Pub
Establishment that serves alcoholic drinks
A pub (short for public house) is in several countries a drinking establishment licensed to serve alcoholic drinks for consumption on the premises. The term first appeared in England in the late 17th century, to differentiate private houses from those open to the public as alehouses, taverns and inns. Today, there is no strict definition, but the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) states a pub has four characteristics:
The history of pubs can be traced to taverns in Roman Britain, and through Anglo-Saxon alehouses, but it was not until the early 19th century that pubs, as they are today, first began to appear. The model also became popular in countries and regions of British influence, where pubs are often still considered to be an important aspect of their culture. In many places, especially in villages, pubs are the focal point of local communities. In his 17th-century diary, Samuel Pepys described the pub as "the heart of England". Pubs have been established in other countries in modern times.
Although the drinks traditionally served include draught beer and cider, most also sell wine, spirits, tea, coffee, and soft drinks. Many pubs offer meals and snacks, and those considered to be gastro-pubs serve food in a manner akin to a restaurant.
A licence is required to operate a pub; the licensee is known as the landlord or landlady, or the publican. Often colloquially referred to as their "local" by regular customers, pubs are typically chosen for their proximity to home or work, good food, social atmosphere, the presence of friends and acquaintances, and the availability of pub games such as darts, pool, or snooker. Pubs often screen sporting events, such as rugby, cricket and football. The pub quiz was established in the UK in the 1970s.
History.
Origins.
Ale was a native British drink before the arrival of the Roman Empire in the first century, but it was with the construction of the Roman road network that the first pubs, called "tabernae" (the origin of modern English "tavern"), began to appear.
After the departure of Roman authority in the fifth century and the fall of the Romano-British kingdoms, the Anglo-Saxons established alehouses that may have grown out of domestic dwellings, first attested in the 10th century. These alehouses quickly evolved into meeting houses for folk to socially congregate, gossip and arrange mutual help within their communities. The Wantage law code of Æthelred the Unready prescribes fines for breaching the peace at meetings held in alehouses.
A traveller in the early Middle Ages could obtain overnight accommodation in monasteries, but later a demand for hostelries grew with the popularity of pilgrimages and travel. The Hostellers of London were granted guild status in 1446, and in 1514 the guild became the Worshipful Company of Innholders. A survey in 1577 of drinking establishment in England and Wales for taxation purposes recorded 14,202 alehouses, 1,631 inns, and 329 taverns, representing one pub for every 187 people.
Inns.
Inns are buildings where travellers can seek lodging and, usually, food and drink. They are typically located in the country or along a highway. In Europe, they possibly first sprang up when the Romans built a system of roads two millennia ago. Some inns in Europe are several centuries old. In addition to providing for the needs of travellers, inns traditionally acted as community gathering places.
In Europe, it is the provision of accommodation, if anything, that now distinguishes inns from taverns, alehouses and pubs. The latter tend to provide alcohol (and, in the UK, soft drinks and often food), but less commonly accommodation. Inns tend to be older and grander establishments: historically they provided not only food and lodging, but also stabling and fodder for travellers' horses, and on some roads fresh horses for the mail coach.
Famous London inns include the George, Southwark and the Tabard. There is, however, no longer a formal distinction between an inn and other kinds of establishment. Many pubs use "Inn" in their name, either because they are long established former coaching inns, or to summon up a particular kind of image, or in many cases simply as a pun on the word "in".
The original services of an inn are now also available at other establishments. Hotels, lodges, and motels focus more on lodging customers than on other services but usually provide meals. Pubs are primarily alcohol-serving establishments. Restaurants and taverns serve food and drink. In North America, the lodging aspect of the word "inn" lives on in hotel brand names like Holiday Inn, and in some state laws that refer to lodging operators as innkeepers.
The Inns of Court and Inns of Chancery in London started as ordinary inns where barristers met to do business, but became institutions of the legal profession in England and Wales.
Advent of the modern pub.
Pubs as we know them today first appeared in the 19th century. Before this time alehouses were largely indistinguishable from private houses and the poor standard of rural roads meant that, away from the larger towns, the only beer available was often brewed by the publican himself. With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, many areas of the United Kingdom were transformed by a surge in industrial activity and rapid population growth. There was huge demand for beer and for venues where the public could engage in social interaction, but there was also intense competition for customers.
Gin houses and palaces became increasingly popular, while the Beerhouse Act 1830 caused a proliferation of beerhouses. By the mid-19th century, pubs were widely purpose-built, and could incorporate architectural features that distinguished them from private houses to make them stand out from the competition. Many existing public houses were also redeveloped at this time, borrowing features from other building types and gradually developing the characteristics that make pubs instantly recognisable today. In particular, and contrary to the intentions of the Beerhouse Act, many drew inspiration from the gin houses and palaces.
Bar counters had been an early adoption, but ornate mirrors, etched glass, polished brass fittings and lavishly tiled surfaces were all features that had first made their appearance in gin houses. Innovations such as the introduction of hand pumps (or beer engines) allowed more people to be served, faster, while technological advances in the brewing industry and improved transportation links made it possible for breweries to deliver beer far from where it was brewed.
Tied house system.
The latter half of the 19th century saw increased competition within the brewing industry and, in an attempt to secure markets for their own products, breweries began rapidly buying local pubs and directly employing publicans to run them. Although some tied houses had existed in larger British towns since the 17th century, this represented a fundamental shift in the way that many pubs were operated and the period is now widely regarded as the birth of the tied house system.
Decreasing numbers of free houses and difficulties in obtaining new licences meant a continual expansion of their tied estates was the only feasible way for breweries to generate new trade. By the end of the century more than 90 per cent of public houses in England were owned by breweries, and the only practical way brewers could now grow their tied estates was to turn on each other. Buy-outs and amalgamations became commonplace, and by the end of the 1980s there were only six large brewers left in the UK, collectively known as the Big Six; Allied, Bass, Courage, Grand Metropolitan, Scottish & Newcastle and Whitbread.
In an attempt to increase the number of free houses, by forcing the big breweries to sell their tied houses, the Government introduced the Beer Orders in 1989. The result, however, was that the Big Six melted away into other sectors; selling their brewing assets and spinning off their tied houses, largely into the hands of branded pub chains, called pubcos. As these were not brewers, they were not governed by the Beer Orders and tens of thousands of pubs remain tied, much in the same way that they had been previously. In reality, government interference did very little to improve Britain's tied house system and all its large breweries are now in the hands of foreign or multi-national companies.
Decline in Britain.
The number of pubs in the UK has declined year on year at least since 1982. Various reasons are put forward for this, such as the failure of some establishments to keep up with customer requirements. Others claim the smoking ban of 2007, intense competition from gastro-pubs, the availability of cheap alcohol in supermarkets or the general economic climate are either to blame, or are factors in the decline. Changes in demographics may be an additional factor. In 2015 the rate of pub closures came under the scrutiny of Parliament in the UK, with a promise of legislation to improve relations between owners and tenants. The Lost Pubs Project listed 42,519 closed English pubs on 6 August 2023, with photographs of over 29,000. In the fifteen years to 2017 a quarter of London's pubs had closed. The closures have been ascribed to factors such as changing tastes and a rise in the cost of beer due to tax increases. Some London boroughs where there has been an increase in British Muslim population—Islam forbids alcohol to its adherents—have seen a high amount of closures.
The industry suffered a major decline from 2020, due to reduced trade during the Covid pandemic, followed by the wave of inflation that increased prices. By June 2022, pub numbers in England and Wales had fallen to a record low of 39,970, a loss of 7,000 in 10 years. Pubs also found it difficult to hire enough staff, with 142,000 jobs unfilled in the accommodation and food services sector by 2023. Figures published in 2023 showed that the rate of pub loss, equivalent to two closures a day, was increasing and that 39,404 pubs in England and Wales remained open at the end of June.
Licensing laws.
There was regulation of public drinking spaces in England from at least the 15th century. In 1496, under, Henry VII, an act was passed, "against vagabonds and beggers" (11 Hen. VII c2), that included a clause empowering two justices of the peace, "to rejecte and put awey comen ale-selling in tounes and places where they shall think convenyent, and to take suertie of the keepers of ale-houses in their gode behavyng by the discrecion of the seid justices, and in the same to be avysed and aggreed at the tyme of their sessions."
The Beerhouse Act of 1830 is widely considered to be a milestone in the history of public houses. Gin was popularised in England in the late 17th century, largely because it provided an alternative to French brandy at a time of political and religious conflict between Britain and France. Because of its cheapness, gin became popular with the poor, eventually leading to a period of drunkenness and lawlessness, known as the Gin Craze.
In the early 19th century, encouraged by a reduction of duties, gin consumption again began to rise and gin houses and gin palaces (an evolution of gin shops) began to spread from London to most towns and cities in Britain. Alarmed at the prospect of a return to the Gin Craze, the government attempted to counter the threat, and encourage the consumption of a more wholesome beverage, by introducing the Beerhouse Act of 1830. The Act introduced a new lower, and largely deregulated, tier of premises called "the beerhouse".
Under the act any householder, upon payment of two guineas (roughly equal in value to £ today), was permitted to brew and sell beer or cider in their own home. Beerhouses were not allowed to open on Sundays, or sell spirits and fortified wines; any beerhouse discovered to be breaking these rules was closed down and the owner heavily fined.
Within eight years 46,000 new beerhouses opened and, because operating costs were so low, huge profits were often made. The combination of increasing competition and high profits eventually led to what has been described as a golden age of pub building when many landlords extended or redeveloped their properties, adopting many features modern pubs still have.
Authorities attempted to check the growth from 1869 by introducing magisterial control and new licensing laws. These aimed to make it harder to obtain a licence, and control drunkenness, prostitution, and other undesirable conduct on licensed premises.
In the United Kingdom, restrictions were tightened considerably following the advent of the First World War. The Defence of the Realm Act, along with introducing rationing and censorship of the press, restricted pubs' opening hours to 12 noon–2:30 pm and 6:30 pm–9:30 pm. Opening for the full licensed hours was compulsory, and closing time was equally firmly enforced by the police. There was also a special case established under the State Management Scheme where the brewery and licensed premises were bought and run by the state, most notably in Carlisle.
Lock-in.
A "lock-in" is when a pub owner allows patrons to continue drinking in the pub after the legal closing time, on the theory that once the doors are locked, it becomes a private party rather than a pub. Patrons may put money behind the bar before official closing time, and redeem their drinks during the lock-in so no drinks are technically sold after closing time. The origin of the British lock-in was a reaction to 1915 changes in the licensing laws in England and Wales, which curtailed opening hours to stop factory workers from turning up drunk and harming the war effort. From then until the start of the 21st century, UK licensing laws changed very little, retaining these comparatively early closing times. The tradition of the lock-in therefore remained. Since the implementation of the Licensing Act 2003, premises in England and Wales may apply to extend their opening hours beyond 11 pm, allowing round-the-clock drinking and removing much of the need for lock-ins. Since the smoking ban, some establishments operated a lock-in during which the remaining patrons could smoke without repercussions but, unlike drinking lock-ins, allowing smoking in a pub was still a prosecutable offence.
Smoking bans.
Concerns about the effects of cigarette smoke inhalation first surfaced in the 1950s and ultimately led many countries to ban or restrict smoking in specific settings, such as pubs and restaurants. Early in 2004, Ireland became the first country in the world to ban smoking in all enclosed public areas. Scotland was the first UK nation to introduce a ban on indoor smoking in March 2006, followed by the rest of the UK in 2007. Australia introduced a similar ban in 2006 and now has some of the world's toughest anti-smoking laws, with some territories having also banned smoking in outside public areas.
Some publicans raised concerns, prior to the implementation of restrictions, that a smoking ban would have a negative impact on sales. The impact of the ban was mixed, with some pubs suffering declining sales, and others seeing an increase, particularly in food sales.
Architecture.
Saloon or lounge.
By the end of the 18th century, a new room in the pub was established: the saloon. Beer establishments had always provided entertainment of some sort—singing, gaming or sport. Balls Pond Road in Islington was named after an establishment run by a Mr. Ball that had a duck pond at the rear, where drinkers could, for a fee, go out and take a potshot at the ducks. More common, however, was a card room or a billiards room. The saloon was a room where, for an admission fee or a higher price of drinks, singing, dancing, drama, or comedy was performed and drinks would be served at the table. From this came the popular music hall form of entertainment—a show consisting of a variety of acts.
A most famous London saloon was the Grecian Saloon in the Eagle, City Road, referenced by name in the 18th-century nursery rhyme: "Up and down the City Road / In and out the Eagle / That's the way the money goes / Pop goes the weasel." This meant that the customer had spent all his money at the Eagle, and needed to pawn his "weasel" to get some more. The meaning of the "weasel" is unclear but the two most likely definitions are: a flat iron used for finishing clothing; or rhyming slang for a coat ("weasel and stoat").
A few pubs have stage performances such as serious drama, stand-up comedy, musical bands, cabaret or striptease; however, juke boxes, karaoke and other forms of pre-recorded music have otherwise replaced the musical tradition of a piano or guitar and singing.
Public bar.
The public bar, or tap room, was where the working class were expected to congregate and drink. It had unfurnished floorboards, sometimes covered with sawdust to absorb the spitting and spillages (known as "spit and sawdust"), bare bench seats and stools. Drinks were generally lower-quality beers and liquors. Public bars were seen as exclusive areas for only men; strictly enforced social etiquettes barred women from entering public bars (some pubs did not lift this rule until the 1980s). In the Manchester area, the public bar was known as the "vault", other rooms being the lounge and snug as usual elsewhere. The vault was a men-only bar, meant for working men in their dirty working clothes.
This style was in marked contrast to the adjacent saloon or lounge bar which, by the early 20th century, was where male or accompanied female middle-class drinkers would drink. It had carpeted floors, upholstered seats, and a wider selection of better quality drinks that cost a penny or two more than those served in the public bar.
By the mid-20th century, the standard of the public bar had generally improved. Many were built between the world wars as part of the "improved" pub movement and as "roadhouse" inns—with large car parks to attract passing trade. Pub patrons only had to choose between economy and exclusivity (or youth and age: a jukebox or dartboard). By the 1970s, divisions between saloons and public bars were being phased out, usually by the removal of the dividing wall or partition. While the names of saloon and public bar may still be seen on the doors of pubs, the prices (and often the standard of furnishings and decoration) are the same throughout the premises. Most present day pubs now comprise one large room, although with the advent of gastropubs, some establishments have returned to maintaining distinct rooms or areas.
Snug.
The "snug" was a small private room or area, typically with access to the bar and a frosted glass window above head height. Customers in the snug paid a higher price for beer and nobody could look in and see the drinkers. Not only did wealthy visitors use these rooms, but also patrons who preferred not to be seen in the public bar. Ladies often enjoyed a private drink in the snug in a time when many frowned on women visiting a pub. The local police officer might nip in for a quiet pint, the parish priest for his evening whisky, or lovers for a rendezvous.
The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) has surveyed the 50,000 pubs in Britain and it believes that there are very few pubs that still have classic snugs. These are on a historic interiors list in order that they can be preserved.
Counter.
The pub took the concept of the bar counter to serve the beer from gin palaces in the 18th century. Until that time beer establishments used to bring the beer out to the table or benches, as remains the practice in (for example) beer gardens and some other drinking establishments in Germany. A bar might be provided for the manager or publican to do paperwork while keeping an eye on his or her customers, and the term "bar" applied to the publican's office where one was built, but beer would be tapped directly from a cask or barrel on a table, or kept in a separate taproom and brought out in jugs.
When purpose built Victorian pubs were built after the Beerhouse Act 1830, the main room was the public room with a large serving bar copied from the gin houses, the idea being to serve the maximum number of people in the shortest possible time. The other, more private, rooms had no serving bar—they had the beer brought to them from the public bar. A number of pubs in the Midlands or the North still retain this set up, though now customers fetch the drinks themselves from the taproom or public bar. One of these is the Vine, known locally as the Bull and Bladder, in Brierley Hill near Birmingham, another the Cock at Broom, Bedfordshire a series of small rooms served drinks and food by waiting staff. By the early 1970s there was a tendency to change to one large drinking room as breweries were eager to invest in interior design and theming.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the British engineer and railway builder, introduced the idea of a circular bar into the Swindon station pub in order that customers were served quickly and did not delay his trains. These island bars became popular as they also allowed staff to serve customers in several different rooms surrounding the bar.
Beer engine.
A "beer engine" is a device for pumping beer, originally manually operated and typically used to dispense beer from a cask or container in a pub's basement or cellar.
The first beer pump known in England is believed to have been invented by John Lofting, a Dutch-born, London-based inventor, manufacturer, and merchant, in the late 1680s or early 1690s. The London Gazette of 17 March 1691 published a patent in favour of John Lofting for a fire engine, but remarked upon and recommended another invention of his, for a beer pump:
"Whereas their Majesties [i.e., William III of England and Mary II of England] have been Graciously Pleased to grant Letters patent to John Lofting of London Merchant for a New Invented Engine for Extinguishing Fires which said Engine have found every great encouragement. The said Patentee hath also projected a Very Useful Engine for starting of beer and other liquors which will deliver from 20 to 30 barrels an hour which are completely fixed with Brass Joints and Screws at Reasonable Rates. Any Person that hath occasion for the said Engines may apply themselves to the Patentee at his house near St Thomas Apostle London or to Mr. Nicholas Wall at the Workshoppe near Saddlers Wells at Islington or to Mr. William Tillcar, Turner, his agent at his house in Woodtree next door to the Sun Tavern London."
A further engine was invented in the late 18th century by the locksmith and hydraulic engineer Joseph Bramah (1748–1814).
Strictly the term refers to the pump itself, which is normally manually operated, though electrically powered and gas powered pumps are occasionally used. When manually powered, the term "handpump" is often used to refer to both the pump and the associated handle.
Companies.
In the 18th century, after the development of the large London Porter breweries, a trend grew for pubs to become "tied houses" that only sold beer from a single brewery. (A pub not 'tied' in this way was called a free house.) The usual arrangement for a tied house was that the brewery owned the pub but rented it out to a private individual (landlord) who ran it as a separate business (even though contracted to buy the beer from the brewery). Another common arrangement was (and is) for the landlord to own the premises (whether freehold or leasehold) independently of the brewer, but then to take a mortgage loan from a brewery, either to finance the purchase of the pub initially, or to refurbish it, and be required as a term of the loan to observe the solus tie.
In the late 20th century, breweries increasingly ran their pubs directly, using managers rather than tenants. Most such breweries, such as the regional brewery Shepherd Neame in Kent and Young's and Fuller's in London, control hundreds of pubs in a particular region of the UK, while a few, such as Greene King, are spread nationally. The landlord of a tied pub may be an employee of the brewery—in which case, they are a manager of a managed house—or a self-employed tenant under a lease agreement with a brewery that obligates (trade tie) them to purchase only that brewery's beer. The beer selection is mainly limited to beers brewed by that particular company. The Beer Orders, passed in 1989, were aimed at getting tied houses to offer at least one alternative beer, known as a guest beer, from another brewery. This law has now been repealed but while in force it dramatically altered the industry. Some pubs still offer a regularly changing selection of guest beers.
Organisations such as Wetherspoons, Punch Taverns and O'Neill's were formed in the UK in the wake of the Beer Orders. A PubCo is a company involved in the retailing but not the manufacture of beverages, while a Pub chain may be run either by a PubCo or by a brewery. In 2016, a number of the largest PubCo's were regulated, and tied tenants in England and Wales got new statutory rights to go free of tie or to have disputes heard by the Pubs Code Adjudicator.
Pubs within a chain usually have items in common—such as fittings, promotions, ambience, and food and drink menu. A pub chain positions itself in the marketplace for a target clientele. One company may run several pub chains aimed at different segments of the market. Pubs for use in a chain are bought and sold in large units, often from regional breweries that then close down. Newly acquired pubs are often renamed by the new owners, and many people resent the loss of traditional names, especially if their favourite regional beer disappears at the same time.
In 2009 about half of Britain's pubs were owned by large pub companies.
Brewery tap.
A brewery tap, also called a brewpub or taproom, is the nearest outlet for a brewery's beers. It is usually a room or bar in the brewery itself, although the name may be applied to a nearby pub.
Types.
A pub has no strict definition, but CAMRA states that a pub has four characteristics:
Together these characteristics differentiate pubs from restaurants and hotel bars, although some pubs also serve as restaurants or hotels.
Gastropub.
A gastropub is a hybrid pub and restaurant, notable for serving good quality beer, wine and food. The name is a portmanteau of "gastronomy" and "public house", and was coined in 1991 when David Eyre and Mike Belben took over the Eagle pub in Clerkenwell, London. The concept of a restaurant in a pub reinvigorated both pub culture and British dining, though it has also attracted criticism for potentially removing the character of traditional pubs.
In 2011, "The Good Food Guide" suggested that the term has become irrelevant such is its commonality these days.
Country pub.
A "country pub" is simply a rural drinking establishment, though the term has acquired a romantic image typically of thatched roofs and whitewashed stone walls. As with urban pubs, the country pub can function as a social and recreational centre, providing opportunities for people to meet, exchange news, and cooperate on local charitable events. However, that culture of functioning as a social centre for a village and rural community started to diminish in the latter part of the 20th century, as many country pubs either closed down, or were converted to restaurants or gastropubs. Those country pubs located on main routes may once have been coaching inns, providing accommodation or refreshment for travellers before the advent of motorised transport.
Roadhouse.
The term roadhouse was originally applied to a coaching inn, but with the advent of popular travel by motor car in the 1920s and 1930s in the United Kingdom, a new type of roadhouse emerged, often located on the newly constructed arterial roads and bypasses. They were large establishments offering meals and refreshment and accommodation to motorists and parties travelling by charabanc. The largest roadhouses boasted facilities such as tennis courts and swimming pools. Their popularity ended with the outbreak of the Second World War when recreational road travel became impossible, and the advent of post-war drunk driving legislation prevented their full recovery. Many of these establishments are now operated as pub restaurants or fast food outlets.
Theme pub.
A theme pub is a pub that aligns itself to a specific culture, style or activity; often with the intention of attracting a niche clientele. Many are decorated and furnished accordingly, with the theme sometimes dictating the style of food or drink on offer too. Examples of theme pubs include sports bars, rock pubs, biker bars, Goth pubs, strip clubs, karaoke bars and Irish pubs.
Micropubs.
In Britain, a micropub is a very small, modern, one-room pub founded on principles set up by Martyn Hillier, the creator of the first micropub, the Butchers Arms in Herne, Kent, in 2005. Micropubs are "based upon good ale and lively banter", commonly with a strong focus on local cask ale. It became easier to start a small pub after the passing of the 2003 Licensing Act, which became effective in 2005.
Other.
A "nolo" or "no lo" pub serves only non-alcoholic and low-alcoholic beverages. A temperance bar serves no alcohol at all.
Pub signs.
In 1393, King Richard II of England compelled landlords to erect signs outside their premises. The legislation stated "Whosoever shall brew ale in the town with intention of selling it must hang out a sign, otherwise he shall forfeit his ale." This law was to make alehouses easily visible to passing inspectors, borough ale tasters, who would decide the quality of the ale they provided. William Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare, was one such inspector.
Another important factor was that during the Middle Ages a large proportion of the population were illiterate and so pictures on a sign were more useful than words as a means of identifying a public house. For this reason there was often no reason to write the establishment's name on the sign and inns opened without a formal written name, the name being derived later from the illustration on the pub's sign.
The earliest signs were often not painted but consisted, for example, of paraphernalia connected with the brewing process such as bunches of hops or brewing implements, which were suspended above the door of the pub. In some cases local nicknames, farming terms and puns were used. Local events were often commemorated in pub signs. Simple natural or religious symbols such as suns, stars and crosses were incorporated into pub signs, sometimes adapted to incorporate elements of the heraldry (e.g., the coat of arms) of the local lords who owned the lands upon which the pub stood. Some pubs have Latin inscriptions.
Other subjects that lent themselves to visual depiction included the name of battles (e.g. Trafalgar), explorers, local notables, discoveries, sporting heroes and members of the royal family. Some pub signs are in the form of a pictorial pun or rebus. For example, a pub in Crowborough, East Sussex called "The Crow and Gate" had for some years an image of a crow with gates as wings. A "British Pathé News " film of 1956 shows artist Michael Farrar-Bell at work producing inn signs.
Most British pubs still have decorated signs hanging over their doors, and these retain their original function of enabling the identification of the pub. Today's pub signs almost always bear the name of the pub, both in words and in pictorial representation. The more remote country pubs often have stand-alone signs directing potential customers to their door.
Names.
Pub names are used to identify and differentiate each pub. Modern names are sometimes a marketing ploy or attempt to create "brand awareness", frequently using a comic theme thought to be memorable, "Slug and Lettuce" for a pub chain being an example. Interesting origins are not confined to old or traditional names, however. Names and their origins can be broken up into a relatively small number of categories.
As many pubs are centuries old, many of their early customers were unable to read, and pictorial signs could be readily recognised when lettering and words could not be read.
Pubs often have traditional names. A common name is the "Marquis of Granby". These pubs were named after John Manners, Marquess of Granby, who was the son of John Manners, 3rd Duke of Rutland and a general in the 18th-century British Army. He showed a great concern for the welfare of his men, and on their retirement, provided funds for many of them to establish taverns, which were subsequently named after him. All pubs granted their licence in 1780 were called the Royal George, after King George III, and the twentieth anniversary of his coronation.
Some names for pubs that seem absurd or whimsical have come from corruptions of old slogans or phrases, such as the Bag o'Nails (Bacchanals), the Goat and Compasses (God Encompasseth Us), the Cat and the Fiddle ("Chaton Fidèle": Faithful Kitten) and the Bull and Bush, which purportedly celebrates the victory of Henry VIII at "Boulogne Bouche" or Boulogne-sur-Mer Harbour.
Entertainment.
Traditional games are played in pubs, ranging from the well-known darts, skittles, dominoes, cards and bar billiards, to the more obscure Aunt Sally, nine men's morris quoits, and ringing the bull. In the UK betting is legally limited to certain games such as cribbage or dominoes, played for small stakes. In recent decades the game of pool (both the British and American versions) has increased in popularity as well as other table based games such as snooker or table football becoming common.
Increasingly, more modern games such as video games and slot machines are provided. Pubs hold special events, from tournaments of the aforementioned games to karaoke nights to pub quizzes. Some play pop music and hip-hop (dance bar), or show football and rugby union on big screen televisions (sports bar). Shove ha'penny and Bat and trap were also popular in pubs south of London.
Some pubs in the UK also have football teams composed of regular customers. Many of these teams are in leagues that play matches on Sundays, hence the term "Sunday League Football". Bowling is found in association with pubs in some parts of the country and the local team plays matches against teams invited from elsewhere on the pub's bowling green.
Pubs may be venues for pub songs and live music. During the 1970s pubs provided an outlet for a number of bands, such as Kilburn and the High Roads, Dr. Feelgood and the Kursaal Flyers, who formed a musical genre called pub rock that was a precursor to punk music.
Food.
Some pubs have a long tradition of serving food, dating back to their historic usage as inns and hotels where travellers would stay.
Many pubs were drinking establishments, and little emphasis was placed on the serving of food, other than sandwiches and "bar snacks", such as pork scratchings, pickled eggs, salted crisps and peanuts. These all helped to increase beer sales. In South East England (especially London) it was common until recent times for vendors of cockles, whelks, mussels, and other shellfish to sell them during the evening and at closing time. Many mobile shellfish stalls would set up near pubs, a practice that continues in London's East End. Otherwise, pickled cockles and mussels may be offered by the pub in jars or packets.
Starting in the 1950s, some British pubs would offer "a pie and a pint", with hot individual steak and ale pies made easily on the premises by the proprietor's wife during the lunchtime opening hours. The ploughman's lunch became popular in the late 1960s, as did the convenient "chicken in a basket", a portion of roast chicken with chips, served on a napkin in a wicker basket.
Family chain pubs that serve food in the evening gained popularity in the 1970s, and included Berni Inn and Beefeater.
Quality dropped but variety increased with the introduction of microwave ovens and frozen food. "Pub grub" expanded to include British food items such as steak and ale pie, shepherd's pie, fish and chips, bangers and mash, Sunday roast, ploughman's lunch, chicken tikka masala, and pasties. In addition, dishes such as burgers, chicken wings, lasagne and chilli con carne are often served. Some pubs offer elaborate hot and cold snacks free to customers at Sunday lunchtimes, to prevent them getting hungry and leaving for their lunch at home.
Since the 1990s, food has become a more important part of a pub's trade, and today most pubs serve lunches and dinners at the table in addition to (or instead of) snacks consumed at the bar. They may have a separate dining room. Some pubs serve meals to a higher standard, to match good restaurant standards; these are sometimes termed gastropubs.
Listed.
CAMRA maintains a "National Inventory" of historical notability and of architecturally and decoratively notable pubs. The National Trust owns thirty-six public houses of historic interest including the George Inn, Southwark, London and the Crown Liquor Saloon, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Records.
Highest and remotest.
The highest pub in the United Kingdom is the Tan Hill Inn, North Yorkshire, at above sea level. The remotest pub on the British mainland is the Old Forge in the village of Inverie, Lochaber, Scotland. There is no road access and it may only be reached by an walk over mountains, or a sea crossing.
Smallest.
Contenders for the smallest public house in the UK include:
The list includes a small number of parlour pubs, one of which is the Sun Inn in Leintwardine, Herefordshire.
The smallest public house in Wales is claimed by Y Goron Fach (the Little Crown) in Denbigh, with a single bar of .
Largest.
The largest pub in the UK is the Royal Victoria Pavilion, in Ramsgate, Kent. The venue was previously a casino and before that a theatre.
Oldest.
A number of pubs claim to be the oldest surviving establishment in the United Kingdom, although in several cases original buildings have been demolished and replaced on the same site. Others are ancient buildings that were used for purposes other than as a pub previously in their history. Some notable claims include:
Longest and shortest name.
The town of Stalybridge in Greater Manchester is thought to have the pubs with both the longest and shortest names in the United Kingdom – The Old Thirteenth Cheshire Astley Volunteer Rifleman Corps Inn and the Q Inn, both operating as of 2019[ [update]] (the Rifleman reopening in new premises, moving from Astley Street to premises two doors away from the Q Inn in Market Street in 2019, after being closed for three years). The original Rifleman building retains a pub sign, and a blue plaque from 1995 recording the recognition of the name in the Guinness Book of Records.
Cultural associations.
Inns and taverns feature throughout English literature and poetry, from the Tabard Inn in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" onwards.
The highwayman Dick Turpin used the Swan Inn at Woughton-on-the-Green in Buckinghamshire as his base. Jamaica Inn near Bolventor in Cornwall gave its name to a 1936 novel by Daphne du Maurier and a 1939 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. In the 1920s John Fothergill (1876–1957) was the innkeeper of the Spread Eagle in Thame, Berkshire, and published his autobiography: "An Innkeeper's Diary" (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931). During his idiosyncratic occupancy many famous people came to stay, such as H. G. Wells. United States president George W. Bush fulfilled his lifetime ambition of visiting a 'genuine British pub' during his November 2003 state visit to the UK when he had lunch and a pint of non-alcoholic lager (Bush being a teetotaler) with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the Dun Cow pub in Sedgefield, County Durham, in Blair's home constituency. There were approximately 53,500 public houses in 2009 in the United Kingdom. This number has been declining every year, so that nearly half of the smaller villages no longer have a local pub.
London.
Many of London's pubs are known to have been used by famous people, but in some cases, such as the association between Samuel Johnson and Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, this is speculative, based on little more than the fact that the person is known to have lived nearby. However, Charles Dickens is known to have visited the Cheshire Cheese, the Prospect of Whitby, Ye Olde Cock Tavern and many others. Samuel Pepys is also associated with the Prospect of Whitby and the Cock Tavern.
The Fitzroy Tavern is a pub situated at 16 Charlotte Street in the Fitzrovia district, to which it gives its name. It became famous (or according to others, infamous) during a period spanning the 1920s to the mid-1950s as a meeting place for many of London's artists, intellectuals and bohemians such as Dylan Thomas, Augustus John, and George Orwell. Several establishments in Soho, London, have associations with well-known, post-war literary and artistic figures, including the Pillars of Hercules, the Colony Room and the Coach and Horses. The Canonbury Tavern, Canonbury, was the prototype for Orwell's ideal English pub, "The Moon Under Water".
The Red Lion in Whitehall is close to the Palace of Westminster and is consequently used by political journalists and Members of Parliament (MPs). The pub is equipped with a Division bell that summons MPs back to the chamber when they are required to take part in a vote. The Punch Bowl, Mayfair was at one time jointly owned by Madonna and Guy Ritchie. The Coleherne public house in Earls Court was a well-known gay pub from the 1950s. It attracted many well-known patrons, such as Freddie Mercury, Kenny Everett and Rudolph Nureyev. It was used by the serial-killer Colin Ireland to pick up victims.
Jack Straw's Castle was a pub named after Jack Straw, one of the three leaders of Peasants' Revolt, the pub was active since the 14th century until its destruction by the Blitz during the Second World War.
In 1966 the Blind Beggar in Whitechapel became infamous as the scene of a murder committed by gangster Ronnie Kray. The Ten Bells is associated with several of the victims of Jack the Ripper. In 1955, Ruth Ellis, the last woman executed in the United Kingdom, shot David Blakely as he emerged from the Magdala in South Hill Park, Hampstead, the bullet holes can still be seen in the walls outside. It is said that Vladimir Lenin and a young Joseph Stalin met in the Crown and Anchor pub (now known as the Crown Tavern) on Clerkenwell Green when the latter was visiting London in 1903.
The Angel, Islington was formerly a coaching inn, the first on the Great North Road, the main route northwards out of London, where Thomas Paine is believed to have written much of "Rights of Man" (1791). It was mentioned by Charles Dickens, became a Lyons Corner House, and is now a Co-operative Bank.
Oxford and Cambridge.
The Eagle and Child and the Lamb and Flag, Oxford, were regular meeting places of the Inklings, a writers' group that included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. The Eagle in Cambridge is where Francis Crick interrupted patrons' lunchtime on 28 February 1953 to announce that he and James Watson had "discovered the secret of life" after they had come up with their proposal for the structure of DNA. The anecdote is related in Watson's book "The Double Helix". and commemorated with a blue plaque on the outside wall.
Outside Great Britain.
Although "British" pubs found outside of Britain and its former colonies are often themed bars owing little to the original British pub, a number of "true" pubs may be found around the world.
In Scandinavia, especially Denmark, a number of pubs that eschew "theming" have opened. They instead focus on providing carefully conditioned beer, often independent of any particular brewery or chain, in an environment not unfamiliar to a British pub-goer. Some import British cask ale, rather than beer in kegs, to provide the full British real ale experience to their customers. This newly established Danish interest in British cask beer and the British pub tradition is reflected by the fact that some 56 British cask beers were available at the 2008 European Beer Festival in Copenhagen, which was attended by more than 20,000 people.
In Ireland, pubs are known for their atmosphere or "craic". In Irish, a pub is referred to as "teach tábhairne" ("tavernhouse") or "teach óil" ("drinkinghouse"). Live music, either sessions of traditional Irish music or varieties of modern popular music, is frequently featured in the pubs of Ireland. Pubs in Northern Ireland are largely identical to their counterparts in the Republic of Ireland except for the lack of spirit grocers. A side effect of the Troubles was that the lack of a tourist industry meant that a higher proportion of traditional bars have survived the wholesale refitting of Irish pub interiors in the "English style" in the 1950s and 1960s. New Zealand sports a number of Irish pubs.
Pubs have a long history in Canada, with some still operating after 200 years, like the Olde Angel Inn in Niagara-on-the-Lake. An "English-looking" pub trend started in the 1990s, built into existing storefronts, often run by corporate pub firms. Most universities in Canada have campus pubs that are central to student life—serving food and drink as well as hosting social events. Often these pubs are run by the student's union and at some universities, a budget is reserved for course pub nights. The gastropub concept has caught on, as traditional British influences are to be found in many Canadian dishes. Aside from pubs, the term "bar" can refer to themed drinking establishments, sports bars, or cocktail bars, or to the physical counter in a pub. Tavern was previously a popular term, though it has become somewhat antiquated.
In South Africa pubs and taverns have had a particularly long and notable presence in the city of Cape Town. Prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, Cape Town was a major trading port between Europe and Asia and hosted a very large number of drinking establishments earning the city the moniker "Tavern of the Seas". The oldest currently operating pub in South Africa, and one of the last drinking establishments left from the "Tavern of the Seas" era, is the Perseverance Tavern opened in 1808.
In fiction.
Pubs are a common setting for fictional works, including novels, stories, films, video games, and other works. In many cases, authors and other creators develop imaginary pubs for their works, some of which have become notable fictional places. Notable fictional pubs include The Admiral Benbow Inn in the "Treasure Island" pirate story, the Garrison in the 1920s crime TV drama "Peaky Blinders", the Golden Perch, the Prancing Pony, and the Green Dragon in the high fantasy novel "The Lord of the Rings", the Leaky Cauldron and the Hog's Head in the "Harry Potter" fantasy series, Moe's Tavern, a working-class venue in "The Simpsons", and the Oak and Crosier in the video game "."
The major soap operas on British television each feature a fictional pub, and these pubs have become household names in Britain. The Rovers Return is the pub in "Coronation Street", the British soap broadcast on ITV. The Queen Vic (short for the Queen Victoria) is the pub in "EastEnders", the major soap on BBC One and the Woolpack in ITV's "Emmerdale". The sets of each of the three major television soap operas have been visited by some of the members of the royal family, including Queen Elizabeth II. The centrepiece of each visit was a trip into the Rovers, the Queen Vic, or the Woolpack to be offered a drink.
The Bull in the BBC Radio 4 soap opera "The Archers" is an important meeting point.
See also.
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References.
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Charles Dickens
English novelist and social critic (1812–1870)
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English novelist, journalist, short story writer and social critic. He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.
Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school at age 12 to work in a boot-blacking factory when his father John was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. After three years, he returned to school before beginning his literary career as a journalist. Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years; wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and nonfiction articles; lectured and performed readings extensively; was a tireless letter writer; and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education and other social reforms.
Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of "The Pickwick Papers", a publishing phenomenon—thanks largely to the introduction of the character Sam Weller in the fourth episode—that sparked "Pickwick" merchandise and spin-offs. Within a few years, Dickens had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire and keen observation of character and society. His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication. Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense. The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback. For example, when his wife's chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in "David Copperfield" seemed to reflect her own disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features. His plots were carefully constructed and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives. Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.
His 1843 novella "A Christmas Carol" remains especially popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every creative medium. "Oliver Twist" and "Great Expectations" are also frequently adapted and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1853 novel "Bleak House", a satire on the judicial system, helped support a reformist movement that culminated in the 1870s legal reform in England. "A Tale of Two Cities" (set in London and Paris) is regarded as his best-known work of historical fiction. The most famous celebrity of his era, he undertook, in response to public demand, a series of public reading tours in the later part of his career. The term "Dickensian" is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social or working conditions, or comically repulsive characters.
Early life.
Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 at 1 Mile End Terrace (now 393 Commercial Road), Landport in Portsea Island (Portsmouth), Hampshire, the second of eight children of Elizabeth Dickens (née Barrow; 1789–1863) and John Dickens (1785–1851). His father was a clerk in the Royal Navy Pay Office and was temporarily stationed in the district. He asked Christopher Huffam, rigger in the Royal Navy and head of an established firm, to act as godfather to Charles. Huffam is thought to be the inspiration for Paul Dombey, the owner of a shipping company in Dickens's novel "Dombey and Son" (1848).
In January 1815, John Dickens was called back to London, and the family moved to Norfolk Street, Fitzrovia. When Charles was four, they relocated to Sheerness and thence to Chatham, Kent, where he spent his formative years until the age of 11. His early life seems to have been idyllic, though he thought himself a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy".
Charles spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, including the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding, as well as "Robinson Crusoe" and "Gil Blas". He read and re-read "The Arabian Nights" and the Collected Farces of Elizabeth Inchbald. Aged seven, he first saw Joseph Grimaldi—the father of modern clowning—perform at the Star Theatre in Rochester, Kent. He later imitated Grimaldi's clowning on several occasions, and would also edit the "Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi". He retained poignant memories of childhood, helped by an excellent memory of people and events, which he used in his writing. His father's brief work as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office afforded him a few years of private education, first at a dame school and then at a school run by William Giles, a dissenter, in Chatham.
This period came to an end in June 1822, when John Dickens was recalled to Navy Pay Office headquarters at Somerset House and the family (except for Charles, who stayed behind to finish his final term at school) moved to Camden Town in London. The family had left Kent amidst rapidly mounting debts and, living beyond his means, John Dickens was forced by his creditors into the Marshalsea debtors' prison in Southwark, London in 1824. His wife and youngest children joined him there, as was the practice at the time. Charles, then 12 years old, boarded with Elizabeth Roylance, a family friend, at 112 College Place, Camden Town. Mrs Roylance was "a reduced impoverished old lady, long known to our family", whom Dickens later immortalised, "with a few alterations and embellishments", as "Mrs Pipchin" in "Dombey and Son". Later, he lived in a back-attic in the house of an agent for the Insolvent Court, Archibald Russell, "a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman ... with a quiet old wife" and lame son, in Lant Street in Southwark. They provided the inspiration for the Garlands in "The Old Curiosity Shop".
On Sundays—with his sister Frances, free from her studies at the Royal Academy of Music—he spent the day at the Marshalsea. Dickens later used the prison as a setting in "Little Dorrit". To pay for his board and to help his family, Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station, where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. The strenuous and often harsh working conditions made a lasting impression on Dickens and later influenced his fiction and essays, becoming the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor. He later wrote that he wondered "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age". As he recalled to John Forster (from "Life of Charles Dickens"):
<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.
When the warehouse was moved to Chandos Street in the smart, busy district of Covent Garden, the boys worked in a room in which the window gave onto the street. Small audiences gathered and watched them at work—in Dickens's biographer Simon Callow's estimation, the public display was "a new refinement added to his misery".
A few months after his imprisonment, John Dickens's mother, Elizabeth Dickens, died and bequeathed him £450. On the expectation of this legacy, Dickens was released from prison. Under the Insolvent Debtors Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors, and he and his family left the Marshalsea, for the home of Mrs Roylance.
Charles's mother, Elizabeth Dickens, did not immediately support his removal from the boot-blacking warehouse. This influenced Dickens's view that a father should rule the family and a mother find her proper sphere inside the home: "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back." His mother's failure to request his return was a factor in his dissatisfied attitude towards women.
Righteous indignation stemming from his own situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes of his works, and it was this unhappy period in his youth to which he alluded in his favourite, and most autobiographical, novel, "David Copperfield": "I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!"
Dickens was eventually sent to the Wellington House Academy in Camden Town, where he remained until March 1827, having spent about two years there. He did not consider it to be a good school: "Much of the haphazard, desultory teaching, poor discipline punctuated by the headmaster's sadistic brutality, the seedy ushers and general run-down atmosphere, are embodied in Mr Creakle's Establishment in "David Copperfield"."
Dickens worked at the law office of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn, as a junior clerk from May 1827 to November 1828. He was a gifted mimic and impersonated those around him: clients, lawyers and clerks. Captivated with London's theatre scene, he went to theatres obsessively: he claimed that for at least three years he went to the theatre every day. His favourite actor was Charles Mathews and Dickens learnt his "monopolylogues" (farces in which Mathews played every character) by heart. Then, having learned Gurney's system of shorthand in his spare time, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant relative, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at Doctors' Commons and Dickens was able to share his box there to report the legal proceedings for nearly four years.
In 1830, Dickens met his first love, Maria Beadnell, thought to have been the model for the character Dora in "David Copperfield". Maria's parents disapproved of the courtship and ended the relationship by sending her to school in Paris.
Career.
Journalism and writing.
In 1832, at the age of 20, Dickens was energetic and increasingly self-confident. He enjoyed mimicry and popular entertainment, lacked a clear, specific sense of what he wanted to become, and yet knew he wanted fame. Drawn to the theatre—he became an early member of the Garrick Club—he landed an acting audition at Covent Garden, where the manager George Bartley and the actor Charles Kemble were to see him. Dickens prepared meticulously and decided to imitate the comedian Charles Mathews, but ultimately he missed the audition because of a cold. Before another opportunity arose, he had set out on his career as a writer.
In 1833, Dickens submitted his first story, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", to the London periodical "Monthly Magazine". His uncle William Barrow offered him a job on "The Mirror of Parliament" and he worked in the House of Commons for the first time early in 1832. He rented rooms at Furnival's Inn and worked as a political journalist, reporting on Parliamentary debates, and he travelled across Britain to cover election campaigns for the "Morning Chronicle".
His journalism, in the form of sketches in periodicals, formed his first collection of pieces, published in 1836: "Sketches by Boz"—Boz being a family nickname he employed as a pseudonym for some years. Dickens apparently adopted it from the nickname 'Moses', which he had given to his youngest brother Augustus Dickens, after a character in Oliver Goldsmith's "The Vicar of Wakefield". When pronounced by anyone with a head cold, "Moses" became "Boses"—later shortened to "Boz". Dickens's own name was considered "queer" by a contemporary critic, who wrote in 1849: "Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations." Dickens contributed to and edited journals throughout his literary career. In January 1835, the "Morning Chronicle" launched an evening edition, under the editorship of the "Chronicle"'s music critic, George Hogarth. Hogarth invited him to contribute "Street Sketches" and Dickens became a regular visitor to his Fulham house—excited by Hogarth's friendship with Walter Scott (whom Dickens greatly admired) and enjoying the company of Hogarth's three daughters: Georgina, Mary and 19-year-old Catherine.
Dickens made rapid progress both professionally and socially. He began a friendship with William Harrison Ainsworth, the author of the highwayman novel "Rookwood" (1834), whose bachelor salon in Harrow Road had become the meeting place for a set that included Daniel Maclise, Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and George Cruikshank. All these became his friends and collaborators, with the exception of Disraeli, and he met his first publisher, John Macrone, at the house. The success of "Sketches by Boz" led to a proposal from publishers Chapman and Hall for Dickens to supply text to match Robert Seymour's engraved illustrations in a monthly letterpress. Seymour committed suicide after the second instalment and Dickens, who wanted to write a connected series of sketches, hired "Phiz" to provide the engravings (which were reduced from four to two per instalment) for the story. The resulting story became "The Pickwick Papers" and, although the first few episodes were not successful, the introduction of the Cockney character Sam Weller in the fourth episode (the first to be illustrated by Phiz) marked a sharp climb in its popularity. The final instalment sold 40,000 copies. On the impact of the character, "The Paris Review" stated, "arguably the most historic bump in English publishing is the Sam Weller Bump." A publishing phenomenon, John Sutherland, Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, called "The Pickwick Papers" "[t]he most important single novel of the Victorian era". The unprecedented success led to numerous spin-offs and merchandise including "Pickwick" cigars, playing cards, china figurines, Sam Weller puzzles, Weller boot polish and joke books.
<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />The Sam Weller Bump testifies not merely to Dickens's comic genius but to his acumen as an "authorpreneur", a portmanteau he inhabited long before "The Economist" took it up. For a writer who made his reputation crusading against the squalor of the Industrial Revolution, Dickens was a creature of capitalism; he used everything from the powerful new printing presses to the enhanced advertising revenues to the expansion of railroads to sell more books. Dickens ensured that his books were available in cheap bindings for the lower orders as well as in morocco-and-gilt for people of quality; his ideal readership included everyone from the pickpockets who read "Oliver Twist" to Queen Victoria, who found it "exceedingly interesting".
On its impact on mass culture, Nicholas Dames in "The Atlantic" writes, "'Literature' is not a big enough category for "Pickwick". It defined its own, a new one that we have learned to call 'entertainment'." In November 1836, Dickens accepted the position of editor of "Bentley's Miscellany", a position he held for three years, until he fell out with the owner. In 1836, as he finished the last instalments of "The Pickwick Papers", he began writing the beginning instalments of "Oliver Twist"—writing as many as 90 pages a month—while continuing work on "Bentley's" and also writing four plays, the production of which he oversaw. "Oliver Twist", published in 1838, became one of Dickens's better known stories and was the first Victorian novel with a child protagonist.
On 2 April 1836, after a one-year engagement, and between episodes two and three of "The Pickwick Papers", Dickens married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1815–1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the "Evening Chronicle". They were married in St Luke's Church, Chelsea, London. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk in Kent, the couple returned to lodgings at Furnival's Inn. The first of their ten children, Charles, was born in January 1837 and a few months later the family set up home in Bloomsbury at 48 Doughty Street, London (on which Charles had a three-year lease at £80 a year) from 25 March 1837 until December 1839. Dickens's younger brother Frederick and Catherine's 17-year-old sister Mary Hogarth moved in with them. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. Unusually for Dickens, as a consequence of his shock, he stopped working, and he and Catherine stayed at a little farm on Hampstead Heath for a fortnight. Dickens idealised Mary; the character he fashioned after her, Rose Maylie, he found he could not now kill, as he had planned, in his fiction, and, according to Ackroyd, he drew on memories of her for his later descriptions of Little Nell and Florence Dombey. His grief was so great that he was unable to meet the deadline for the June instalment of "The Pickwick Papers" and had to cancel the "Oliver Twist" instalment that month as well. The time in Hampstead was the occasion for a growing bond between Dickens and John Forster to develop; Forster soon became his unofficial business manager and the first to read his work.
His success as a novelist continued. The young Queen Victoria read both "Oliver Twist" and "The Pickwick Papers", staying up until midnight to discuss them. "Nicholas Nickleby" (1838–39), "The Old Curiosity Shop" (1840–41) and, finally, his first historical novel, "Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty", as part of the "Master Humphrey's Clock" series (1840–41), were all published in monthly instalments before being made into books. Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd has called "Barnaby Rudge" "one of Dickens's most neglected, but most rewarding, novels". The poet Edgar Allan Poe read "Barnaby Rudge", and the talking raven that featured in the novel inspired in part Poe's 1845 poem "The Raven".
In the midst of all his activity during this period, there was discontent with his publishers and John Macrone was bought off, while Richard Bentley signed over all his rights in "Oliver Twist". Other signs of a certain restlessness and discontent emerged; in Broadstairs he flirted with Eleanor Picken, the young fiancée of his solicitor's best friend and one night grabbed her and ran with her down to the sea. He declared they were both to drown there in the "sad sea waves". She finally got free, and afterwards kept her distance. In June 1841, he precipitously set out on a two-month tour of Scotland and then, in September 1841, telegraphed Forster that he had decided to go to America. His weekly periodical "Master Humphrey's Clock" ended, though Dickens was still keen on the idea of the weekly magazine, an appreciation that had begun with his childhood reading of Samuel Johnson's "The Idler" and the 18th-century magazines "Tatler" and "The Spectator".
Dickens was perturbed by the return to power of the Tories, whom he described as "people whom, politically, I despise and abhor." He had been tempted to stand for the Liberals in Reading, but decided against it due to financial straits. He wrote three anti-Tory verse satires ("The Fine Old English Gentleman", "The Quack Doctor's Proclamation", and "Subjects for Painters") which were published in "The Examiner".
First visit to the United States.
On 22 January 1842, Dickens and his wife arrived in Boston, Massachusetts, aboard the RMS "Britannia" during their first trip to the United States and Canada. At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, joined the Dickens household, now living at Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone to care for the young family they had left behind. She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser and friend until Dickens's death in 1870. Dickens modelled the character of Agnes Wickfield after Georgina and Mary.
He described his impressions in a travelogue, "American Notes for General Circulation". In "Notes", Dickens includes a powerful condemnation of slavery which he had attacked as early as "The Pickwick Papers", correlating the emancipation of the poor in England with the abolition of slavery abroad citing newspaper accounts of runaway slaves disfigured by their masters. In spite of the abolitionist sentiments gleaned from his trip to America, some modern commentators have pointed out inconsistencies in Dickens's views on racial inequality. For instance, he has been criticised for his subsequent acquiescence in Governor Eyre's harsh crackdown during the 1860s Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and his failure to join other British progressives in condemning it. From Richmond, Virginia, Dickens returned to Washington, D.C., and started a trek westward, with brief pauses in Cincinnati and Louisville, to St. Louis, Missouri. While there, he expressed a desire to see an American prairie before returning east. A group of 13 men then set out with Dickens to visit Looking Glass Prairie, a trip 30 miles into Illinois.
During his American visit, Dickens spent a month in New York City, giving lectures, raising the question of international copyright laws and the pirating of his work in America. He persuaded a group of 25 writers, headed by Washington Irving, to sign a petition for him to take to Congress, but the press were generally hostile to this, saying that he should be grateful for his popularity and that it was mercenary to complain about his work being pirated.
The popularity he gained caused a shift in his self-perception according to critic Kate Flint, who writes that he "found himself a cultural commodity, and its circulation had passed out his control", causing him to become interested in and delve into themes of public and personal personas in the next novels. She writes that he assumed a role of "influential commentator", publicly and in his fiction, evident in his next few books. His trip to the US ended with a trip to Canada—Niagara Falls, Toronto, Kingston and Montreal—where he appeared on stage in light comedies.
Return to England.
Soon after his return to England, Dickens began work on the first of his Christmas stories, "A Christmas Carol", written in 1843, which was followed by "The Chimes" in 1844 and "The Cricket on the Hearth" in 1845. Of these, "A Christmas Carol" was most popular and, tapping into an old tradition, did much to promote a renewed enthusiasm for the joys of Christmas in Britain and America. The seeds for the story became planted in Dickens's mind during a trip to Manchester to witness the conditions of the manufacturing workers there. This, along with scenes he had recently witnessed at the Field Lane Ragged School, caused Dickens to resolve to "strike a sledge hammer blow" for the poor. As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He later wrote that as the tale unfolded he "wept and laughed, and wept again" as he "walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed".
Between 1843 and 1844, "Martin Chuzzlewit", the last of his picaresque novels, was serialised. It includes the character of Sarah Gamp, a nurse who is dissolute, sloppy and generally drunk, and also features one of the first literary private detective characters, Mr Nadgett. After living briefly in Italy (1844), Dickens travelled to Switzerland (1846), where he began work on "Dombey and Son" (1846–48).
At about this time, he was made aware of a large embezzlement at the firm where his brother, Augustus, worked (John Chapman & Co). It had been carried out by Thomas Powell, a clerk, who was on friendly terms with Dickens and who had acted as mentor to Augustus when he started work. Powell was also an author and poet and knew many of the famous writers of the day. After further fraudulent activities, Powell fled to New York and published a book called "The Living Authors of England" with a chapter on Charles Dickens, who was not amused by what Powell had written. One item that seemed to have annoyed him was the assertion that he had based the character of Paul Dombey ("Dombey and Son") on Thomas Chapman, one of the principal partners at John Chapman & Co. Dickens immediately sent a letter to Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the New York literary magazine "The Knickerbocker", saying that Powell was a forger and thief. Clark published the letter in the "New-York Tribune" and several other papers picked up on the story. Powell began proceedings to sue these publications and Clark was arrested. Dickens, realising that he had acted in haste, contacted John Chapman & Co to seek written confirmation of Powell's guilt. Dickens did receive a reply confirming Powell's embezzlement, but once the directors realised this information might have to be produced in court, they refused to make further disclosures. Owing to the difficulties of providing evidence in America to support his accusations, Dickens eventually made a private settlement with Powell out of court.
Philanthropy.
Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens in May 1846 about setting up a home for the redemption of fallen women of the working class. Coutts envisioned a home that would replace the punitive regimes of existing institutions with a reformative environment conducive to education and proficiency in domestic household chores. After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named Urania Cottage, in the Lime Grove area of Shepherd's Bush, which he managed for ten years, setting the house rules, reviewing the accounts and interviewing prospective residents. Emigration and marriage were central to Dickens's agenda for the women on leaving Urania Cottage, from which it is estimated that about 100 women graduated between 1847 and 1859.
Religious views.
As a young man, Dickens expressed a distaste for certain aspects of organised religion. In 1836, in a pamphlet titled "Sunday Under Three Heads", he defended the people's right to pleasure, opposing a plan to prohibit games on Sundays. "Look into your churches—diminished congregations and scanty attendance. People have grown sullen and obstinate, and are becoming disgusted with the faith which condemns them to such a day as this, once in every seven. They display their feeling by staying away [from church]. Turn into the streets [on a Sunday] and mark the rigid gloom that reigns over everything around."
Dickens honoured the figure of Jesus Christ. He is regarded as a professing Christian. His son, Henry Fielding Dickens, described him as someone who "possessed deep religious convictions". In the early 1840s, he had shown an interest in Unitarian Christianity and Robert Browning remarked that "Mr Dickens is an enlightened Unitarian." Professor Gary Colledge has written that he "never strayed from his attachment to popular lay Anglicanism". Dickens authored a work called "The Life of Our Lord" (1846), a book about the life of Christ, written with the purpose of sharing his faith with his children and family. In a scene from "David Copperfield", Dickens echoed Geoffrey Chaucer's use of from "Troilus and Criseyde" (Dickens held a copy in his library), with G. K. Chesterton writing, "among the great English authors, Chaucer and Dickens have the most in common."
Dickens disapproved of Roman Catholicism and 19th-century evangelicalism, seeing both as extremes of Christianity and likely to limit personal expression, and was critical of what he saw as the hypocrisy of religious institutions and philosophies like spiritualism, all of which he considered deviations from the true spirit of Christianity, as shown in the book he wrote for his family in 1846. While Dickens advocated equal rights for Catholics in England, he strongly disliked how individual civil liberties were often threatened in countries where Catholicism predominated and referred to the Catholic Church as "that curse upon the world." Dickens also rejected the Evangelical conviction that the Bible was the infallible word of God. His ideas on Biblical interpretation were similar to the Liberal Anglican Arthur Penrhyn Stanley's doctrine of "progressive revelation". Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky referred to Dickens as "that great Christian writer".
Middle years.
In December 1845, Dickens took up the editorship of the London-based "Daily News", a liberal paper through which Dickens hoped to advocate, in his own words, "the Principles of Progress and Improvement, of Education and Civil and Religious Liberty and Equal Legislation." Among the other contributors Dickens chose to write for the paper were the radical economist Thomas Hodgskin and the social reformer Douglas William Jerrold, who frequently attacked the Corn Laws. Dickens lasted only ten weeks on the job before resigning due to a combination of exhaustion and frustration with one of the paper's co-owners.
A Francophile, Dickens often holidayed in France and, in a speech delivered in Paris in 1846 in French, called the French "the first people in the universe". During his visit to Paris, Dickens met the French literati Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Eugène Scribe, Théophile Gautier, François-René de Chateaubriand and Eugène Sue. In early 1849, Dickens started to write "David Copperfield". It was published between 1849 and 1850. In Dickens's biography, "Life of Charles Dickens" (1872), John Forster wrote of "David Copperfield", "underneath the fiction lay something of the author's life". It was Dickens's personal favourite among his novels, as he wrote in the preface to the 1867 edition. His collection of letters, of which more than 14,000 are known, covered a wide range of subject-matter. Letters during this period included a correspondence with Mary Tyler, dated 6 November 1849, on the comedic merits of Punch and Judy, a puppet show dominated by the anarchic clowning of Mr. Punch, and his review of the Great Exhibition, the first in a series of world's fairs, which he attended at Hyde Park, London in 1851.
In November 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he wrote "Bleak House" (1852–53), "Hard Times" (1854) and "Little Dorrit" (1855–57). A work of Gothic fiction depicting London as a murky city swathed in fog, "Bleak House" is credited with introducing urban fog to the novel, which would become a frequent characteristic of urban Gothic literature and film. Reflecting the public enthusiasm for dinosaurs that first developed in Victorian England, the opening of "Bleak House" contains an early mention of dinosaurs in literature: "it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill".
While at Tavistock Dickens indulged in amateur theatricals, and he worked closely with the novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins. In 1856, his income from writing allowed him to buy Gads Hill Place in Higham, Kent. As a child, Dickens had walked past the house and dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Part 1" and this literary connection pleased him.
During this time Dickens was also the publisher, editor and a major contributor to the journals "Household Words" (1850–1859) and "All the Year Round" (1858–1870), with both titles deriving from a Shakespearean quotation. The journals contained a mix of fiction and non-fiction, and dealt with aspects in the culture. For example, the latter included Dickens' assessment of Madame Tussauds, a wax museum established in Baker Street in 1835, which he called "something more than an exhibition, it is an institution." In 1854, at the behest of Sir John Franklin's widow Lady Jane, Dickens viciously attacked Arctic explorer John Rae in "Household Words" for his report to the Admiralty, based on interviews with local Inuit, that the members of Franklin's lost expedition had resorted to cannibalism. These attacks would later be expanded on his 1856 play "The Frozen Deep", which satirises Rae and the Inuit. Twentieth-century archaeology work in King William Island later confirmed that the members of the Franklin expedition resorted to cannibalism.
In 1855, when Dickens's good friend and Liberal MP Austen Henry Layard formed an Administrative Reform Association to demand significant reforms of Parliament, Dickens joined and volunteered his resources in support of Layard's cause. With the exception of Lord John Russell, who was the only leading politician in whom Dickens had any faith and to whom he later dedicated "A Tale of Two Cities", Dickens believed that the political aristocracy and their incompetence were the death of England. When he and Layard were accused of fomenting class conflict, Dickens replied that the classes were already in opposition and the fault was with the aristocratic class. Dickens used his pulpit in "Household Words" to champion the Reform Association. He also commented on foreign affairs, declaring his support for Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, helping raise funds for their campaigns and stating that "a united Italy would be of vast importance to the peace of the world, and would be a rock in Louis Napoleon's way," and that "I feel for Italy almost as if I were an Italian born." Dickens also published dozens of writings in "Household Words" supporting vaccination, including multiple laudations for vaccine pioneer Edward Jenner.
Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857, Dickens joined in the widespread criticism of the East India Company for its role in the event, but reserved his fury for Indians, wishing that he was the commander-in-chief in India so that he would be able to "do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested."
In 1857, Dickens hired professional actresses for "The Frozen Deep", which he and his protégé Wilkie Collins had written. Dickens fell in love with one of the actresses, Ellen Ternan, and this passion was to last the rest of his life. In 1858, when Dickens was 45 and Ternan 18, divorce would have been scandalous for someone of his fame. After publicly accusing Catherine of not loving their children and suffering from "a mental disorder"—statements that disgusted his contemporaries, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning—Dickens attempted to have Catherine institutionalised. When his scheme failed, they separated. Catherine left, never to see her husband again, taking with her one child. Her sister Georgina, who stayed at Gads Hill, raised the other children.
During this period, whilst pondering a project to give public readings for his own profit, Dickens was approached through a charitable appeal by Great Ormond Street Hospital to help it survive its first major financial crisis. His "Drooping Buds" essay in "Household Words" earlier on 3 April 1852 was considered by the hospital's founders to have been the catalyst for the hospital's success. Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked by his friend, the hospital's founder Charles West, to preside over the appeal, and he threw himself into the task, heart and soul. Dickens's public readings secured sufficient funds for an endowment to put the hospital on a sound financial footing; one reading on 9 February 1858 alone raised £3,000.
After separating from Catherine, Dickens undertook a series of popular and remunerative reading tours which, together with his journalism, were to absorb most of his creative energies for the next decade, in which he was to write only two novels. His first reading tour, lasting from April 1858 to February 1859, consisted of 129 appearances in 49 towns throughout England, Scotland and Ireland. Dickens's continued fascination with the theatrical world was written into the theatre scenes in "Nicholas Nickleby", and he found an outlet in public readings. In 1866, he undertook a series of public readings in England and Scotland, with more the following year in England and Ireland.
Other works soon followed, including "A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) and "Great Expectations" (1861), which were resounding successes. Set in London and Paris, "A Tale of Two Cities" is his best-known work of historical fiction and includes the famous opening sentence "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." It is regularly touted as one of the best-selling novels of all time. Themes in "Great Expectations" include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil.
In early September 1860, in a field behind Gads Hill, Dickens made a bonfire of most of his correspondence; he spared only letters on business matters. Since Ellen Ternan also destroyed all of his letters to her, the extent of the affair between the two remains speculative. In the 1930s, Thomas Wright recounted that Ternan had unburdened herself to a Canon Benham and gave currency to rumours they had been lovers. Dickens's daughter, Kate Perugini, stated that the two had a son who died in infancy to biographer Gladys Storey in an interview before the former's death in 1929. Storey published her account in "Dickens and Daughter", though no contemporary evidence was given. On his death, Dickens settled an annuity on Ternan which made her financially independent. Claire Tomalin's book "The Invisible Woman" argues that Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life. The book was turned into a play, "Little Nell", by Simon Gray, and a 2013 film. During the same period, Dickens furthered his interest in the paranormal, becoming one of the early members of The Ghost Club in London. In Christmas Eve of 1862, a theatrical production of his novella, "The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain", saw the first public demonstration of "Pepper's ghost"—a method of projecting the illusion of a ghost into a theatre (named after its developer John Henry Pepper)—which caused a sensation among those in attendance at the Regent Street theatre.
In June 1862, he was offered £10,000 for a reading tour of Australia. He was enthusiastic, and even planned a travel book, "The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down", but ultimately decided against the tour. Two of his sons, Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, migrated to Australia, Edward becoming a member of the Parliament of New South Wales as Member for Wilcannia between 1889 and 1894.
Later life.
On 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris with Ellen Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash in Kent. The train's first seven carriages plunged off a cast iron bridge that was under repair and ten passengers were killed. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track—which was left hanging precariously off the bridge—was the one in which Dickens was travelling. For three hours before rescuers arrived, Dickens tended and comforted the wounded and the dying with a flask of brandy and a hat refreshed with water. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for "Our Mutual Friend", and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it.
Dickens later used the experience of the crash as material for his short ghost story, "The Signal-Man", in which the central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail crash. He also based the story on several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash in Sussex of 1861. Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquest to avoid disclosing that he had been travelling with Ternan and her mother, which would have caused a scandal. After the crash, Dickens was nervous when travelling by train and would use alternative means when available. In 1868 he wrote, "I have sudden vague rushes of terror, even when riding in a hansom cab, which are perfectly unreasonable but quite insurmountable." Dickens's son, Henry, recalled, "I have seen him sometimes in a railway carriage when there was a slight jolt. When this happened he was almost in a state of panic and gripped the seat with both hands."
Second visit to the United States.
While he contemplated a second visit to the United States, the outbreak of the Civil War in America in 1861 delayed his plans. On 9 November 1867, over two years after the war, Dickens set sail from Liverpool for his second American reading tour. Landing in Boston, he devoted the rest of the month to a round of dinners with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his American publisher, James T. Fields. In early December, the readings began. He performed 76 readings, netting £19,000, from December 1867 to April 1868. Dickens shuttled between Boston and New York, where he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall. Although he had started to suffer from what he called the "true American catarrh", he kept to a schedule that would have challenged a much younger man, even managing to squeeze in some sleighing in Central Park.
During his travels, he saw a change in the people and the circumstances of America. His final appearance was at a banquet the American Press held in his honour at Delmonico's on 18 April, when he promised never to denounce America again. By the end of the tour Dickens could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. On 23 April he boarded the Cunard liner to return to Britain, barely escaping a federal tax lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.
Farewell readings.
In 1868–69, Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" in England, Scotland and Ireland, beginning on 6 October. He managed, of a contracted 100 readings, to give 75 in the provinces, with a further 12 in London. As he pressed on he was affected by giddiness and fits of paralysis. He had a stroke on 18 April 1869 in Chester. He collapsed on 22 April 1869, at Preston, Lancashire; on doctor's advice, the tour was cancelled. After further provincial readings were cancelled, he began work on his final novel, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood". Described as a "dark and gothic" tale, his unfinished novel focuses on Drood's uncle, John Jasper, a drug-addicted choirmaster. It was fashionable in the 1860s to 'do the slums' and, in company, Dickens visited opium dens in Shadwell in the East End of London, where he witnessed an elderly addict called "Laskar Sal", who formed the model for "Opium Sal" in "Edwin Drood".
After Dickens regained enough strength, he arranged, with medical approval, for a final series of readings to partly make up to his sponsors what they had lost due to his illness. There were 12 performances, on 11 January to 15 March 1870; the last at 8:00pm at St. James's Hall, London. Though in grave health by then, he read "A Christmas Carol" and "The Trial from Pickwick". On 2 May, he made his last public appearance at a Royal Academy banquet in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, paying a special tribute on the death of his friend, illustrator Daniel Maclise.
Death.
On 8 June 1870, Dickens had another stroke at his home after a full day's work on "Edwin Drood". He never regained consciousness. The next day, he died at Gads Hill Place. Biographer Claire Tomalin has suggested Dickens was actually in Peckham when he had had the stroke and his mistress Ellen Ternan and her maids had him taken back to Gads Hill so that the public would not know the truth about their relationship. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner", he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads:
<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world.
A letter from Dickens to the Clerk of the Privy Council in March indicates he had been offered and accepted a baronetcy, which was not gazetted before his death. His last words were "On the ground" in response to his sister-in-law Georgina's request that he lie down. On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens was buried in the Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley delivered a memorial elegy, lauding "the genial and loving humorist whom we now mourn", for showing by his own example "that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be innocent". Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the novelist's grave, Stanley assured those present that "the spot would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue."
In his will, drafted more than a year before his death, Dickens left the care of his £80,000 estate (£ in 2023) to his long-time colleague John Forster and his "best and truest friend" Georgina Hogarth who, along with Dickens's two sons, also received a tax-free sum of £8,000 (equivalent to £ in 2023). He confirmed his wife Catherine's annual allowance
of £600 (£ in 2023). He bequeathed £19 19s (£ in 2023) to each servant in his employment at the time of his death.
Literary style.
Dickens's approach to the novel is influenced by various things, including the picaresque novel tradition, melodrama and the novel of sensibility. According to Ackroyd, other than these, perhaps the most important literary influence on him was derived from the fables of "The Arabian Nights". Satire and irony are central to the picaresque novel. Comedy is also an aspect of the British picaresque novel tradition of Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett. Fielding's "Tom Jones" was a major influence on the 19th-century novelist including Dickens, who read it in his youth and named a son Henry Fielding Dickens after him. Influenced by Gothic fiction—a literary genre that began with "The Castle of Otranto" (1764) by Horace Walpole—Dickens incorporated Gothic imagery, settings and plot devices in his works. Victorian gothic moved from castles and abbeys into contemporary urban environments: in particular London, such as Dickens's "Oliver Twist" and "Bleak House". The jilted bride Miss Havisham from "Great Expectations" is one of Dickens's best-known gothic creations; living in a ruined mansion, her bridal gown effectively doubles as her funeral shroud.
No other writer had such a profound influence on Dickens as William Shakespeare. On Dickens's veneration of Shakespeare, Alfred Harbage wrote in "A Kind of Power: The Shakespeare-Dickens Analogy" (1975) that "No one is better qualified to recognise literary genius than a literary genius". Regarding Shakespeare as "the great master" whose plays "were an unspeakable source of delight", Dickens's lifelong affinity with the playwright included seeing theatrical productions of his plays in London and putting on amateur dramatics with friends in his early years. In 1838, Dickens travelled to Stratford-upon-Avon and visited the house in which Shakespeare was born, leaving his autograph in the visitors' book. Dickens would draw on this experience in his next work, "Nicholas Nickleby" (1838–39), expressing the strength of feeling experienced by visitors to Shakespeare's birthplace: the character Mrs Wititterly states, "I don't know how it is, but after you've seen the place and written your name in the little book, somehow or other you seem to be inspired; it kindles up quite a fire within one."
Dickens's writing style is marked by a profuse linguistic creativity. Satire, flourishing in his gift for caricature, is his forte. An early reviewer compared him to the artist and social critic Hogarth for his keen practical sense of the ludicrous side of life, though his acclaimed mastery of varieties of class idiom may in fact mirror the conventions of contemporary popular theatre. Dickens worked intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that would reverberate with associations for his readers and assist the development of motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an "allegorical impetus" to the novels' meanings. To cite one of numerous examples, the name Mr Murdstone in "David Copperfield" conjures up twin allusions to murder and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery—he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator"—are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy. On his ability to elicit a response from his works, English screenwriter Sarah Phelps writes, "He knew how to work an audience and how to get them laughing their heads off one minute or on the edge of their seats and holding their breath the next. The other thing about Dickens is that he loved telling stories and he loved his characters, even those horrible, mean-spirited ones."
The author worked closely with his illustrators, supplying them with a summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them. He briefed the illustrator on plans for each month's instalment so that work could begin before he wrote them. Marcus Stone, illustrator of "Our Mutual Friend", recalled that the author was always "ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ... life-history of the creations of his fancy". Dickens employs Cockney English in many of his works, denoting working-class Londoners. Cockney grammar appears in terms such as ain't, and consonants in words are frequently omitted, as in 'ere (here) and wot (what). An example of this usage is in "Oliver Twist". The Artful Dodger uses cockney slang which is juxtaposed with Oliver's 'proper' English, when the Dodger repeats Oliver saying "seven" with "sivin".
Characters.
Dickens's biographer Claire Tomalin regards him as the greatest creator of character in English fiction after Shakespeare.
Dickensian characters are amongst the most memorable in English literature, especially so because of their typically whimsical names. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley and Bob Cratchit ("A Christmas Carol"); Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin and Bill Sikes ("Oliver Twist"); Pip, Miss Havisham, Estella and Abel Magwitch ("Great Expectations"); Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay and Madame Defarge ("A Tale of Two Cities"); David Copperfield, Uriah Heep and Mr Micawber ("David Copperfield"); Daniel Quilp and Nell Trent ("The Old Curiosity Shop"), Samuel Pickwick and Sam Weller ("The Pickwick Papers"); and Wackford Squeers ("Nicholas Nickleby") are so well known as to be part and parcel of popular culture, and in some cases have passed into ordinary language: a "scrooge", for example, is a miser or someone who dislikes Christmas festivity.
His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. "Gamp" became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs Gamp, and "Pickwickian", "Pecksniffian" and "Gradgrind" all entered dictionaries due to Dickens's original portraits of such characters who were, respectively, quixotic, hypocritical and vapidly factual. The character that made Dickens famous, Sam Weller became known for his Wellerisms—one-liners that turn proverbs on their heads. Many were drawn from real life: Mrs Nickleby is based on his mother, although she did not recognise herself in the portrait, just as Mr Micawber is constructed from aspects of his father's 'rhetorical exuberance'; Harold Skimpole in "Bleak House" is based on James Henry Leigh Hunt; his wife's dwarfish chiropodist recognised herself in Miss Mowcher in "David Copperfield". Perhaps Dickens's impressions on his meeting with Hans Christian Andersen informed the delineation of Uriah Heep (a term synonymous with sycophant).
Virginia Woolf maintained that "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens" as he produces "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks". T. S. Eliot wrote that Dickens "excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings". One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. Dickens described London as a magic lantern, inspiring the places and people in many of his novels. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital—Dickens's London—are described over the course of his body of work. Walking the streets (particularly around London) formed an integral part of his writing life, stoking his creativity. Dickens was known to regularly walk at least a dozen miles (19 km) per day, and once wrote, "If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish."
Autobiographical elements.
Authors frequently draw their portraits of characters from people they have known in real life. "David Copperfield" is regarded by many as a veiled autobiography of Dickens. The scenes of interminable court cases and legal arguments in "Bleak House" reflect Dickens's experiences as a law clerk and court reporter, and in particular his direct experience of the law's procedural delay during 1844 when he sued publishers in Chancery for breach of copyright. Dickens's father was sent to prison for debt, and this became a common theme in many of his books, with the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in "Little Dorrit" resulting from Dickens's own experiences of the institution. Lucy Stroughill, a childhood sweetheart, may have affected several of Dickens's portraits of girls such as Little Em'ly in "David Copperfield" and Lucie Manette in "A Tale of Two Cities".
Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew the details of his early life until six years after his death, when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated. Though Skimpole brutally sends up Leigh Hunt, some critics have detected in his portrait features of Dickens's own character, which he sought to exorcise by self-parody.
Episodic writing.
A pioneer of the serial publication of narrative fiction, Dickens wrote most of his major novels in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as "Master Humphrey's Clock" and "Household Words", later reprinted in book form. These instalments made the stories affordable and accessible, with the audience more evenly distributed across income levels than before. His instalment format inspired a narrative that he would explore and develop throughout his career, and the regular cliffhangers made each new episode widely anticipated. When "The Old Curiosity Shop" was being serialised, American fans waited at the docks in New York harbour, shouting out to the crew of an incoming British ship, "Is little Nell dead?" Dickens was able to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end. He wrote, "The thing has to be planned for presentation in these fragments, and yet for afterwards fusing together as an uninterrupted whole."
Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers and friends. His friend Forster had a significant hand in reviewing his drafts, an influence that went beyond matters of punctuation; he toned down melodramatic and sensationalist exaggerations, cut long passages (such as the episode of Quilp's drowning in "The Old Curiosity Shop"), and made suggestions about plot and character. It was he who suggested that Charley Bates should be redeemed in "Oliver Twist". Dickens had not thought of killing Little Nell and it was Forster who advised him to entertain this possibility as necessary to his conception of the heroine. When in 1863 Jewish English reader Eliza Davis wrote to rebuke him for having "encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew" with the character of Fagin in "Oliver Twist", Dickens halted the second printing of the novel and made some changes to the original 1837 text. He also created a group of sympathetic Jewish characters in his next novel, "Our Mutual Friend", published 1864–1865.
At the helm in popularising cliffhangers and serial publications in Victorian literature, Dickens's influence can also be seen in television soap operas and film series, with "The Guardian" stating that "the DNA of Dickens's busy, episodic storytelling, delivered in instalments and rife with cliffhangers and diversions, is traceable in everything." His serialisation of his novels also drew comments from other writers. In Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson's novel "The Wrecker", Captain Nares, investigating an abandoned ship, remarked: "See! They were writing up the log," said Nares, pointing to the ink-bottle. "Caught napping, as usual. I wonder if there ever was a captain yet that lost a ship with his log-book up to date? He generally has about a month to fill up on a clean break, like Charles Dickens and his serial novels."
Social commentary.
Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. Simon Callow states, "From the moment he started to write, he spoke for the people, and the people loved him for it." He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. In a New York address, he expressed his belief that "Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen". Dickens's second novel, "Oliver Twist" (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime: it challenged middle class polemics about criminals, making impossible any pretence to ignorance about what poverty entailed. Today, "Dickensian" is a term applied to insanitary social conditions or grim institutions akin to those denounced by Dickens in his work, with Oxford professor Peter Conrad writing, "Dickens, like Banksy, writes blackly prophetic graffiti on the wall."
At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged within society. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues—such as sanitation and the workhouse—but his fiction probably demonstrated its greatest prowess in changing public opinion in regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and oppression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of this condition is in "Hard Times" (1854), Dickens's only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In this work, he uses vitriol and satire to illustrate how this marginalised social stratum was termed "Hands" by the factory owners; that is, not really "people" but rather only appendages of the machines they operated. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address such problems of class oppression. For example, the prison scenes in "The Pickwick Papers" are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. Karl Marx asserted that Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together". George Bernard Shaw even remarked that "Great Expectations" was more seditious than Marx's "Das Kapital". The exceptional popularity of Dickens's novels, even those with socially oppositional themes ("Bleak House", 1853; "Little Dorrit", 1857; "Our Mutual Friend", 1865), not only underscored his ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also ensured that the Victorian public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored. "Bleak House", a satire of protracted legal cases with "Jarndyce and Jarndyce"—a fictional long-running Chancery case which has been cited by courts as a symbol of a legal case that interminably drags on—the central plot of the novel, helped support a judicial reform movement that culminated in the enactment of legal reform in England in the 1870s.
It has been argued that his technique of flooding his narratives with an 'unruly superfluity of material' that, in the gradual dénouement, yields up an unsuspected order, influenced the organisation of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species".
Literary techniques.
Dickens is often described as using idealised characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and the ugly social truths he reveals. The story of Nell Trent in "The Old Curiosity Shop" (1841) was received as extremely moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde. "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell", he said in a famous remark, "without dissolving into tears ... of laughter." G. K. Chesterton stated, "It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell, that I object to", arguing that the maudlin effect of his description of her life owed much to the gregarious nature of Dickens's grief, his "despotic" use of people's feelings to move them to tears in works like this.
The question as to whether Dickens belongs to the tradition of the sentimental novel is debatable. Valerie Purton, in her book "Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition", sees him continuing aspects of this tradition, and argues that his "sentimental scenes and characters [are] as crucial to the overall power of the novels as his darker or comic figures and scenes", and that ""Dombey and Son" is [ ... ] Dickens's greatest triumph in the sentimentalist tradition". The "Encyclopædia Britannica" online comments that, despite "patches of emotional excess", such as the reported death of Tiny Tim in "A Christmas Carol" (1843), "Dickens cannot really be termed a sentimental novelist".
In "Oliver Twist", Dickens provides readers with an idealised portrait of a boy so inherently and unrealistically good that his values are never subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a gang of young pickpockets. While later novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in "Bleak House" and Amy Dorrit in "Little Dorrit"), this idealism serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant social commentary. Dickens's fiction, reflecting what he believed to be true of his own life, makes frequent use of coincidence, either for comic effect or to emphasise the idea of providence. For example, Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper-class family that rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group. Such coincidences are a staple of 18th-century picaresque novels, such as Henry Fielding's "Tom Jones," which Dickens enjoyed reading as a youth.
Reputation.
Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time, and remains one of the best-known and most-read of English authors. His works have never gone out of print, and have been adapted continually for the screen since the invention of cinema, with at least 200 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens's works documented. Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime—early productions included "The Haunted Man" which was performed in the West End's Adelphi Theatre in 1848—and, as early as 1901, the British silent film "Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost" was made by Walter R. Booth. Contemporaries such as publisher Edward Lloyd cashed in on Dickens's popularity with cheap imitations of his novels, resulting in his own popular 'penny dreadfuls'.
Dickens created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest British novelist of the Victorian era. From the beginning of his career in the 1830s, his achievements in English literature were compared to those of Shakespeare. Dickens's literary reputation, however, began to decline with the publication of "Bleak House" in 1852–53. Philip Collins calls "Bleak House" "a crucial item in the history of Dickens's reputation. Reviewers and literary figures during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, saw a 'drear decline' in Dickens, from a writer of 'bright sunny comedy ... to dark and serious social' commentary". "The Spectator" called "Bleak House" "a heavy book to read through at once ... dull and wearisome as a serial"; Richard Simpson, in "The Rambler", characterised "Hard Times" as "this dreary framework"; "Fraser's Magazine" thought "Little Dorrit" "decidedly the worst of his novels". All the same, despite these "increasing reservations amongst reviewers and the chattering classes, 'the public never deserted its favourite'". Dickens's popular reputation remained unchanged, sales continued to rise, and "Household Words" and later "All the Year Round" were highly successful.
As his career progressed, Dickens's fame and the demand for his public readings were unparalleled. In 1868, "The Times" wrote, "Amid all the variety of 'readings', those of Mr Charles Dickens stand alone." A Dickens biographer, Edgar Johnson, wrote: "It was [always] more than a reading; it was an extraordinary exhibition of acting that seized upon its auditors with a mesmeric possession." Author David Lodge called him the "first writer to be an object of unrelenting public interest and adulation". Juliet John backed the claim for Dickens "to be called the first self-made global media star of the age of mass culture". The word "celebrity" first appeared in the "Oxford English Dictionary" in 1851, and the BBC states "Charles Dickens was one of the first figures to be called one". Comparing his reception at public readings to those of a contemporary pop star—the BBC compared his reception in the US to The Beatles—"The Guardian" states, "People sometimes fainted at his shows. His performances even saw the rise of that modern phenomenon, the 'speculator' or ticket tout (scalpers)—the ones in New York City escaped detection by borrowing respectable-looking hats from the waiters in nearby restaurants."
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"Dickens's vocal impersonations of his own characters gave this truth a theatrical form: the public reading tour. No other Victorian could match him for celebrity, earnings, and sheer vocal artistry. The Victorians craved the author's multiple voices: between 1853 and his death in 1870, Dickens performed about 470 times."
—Peter Garratt in "The Guardian" on Dickens's fame and the demand for his public readings
Among fellow writers, there was a range of opinions on Dickens. Poet laureate, William Wordsworth (1770–1850), thought him a "very talkative, vulgar young person", adding he had not read a line of his work, while novelist George Meredith (1828–1909), found Dickens "intellectually lacking". In 1888, Leslie Stephen commented in the "Dictionary of National Biography" that "if literary fame could be safely measured by popularity with the half-educated, Dickens must claim the highest position among English novelists". Anthony Trollope's "Autobiography" famously declared Thackeray, not Dickens, to be the greatest novelist of the age. However, both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were admirers. Dostoyevsky commented: "We understand Dickens in Russia, I am convinced, almost as well as the English, perhaps even with all the nuances. It may well be that we love him no less than his compatriots do. And yet how original is Dickens, and how very English!" Tolstoy referred to "David Copperfield" as his favourite book, and he later adopted the novel as "a model for his own autobiographical reflections". French writer Jules Verne called Dickens his favourite writer, writing his novels "stand alone, dwarfing all others by their amazing power and felicity of expression". Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was inspired by Dickens's novels in several of his paintings, such as "Vincent's Chair", and in an 1889 letter to his sister stated that reading Dickens, especially "A Christmas Carol", was one of the things that was keeping him from committing suicide. Oscar Wilde generally disparaged his depiction of character, while admiring his gift for caricature. Henry James denied him a premier position, calling him "the greatest of superficial novelists": Dickens failed to endow his characters with psychological depth, and the novels, "loose baggy monsters", betrayed a "cavalier organisation". Joseph Conrad described his own childhood in bleak Dickensian terms, noting he had "an intense and unreasoning affection" for "Bleak House" dating back to his boyhood. The novel influenced his own gloomy portrait of London in "The Secret Agent" (1907). Virginia Woolf had a love-hate relationship with Dickens, finding his novels "mesmerizing" while reproving him for his sentimentalism and a commonplace style.
Around 1940–41, the attitude of the literary critics began to warm towards Dickens—led by George Orwell in "Inside the Whale and Other Essays" (March 1940), Edmund Wilson in "The Wound and the Bow" (1941) and Humphry House in "Dickens and His World". However, even in 1948, F. R. Leavis, in "The Great Tradition", asserted that "the adult mind doesn't as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness"; Dickens was indeed a great genius, "but the genius was that of a great entertainer", though he later changed his opinion with "Dickens the Novelist" (1970, with Q. D. (Queenie) Leavis): "Our purpose", they wrote, "is to enforce as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers". In 1944, Soviet film director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein wrote an essay on Dickens's influence on cinema, such as cross-cutting—where two stories run alongside each other, as seen in novels such as "Oliver Twist".
In the 1950s, "a substantial reassessment and re-editing of the works began, and critics found his finest artistry and greatest depth to be in the later novels: "Bleak House", "Little Dorrit" and "Great Expectations"—and (less unanimously) in "Hard Times" and "Our Mutual Friend"". Dickens was among the favourite authors of Roald Dahl; the best-selling children's author would include three of Dickens's novels among those read by the title character in his 1988 novel "Matilda". In 2005, Paul McCartney, an avid reader of Dickens, named "Nicholas Nickleby" his favourite novel. On Dickens he states, "I like the world that he takes me to. I like his words; I like the language", adding, "A lot of my stuff—it's kind of Dickensian." Screenwriter Jonathan Nolan's screenplay for "The Dark Knight Rises" (2012) was inspired by "A Tale of Two Cities", with Nolan calling the depiction of Paris in the novel "one of the most harrowing portraits of a relatable, recognisable civilisation that completely folded to pieces". On 7 February 2012, the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, Philip Womack wrote in "The Telegraph": "Today there is no escaping Charles Dickens. Not that there has ever been much chance of that before. He has a deep, peculiar hold upon us".
Legacy.
Museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and works exist in many places with which Dickens was associated. These include the Charles Dickens Museum in London, the historic home where he wrote "Oliver Twist", "The Pickwick Papers" and "Nicholas Nickleby"; and the Charles Dickens' Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth, the house in which he was born. The original manuscripts of many of his novels, as well as printers' proofs, first editions and illustrations from the collection of Dickens's friend John Forster are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dickens's will stipulated that no memorial be erected in his honour; nonetheless, a life-size bronze statue of Dickens entitled "Dickens and Little Nell", cast in 1890 by Francis Edwin Elwell, stands in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Another life-size statue of Dickens is located at Centennial Park in Sydney, Australia. In 1960 a bas-relief sculpture of Dickens, notably featuring characters from his books, was commissioned from sculptor Estcourt J Clack to adorn the office building built on the site of his former home at 1 Devonshire Terrace, London. In 2014, a life-size statue was unveiled near his birthplace in Portsmouth on the 202nd anniversary of his birth; this was supported by his great-great-grandsons, Ian and Gerald Dickens.
"A Christmas Carol" is most probably his best-known story, with frequent new adaptations. It is also the most-filmed of Dickens's stories, with many versions dating from the early years of cinema. According to the historian Ronald Hutton, the current state of the observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by "A Christmas Carol". Dickens catalysed the emerging Christmas as a family-centred festival of generosity, in contrast to the dwindling community-based and church-centred observations, as new middle-class expectations arose. Its archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) entered into Western cultural consciousness. "Merry Christmas", a prominent phrase from the tale, was popularised following the appearance of the story. The term Scrooge became a synonym for miser, and his exclamation "Bah! Humbug!'", a dismissal of the festive spirit, likewise gained currency as an idiom. The Victorian era novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called the book "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness".
Dickens was commemorated on the £10 note issued by the Bank of England that circulated between 1992 and 2003. His portrait appeared on the reverse of the note accompanied by a scene from "The Pickwick Papers". The Charles Dickens School is a high school in Broadstairs, Kent. A theme park, Dickens World, was open in Chatham from 2007 to 2016. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth in 2012, the Museum of London held the UK's first major exhibition on the author in 40 years. In 2002, Dickens was number 41 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. American literary critic Harold Bloom placed Dickens among the . In the 2003 UK survey The Big Read carried out by the BBC, five of Dickens's books were named in the Top 100.
Actors who have portrayed Dickens on screen include Anthony Hopkins, Derek Jacobi, Simon Callow, Dan Stevens and Ralph Fiennes, the latter playing the author in "The Invisible Woman" (2013) which depicts Dickens's alleged secret love affair with Ellen Ternan which lasted for thirteen years until his death in 1870.
Dickens and his publications have appeared on a number of postage stamps in countries including: the United Kingdom (1970, 1993, 2011 and 2012 issued by the Royal Mail—their 2012 collection marked the bicentenary of Dickens's birth), the Soviet Union (1962), Antigua, Barbuda, Botswana, Cameroon, Dubai, Fujairah, St Lucia and Turks and Caicos Islands (1970), St Vincent (1987), Nevis (2007), Alderney, Gibraltar, Jersey and Pitcairn Islands (2012), Austria (2013) and Mozambique (2014). In 1976, a crater on the planet Mercury was named in his honour.
In November 2018 it was reported that a previously lost portrait of a 31-year-old Dickens, by Margaret Gillies, had been found in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Gillies was an early supporter of women's suffrage and had painted the portrait in late 1843 when Dickens, aged 31, wrote "A Christmas Carol". It was exhibited, to acclaim, at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1844. The Charles Dickens Museum is reported to have paid £180,000 for the portrait.
Works.
Dickens published 15 major novels, several novellas, a large number of short stories (including a number of Christmas-themed stories), a handful of plays, and several non-fiction books.
Novels and novellas.
Dickens's novels and novellas were initially published in weekly and monthly magazines, the novels in serial format, then reprinted in standard book formats.
Notes.
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References.
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Sources.
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Further reading.
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