|
CHARLES DICKENS Biography
Iconic Writer (1812 - 1870)
Header Photo: A still from David Lean's classic adaptation of Great Expectations, what many of us see in our mind's eye when we think of the book. No other version comes remotely close in expressing the power of Dickens. Dvd available @ amazon.co.uk (direct link to Dvd).
Header Photo © Criterion.
Great Expectations-land & Heartbreakland
Charles Dickens Dvds @ amazon.com (direct link)
Charles Dickens Books @ amazon.com (direct link)
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born February 7, 1812 in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England. Shortly thereafter his family moved to Chatham, and Dickens considered his years there as the happiest of his childhood. In 1822, the family moved to London, where his father worked as a clerk in the navy pay office. Dickens' family was considered middle class, however, his father had a difficult time managing money. His extravagant spending habits brought the family to financial disaster, and in 1824, John Dickens was imprisoned for debt.
Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.
Charles was the oldest of the Dickens children, and a result of his father's imprisonment, he was withdrawn from school and sent to work in a shoe-dye factory. During this period, Dickens lived alone in a lodging house in North London and considered the entire experience the most terrible of his life. Nevertheless, it was this experience that shaped his much of his future writing...(scroll down)
Personal Favourite Dickens Film Adaptation:
It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the temper; so cry away.
{Born}
{Spouse}
{Died}
(Cont.):
After receiving an inheritance several months later, Dickens' father was released from prison. Although Dickens' mother wanted him to stay at work, resulting in bitter resentment towards her, his father allowed him to return to school. His schooling was again interrupted and ultimately ended when
Dickens was forced to return to work at age 15. He became a clerk in a law firm, then a shorthand reporter in the courts, and finally a parliamentary and newspaper reporter.
In 1833, Dickens began to contribute short stories and essays to periodicals. He then provided a comic narrative to accompany a series of engravings, which were published as the Pickwick Papers in 1836. Within several months, Dickens
became internationally popular. He resigned from his position as a newspaper reporter and became editor of a monthly magazine entitled Bentley's Miscellany. Also during 1836, Dickens married Catherine Hogarth. Together, they had nine surviving children, before they separated in 1858.
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts
Dickens' career continued at an intense pace for the next several years. Oliver Twist was
serialized in Bentley's Miscellany beginning in 1837. Then, with Oliver Twist only half completed, Dickens began to publish monthly installments of
Nicholas Nickleby in 1838. Because he had so many projects in the works, Dickens was barely able to stay ahead of his monthly deadlines. After the completion of
Twist and Nickleby, Dickens produced weekly installments of The Old Curiosity Shop and
Barnaby Rudge.
After a short working vacation in the United States in 1841, Dickens
continued at his break-neck pace. He began to publish annual Christmas stories, beginning with
A Christmas Carol in 1843. Within the community, Dickens actively fought for social issues; such as education reform, sanitary measures, and slum clearance, and he began to directly address social issues in novels such
as Dombey and Son (1846-48).
In 1850, Dickens established a weekly journal entitled Household Words
to which he contributed the serialized works of Child's History of England (1851-53), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations
(1860-61). At the same time, Dickens continued to work on his novels, including David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), Little Dorrit (1855-57),
and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). As his career progressed, Dickens became
more and more disenchanted. His works had always reflected the pains of the common man, but works such as Bleak House
and Our Mutual Friend expressed his
progressing anger and disillusionment with society.
There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated
In 1858, Dickens began a series of paid readings, which became instantly popular. Through these readings, Dickens was able to combine his love of the stage with an accurate rendition of his writings. In all, Dickens performed more than 400 times. The readings often left him exhausted and ill, but they allowed him to increase his income, receive creative satisfaction, and stay in touch with his audience.
After the breakup of his marriage with Catherine, Dickens moved permanently to his country house called Gad's Hill, near Chatham in 1860. It was also around this time that Dickens became involved in an affair with a young actress named Ellen Ternan. The affair
lasted until Dickens' death, but it was kept quite secret. Information about the relationship is quite scanty.
Dickens was required to abandon his reading tours in 1869 after his health began to decline. He retreated to Gad's Hill and began to work on
Edwin Drood, which was never completed. Died suddenly at home on June 9, 1870. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
The Complete Works of Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens Film Adaptation Dvds @ Amazon.com
Charles Dickens Posters
Photos/Porcelain Pieces
St James Church, Cooling, Hoo Peninsula, Kent. Remote and wild, ethereal when the mists sweep across its desolate fields of shit or marshlands as the polite class would call them and all in ear shot of the river inexorably meandering towards the sea.
I went to the Hoo Peninsula in 2014 by car, stopping beforehand at Gravesend as I wanted to see the locations of a half forgottten but cult British movie from the 1950s, The Long Memory now only available in the UK as part of a John Mills Dvd boxset
It's a depressing place. The effect it had on me, well, I can't put it better than the 2,000 or so West Ham fans who whilst making their way down my neck of the woods, South Norwood high street on their way to Selhurst Park and Crystal Palace, burst into song:
"I wanna go home,
I followed the road to its end at the Isle of Grain. Roughly half way is Cooling.
Now I must confess that when I made the trip I had no idea that the Church inspired the graveyard scene in Great Expectations. Pip meeting the escaped convict. Pip's Graves and "little stone lozenges each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their [parents’] graves" (Great Expectations). 13 stone lozenges. 2 families. Not one reaching the age of 2. And there they are, before your very eyes, side by side, encased in weathered slithers of stone, one by one, the flesh long since skipped the bone but real babies nonetheless, flesh and blood, with real lives to be lived if they hadn't been cut short by marsh fever.
And as you look down on this forlorn sight, close your eyes and just visualise that where you are the man with the great beard, Dickens, once stood, years before and smelt the same smells and saw the same things and had the immortal skill of describing it to captivate generation upon generation. He would have seen the same as we see today for in this desolate landscape nothing has changed. Pip's Graves are foreverland for this group of children who had nothing. A foreverland calling you and calling me.
Beyond the stone are dreams of little lives that might have been.
The Hoo Peninsula inspires bad writing because it's a bad place. You can think of it as beautiful in its remoteness, its ruggedness, or, like me, you can think of it as a shithole. Beyond graves'end. Beyond the end of the world. Beyond everything there is nothing.
Seperating the estuaries of the Thames and the Medway, this melancholic place serves as a kind of Disneyland for the birds and Faust's Hell for the rest of us. The cries of the damned are brought forth on the winds from the river from times past.
Time spent. Time past. Winding through this marshland you can envisage the times that have gone for the land remains the same. The past from whatever period crashes as one against your senses. Crows fly in chaos, coloured like little daubs of shit against a leaden grey sky; fields and remote halfway homes are enveloped in mists and the sounds beyond it all, echoing from a distance, are the giant empy iron vessels groaning along the Thames with their cargos of invisible ghosts of the souls of desperate prisoners in irons as they make their way to the sea and Australia.
Faint, crackling radio sounds of foreign voices and snatches of foreign music come from the distant vessels. Almost melodic one minute, gone with the wind the next.
At Land's End is the Isle of Grain. Giant ugly steel cathedrals to commerce and big business pass and you are there, looking across to the distant metropolis of a neon Southend, so inviting and yet far far away, and to your right Sheerness, the Medway, and real Dickens lands of Rochester and Chatham. There's even a bus that takes you from the end of the world and to Rochester. A one way ticket to Life I guess for there is nothing here worth visiting again. It's a long way from most places, certainly happiness.
That is my backdrop to Great Expectations. It's real life so there's no happy ending, Death and dying and nothingness is seemingly behind the mists leading you to marshlands, to graves's end.
© Paul Page, 2016
KINDLE:
Elizabeth Dickens (1789-1863) was born Elizabeth Barrow. She and John Dickens (1785 - 1851) named their eldest son after her father, Charles Barrow (1759-1826).
|
The still is actually from the US Dvd cover of the Criterion Collection release. Dvd @ 
Cover is 
. I wanted to see if it was as depressingly decayed as those times and though there are some nice bits you only have to walk down to the river side and see the sky punctuated by seemingly endless brightly daubed metal cranes of Tilbury Docks (as though, from a distance, they are pegging up wads of cash) to realise this is graves's end. Life is no more after here.
