In world culture every city has its portraitist. London of Ch. Dickens came to be something like St. Petersburg of Dostoyevsky. It is a matter of fact that no one else managed to depict the physiology of London with its colourful greatness neighbouring with crying poverty.
Dickens applied his unique power of observation to the city in which he spent most of his life. He routinely walked the city streets, 10 or 20 miles at a time, and his descriptions of nineteenth century London allow readers to experience the sights, sounds, and smells of the old city. This ability to immerse the reader into time and place sets the perfect stage for Dickens to weave his fiction.
Victorian London was the largest, most spectacular city in the world. While Britain was experiencing the Industrial Revolution, its capital was both reaping the benefits and suffering the consequences. In 1800 the population of London was around a million souls. That number would swell to 4.5 million by 1880. While fashionable areas like Regent and Oxford streets were growing in the west, new docks supporting the city's place as the world's trade center were being built in the east. Perhaps the biggest impact on the growth of London was the coming of the railroad in the 1830s which displaced thousands and accelerated the expansion of the city.
The price of this explosive growth and domination of world trade was untold squalor and filth. In his excellent biography, Dickens, Peter Ackroyd notes that "If a late twentieth-century person were suddenly to find himself in a tavern or house of the period, he would be literally sick - sick with the smells, sick with the food, sick with the atmosphere around him".
Charles Dickens was born on February, 7, 1812. His father - John Dickens was an employee of Portsmouth docks; his mother — Elizabeth Barrow was from an official’s family. From 1817 to 1823 Charles lives in Chatham (its image is recognized in a town of Mudfog, described in “Mudfog papers”), from 1823 — in London, where his family lives in extremely constrained circumstances, which force him & his elder sister Fanny work on a blacking factory in 1824, February — June.
In 1824, 20 February John Dickens was put in Marshalsy debtor’s prison, but in May he got an inheritance & managed to pay all the debts.
To summarize about Charles Dickens’s family, his father, John, was a very easy going person, but
a lucky one. He is recognized as a prototype of Mr. Micowber from “Personal History of David Copperfield”; & maybe can also be compared with Dick Swiveller from “Old Curiosity Shop”, whom G.K Chesterton considered to be ideals of Dickens’s characters.
Life of the prisoners was a hard experience for Charles; it was later described in the novel “Little Dorrit”.
The career of a writer for Dickens began on the 5th, March, 1832, when he became a stenographic reporter in “True Sun”, later in “Mirror of Parliament”.
In October, 1833 he writes several sketches about London, published in “Monthly Magazine”. In August, 1834 Dickens chooses the penname of Boz, which was a nickname of his younger brother Augustus. This penname he uses for his sketches & first novels.
In September, 1834 “Sketches by Boz” appear in “Morning Chronicle”.
Sketches are devoted to some occasions in London streets, but mostly—to life of different regions of London.
The next step to creating the image of a city was “Oliver Twist”, the most famous novel about
Victorian London. Dickens began the work over the novel in 1836, when he signed a contract with Richard Bentley, an editor. The full version of it was firstly published 1838, even before it was finished in the periodical of “Bentley’s Miscellany”; it comprised 3 items.
These were the most vivid attempts to reflect life of London & its residents.
