Charles Dickens: first pop culture celebrity

Charles Dickens (Taniya Johnson illustration/Chronicle)

Colorful caricatures from Charles Dickens’ novels have become fixtures of our 21st-century imagination.

There is the cunning Artful Dodger, Oliver Twist’s swaggering pickpocket; David Copperfield’s Uriah Heep, that creepy paragon of villainy; and Great Expectations’ vengeful Mrs. Havisham, the delusional spinster. And don’t forget Mrs. Jellyby, the do-gooder from Bleak House who is so intent on saving Africa, she neglects her own children.

These satiric creations are as varied as Dickens’ own restless appetites. He was a theater lover and would-be actor, political reporter, avid reformer, philanthropist, and father of 10. On the eve of his 200th birthday, his cachet among critics and scholars has never been greater.

The author of 16 major novels over four decades was the first pop-culture celebrity, says Natalie Mc-Knight, professor of humanities and Victorian literature at Boston University and co-editor of Dickens Studies Annual. “People tried to get access to Dickens’ hotel room when he was in Boston in 1842. He was stalked, and reportedly fans tried to grab handfuls of fur from his coat when he was out in public.”

Dickens was also “the most photographically famous person in Britain outside the royal family,” according to Joss Marsh’s essay, “The Rise of Celebrity Culture.”

Americans found him irresistible during a U.S. tour from 1867 to 1868. “People stood in line for hours just to get tickets to his dramatic readings,” McKnight says.

Childhood

The son of a Navy clerk, young Charles’s uneventful, middle-class childhood was abruptly halted when his father’s financial disarray landed him in debtor’s prison. At age 12, Charles was forced to room with a family friend. To pay for board, he worked long, grueling hours alongside poor children in a blacking warehouse that made shoeshine polish. This hardship left an indelible mark on his fiction and inspired a lifelong zeal for labor reform.

Dickens’s enduring popularity in the digital age is a hot topic among scholars. At a time when readers often prefer 140-character tweets, how does a one-thousand-page classic like Bleak House leave its mark?

“Perhaps the most important reason why Dickens is still winning over readers is that his novels still make people laugh out loud and they still make people cry,” McKnight says. “The way in which he wrote, in installments, always including humor and pathos, still keeps general readers and our ADD-ish population entertained.”

Few critics dispute that the man who created Pip and Oliver Twist was an artistic genius. Recently, though, Dickens scholars have become more fascinated by trends in “new historicism.” Scholars in this area study Dickens from a socio-historical context. “For the new historicist,” McKnight says, “the novel can illuminate the minute fabric of a particular place and time, and this context can also illuminate the novel.”

In Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction(Oxford University Press), Talia Schaffer links the making of handicrafts — such as imitation wax coral — to themes of representation and consumption in Our Mutual Friend.

Several recent biographies grapple with the author’s personal incongruities. How did this prolific writer and theatre lover become so unhappily married? Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life (Penguin Group) is easily digestible, frankly addressing Dickens’ relationship with actress Ellen Ternan, the longtime mistress and companion to whom he remained devoted in his later years.

As a young writer, Dickens managed to take the English novel in a new direction by publishing his works in monthly installments. In Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist (Harvard University Press), Robert Douglas-Fairhurst casts a critical eye on the unsettled young journalist.

Dickens in context

Two new books for middle-grade readers dwell on the author’s life in the context of his times. Andrea Warren’sCharles Dickens and the Street Children of London (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) documents how readers’ love forOliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby created public awareness of the grim suffering experienced by the poor. In Charles Dickens: England’s Most Captivating Storyteller (Candlewick Press), Catherine Wells-Cole compiles a scrapbook of Victorian-era documents, letters, book covers, and other touchable illustrations, allowing young readers to connect incidents in Dickens’s life to his works. 

Presenting a life in context using archival material is Charles Dickens: The Dickens Bicentenary 1812-2012 (Insight Editions), produced by Dickens’s great-great-great-granddaughter, Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, in association with the Charles Dickens Museum. It’s an exquisite, over-size volume of letters, illustrations and playbills that can be pulled out and examined. Hawksley addresses how the author’s experience in a blacking factory influenced David Copperfield, his most autobiographical novel.

Like Shakespeare, Dickens delighted in playing with language. Indeed, a new word for a nasty miser was coined after Dickens unveiled his portrait of Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Dickens’s affinity for “linguistic pyrotechnics,” McKnight says, explains why he remains as appealing to very young readers today as Dr. Seuss himself.

Cynthia Greenwood, based in Houston, writes about books and the performing arts.