Charles Dickens is much loved for his great contribution to classic English literature. He was the quintessential Victorian author. His epic stories, vivid characters and exhaustive depiction of contemporary life are unforgettable.
His own story is one of rags to riches. He was born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812, to John and Elizabeth Dickens. The good fortune of being sent to school at the age of nine was short-lived because his father, inspiration for the character of Mr Micawber in 'David Copperfield', was imprisoned for bad debt. The entire family, apart from Charles, were sent to Marshalsea along with their patriarch. Charles was sent to work in Warren's blacking factory and endured appalling conditions as well as loneliness and despair. After three years he was returned to school, but the experience was never forgotten and became fictionalised in two of his better-known novels 'David Copperfield' and 'Great Expectations'.
Like many others, he began his literary career as a journalist. His own father became a reporter and Charles began with the journals 'The Mirror of Parliament' and 'The True Sun'. Then in 1833 he became parliamentary journalist for The Morning Chronicle. With new contacts in the press he was able to publish a series of sketches under the pseudonym 'Boz'. In April 1836, he married Catherine Hogarth, daughter of George Hogarth who edited 'Sketches by Boz'. Within the same month came the publication of the highly successful 'Pickwick Papers', and from that point on there was no looking back for Dickens.
As well as a huge list of novels he published autobiography, edited weekly periodicals including 'Household Words' and 'All Year Round', wrote travel books and administered charitable organisations. He was also a theatre enthusiast, wrote plays and performed before Queen Victoria in 1851. His energy was inexhaustible and he spent much time abroad - for example lecturing against slavery in the United States and touring Italy with companions Augustus Egg and Wilkie Collins, a contemporary writer who inspired Dickens' final unfinished novel 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood'.
He was estranged from his wife in 1858 after the birth of their ten children, but maintained relations with his mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan. He died of a stroke in 1870. He is buried at Westminster Abbey.
Everyone is hoping for good weather on Saturday June 8th 2013 when there will be a brief ceremony to unveil a new blue plaque on the house near the Workhouse which was twice the home of Charles Dickens.
The old house stands on the southern corner of Cleveland Street and Tottenham Street, and was Charles’s Dickens’s first home in London. It is now known as number 22 Cleveland Street, but in those days the southernmost part of Cleveland Street was known as Norfolk Street. You can still see the bulge in the pavement opposite what is now Riding House Street, which marks the top end of Norfolk Street.
In those days when there were shops along both sides of the street, Number 10 – the corner house in which the Dickens family lived – was above a grocer’s shop.
Those familiar with our campaign to save the Cleveland Street Workhouse will remember that the Dickens family first arrived in Cleveland Street in 1815 when Dickens was a child, and stayed two years, renting their rooms from the grocer, Mr Dodd, whose corner shop survives. Dickens him self was nearly three when the family first arrived and nearly five when they left, so it is likely that he learned to read there.
The terrible period when Dickens’s father was arrested for debt and the family was forced to live inside the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison in Southwark, occurred between their two stays in Norfolk Street. The family returned to the same house several years later, when Dickens was a late teenager, and remained this time for nearly three years.
The family’s second stay began when Dickens was nearly seventeen, and lasted until he was almost twenty. During that time, he was out at work as a young legal clerk, and training himself to become a shorthand court reporter. He applied to become a Reader in the British Museum Reading Room from that address, and his first calling card – on which Dickens described himself as a Short Hand Writer – features the address: 10 Norfolk Street, Fitzroy Square.
There is good reason to believe that the street influenced Dickens’s fiction, since local names and themes crop up in his sketches and novels, and it is even possible that the plot of Oliver Twist may derive from his knowledge of the locality and of the Cleveland Street Workhouse.
The cost of the plaque has been sponsored by Dan Calinescu, a Dickens enthusiast from Toronto.English Heritage declined funding a new blue plaque for Dickens on his old home partly from lack of funding (English Heritage has discontinued the blue plaque scheme), and partly because Dickens already has numerous plaques dotted about London. MrCalinescu stepped into the breach.
We are very pleased to announce that Lucinda Dickens Hawksley – who is Dickens’s great great grand-daughter, and a writer herself – has agreed to unveil the plaque on June 8th 2013.