Dickens: Experience Versus The Imagination

Literary Blog Hop - Question of the Week:  How do you feel about fictional characters who are obviously closely based on the author? Is this an example of authorial superego? Or just a natural extension of the "write what you know" advice?
Well, if you consider the works of Charles Dickens, one of the best author's to have written in the English language in my opinion, his novels invariably contain something of his own life and experience.  The squalor of Victorian London, that so brilliantly captured in novels like 'Oliver twist' and 'Our Mutual Friend', was something that had shaped him as a boy.  He wrote from first hand experience of what the Debtor's prison did to a family at that time.

His own father was incarcerated there for running up debts, a fact which Dickens kept to himself all his life, only speaking of it to a couple of  friends, and never to his close family.  Up until this point, no gentleman writer had experienced the hardship endured by the lower classes, they not having had a voice themselves in literature, and this partly explains Dickens's popularity.  He told the story that only he could have told, having secretly lived thorough it himself.  So it is difficult to separate Dickens's story form that of Nicholas Nickelby or David Copperfield; to know where Dickens ended and they begun, so complete are their stories intertwined.

Because of this, I would have to conclude that it is from our great life experiences that the finest novels come, be it consciously done or not. Of course depth of feeling and a fine imaginative mind also served Dickens well, as evidenced by his wonderful plot lines and memorable characters, but that is another day's topic!  It is not that Dickens could not make up a good story, but rather that he had lived so many interesting and wonderful adventures, that he could dip into past experiences to tell tales that are all the richer and more vivid because of it.

By Michelle Burrowes

Charles Dickens at 200

Hardly can I let the day go by without some reference to the great novelist Charles Dickens, whose 200^th birthday it would have been today.   I first read Dickens as a college student, and instantly fell in love with the numerous colourful characters that litter his books.  I was dazzled by his gift for language, dialogue in particular, and his ability to spin a good yarn with multiple twists and turns that could lead you miles from where the story first began.  Who could not fall in love with the tender young Pip, who was such a gentleman to begin with, although he didn’t know it, or the pillar box that was Wemmick, with his portable property, flag-pole and aged parent.  I was bowled over by the warmth of human kindness that flows throughout his stories;  the selfless deeds of ‘A tale of Two Cities; the brooding darkness and grime of ‘Our Mutual Friend’; and the warning against unsuitable marriage that was ‘David Copperfield’. 

But it was the sweet humour of ‘The Pickwick Papers’ that kept coming to my mind today when I thought of Dickens. Often his vast array of colourful characters are what he is most remembered for, the Scrooges, Steerforths and Little Nells of Dickensia, but let us not forget the slapstick, the witty retorts and the situation comedy that makes Dickens live on in his books, and leaves a lingering smile on our faces when we think on him.  

Happy Birthday Mr Dickens.