Extrinsic Element (Mutual Friend)

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, to John and Elizabeth Barrow Dickens. The second of eight children, Dickens spent his childhood on the southern coast of England, where he attended a good school until the age of eleven. The family then moved to London and shortly thereafter his father was sent to debtor's prison. Young Charles went to work in a blacking warehouse and was forced to live on his own in cheap lodgings in a state of near starvation. Although he was soon rescued by his father and sent to school in London, the brief period of abandonment and uncertainty affected his life and his writings for years to come. Dickens did not attend college but was admitted as a reader to the library of the British Museum, where he immersed himself in the study of great literature, particularly Shakespeare. He worked for some time as a clerk, as a shorthand reporter, and eventually as a news reporter for the Morning Chronicle, a position which required him to travel all over the country. Career Dickens's first success, both critical and popular, was Sketches by Boz (1836), a series of short pieces on life in London. His first novel, Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837), was published, as were all of his novels, in serial form, and by the time the fourth monthly installment was issued, Dickens was the most popular author in England. His writing, once full of hope and optimism, grew increasingly pessimistic as he aged, with ima ges of decay and corruption dominating the later works. Our Mutual Friend was his last completed novel; with its images of dustheaps and death, it is widely considered one of the author's darkest visions. In 1870, while working on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens suffered an aneurysm in the brain and died the next day. He was buried in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. – Dickens’ Works Over the next thirty years, he continued to publish successful novels, among them: Oliver Twist (1838), A Christmas Carol In Prose (1843), The Personal History of David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853), Hard Times for These Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations 1861). – View Charles Dickens distaste for the upper class and his strong interest in social reform is very evident in all of his writings. Throughout his life, he continually worked on writing novels that reflected his own view of the social classes. Dickens writes his characters of the lower social class to have more value than the aristocrats that in his own view he has grown to despise B. SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS World view: most people in england in the middle of 19th century did not have money. They could not become ladies and gentlemen. They were the working class. Some working class people, like Bradley Headstone and Charley Hexam wanted to do better in life. – Economy: England in the middle of 19th century grew wealthy. Many people suddenly became rich. People who have money could become part of Society. Society people were known as ladies and gentlemen.