attitudes remain inscrutable. In its combination of ferocity, imagination, perspective
and control,Wuthering Heights is unique.Elizabeth Gaskell
It is convenient, if achronological, to take next Charlotte’s biographer,Elizabeth
Gaskell(1810–1865), the wife of a Manchester Unitarian minister and mother of a
large family, who began at 37 to write Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848).
Dickens then secured her for his magazines.
Her work has the virtues of 19th-century realist fiction, of Jane Austen and
Anthony Trollope.Cranford (1853), set among the ladies of a small town near
Manchester, is small, well observed, gently penetrating. Apparently her least serious
book, its deserved popularity may diminish ideas of her true merit. Her most distin-
guished book is the not-quite-finished Wives and Daughters (1866), which antici-
pates George Eliot in its steadily built-up exploration of family and provincial life
shaped by historical contingencies which are less obviously thematic than those of
Ruth (1853), about a seduced milliner, and North and South (1855). An age in which
a Mrs Gaskell is in the second rank is healthy.Charles Dickens
The bubble of reputation that floats above writers seems to be more volatile above
novelists and dramatists than above poets. Lord Lytton, Harrison Ainsworth,
Benjamin Disraeli and George Meredith are little read today. Trollope thought
George Eliot’s novels impossibly intellectual, but she has lately had a popular as well
as her long-standing critical success.Trollope’s own popularity has recently been
accompanied by a developing critical reputation.
The 19th-century novel itself achieved full respectability only with George Eliot.
Newman,in Loss and Gain (1848),had used it to explore religious issues. Cardinal
Manning said, ‘I see that Newman has stooped to writing novels.’ Some Anglicans
thought that Newman had thus ‘sunk lower than Dickens’. Fiction was to be
co nsciously raised to the status of art by Henry James. Yet the master of the early
Victorian novel,Charles Dickens(1812–1870),had no interest in the theory of
fiction. The success of his early books owed much to the immediate popular appeal
of their comedy and pathos, and their attacks on notorious public abuses. For
Trollope in The Warden (1855), Dickens was still ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’. First
impressions are not easily dislodged: Dickens so entertained everybody that it was a
century before he was taken seriously. Academics have since remedied this.
Dickens’s novels came out originally not in book form but in parts in illustrated
monthly magazines – the 19th-century equivalent of a television series. They were
read aloud in families, and Dickens gave semi-dramatic readings by gaslight to large
audiences. The novels were staged, and are often adapted to film and musical
performance. There had been crazes before – Richardson in the 18th century, Scott
and Byron in the 1810s and 1820s – but Dickens’s public was much larger. His success
in popular media continues, both with readers and with audiences, usually in forms
different from those of their first incarnation – as has happened to Shakespeare.
Dicke ns’s mother, when she and her husband were released from the Marshalsea
prison, wanted Charles to stay on at the blacking factory. The trauma, retold in
David Copperfield, toughened Dickens. He early learned Mr Micawber’s lesson:290 10 · FICTION
Charles Dickens
(1812–1870) Born in
Portsmouth, Dickens moved
to Chatham. His father, a
clerk in the Navy pay office,
was imprisoned for debt in
Marshalsea prison. Charles
was taken out of school, aged
12, to work in a blacking
warehouse, but returned to
school, and was a legal office
boy at 15, and then a
shorthand reporter of
Parliamentary debates for the
Morning Chronicle. Works
include: Sketches by ‘Boz’
(1836–7), The Pickwick
Papers, Oliver Twist (1837),
Nicholas Nickelby (1838), The
Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1),
Barnaby Rudge (1841),
American Notes (1842),
Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4),
A Christmas Carol (1843),
Pictures from Italy (1844),
Dombey and Son (1847–8),
David Copperfield (1848–50),
Bleak House (1852–3), A
Child’s History of England
(1851–3), Hard Times
(1854), Little Dorrit
(1855–7), A Tale of Two Cities
(1859), Great Expectations
(1860–1), Our Mutual Friend
(1864–5), The Mystery of
Edwin Drood (1870). He
married Catherine Hogarth in
1837; they had ten children.
Founding editor of the Daily
News, Household Wordsand
All the Year Round, he
travelled in America and
Europe, and was a
philanthropist, and amateur
actor. He left his wife in
1858, defying scandal;
maintained a secret friendship
with Ellen Ternan, an actress.
He died worn out by public
reading tours.