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CHARLES DICKENS: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

In his lifetime Charles Dickens achieved a popularity we associate
nowadays with rock stars. His works were international best-sellers,
and Dickens himself was in great demand: he excelled as a speaker,
an actor-director of amateur theatricals, and a dramatic reader of
his own fiction. At times Dickens' skill as a public performer
threatened to overshadow his writing career. It was said that women
fainted by the dozens on hearing his narration of the murder scene
from Oliver Twist. On the whole he gloried in recognition and strove
to be a crowd-pleaser. He wrote novels in monthly, even weekly
installments, publishing them as newspaper serials. His goal was to
satisfy the tastes and expectations of a mass audience.

Playing to an audience had both a good and bad effect on Dickens'
art. On the one hand his works have had wide, lasting appeal. On
the other, his urge to please sometimes made him overly sentimental:
once, anticipating audience demand, he even tacked on a happy ending.

What fueled Dickens' ambition? Biographers have pointed to the
events of his childhood and youth, which reverberate throughout his
books, including A Tale of Two Cities. He was fascinated by prisons,
the home, the ideal woman, dual personalities, and even violence.
All these concerns may be partly traced to Dickens' life; all play a
role in A Tale of Two Cities.

Born in 1812, in Portsmouth, England, Charles Dickens was a
sensitive, imaginative child. He enjoyed his schoolwork and showed
promise; when a family crisis interrupted his studies he suffered an
emotional trauma. Charles' father, John Dickens, was a hospitable
fellow who tended to outspend his modest, government clerk's salary.
After the family moved to London, John Dickens' excesses caught up
with him and he was arrested for debt and sent to prison. His wife
and youngest children moved into prison with him, while Charles,
lodging nearby, went to work full time in a shoe-polish factory,
pasting labels on bottles. He was twelve years old. The job ended
within months, but Charles' memory of its humiliation never faded.
As an adult he hid the incident from all but one close friend; even
his wife remained in the dark.

Given Dickens' bent for concealing his own past, it's no accident
that secrets and mysterious life histories lie at the heart of A Tale
of Two Cities. The famous prisons that loom in the novel may well be
by-products of young Charles' exposure to the debtors' prison. As
for the blacking--or shoe-polish--factory, it must have struck the
impressionable boy as his own private jail. A serious result of the
experience was Charles' growing resentment of his mother, who tried,
even after John Dickens' release, to keep her son on the job. "I
never afterwards forgot," confided Dickens in a letter, years later.