ABSTRACT
Better known as a novelist than a journalist, Charles Dickens (1812-70) became the first global literary celebrity. Biographers emphasize the dark side of his childhood – the social disgrace of a father imprisoned for debt, an interrupted education, a sixmonth spell working in Warren’s blacking factory – and portray him as a driven, psychologically-wounded writer. But during his early years in rapidly changing London he enjoyed the support of a loving, if improvident, family – and he spent many happy hours voraciously reading the classics such as Smollett and Fielding. After mastering a version of shorthand, Dickens escaped from being a lawyer’s clerk and entered journalism at 19 as a parliamentary reporter. He excelled in covering debates and published his first journalistic sketches of people and places in magazines and newspapers from 1833. These were collected in book form as Sketches by Boz: Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People in 1836. At the same time, Dickens began work on Pickwick Papers, published monthly from March 1836. During the run of Pickwick, he started publishing Oliver Twist, inaugurating the mix of social campaigning and urban observation so distinctive of his fiction. Throughout his career, Dickens published his fiction in serial form, either in weekly episodes in magazines or monthly numbers. At roughly one third the price of a conventional novel, this ensured a mass audience for his fiction, and high circulations for magazines he edited and owned: Household Words (1850) and All the Year Round (1859). His journalism embraced virtually every genre, including campaigning articles, travel pieces, essays, reviews. Most memorable are his urban sketches – including a late series published from January 1860 onwards as The Uncommercial Traveller. From 1858 his public readings in England and the United States drew massive crowds. He died suddenly during the serialization of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
