Happy Charles Dickens Day!

7 February is Charles Dickens Day, when we celebrate Portsmouth’s most famous Victorian author.

Born to a Victorian Portsmouth in 1812, the son of a naval payroll clerk, Charles Dickens was prodigiously industrious and despite an interrupted schooling, enjoyed a varied career spanning journalism, writing, editing, acting, and public readings. He rose to fame as the most popular author to date on both sides of the Atlantic during his lifetime, in part because of the widespread appeal of the topics of his writing and partly because technical developments in publishing facilitated more rapid production and distribution of his works than previous authors.

Having experienced financial upheaval in his childhood thanks to his father’s extravagant overspending, he was a strong advocate for an empathetic understanding of social problems, poverty and exploitation. As a result of his father’s overspending, Dickens was withdrawn from school aged 15 and made to work. Dickens served as a solicitor’s clerk before moving into journalism and fuelled his contempt for the Establishment. A fan of the theatre, which was a major source of entertainment at the time, Dickens became a professional actor in 1832 while still publishing stories and essays in magazines and newspapers, plays, pamphlets and more, which led into the serialised publication of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, publishing two instalments each month alongside all his other many publications.

Dickens invented the Christmas novel genre with A Christmas Carol, which he dreamed up and wrote late in 1843 while writing a second, larger novel. Later in life, Dickens became a vocal social critic of the political and social impact of the Crimean War, which he accused distracting attention from the “poverty, hunger, and ignorant desperation” at home, and moved into a more editorial role for twenty years, bringing his characteristic energy and industriousness into his editorial work.

Public readings

Dickens gave regular public readings of his works, which scholar Kathleen Tillotson described as “by far the most interesting love affair of his life”. Dickens had a difficult time relating to women in general and hugely stepped up his public readings around the time he separated from his wife, considering turning a professional public book reader around the time he began giving public readings for charity, leading on to public reading tours in England and the United States of his shorter, lighter works, often abridged specifically to appeal to a popular audience, with the deeper social commentary removed.

Defiantly jovial in public even up to the time of his death, Dickens ailed in his later years, suffering a number of afflictions that weighed heavily upon him. His farewell US reading tour was abandoned after he collapsed in April 1869. He gave a short farewell reading series in London ending in a famous speech, “From these garish lights I vanish now for evermore…” just three months before his death in June 1870. Dickens was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Read Dickens for free!

All Dickens’ novels are available to download for free from Project Gutenberg, where they are listed in decreasing order of the number of downloads. Not surprisingly, A Christmas Carol tops the list!

The local public library offers many of Dickens novels in print and as ebooks and audio books.

You can also find many of Dicken’s novels in the University Library as print and ebooks. The printed books are all shelved at 820.6 DIC in the English Literature section on the second floor.

Visit Charles Dickens’ Birthplace Museum for free

If you are looking for a cheap day out, why not visit Charles Dickens’ Birthplace Museum here in Portsmouth. Show them your university card for their cheaper student entry rate (currently £4.20). The museum is even free to visit on Heritage Open Days, so watch for announcements!

Source

Collins, P. (2025). Charles Dickens: British novelist. In Britannica. Retrieved January 9, 2025, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Dickens-British-novelist