Journalism of Courage
He peopled our world with some immortal literary characters,many of them a take-off from his own life and experiences. Biographer and critic John Forster,in his famous book,The Life of Charles Dickens,called him “The most popular novelist and one of the greatest humorists England has produced.
On Tuesday,the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Dickens,his immortal name was invoked in literary circles and his troubled childhood mired in financial difficulties that forced him to leave school and work in a factory when he was 12,was revisited.
As he told his biographer,he could never really shake off memories of his childhood,and fictionalised them in novels like David Copperfield,Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. But the tough times could never rob him of his creative genius and his exuberant sense of humour. He had the uncanny ability to commit to memory his observation of people. He made full use of this in his Sketches by Boz,after he started working as a reporter for the Morning Chronicle around 1830. In 1837,The Pickwick Papers was born.
In the words of Forster,Dickens made his characters real,not by describing them,but letting them describe themselves. Perhaps,the best description of his characters appears in the preface to a folio of famous characters from his novels; The characters of Charles Dickens are something more than fictional. We know or seem to have known them personally. They will cease to charm us only when English language is forgotten or human nature ceases to exist. No wonder,he is talked about and still read 200 years after his birth.
Entrepreneur and Founder Trustee of Arbutus,an NGO in Education for Sustainable Development.
