Charles Dickens Read Free Page B

gone before. That the introduction of SamWeller coincided with the rise in sales of the serial numbers indicates that through him Dickens had found his marriage of story and theme—great variety and breadth of incident plus overt, but comically expressed, social commentary. This form would remain constant to the end of Dickens’s life, changing in mood and balance, but always constituting what we consider to be quintessentially “Dickensian.”
    No author’s life is a strand of pearls, with books or plays or poems strung in a neat sequence upon a smooth string of personal events, but Dickens’s life is even less sequential than most. Events and projects cascaded over one another, each requiring the author’s intensive focus. He did not write the two volumes of Sketches, and then Pickwick, and then Oliver Twist, and so on. Rather, he was still gathering together the Sketches while he was writing Pickwick, and Oliver Twist began to run as a serial before Pickwick had finished. He was also writing essays and articles, and in some of them can be seen the germs of characters or ideas that are later developed more extensively in the novels. And during the extremely productive period of the late 1830s, Charles Dickens threw himself into two other activities that were to shape much of the rest of his life. One of these was editing.
    In the autumn of 1836, publisher Richard Bentley approached Dickens with a plan for a new monthly magazine that Dickens would edit, and in January 1837, Dickens introduced the first number. This was the author’s first experience wearing a hat he would continue to wear for many decades. He was no figurehead, but a very active and opinionated director of all aspects of the magazine. He read and considered eighty manuscripts each month, then prepared them forpublication. He even did the proofreading. When his relationship with Bentley broke down after only a few years, it was because he found Bentley too interfering, not because he felt overburdened by work (though he often felt overburdened by work). Dickens was always looking for control and autonomy, and his career was marked by ferocious battles with publishers over contracts, money, and independence. His correspondence with authors shows that he had specific and very strong views about how pieces should be written and what effect they should have. His views were both aesthetic and political—to make a piece more lively and interesting was also to take a stand against the mechanical dreariness that Dickens felt was overwhelming English life. He was always in favor of imagination and “fancy,” always opposed to dullness and the ponderousness that was a mask for social cruelty. His success in depicting the variety of lower-class English life was no accident—he was both interested in the lower orders and eager to show them to themselves and to the middle and upper classes.
    The first ten parts of Oliver Twist were written at the same time Dickens was writing the last ten parts of Pickwick . Each section of Oliver Twist ran to about eight thousand words, and each section of Pickwick ran to about twice that or a bit more, so Dickens was writing ninety pages a month of these novels, while also working on other essays, articles, speeches, and plays. Evidence is that he would write the dark, ironic chapters of Oliver Twist first, then the light, comic chapters of Pickwick . The death of Mary Hogarth caused him to miss the June number of both novels and, some critics say, to softenthe harshness of Oliver Twist; but in spite of his profound mourning, he never stinted his activities.
    All through 1836 and 1837—that is, while writing, editing, getting married, moving house, and having children (Mary, called Mamie, was born on March 6, 1838)—Dickens was also writing plays and promoting or overseeing their production. He wrote four dramatic works during this period: The Strange Gentleman, a comic piece; The