But the years after 1850 were not happy ones. Dickens had loved his children when they were young but he didn’t like them now that they were grown up. Worse, he was having serious trouble with his wife. From 1868 on, they lived apart; for years before that Dickens had spent most of his time away from home. The world knew little of this at the time; only as recently as 1939 did some of the details come out about his relations with his wife and other women.
Whether or not his personal unhappiness was the cause, the novels that followed Copperfield—Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorritt (1855–57)—were different from what had gone before. They were more carefully plotted, technically more competent and efficient, stylistically more powerful. The most important change was in the balance between light and dark, between happiness and woe.
The latter part of Dickens’s career was spent half in his study and half in the theater. He developed a series of dramatic readings and presented them all over the English-speaking world, and was even more successful at that than at writing books. Not that he stopped doing the latter. A Tale of Two Cities appeared in 1859, Great Expectations in 1860–61, and Our Mutual Friend in 1865. When he died in 1870, at the age of fifty-eight, worn out by the extraordinary efforts that had hardly stopped since his twenty-first year, he was mourned around the world.
I am certain that the way to begin reading—or rereading—Dickens is with A Christmas Carol. It doesn’t matter how many times you may have read it as a child; nor does it matter how often it has been exploited by television and the other media. All these productions do not touch the heart of the book, which is as hard and imperishable as a diamond.
To Ebenezer Scrooge, Christmas is all “humbug.” Believing this does not make Scrooge happy, however; and when the ghost of his partner, Marley, returns to try to redirect his spirit while there is yet time, Scrooge does not long resist. A succession of visions—of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas to Come—makes him a better man, and he ends up filled not only with Christmas happiness but also with a sense that there is more meaning and value to life than he had ever thought.
How utterly familiar is the story, and yet how moving when you read it! A reader would have to struggle not to cry at several points in the narrative and the struggle would be misspent effort. Why not cry? Why not allow the change in Scrooge, and the picture of Bob Cratchit and his little crippled son, Tiny Tim, to enter your heart and change you, too?
Probably the best time to read A Christmas Carol is close to Christmas, but this sovereign remedy for the gloomy cynicism of ordinary life works any time.
After A Christmas Carol I suggest reading Hard Times, one of the shortest of Dickens’s novels and perhaps the most uncompromising. The story has a solid Dickensian plot with no surprises in it. But plot is not the essence of this book. Mainly it is about the deep conflict that Dickens saw in his time—and that we see in ours—between two kinds of lives: a carefree, feeling existence, full of sentiment and imagination; and one based on facts, efficiency, and dogged work. The Gradgrind family tries to live entirely in their heads; Sissy Jupe, the little circus orphan who, untypically, they take in and care for, tries to be like them. But they fail to turn Sissy into an efficient human machine, and she ends up revealing to all of them—amid much pain and anguish—the values of the heart. It is a beautiful and moving story, made not the less effective by Dickens’s savage descriptions of Coketown, his imaginary blighted Midlands town.
Hard Times has fewer than three hundred pages; The Pickwick Papers has nearly eight hundred, which is closer to the Dickensian norm.
The original proposal made to the then young Dickens by his publisher was for a series of sketches about the members of a sporting club—hunters and fishermen. Dickens vetoed the idea; he knew very little about such sports. What he did know a lot about, from his reporter days, was travel. He decided to write a book about a club of traveling gentlemen.
It started unremarkably; the first issue sold only fifty copies and reviews were mixed. As the issues appeared, Samuel Pickwick, fat, wealthy, and good-hearted, the head of the club, emerged as the leading character. But it was not until the fifth issue—Chapter 15—that Dickens was inspired to introduce Sam Weller as Mr. Pickwick’s servant. By the fifteenth number the publishers were selling upward of forty thousand copies, and Dickens was famous.
So was Pickwick, whose name has given us an English adjective; so, even more so, was Sam Weller. There are many intelligent, cunning, loyal servants in literature but none quite like Sam Weller, who is more loyal and loving than any other at the same time that the world is never able to outwit him. Mr. Pickwick flourishes under his care and so does this splendid book.
It is customary to say that The Pickwick Papers is not really a novel—but what is a novel, then, if this is not one? True, it has its false starts, its slow places. On the whole it charges ahead at full speed, entertaining all its readers enormously and touching their hearts.
A Christmas Carol and Hard Times are both short books, and The Pickwick Papers is easy because it demands nothing from readers (except enjoyment). There is a great part of Dickens that remains after those comfortable books have been read and digested. Once captured by this greatest of English novelists, you may decide to read all of Dickens, from Oliver Twist to Great Expectations, from The Old Curiosity Shop to A Tale of Two Cities (you may have read that one in school). But where to start? I suggest Bleak House. It is a very long, very great book. It has all of Dickens’s faults but also all of his virtues; the latter much outweigh the former. And if you decide to read no more, you will have read, in Bleak House, what is probably the quintessential Dickens work.
If our memory of David Copperfield is primarily one of sunshine happiness, then our memory of Bleak House is just the opposite. The prevailing image of the book is fog. It is there from the very first page.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights … Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all around them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
The fog is not only on the outside, it is also within the characters in Bleak House, all of them, in their eyes, their throats, their very brains. It is an extraordinary living thing, this fog.
Bleak House contains scenes of love and happiness, but the most memorable ones are fog-bound and fog-dirtied. Nevertheless, readers are not left with a sense of foggy confusion. Just the opposite. The world may be fog-bound, Dickens is telling us, but good and evil, true and false, right and wrong, are as clear-cut as ever. Indeed, it is almost as if you cannot make those fundamental human judgments if you have not experienced the fogginess that lies at the heart of so much that we think and do.