100 years of the Charles Dickens Museum: The writer’s lasting legacy

Dickens did odd jobs for much of his childhood after his father was jailed for not repaying his debts.

He drew on the experience of working in boot-blacking factories, law offices, and as a court reporter to pen fiction that Karl Marx said “issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together”.

In Dickens’s works, reflections of his early life

Dickens was the second-eldest of eight children in a family that moved around a fair bit. After his father, a navy clerk, was put in prison in London for not paying back his creditors, Dickens, all of 12 at the time, worked pasting labels on bottles of shoe polish for six shillings a week.

Growing up, he would frequently remember this formative experience of having to leave school to do manual labour, involving long hours and little pay, to explore the Industrial Revolution and its impact on workers.

So, Oliver Twist (1837-1839) was about a virtuous orphan drawn into a gang of pickpockets, David Copperfield (1849-1850) was a largely autobiographical work about a man coming to terms with his family and society, and Hard Times (1854), was about a factory worker accused of thievery.

All these works explored the conflict between factory owners and unions, and the lives of children abandoned by the system.

The Pickwick Papers and Dickens’s fame

From the beginning, Dickens’s journalism and his fiction were intertwined. At age 21, after he had submitted a short story to a London periodical, Dickens was hired by his uncle to become a reporter at his publication to cover debates in Parliament.

Dickens subsequently travelled across Britain, covering election campaigns for many publications. He also released a series of sketches on London life in 1836 – these ‘Sketches by Boz’ showed early signs of a satirical genius.

At age 24, at the request of a publisher who noticed his work, Dickens started writing The Pickwick Papers, which was released periodically between 1836 and 1837.

It was the story of a socialite who travelled to various parts of London and reported on what he saw. The cast that surrounded him – a sportsman, a poet, a coachman, a landlady – elevated the material to a tragicomic height. But it was the socialite’s sharp-tongued valet, Sam Weller, who catapulted Dickens to fame. Joke books, cigars, and china figurines based on the character flooded the market.

Dickens’s idols and his followers

Many literary luminaries from Salman Rushdie to Virginia Woolf, Jules Verne to Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ray Bradbury to TS Eliot, have professed their love and admiration for Dickens’s writing.

However, certain aspects of his writing – such as his sentimental appraisal of the working class and his Victorian outlook towards women – have complicated opinion on him in critical circles. Indeed, to avenge the uprising of 1857, he wanted to “do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested”.

But the legacy remains strong and singular. The peculiar names of his characters – Mr Murdstone, Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Madame Defarge – drew from 18th century picaresque tradition, in which characters were often from the lower classes, and satire was an important element.

Dickens loved Robinson Crusoe and The Arabian Nights; he was fascinated by the spirit of adventure that ran through these whimsical tales. All of this allowed Dickens to turn himself, once a “very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy”, in his own words, into a novelist for the ages.