Oliver Twist (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [2]
In 1858 Dickens’s twenty-three-year marriage to Catherine Hogarth dissolved when he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, a young actress. The last years of his life were filled with intense activity: writing, managing amateur theatricals, and undertaking several reading tours that reinforced the public’s favorable view of his work but took an enormous toll on his health. Working feverishly to the last, Dickens collapsed and died on June 9, 1870, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood uncompleted.
Oliver claimed by his Affectionate Friends
THE WORLD OF CHARLES DICKENS AND OLIVER TWIST
1811 Jane Austen publishes Sense and Sensibility, arguably the first modern English novel.
1812 Charles John Huffam Dickens is born at Portsmouth to John and Elizabeth (nee Barrow) Dickens. The government orders a group of Luddites, an organized band of laborers opposed to the industrialized machinery that threatens to replace them, to be shot down.
1817 The Dickens family moves to Chatham, in Kent. Dickens be gins reading the books in his father’s library; his favorites include the works of Miguel de Cervantes, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett.
1822 The Dickens family moves again, this time to Camden, in North London. Dickens quickly and fastidiously learns the landscape of London, an invaluable resource for his later writing.
1824 Charles is sent to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory, a manufacturer of boot-blacking. His father is arrested for debt and imprisoned for three months, and while the rest of the family stays with John Dickens in prison, Charles lodges elsewhere and continues pasting labels onto bottles of blacking at Warren’s.
1825 John Dickens retires on a naval pension, and Charles attends Wellington House Academy, a private school where he wins a prize in Latin.
1827 Dickens becomes a clerk in a solicitor’s office.
1829 After learning shorthand, he establishes himself as a reporter for the law courts, Parliament, and various London newspapers. He meets Maria Beadnell and falls in love with her.
1831 Dickens joins the journalistic staff of the Mirror of Parliament: he transcribes speeches by the members of Parliament on such topics as factory conditions, penal reform, education reform, the Poor Law Commission, and the First Reform Bill of 1832.
1833 After four arduous years, Dickens’s affair with Beadnell dissolves in the face of her family’s disapproval. He publishes his first story, “A Dinner at Poplar Walk,” in the Monthly Magazine. The British Parliament passes the Factory Act, which regulates child labor and forces children to attend school until age thirteen.
1834 Dickens becomes a journalist for the Morning Chronicle, a job that requires frequent travel and attendance at political meetings. He continues to publish stories and sketches in periodicals. The Poor Law Amendment Act ends out-of-door relief (aid given to the poor in their own homes) and compels those in need of assistance to enter workhouses, where conditions are very harsh.
1835 Dickens becomes engaged to Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle.
1836 Dickens writes in several different genres and achieves significant literary success. Adopting the pseudonym “Boz,” based on his pronunciation as a young child of Moses as “Boses,” Dickens publishes in volume form Sketches by Boz, a collection of his earlier writings. He marries Catherine Hogarth; the couple eventually has ten children. Dickens becomes intensely and unceasingly prolific, continuing to write feverishly throughout his life. Pickwick Papers, his first novel, brings him instant popular success; it also sets the precedent of serialization that he will follow for nearly