A few days ago, Sony Pictures released “The Invisible Woman.” The film, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, focuses on the life of British author Charles Dickens and reminds us of how the man’s stories brighten our lives, our dreams and our aspirations.
On Feb. 7, 1812, Charles John Huffam Dickens entered the earthly stage. Born into an impoverished family, his father having served a term in debtors’ prison, Charles, worked as a child slave in a London blacking factory. Dickens’ rags-to-riches life was more remarkable than any of his stories. From such unpromising origins he arose to become the best-selling writer of his time and one of the most beloved and quotable writers of all time.
What has been described as the most successful writing career in history was launched when Dickens was 24. On March 31, 1836, he published the first installment of a comic novel about a bunch of bumbling gentlemen who knock about England getting into various scrapes.
At the center of the group was one of the greatest comedy teams in all literature — Samuel Pickwick, a fat retired businessman, and a jaunty young cockney by the name of Sam Weller. The novel emerged as “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club,” popularly known as “The Pickwick Papers.”
Following Pickwick came 14 more enormously popular novels, from “The Adventures of Oliver Twist or the Parish Boy’s Progress,” to “The Old Curiosity Shop” to “The Personal History of David Copperfield” to “A Tale of Two Cities” to “Great Expectations” (which he considered to be his best novel) to the unfinished “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” and hundreds of stories, including “A Christmas Carol,” which has shaped our images of what Christmas is.
How did Dickens do it? First and foremost, he possessed a preternatural feel and ear for the hum and buzz of human life. People and situations endlessly flared up in his imagination; he said he could literally hear what his characters said before he wrote the words down.
A supporting cast of more than 300 fantastic bit players floats in and out of “Pickwick.” Over his career Dickens gave birth to thousands of characters, including some of the most enduring and whimsical names in all of literature: Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, The Artful Dodger, Mr. Jaggers, Abel Magwitch, Thomas Gradgrind, Daniel Quilp, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers and Uriah Heep.
As evidenced by the names of her characters in the Harry Potter series, such as Albus Dumbledore, Filius Flitwick, Wilhelmina Grubbly-Plank, Minerva McGonagall, Quirinus Quirrell and Severus Snape, J.K. Rowling is clearly a lineal descendant of Charles Dickens.
And let us not forget the incredible piston energy that drove the man. His contemporary Leigh Hunt said of Dickens: “What a face is his to meet in a drawing room! It has the life and soul in it of 50 human beings.” Dickens did indeed possess the capacity of multitudes for work and play.
In addition to pouring forth his literary works, he was a journalist, writer of long and vivacious letters, indefatigable walker, amateur theater producer and actor and vastly popular lecturer and reader.
Dickens not only wrote about people; he spoke to the people, who gobbled up every one of his books and stories. James Nathan Miller describes the results of Dickens’s literary empathy and brimming vitality: “Incredibly, Dickens’s career never had a pinnacle. It was all pinnacle. From the appearance of Sam Weller in 1836 to the day in 1870, when Dickens died at age 58 while writing ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood,’ his career was like a Roman candle that went straight up and just hung there, shooting one brilliant shower after another.”
We today are still being showered by those sparks, as witness the more than 100 motion pictures made from Dickens’ works.
No wonder that G.K. Chesterton said of him: “Whatever the word great means, Dickens was what it means.”
Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com