Charles Dickens Day

What the day is

Charles Dickens Day is observed on February 7, his birthday. He was born in Portsmouth in 1812 and is the most widely read English novelist of the nineteenth century.

Origin and background

The single fact that explains the novels is that they were not published as novels. They appeared in cheap instalments, usually monthly, over a year or more, and readers bought each part as it came. That arrangement shaped everything. The books are long because length was the product. They have a strong hook at the close of each instalment because the next one had to be sold. Characters are introduced with vivid, repeatable tics because a reader meeting someone again after four weeks needs reminding who they are. And the casts are enormous because a serial can afford to keep adding.

It also means Dickens was writing with live feedback, adjusting as sales and reactions came in, and he did: minor characters were expanded when readers liked them, and plots shifted in response. He was working more like a television writer with a running audience than a novelist delivering a finished manuscript.

The biography drives the subject matter directly. His father was imprisoned for debt when Dickens was twelve, and the boy was sent to work in a factory pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. He told almost nobody, and the humiliation runs through the work: the recurring interest in debt, abandoned children, institutional cruelty and precarious respectability is not general social conscience but something closer to reporting.

He campaigned as well as wrote, and several novels were aimed squarely at specific abuses, including the notorious Yorkshire boarding schools he visited before writing about them.

How to take part

• Read one in instalments, a chapter or two a week, which is how it was designed to land.
• Start with a shorter one if the doorstops put you off.
• Read a passage aloud. He performed these to huge audiences and wrote for the ear.
• Look up the blacking factory, which is the key to the whole body of work.
• Notice the instalment breaks, which are still visible in the structure.