 1843.

the century. A recently established publishing company. Chapman and Hall, commissioned him to write hunting stories to compete with the immensely popular sporting tales of Robert Smith Surtees. Dickens produced The Pickwick Papers, which like all of his novels was first published in serial form. The Pickwick Papers portrays members of the fictional Pickwick Club as eccentrics who are neither adept at hunting nor very skillful in any of their other pursuits, Pickwick mania swept England, and soon forty thousand copies of every installment were being sold. By the time that The Pickwick Papers became a book in 1837, Dickens had achieved a popularity that he never lost in a career spanning more than three decades.

The Pickwick Papers, Dickens's first real work of fiction, proved to be unique among his works in that its comic tone is not tempered by an examination of serious social ills. In his next work, Oliver Twist, Dickens turned his attention

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to the problem of impoverished children in London. In Nicholas Nickleby (1839), an expose of brutal educational institutions, Dickens again took up the cause of abused children.

In 1840 he began writing The Old Curiosity Shop, his greatest success as a popular writer. It appeared in Master Humphrey's Clock, the first of the three magazines Dickens founded. Readers on both sides of the Atlantic waited impatiently for its installments to appear and later mourned the death of Little Nell, the novel's heroine. The Old Curiosity Shop became identified with the two biggest faults that modern readers find in Dickens, his sentimentality and melodrama, but these are found in all of his works to some extent. His genius as a writer is equally apparent, with brilliant passages often closely following his more maudlin scenes.

Dickens threw himself into work on his Christmas fable, A Christmas Carol with all of the manic energy that, especially in his early career, seized him while he developed an idea. This highly energetic creativity and the frequently hilarious characters it produced have made his earliest works the favorites of the reading public.

Hisworksofthe 1850s and 1860s were well constructed and contained little sentimentality and melodrama, but in them the irrepressible imagination seems more subdued, less optimistic. The comic element, while never totally absent in his books, became less prominent. These later works include David Copperfield, Bleak House (1852), Hard Times, Little Dorrit (1857), A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual friend (1865).

Dickens wrote fiction until the end of his life. He left The Mystery of Edwin Drood half-finished when he died on

A Christmas Carol

June 9, 1870, in Rochester, England. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, London, on June 14.

ISBN 0-933833-11-3 Copyright ©, 1990. by Walton Beacham All rights to this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or in any information or storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information write the publisher, Beacham Publishing. Inc., 2100 "S" Street, N.W.. Washington. D.C. 20008. All Rights Reserved.