Quick, in which Charles Dickens novel does the following character appear?
He is a small boy of 11, delicate of frame, sensitive in nature, forced to work inhumane hours in a shoe-blacking factory around 1823. When his overseer is not around to beat and abuse him, he works with grimy fingers while tears fall down on the greasy machinery in this dark hell-hole, and perhaps his sobs drift out onto cobbled streets and down over the River Thames. He is quick of wit, a bright little soul, cast into despair and misfortune after his father is thrown into debtor's prison. His mother, who has other, even smaller children, is torn from previous middle-class comfort into abject poverty and often has nothing to feed her family in the slum where they now live.
Meanwhile, our little black-smeared hero, bruised as he is, weeping over his merciless fortune, sends home to this mother the miserable six shillings he earns working six days a week from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. under intolerable conditions, with a half hour respite for tea and an hour in which to eat his wretched dinner. From this misery, our little hero eventually breaks free through hard work, thrift, honesty, and a bit of good fortune and achieves fortune and fame--all in the finest tradition of Charles Dickens's literary heroes.
If you guessed that this little fellow was the real-life Charles Dickens, congratulations. If you guessed that it might be one of his characters like David Copperfield or Oliver Twist, congratulations again--because Dickens wrote his immortal characters from the truest source of all: his own life's story.
Just as Gustave Flaubert wrote of his heroine in a different milieu of despair two or three generations later ("Madame Bovary--c'est moi") so Dickens might well have said: "I am David Copperfield and Oliver Twist."
By age 24, he was nationally famous as the up and coming young author of The Pickwick Papers. But he would never forget the trauma of his early life, and in time he became not only the most famous of all English-language novelists, but also one of the premier investigative reporters of his time.
If you enjoy Sixty Minutes, Geraldo, and some of the other best known names in modern day investigative reporting, and assuming you might have been a person of some leisure back in early Victorian times, you would have loved picking up the latest copy of The Morning Chronicle, The Times, or Mirror of Parliament to read at home by candle-light or by your oil lamp. To be precise: Victoria reigned 1837 to 1901, and we're talking Pickwick in 1836, so effectively Dickens came into his own almost the same year that the young queen came to power. Gaslight didn't come to London until the 1880s, the time of Jack the Ripper, when Dickens was already gone, but Victoria was still queen.
Because of his difficult and tragic early life, Dickens had first-hand knowledge and a paramount understanding of the misery of London's working poor. In the broader sense, he became a voice of the social conscience when the Industrial Revolution was uprooting the old rural folkways and pouring millions of destitute and often illiterate workers into the smoggy and teeming new urban centers.
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