Schlicke Simply Dickens

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-943657-02-5
Verlag: Simply Charly
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 3, 97 Seiten

Reihe: Great Lives

'This is one of the best short introductions to Dickens's life and work that I know. Paul Schlicke integrates the life of this extraordinary man with his fiction, journalism, and public readings in a very engaging and lively narrative. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this to the widest range of readers.'
-Malcolm Andrews, Emeritus Professor Victorian & Visual Arts, University of Kent, Editor of The Dickensian
Oliver Twist. A Christmas Carol. David Copperfield. Bleak House. A Tale of Two Cities. Great Expectations. The novels of Charles Dickens (1812-1870) read like a 'Who's Who' of canonical works. Yet, less well known is the fact that Dickens himself was something of a created character, a larger-than-life figure who lived through his art and pursued his many passions with a theatrical zeal that could have belonged to one of his famous protagonists. 
Largely self-taught, with little formal education, Dickens was catapulted to fame at the age of 24 with the publication of The Pickwick Papers in 1836. For the next 30 years, he wrote a prodigious number of novels, short stories, essays, and other works, while simultaneously campaigning for a variety of social reforms. As Simply Dickens colorfully describes, in life and in art, Dickens threw himself into everything he undertook-from taking on the personalities of his characters as he wrote, to pursuing such causes as children's rights and universal education. 
While some authors have depicted Dickens as a tormented soul or cruel misogynist who compromised his work by pandering to a wide audience, Simply Dickens convincingly shows him as a purposeful, supremely talented, and versatile personality, whose popular appeal was central to his achievement.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schlicke, Paul

Leseproben

“Almost a little vagabond”
Some of Dickens’s most poignant journalistic writing evoked reminiscences of himself as a child. He was also the first great novelist who wrote extensively about childhood—creating characters like Oliver Twist, Little Nell, Tiny Tim, Paul Dombey, David Copperfield, and Philip Pirrip (known as Pip). We don’t know to what extent these writings drew upon actual events in his life, but one thing is certain: the emotional experiences described in his books stemmed from his own memories. One of the most touching pieces is the 1853 sketch “Gone Astray,” which depicted Dickens as a youngster separated from his adult companion: When I was a very small boy indeed, both in years and stature, I got lost one day in the City of London. I was taken out by Somebody (shade of Somebody forgive me for remembering no more of thy identity!), as an immense treat, to be shown the outside of St. Giles’s church. The sketch proceeds to recount solitary adventures on that fateful day, with an intensity of feeling, which stamps them with the authenticity of events as they really happened. The boy befriends a dog, which ungraciously snatches his saveloy (sausage); he observes the giant statues of Gog and Magog at the Guildhall, and he wanders into a theater, where he becomes alarmed at the prospect of winning a donkey, which is being raffled off. The experiences epitomize key elements of Dickens’s conception of childhood: solitary, observant, sensitive, hopeful, full of wonder—as well as terror—at the fearsome immensity and otherness of the world beyond his own little self. It is a marvelously compelling image, one of the triumphs of Dickens’s artistry, but it is not only an image: it is also a narrative stance, which allowed him to see with vivid freshness, pathos, and humor. What personal, life-altering experiences had made it possible for young Dickens to develop such profound insight into the workings of a child’s mind? Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, at 13 Mile End Terrace, Portsea (now 396 Commercial Road, Portsmouth, home of the Dickens Birthplace Museum), a suburb of a great naval port then servicing wars in two hemispheres, against Napoleon on the continent and against the United States in America. His mother, Elizabeth Barrow Dickens, was said to have been dancing at a ball the night before her first son and second child was born, and his father, John Dickens, held a responsible position in the naval pay office. The job took the family first to London and then to the dockyards at Chatham, at the junction of the Medway with the Thames. It was in Chatham that young Dickens experienced the happiest days of his childhood, playing imaginative games with neighborhood friends in the field across the street from the family home in Ordnance Terrace, and falling desperately in love with a little girl named Lucy Stroughill. “Dullborough Town” [1860] is his fictionalized evocation of those joyful days: Here, in the haymaking time, had I been delivered from the dungeons of Seringapatam, an immense pile (of haycock), by my countrymen, the victorious British (boy next door and his two cousins), and had been recognised with ecstasy by my affianced one (Miss Green), who had come all the way from England (second house in the terrace), to ransom me, and marry me. In Chatham, Dickens had been schooled by his mother, and later under the tutelage of a schoolmaster, the Rev. William Giles, whom he remembered fondly in later years. During this time, he began (like David Copperfield in his childhood) to read voraciously (“as if for life”), novels and essays above all, and to listen with rapt attention to the terrifying stories, such as Captain Murderer, told by his nursemaid Mary Weller. It was in those days too, that he first saw Gad’s Hill Place, on walks with his father, who told him that if he worked hard enough, he might one day live in that big house—as he did, many years later. The childhood idyll ended abruptly when Dickens’s father was transferred back to London, where financial difficulties led to several moves of house to escape creditors. His beloved older sister Fanny was funded to continue her studies at the Royal Academy of Music, but there was not enough money to allow young Dickens to continue his education, and around the time of his 12th birthday an event occurred, which Dickens (and most of his biographers) considered to be the formative trauma of his life. He was sent to work pasting labels on bottles of bootblacking while sitting in a window, exposed to the gaze of passers-by. Soon after he started the work, his father was arrested for debt, and the rest of the family moved to the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison in Borough High Street while young Dickens lived in lodgings in nearby Lant Street. The alienation he felt was signaled by the fact that he adopted the name of a boy who befriended him at the blacking factory—Bob Fagin—for the nightmarish villain of Oliver Twist. The actual employment lasted about a year, but to the boy himself, it seemed the end of the world. It is wonderful to me [he wrote later] how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. . . No words can express the secret agony of my soul . . . my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless . . . My whole nature . . . penetrated with the grief and humiliation . . . I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond. After a few months, his father was released from prison, quarreled with the factory manager, and withdrew young Dickens from his employment. His mother tried to patch up the dispute, and, as Dickens wrote: I never afterwards forgot, I shall never forget, I never can forget that my mother was warm for my being sent back. The trauma was long-lasting. Deeply ashamed, Dickens kept the experience secret; it did not become public knowledge until his intimate friend and biographer John Forster made the revelation after Dickens’s death. Because of this early trauma, Dickens had a morbid sensitivity and fear of failure, coupled with an iron determination to succeed at whatever he did and avoid any possibility of financial difficulty. It gave him a sense of self-sufficiency, a readiness to depend on no one but himself for anything he undertook. Above all, it gave him a perception of childhood as an idyllic state irrevocably lost; it also fostered in him the essential need to never outgrow the child’s sense of wonder. Afterward, Dickens resumed schooling briefly, at Wellington House Academy, under a schoolmaster whom he later described as “by far the most ignorant man I have ever had the pleasure to know. “Our school,” he recalled, “was remarkable for white mice:” The boys trained the mice much better than the masters taught the boys. We recall one white mouse, who lived in the cover of a Latin dictionary, who ran up ladders, drew Roman chariots, shouldered muskets, turned wheels, and even made a very creditable appearance on the stage as the dog of Montargis. He might have achieved greater things, but for having the misfortune to mistake his way in a triumphal procession to the Capitol, when he fell into a deep inkstand, and was dyed black and drowned. Dickens was always the leader in such activities. While still very young, he and his sister Fanny would use a table for a stage in the Mitre Tavern in Rochester to sing duets. “At the mature age of eight or ten,” he recalled in his Preface to the 1850 edition of Sketches by Boz, he composed his first attempts at authorship, “certain tragedies achieved and represented with great applause to overflowing nurseries,” one of which was Misnar, the Sultan of India, based on his beloved Arabian Nights. His lifelong fascination with the theater began early, leading to discovery of “many wondrous secrets of nature . . . not the least terrific were, that the witches in Macbeth bore an awful resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland, and that the good King Duncan couldn’t rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it, and calling himself somebody else.” His toy theater production of The Miller and His Men resulted in the police being called when the explosion at the finale was too realistic. After school, Dickens had found employment as an office boy, first with the law firm of Ellis and Blackmore of Gray’s Inn, and subsequently with the solicitor Charles Molloy of Symonds Inn. On his first day, resplendent in a new blue coat and a military-looking cap, Dickens responded to the taunts of a bully and turned up in the office with a black eye. He amused himself by dropping cherry stones out of the window on the hats of passers-by, and during those years, he started going to the theater frequently, sometimes paying to take on roles on private stages, as later described in one of the Sketches by Boz. At this time, another devastating event occurred in Dickens’s life. Only recently discovered and previously thought to relate to a far earlier time, its significance can hardly be overstated. Dickens’s youngest sister Harriet, not quite nine years old, died on August 19, 1827, long after the family’s move from Chatham and years after the days at the...