Agatha Christie

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="284"]<img alt="" height="400" src="http://flappinessis.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/agatha_christie_portrait.jpg" width="284" /> Agatha Christie[/caption]<br/><br/>Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, DBE (15 September 1890 - 12 January 1976) was an English crime novelist, short story writer, and playwright. She also wrote six romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best known for the 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections she wrote under her own name, most of which revolve around the investigations of such characters as Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple and Tommy and Tuppence. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, The Mousetrap.<br/><br/>Born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, Christie served in a hospital during the First World War, before marrying and starting a family in London. She was initially unsuccessful at getting her work published; but in 1920 The Bodley Head press published her novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring the character of Poirot. This launched her literary career.<br/><br/>The Guinness Book of World Records lists Christie as the best-selling novelist of all time. Her novels have sold roughly 4 billion copies, and her estate claims that her works come third in the rankings of the world's most-widely published books, behind Shakespeare's works and the Bible. According to Index Translationum, Christie is the most-translated individual author - having been translated into at least 103 languages. And Then There Were None is Christie's best-selling novel with 100 million sales to date, making it the world's best-selling mystery ever, and one of the best-selling books of all time.  In 1971, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. In 2013, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was voted the best crime novel ever by 600 fellow writers of the Crime Writers' Association.<br/><br/>Christie's stage play The Mousetrap holds the record for the longest initial run: it opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in London on 25 November 1952 and as of 2012 is still running after more than 25,000 performances. In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's highest honour, the Grand Master Award, and in the same year Witness for the Prosecution was given an Edgar Award by the MWA for Best Play. Most of her books and short stories have been adapted for television, radio, video games and comics, and more than thirty feature films have been based on her work.<br/><h2>Life and career</h2><br/><h3>Childhood: 1890 - 1910</h3><br/>Agatha-Mary Clarissa Christie was born on 15 September 1890 into a wealthy upper middle-class family in Ashfield, Torquay, Devon in South West England. Christie's mother, Clara Boehmer, was an Englishwoman who had been born in Belfast, modern-day Northern Ireland, in 1854 to Captain Frederick Boehmer and Mary Ann West; the couple's only daughter, she had four brothers, one of whom died young. Captain Boehmer was killed in a riding accident while stationed on Jersey in April 1863, leaving Mary Ann to raise her children alone on a meagre income. Under financial strain, she sent Clara to live with her aunt Margaret Miller née West, who had married wealthy American Nathaniel Frary Miller in 1863 and lived in Prinsted, West Sussex. Clara stayed with Margaret, and there she would meet her future husband, an American stockbroker named Frederick Alvah Miller, who was the son of Nathaniel. Frederick was a member of the small and wealthy American upper class, and had been sent to Europe to gain an education in Switzerland. Considered personable and friendly by those who knew him, he soon developed a romantic relationship with Clara, and they were married in April 1878.Their first child, Margaret "Madge" Frary Miller (1879 - 1950) was born in Torquay, where the couple were renting lodgings, while their second, Louis "Monty" Montant (1880 - 1929) was born in the U.S. state of New York, where Frederick was on a business trip. Clara soon purchased a villa in Torquay, named "Ashfield", in which to raise her family, and it was here that her third and final child, Agatha, was born.<br/><br/>Christie would describe her childhood as "very happy", and was surrounded by a series of strong and independent women from an early age. Her time was spent alternating between her Devonshire home, her step grandmother/aunt's house in Ealing, West London and parts of Southern Europe, where her family would holiday during the winter. Nominally Christian, she was also raised in a household with various esoteric beliefs, and like her siblings believed that their mother Clara was a psychic with the ability of second sight. Her mother insisted that she receive a home education, and so her parents were responsible for teaching her to read and write, and to be able to perform basic arithmetic, a subject that she particularly enjoyed. They also taught her about music, and she learned to play both the piano and the mandolin. A voracious reader from an early age, among her earliest memories were those of reading the children's books written by Mrs Molesworth, including The Adventures of Herr Baby (1881), Christmas Tree Land (1897) and The Magic Nuts (1898). She also read the work of Edith Nesbit, including The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1903) and The Railway Children (1906). When a little older she moved on to reading the surreal verse of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Much of her childhood was spent largely alone and separate from other children, although she spent much time with her pets, whom she adored. Eventually making friends with a group of other girls in Torquay, she noted that "one of the highlights of my existence" was her appearance with them in a youth production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeomen of the Guard, in which she played the hero, Colonel Fairfax. This was to be her last operatic role, for as she later wrote, "an experience that you really enjoyed should never be repeated."<br/><br/>Her father was often ill, suffering from a series of heart attacks, and in November 1901 he died, aged 55. His death left the family devastated, and in an uncertain economic situation. Clara and Agatha continued to live together in their Torquay home; Madge had moved to the nearby Cheadle Hall with her new husband and Monty had joined the army and been sent to South Africa to fight in the Boer War. Agatha would later claim that her father's death, occurring when she was 11 years old, marked the end of her childhood for her. In 1902, Agatha would be sent to receive a formal education at Miss Guyer's Girls School in Torquay, but found it difficult to adjust to the disciplined atmosphere. In 1905 she was then sent to the city of Paris, France, where she was educated in three pensions  - Mademoiselle Cabernet's, Les Marroniers and then Miss Dryden's - the latter of which served primarily as a finishing school.<br/><h3>Early literary attempts and the First World War: 1910 - 1919</h3><br/>Returning to England in 1910, Agatha found that her mother Clara was ill. They decided to spend time together in the warmer climate of Cairo, then a popular tourist destination for wealthy Britons; staying for three months at the Gezirah Palace Hotel. Agatha - always chaperoned by her mother  - attended many social functions in search of a husband. She visited such ancient Egyptian monuments as the Great Pyramid of Giza, but did not exhibit the great interest in archaeology and Egyptology that became prominent in her later years.<br/><br/>Returning to Britain, she continued her social activities. Writing and performing in amateur theatrics, she also helped put on a play called The Blue Beard of Unhappiness with female friends. Her writing extended to both poetry and music. Some early works saw publication, but she decided against focusing on either of these as future professions.<br/><br/>While recovering in bed from illness she penned her first short story - "The House of Beauty". This was about 6000 words on the world of "madness and dreams", a subject of fascination for her. Biographer Janet Morgan later commented that despite "infelicities of style", the story was nevertheless "compelling". Other shorts followed, most of them illustrating her interest in spiritualism and the paranormal. These included "The Call of Wings" and "The Little Lonely God". Various magazines rejected all her early submissions, made under pseudonyms, although some were revised and published later, often with new titles.<br/><br/>Christie then set her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, in Cairo, and drew from her recent experiences in that city. Under the pseudonym Monosyllaba, she was perturbed when various publishers all declined. Clara suggested that her daughter ask for advice from a family friend and neighbour, the successful writer Eden Philpotts. Philpotts obliged her enquiry, encouraged her writing, and sent her an introduction to his literary agent, Hughes Massie. However, he too rejected Snow Upon the Desert, and suggested a second novel.<br/><br/>Meanwhile, Christie continued searching for a husband, and entered into short-lived relationships with four separate men and an engagement with another. She then met Archibald "Archie" Christie (1889 - 1962) at a dance given by Lord and Lady Clifford of Chudleigh, about 12 miles (19 kilometres) from Torquay. Archie had been born in India, the son of a judge in the Indian Civil Service. In England he joined the air service, stationed at Devon in 1912. The couple quickly fell in love. Upon learning he would be stationed in Farnborough, Archie proposed marriage, and Agatha accepted.<br/><br/>1914 saw the outbreak of World War I, and Archie was sent to France to do battle with the German forces. Agatha also involved herself in the war effort, joining the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) and attending to wounded soldiers at the hospital in Torquay. In this position she was responsible for aiding the doctors and maintaining morale; performing 3,400 hours of unpaid work between October 1914 and December 1916. As a dispenser, she finally earned £16 yearly until the end of her service in September 1918.<br/><br/>She met her fiancé Archie in London during his leave at the end of 1914, and they married on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. They met throughout the war every time he was posted home. Rising through the ranks, he was eventually stationed back to Britain in September 1918 as a colonel in the Air Ministry. They settled into a flat at 5 Northwick Terrace in St. John's Wood, Northwest London.<br/><h3>First novels: 1919 - 1923</h3><br/>Christie had long been a fan of detective novels, having enjoyed Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White and The Moonstone as well as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's early Sherlock Holmes stories. She wrote her own detective novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles featuring Hercule Poirot; portrayed as a former Belgian police officer noted for his twirly large "magnificent moustaches" and egg-shaped head, who took refuge in Britain after Germany had invaded Belgium. Christie's inspiration for this stemmed from real Belgian refugees who existed in Torquay.<br/><br/>The Styles manuscript was not accepted by such publishing companies as Hodder and Stoughton and Methuen. However, John Lane at The Bodley Head kept the submission for several months, then offered to accept it provided Christie change the ending. She duly did so, and then signed a contract that she later felt was exploitative. Christie meanwhile settled into married life, giving birth to daughter Rosalind at Ashfield in August 1919, where the couple - having few friends in London  - spent much of their time. Archie left the Air Force at the end of the war and started working in the City financial sector at a relatively low salary, though they still employed a maid.<br/><br/>Christie's second novel, The Secret Adversary (1922), featured a new detective couple Tommy and Tuppence. Again published by The Bodley Head, it earned her £50. A third novel again featured Poirot, Murder on the Links (1923), as did short stories commissioned by Bruce Ingram, editor of Sketch magazine. In order to tour the world promoting the British Empire Exhibition the couple left their daughter Rosalind with Agatha's mother and sister then travelled to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii. They learned to surf prone in South Africa, then in Waikiki were among the first Britons to surf standing up.<br/><h3>Disappearance</h3><br/>In late 1926, Archie asked Agatha for a divorce. He was in love with Nancy Neele, who had been a friend of Major Belcher, director of the British Empire Mission, on the promotional tour a few years earlier. On 3 December 1926, the Christies quarrelled, and Archie left their house, Styles, in Sunningdale, Berkshire, to spend the weekend with his mistress at Godalming, Surrey. That same evening, around 9.45 pm, Christie disappeared from her home, leaving behind a letter for her secretary saying that she was going to Yorkshire.<br/><br/>Her car, a Morris Cowley, was later found at Newlands Corner, by a lake near Guildford, with an expired driving licence and clothes. Her disappearance caused an outcry from the public. The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, pressured police, and a newspaper offered £100 reward.<br/><br/>Over a thousand police officers, 15,000 volunteers and several aeroplanes scoured the rural landscape. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even gave a spirit medium one of Christie's gloves to find the missing woman. Dorothy L Sayers visited the house in Surrey, later using the scenario in her book Unnatural Death.<br/><br/>Christie's disappearance featured on the front page of The New York Times. Despite the extensive manhunt, she was not found for 10 days. On 14 December 1926, Agatha Christie was found at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel (now the Old Swan Hotel)  in Harrogate, Yorkshire, registered as Mrs Teresa Neele from Cape Town.<br/><br/>Christie's autobiography makes no reference to her disappearance. Although two doctors diagnosed her as suffering from amnesia, opinion remains divided as to why she disappeared. She was known to be in a depressed state from literary overwork, her mother's death earlier that year and her husband's infidelity. Public reaction at the time was largely negative, supposing a publicity stunt or attempt to frame her husband for murder.<br/><br/>The 1979 Michael Apted film Agatha features a disclaimer in the opening credits stating that what follows is an imaginary solution to an authentic mystery. The film stars Vanessa Redgrave, Dustin Hoffman and Timothy Dalton and depicts Christie planning suicide in such a way as to frame her husband's mistress for her "murder". An American reporter, played by Hoffman, follows her closely and stops the plan. The film outraged Christie's heirs who fought two unsuccessful lawsuits in America in an attempt to prevent the film from being distributed.<br/><br/>Author Jared Cade interviewed numerous witnesses and relatives for his sympathetic biography, Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days, revised 2011. He provided substantial evidence to suggest she planned the event to embarrass her husband, never supposing the resulting escalated melodrama.<br/><br/>The Christies divorced in 1928, and Archie married Nancy Neele. Agatha retained custody of daughter Rosalind, and the Christie name for her writing. During their marriage, she published six novels, a collection of short stories, and a number of short stories in magazines.<br/><h3>Second marriage and later life</h3><br/>In 1930 Christie married archaeologist Max Mallowan, having met him in an archaeological dig. Their marriage was always happy, and it continued until Christie's death in 1976. Max introduced her to wine, which she never enjoyed  - preferring to drink water in restaurants. She tried unsuccessfully to make herself like cigarettes by smoking one after lunch and one after dinner every day for six months.<br/><br/>Christie frequently used settings that were familiar to her for her stories. Her travels with Mallowan contributed background to several of her novels set in the Middle East. Other novels (such as And Then There Were None) were set in and around Torquay, where she was raised. Christie's 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express was written in the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, Turkey, the southern terminus of the railway. The hotel maintains Christie's room as a memorial to the author. The Greenway Estate in Devon, acquired by the couple as a summer residence in 1938, is now in the care of the National Trust.<br/><br/>Christie often stayed at Abney Hall in Cheshire, owned by her brother-in-law, James Watts, basing at least two stories there: a short story "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding", in the story collection of the same name, and the novel After the Funeral. "Abney became Agatha's greatest inspiration for country-house life, with all its servants and grandeur being woven into her plots. The descriptions of the fictional Chimneys, Stoneygates, and other houses in her stories are mostly Abney in various forms."<br/><br/>During the Second World War, Christie worked in the pharmacy at University College Hospital, London, where she acquired a knowledge of poisons that she put to good use in her post-war crime novels. For example, the use of thallium as a poison was suggested to her by UCH Chief Pharmacist Harold Davis (later appointed Chief Pharmacist at the UK Ministry of Health), and in The Pale Horse, published in 1961, she employed it to dispatch a series of victims, the first clue to the murder method coming from the victims' loss of hair. So accurate was her description of thallium poisoning that on at least one occasion it helped solve a case that was baffling doctors.<br/><br/>Christie lived in Chelsea, first in Cresswell Place and later in Sheffield Terrace. Both properties are now marked by blue plaques.<br/><br/>Around 1941 - 1942, the British intelligence agency MI5 investigated Agatha Christie. A character called Major Bletchley appeared in her 1941 thriller N or M?, a story that features a hunt for two of Hitler's top secret spy agents in Britain. MI5 was afraid that Christie had a spy in Britain's top-secret codebreaking centre, Bletchley Park. The agency's fears were allayed when Christie commented to codebreaker Dilly Knox that Bletchley was simply the name of "one of my least lovable characters."<br/><br/>To honour her many literary works, she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1956 New Year Honours. The next year, she became the President of the Detection Club. In the 1971 New Year Honours, she was promoted Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, three years after her husband had been knighted for his archaeological work in 1968. They were one of the few married couples where both partners were honoured in their own right. From 1968, owing to her husband's knighthood, Christie could also be styled Lady Mallowan.<br/><br/>From 1971 to 1974, Christie's health began to fail, although she continued to write. In 1975, sensing her increasing weakness, Christie signed over the rights of her most successful play, The Mousetrap, to her grandson. Recently, using experimental textual tools of analysis, Canadian researchers have suggested that Christie may have begun to suffer from Alzheimer's disease or other dementia.<br/><br/>Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976 at age 85 from natural causes at her Winterbrook House in the north of Cholsey parish, adjoining Wallingford in Oxfordshire (formerly part of Berkshire). She is buried in the nearby churchyard of St Mary's, Cholsey. She was survived by her only child, Rosalind Margaret Hicks.<br/><h3>Agatha Christie's estate and subsequent ownership of works</h3><br/>During Agatha Christie's life, she had set up a private company, Agatha Christie Limited to hold the rights to her works, and around 1959 she had also transferred her 278 acre home, Greenway Estate, to her daughter Rosalind. In 1968, when she was almost 80 years old, she sold a 51% stake in Agatha Christie Limited (and therefore the works it owned) to Booker Books (better known as Booker Author's Division), a subsidiary of the British food and transport conglomerate Booker-McConnell (now Booker Group), the founder of the Booker Prize for literature, which later increased its stake to 64%. Agatha Christie Limited remains the owner of the worldwide rights for over 80 of Christie's novels and short stories, 19 plays and nearly 40 TV films.<br/><br/>After her death in 1976, Christie's remaining 36% share of the company was additionally inherited by Rosalind, who passionately preserved her mother's works, image and legacy until her own death 28 years later. The family's share of the company allowed them to appoint 50% of the board and the chairman, and thereby to retain a veto over new treatments, updated versions, and republications, of her works. In 1993 Rosalind founded the Agatha Christie Society and became its first president. In 2004 her obituary in The Telegraph commented that Rosalind had been "determined to remain true to her mother's vision and to protect the integrity of her creations" and disapproved of "merchandising" activities. On Rosalind's death - also at age 85 (28 October 2004 in Torbay, Devon, from natural causes) - both this and the Greenway Estate passed to Christie's grandson Matthew Pritchard, who in 2000 gifted Greenway - both house and contents - to the National Trust. Christie's family and family trusts, including Prichard, continue to own the remaining 36% stake in Agatha Christie Limited, and remain associated with the company. In particular Prichard remains as the company's chairman, and also in his own right holds the copyright to some of his grandmother's later literary works (including The Mousetrap).<br/><br/>In 1998, Booker sold a number of its non-food assets to focus on its core business. As part of that, its shares in Agatha Christie Limited (at the time earning £2.1m annual revenue) were sold for £10m to Chorion, a major international media company whose portfolio of well known authors' works also included the literary estates of Enid Blyton and Dennis Wheatley. However in February 2012, Chorion found itself in financial difficulties some years after a management buy-out, and began to sell off their literary assets on the market, selling their stake in Christie’s estate (specifically, their 64% stake in Agatha Christie Limited) to the current owner Acorn Media UK (part of RLJ Entertainment, Inc. and the RLJ Companies, owned by American entrepreneur Robert L. Johnson) during that same month.<br/><br/>As of 2014, media reports state that the BBC had acquired the exclusive television rights to Christie's works in the UK (previously associated with ITV) and plans with Acorn's co-operation to air new productions for the 125th anniversary of Christie's birth in 2015.<br/><h2>Writings</h2><br/><h3>Fictional writings</h3><br/><strong>Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple</strong><br/><br/>Agatha Christie's first book The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920 and introduced the detective Hercule Poirot, who became a long-running character in many of Christie's works, appearing in 33 novels and 54 short stories.<br/><br/>Miss (Jane) Marple, who also became well known, was introduced in the short stories The Thirteen Problems in 1927 and was based on Christie's grandmother and her "Ealing cronies". Both Jane and Gran "always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and were, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right." Miss Marple appeared in 12 of Christie's novels.<br/><br/>During the Second World War, Christie wrote two novels, Curtain, and Sleeping Murder, intended as the last cases of these two great detectives, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. Both books were sealed in a bank vault for over thirty years and were released for publication by Christie only at the end of her life, when she realised that she could not write any more novels. These publications came on the heels of the success of the film version of Murder on the Orient Express in 1974.<br/><br/>Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, Christie was to become increasingly tired of her detective Poirot. By the end of the 1930s, Christie wrote in her diary that she was finding Poirot "insufferable," and by the 1960s she felt that he was "an egocentric creep." However, unlike Conan Doyle, Christie resisted the temptation to kill her detective off while he was still popular. She saw herself as an entertainer whose job was to produce what the public liked, and the public liked Poirot. Feeling tied down, stuck with a love interest, she did marry off Hastings in an attempt to trim her cast commitments. In contrast, Christie was fond of Miss Marple. However, the Belgian detective's titles outnumber the Marple titles more than two to one: this is largely because Christie wrote numerous Poirot novels early in her career, while The Murder at the Vicarage remained the sole Marple novel until the 1940s. Christie never wrote a novel or short story featuring both Poirot and Miss Marple. In a recording discovered and released in 2008, Christie revealed the reason for this: "Hercule Poirot, a complete egoist, would not like being taught his business or having suggestions made to him by an elderly spinster lady".<br/><br/>Poirot is the only fictional character to have been given an obituary in The New York Times, following the publication of Curtain. It appeared on the front page of the paper on 6 August 1975.<br/><br/>Following the great success of Curtain, Christie gave permission for the release of Sleeping Murder sometime in 1976 but died in January 1976 before the book could be released. This may explain some of the inconsistencies compared to the rest of the Marple series - for example, Colonel Arthur Bantry, husband of Miss Marple's friend Dolly, is still alive and well in Sleeping Murder despite the fact he is noted as having died in books published earlier. It may be that Christie simply did not have time to revise the manuscript before she died. Miss Marple fared better than Poirot, since after solving the mystery in Sleeping Murder she returns home to her regular life in St. Mary Mead.<br/><h3>Formula and plot devices</h3><br/>Agatha Christie's reputation as "The Queen of Crime" was built upon the large number of classic motifs that she introduced, or for which she provided the most famous example. Christie built these tropes into what is now considered classic mystery structure: a murder is committed, there are multiple suspects who are all concealing secrets, and the detective gradually uncovers these secrets over the course of the story, discovering the most shocking twists towards the end. At the end, in a Christie hallmark, the detective usually gathers the surviving suspects into one room, explains the course of his or her deductive reasoning, and reveals the guilty party, although there are exceptions in which it is left to the guilty party (or parties) to explain all (such as And Then There Were None and Endless Night, both rather nihilistic in nature).<br/><br/>Seven stories are named for, or built around words from, well known children's nursery rhymes: And Then There Were None (by Ten Little Indians), One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (by One, Two, Buckle My Shoe), Five Little Pigs (by This Little Piggy), Crooked House (by There Was a Crooked Man), A Pocket Full of Rye (by Sing a Song of Sixpence), Hickory Dickory Dock (by Hickory Dickory Dock), and Three Blind Mice (by Three Blind Mice).<br/><br/>Twice, the murderer turns out to be the unreliable narrator of the story. In six stories, Christie allows the murderer to escape justice: these are The Witness for the Prosecution, Five Little Pigs, The Man in the Brown Suit, Murder on the Orient Express, Curtain and The Unexpected Guest. (When Christie adapted Witness into a stage play, she lengthened the ending so that the murderer was also killed.) There are also numerous instances where the killer is not brought to justice in the legal sense but instead dies (death usually being presented as a more 'sympathetic' outcome), for example Death Comes as the End, And Then There Were None, Death on the Nile, Dumb Witness, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Crooked House, Appointment with Death, The Hollow, Nemesis, Cat Among the Pigeons, and The Secret Adversary. In some cases, this is with the collusion of the detective involved. In some stories, the question of whether formal justice will be done is left unresolved, such as Five Little Pigs and Ordeal by Innocence.<br/><br/>Christie often made the unlikeliest character guilty. This happened so often that it became a cliché; savvy readers could identify the murderer by simply identifying the least likely suspect. On an edition of Desert Island Discs in 2007, Brian Aldiss claimed that Agatha Christie told him that she wrote her books up to the last chapter, then decided who the most unlikely suspect was, after which she would then go back and make the necessary changes to "frame" that person. John Curran's Agatha Christie: The Secret Notebooks describes different working methods for every book in her autobiography, thus contradicting this claim.<br/><br/>The first Hercule Poirot began with tram passengers and Belgian refugees. Man in the Brown Suit started with Belcher from the world tour. Murder on the Links began with news from France, a wife debunked, who claimed intruders tied her up and murdered her husband. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd killer was suggested by brother-in-law James Watt. The Big Four, helped by Archie's brother Cambell, was a stop-gap collection of Sketch magazine stories, for money when her husband left.<br/><h3>Character stereotypes</h3><br/>Christie occasionally inserted stereotyped descriptions of characters into her work, particularly before the end of the Second World War (when such attitudes were more commonly expressed publicly), and particularly in regard to Italians, Jews, and non-Europeans. For example, in the first editions of the collection The Mysterious Mr Quin (1930), in the short story "The Soul of the Croupier," she described "Hebraic men with hook-noses wearing rather flamboyant jewellery"; in later editions the passage was edited to describe "sallow men" wearing same. In The Hollow, published as late as 1946, one of the more unsympathetic characters is "a Whitechapel Jewess with dyed hair and a voice like a corncrake ..... a small woman with a thick nose, henna red and a disagreeable voice". To contrast with the more stereotyped descriptions, Christie sometimes characterised the "foreigners" in such a way as to make the reader understand and sympathise with them; this is particularly true of her Jewish characters, who while seen as un-English are seldom actually criminals. (See, for example, the character of Oliver Manders in Three Act Tragedy.)<br/><br/>Often she is lovingly affectionate or teasing with her prejudices. After four years of war-torn London, Christie hoped to return some day to Syria, which she described as "gentle fertile country and its simple people, who know how to laugh and how to enjoy life; who are idle and gay, and who have dignity, good manners, and a great sense of humour, and to whom death is not terrible."<br/><br/>After trouble with an incompetent Swiss French nursery helper Marcelle for toddler Rosalind, she decides "Scottish preferred ... good with the young. The French were hopeless disciplinarians ... Germans good and methodical, but it was not German that I really wanted Rosalind to learn. The Irish were gay but made trouble in the house; the English were of all kinds" She proposes this, after the fact, knowing the chosen Charlotte lasts decades.<br/><br/>Her book titles, changed by American publishers, for example Ten Little Niggers to Ten Little Indians, were kept the same across the Atlantic, after bushels of fan mail.<br/><h3>Non-fictional writings</h3><br/>Among Christie published relatively few nonfiction works.<br/><ul><br/> <li>Come, Tell Me How You Live, about working on an archaeological dig, drawn from her life with second husband Max Mallowan.</li><br/> <li>The Grand Tour: Around the World with the Queen of Mystery, a collection of correspondence from her 1922 Grand Tour of the British empire, including South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.</li><br/> <li>Agatha Christie: An Autobiography was published posthumously in 1977.</li><br/></ul><br/><h3>Critical reception</h3><br/>The world's best-selling mystery writer, and often referred to as the "Queen of Crime", Agatha Christie is considered a master of suspense, plotting, and characterisation. Some critics however regarded Christie's plotting abilities as considerably exceeding her literary ones. The novelist Raymond Chandler criticised her in his essay, "The Simple Art of Murder", and the American literary critic Edmund Wilson was dismissive of Christie and the detective fiction genre generally in his New Yorker essay, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?".<br/><h3>Interests and influences</h3><br/>Christie had a lifelong interest in archaeology. On a trip to the excavation site at Ur in 1930, she met her future husband, Sir Max Mallowan, a distinguished archaeologist, but her fame as an author far surpassed his fame in archaeology. Prior to meeting Mallowan, Christie had not had any extensive brushes with archaeology, but once the two married they made sure to only go to sites where they could work together.<br/><br/>While accompanying Mallowan on countless archaeological trips (spending up to 3-4 months at a time in Syria and Iraq at excavation sites at Ur, Ninevah, Tell Arpachiyah, Chagar Bazar, Tell Brak, and Nimrud), Christie not only wrote novels and short stories, but also contributed work to the archaeological sites, more specifically to the archaeological restoration and labelling of ancient exhibits which includes tasks such as cleaning and conserving delicate ivory pieces, reconstructing pottery, developing photos from early excavations which later led to taking photographs of the site and its findings, and taking field notes.<br/><br/>So as to not influence the funding of the archaeological excavations, Christie would always pay for her own board and lodging and her travel expenses, and supported excavations as an anonymous sponsor.<br/><br/>During their time in the Middle East, there was also a large amount of time spent travelling to and from Mallowan's sites. Their extensive travelling had a strong influence on her writing, which is often reflected as some type of transportation playing a part in her murderer's schemes. The large amount of travel was reused in novels such as The Murder on the Orient Express, as well as suggesting the idea of archaeology as an adventure itself.<br/><br/>After the Second World War, she chronicled her time in Syria with fondness in "Come Tell Me How You Live". Anecdotes, memories, funny episodes, are strung in a rough timeline, with more emphasis on eccentric characters, lovely scenery, than factual accuracy.<br/><br/>From 8 November 2001 to 24 March 2002, The British Museum had an exhibit named Agatha Christie and Archaeology: Mystery in Mesopotamia, which presented the secret life of Agatha Christie and the influences of archaeology in her life and works.<br/><h3>Spirituality</h3><br/>Christie's life within the archaeological world shaped not only the settings and characters for her books but also the issues she highlights. One of the stronger influences is her love of the mystical and mysterious. Many of Christie's books and short stories set both in the Middle East and back in England have a decidedly otherworldly influence in which religious sects, sacrifices, ceremony, and seances play a part. Such stories include "The Hound of Death" and "the Idol House of Astarte". This theme was greatly strengthened by those times Christie spent in the Middle East where she was consistently surrounded by the religious temples and spiritual history of the towns and cities they were excavating during Mallowan's archaeological work.<br/><h3>Use of archaeology and spirituality in her writing</h3><br/>Many of the settings for Agatha Christie's books were directly inspired by the many archaeological field seasons spent in the Middle East on the sites managed by her husband Max. The extent of her time spent at the many locations featured in her books is apparent from the extreme detail in which she describes them. One such site featured in her work is the temple site of Abu Simbel, depicted in Death on the Nile. Also there is the great detail in which she describes life at the dig site in Murder in Mesopotamia.<br/><br/>Among the characters in her books, Christie has often given prominence to the archaeologists and experts in Middle Eastern cultures and artefacts. Most notable are the characters of Dr. Eric Leidner in Murder in Mesopotamia and Signor Richetti in Death on the Nile, while many minor characters in They Came to Baghdad were archaeologists.<br/><br/>Indirectly, Christie's famous character Hercule Poirot may be compared to an archaeologist by the manner of his detailed scrutiny of all facts both large and small. Cornelius Holtorf, an academic archaeologist, cites an archaeologist as a detective as being one of the key themes of archaeology in popular culture. He describes an archaeologist as a professional detective of the past who has the ability to reveal secrets for the greater good of society. Holtorf's description of the archaeologist as a detective is very similar to Christie's depiction of Poirot, who is hugely observant and is very careful to look at small details as they often impart the most information. Many of Christie's detective characters show some archaeological traits through their careful attention to clues and artefacts alike. Miss Marple, another of Christie's famous characters, shares these characteristics of careful deduction though the attention paid to the small clues.<br/><br/>Some of Christie's best known novels with heavy archaeological influences are:<br/><ul><br/> <li>Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) - the most archaeologically influenced of all her novels, as it is set in the Middle East at an archaeological dig site and associated expedition house. The main characters include an archaeologist, Dr. Eric Leidner, his wife, multiple specialists, assistants, and the men working on the site. The novel is noted most for its careful description of the dig site and house, which showed the author had spent much of her time in very similar situations. The characters in this book in particular are also based on archaeologists Christie knew from her personal experiences on excavation sites.</li><br/> <li>Appointment with Death (1938) - set in Jerusalem and its surrounding area. The death itself occurs at an old cave site in Petra and offers some very descriptive details of sites which Christie herself could have visited in order to write the book.</li><br/> <li>Death on the Nile (1937) - takes place on a tour boat on the Nile. Many archaeological sites are visited along the way and one of the main characters is an archaeologist, Signor Richetti.</li><br/> <li>They Came to Baghdad (1951) - inspired by Christie's own trips to Baghdad with Mallowan, and involves an archaeologist as the heroine's love interest.</li><br/></ul><br/><h3>Portrayals of Christie</h3><br/>Christie has been portrayed on a number of occasions in film and television. Several biographical programmes have been made, such as the 2004 BBC's Agatha Christie: A Life in Pictures, in which she is portrayed by Olivia Williams, Anna Massey, and Bonnie Wright.<br/><br/>Christie has also been portrayed fictionally. Some of these portrayals have explored and offered accounts of Christie's disappearance in 1926, including the 1979 film Agatha (with Vanessa Redgrave, in which she sneaks away to plan revenge against her husband), and the Doctor Who episode "The Unicorn and the Wasp" (with Fenella Woolgar, in which her disappearance is the result of her suffering a temporary breakdown owing to a brief psychic link being formed between her and an alien). Others, such as 1980 Hungarian film, Kojak Budapesten (not to be confused with the 1986 comedy by the same name) create their own scenarios involving Christie's criminal skill In the 1986 TV play, Murder by the Book, Christie herself (Dame Peggy Ashcroft) murdered one of her fictional-turned-real characters, Poirot. The heroine of Liar-Soft's 2008 visual novel Shikkoku no Sharnoth: What a Beautiful Tomorrow, Mary Clarissa Christie, is based on the real-life Christie. Christie features as a character in Gaylord Larsen's Dorothy and Agatha and The London Blitz Murders by Max Allan Collins.<br/><br/>Sumber: Wikipedia

Agatha Christie

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="284"] Agatha Christie[/caption] Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, D...

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English Renaissance

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="500"]<img alt="" height="335" src="http://www.bfcsd.org/webpages/ccompomartin/photos/x_120100_school_of_athens2.jpg" width="500" /> Foto: Istimewa[/caption]<br/><br/>The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the late 15th and early 16th centuries to the early 17th century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late 14th century. Like most of northern Europe, England saw little of these developments until more than a century later. The beginning of the English Renaissance is often taken, as a convenience, to be 1485, when the Battle of Bosworth Field ended the Wars of the Roses and inaugurated the Tudor Dynasty. Renaissance style and ideas, however, were slow in penetrating England, and the Elizabethan era in the second half of the 16th century is usually regarded as the height of the English Renaissance.<br/><h3>Literature</h3><br/>England had a strong tradition of literature in the English vernacular, which gradually increased as English use of the printing press became common by the mid 16th century. By the time of Elizabethan literature a vigorous literary culture in both drama and poetry included poets such as Edmund Spenser, whose verse epic The Faerie Queene did not become a dominating influence on English literature in the way that some foreign equivalents did for their countries. Instead the lyrics of William Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt and others, typically circulating in manuscript form for some time before they were published, and above all the plays of English Renaissance theatre, were the outstanding legacy of the period.<br/><br/>The English theatre scene, which performed both for the court and nobility in private performances, and a very wide public in the theatres, was the most crowded in Europe, with a host of other playwrights as well as the giant figures of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Elizabeth herself was a product of Renaissance humanism trained by Roger Ascham, and wrote occasional poems such as On Monsieur’s Departure at critical moments of her life. Philosophers and intellectuals included Thomas More and Francis Bacon. All the 16th century Tudor monarchs were highly educated, as was much of the nobility, and Italian literature had a considerable following, providing the sources for many of Shakespeare's plays. English thought advanced towards modern science with the Baconian Method, a forerunner of the Scientific Method. The language of the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549, and at the end of the period the Authorised Version ("King James Version" to Americans) of the Bible (1611) had enduring impacts on the English consciousness.<br/><h3>Visual arts</h3><br/>England was very slow to produce visual arts in Renaissance styles, and the artists of the Tudor court were mainly imported foreigners until after the end of the Renaissance; Hans Holbein was the outstanding figure. The English Reformation produced a huge programme of iconoclasm that destroyed almost all medieval religious art, and all but ended the skill of painting in England; English art was to be dominated by portraiture, and then later landscape art, for centuries to come. The significant English invention was the portrait miniature, which essentially took the techniques of the dying art of the illuminated manuscript and transferred them to small portraits worn in lockets. Though the form was developed in England by foreign artists, mostly Flemish like Lucas Horenbout, the somewhat undistinguished founder of the tradition, by the late 16th century natives such as Nicolas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver produced the finest work, even as the best producers of larger portraits in oil were still foreigners. The portrait miniature had spread all over Europe by the 18th century. The portraiture of Elizabeth I was carefully controlled, and developed into an elaborate and wholly un-realist iconic style, that has succeeded in creating enduring images.<br/><h3>Music</h3><br/>English Renaissance music kept in touch with continental developments far more than visual art, and managed to survive the Reformation relatively successfully, though William Byrd and other major figures were Catholic. The Elizabethan madrigal was distinct from, but related to the Italian tradition. Thomas Tallis, Thomas Morley, and John Dowland were other leading English composers.<br/><br/>The colossal polychoral productions of the Venetian School had been anticipated in the works of Thomas Tallis, and the Palestrina style from the Roman School had already been absorbed prior to the publication of Musical transalpina, in the music of masters such as William Byrd.<br/><br/>The Italian and English Renaissances were similar in sharing a specific musical aesthetic. In the late 16th century Italy was the musical center of Europe, and one of the principal forms which emerged from that singular explosion of musical creativity was the madrigal. In 1588, Nicholas Yonge published in England the Musica transalpina—a collection of Italian madrigals that had been Anglicized—an event which began a vogue of madrigal in England which was almost unmatched in the Renaissance in being an instantaneous adoption of an idea, from another country, adapted to local aesthetics. English poetry was exactly at the right stage of development for this transplantation to occur, since forms such as the sonnet were uniquely adapted to setting as madrigals: indeed, the sonnet was already well developed in Italy. Composers such as Thomas Morley, the only contemporary composer to set Shakespeare, and whose work survives, published collections of their own, roughly in the Italian manner but yet with a unique Englishness; interest in the compositions of the English Madrigal School have enjoyed a considerable revival in recent decades.<br/><h3>Architecture</h3><br/>Despite some buildings in a partly Renaissance style from the reign of Henry VIII, notably Hampton Court Palace, the vanished Nonsuch Palace, Sutton Place and Layer Marney Tower, it was not until the Elizabethan architecture of the end of the century that a true Renaissance style emerged, influenced far more by northern Europe than Italy. The most famous buildings are large show houses constructed for courtiers, and characterised by lavish use of glass, as at "Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall", Wollaton Hall and Hatfield House and Burghley House, the style continuing into the early 17th century before developing into Jacobean architecture. Lesser, but still large, houses like Little Moreton Hall continued to be constructed and expanded in essentially medieval half-timbered styles until the late 16th century. Church architecture essentially continued in a late Gothic style until the Reformation, and then stopped almost completely, although church monuments, screens and other fittings often had classical styles from about the mid-century. The few new church buildings were usually still Gothic in style, as in Langley Chapel of 1601.<br/><h3>Criticism of the idea of the English Renaissance</h3><br/>The notion of calling this period "The Renaissance" is a modern invention, having been popularized by the historian Jacob Burckhardt in the 19th century. The idea of the Renaissance has come under increased criticism by many cultural historians, and some have contended that the "English Renaissance" has no real tie with the artistic achievements and aims of the Italian artists (Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello) who are closely identified with the Renaissance. Indeed, England had already experienced a flourishing of literature over 200 years before the time of Shakespeare when Geoffrey Chaucer was working. Chaucer's popularizing of English as a medium of literary composition rather than Latin occurred only 50 years after Dante had started using Italian for serious poetry. At the same time William Langland, author of Piers Plowman, and John Gower were also writing in English. Even during these war years, though, Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte D'Arthur, was a notable figure. For this reason, scholars find the singularity of the period called the English Renaissance questionable; C. S. Lewis, a professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford and Cambridge, famously remarked to a colleague that he had "discovered" that there was no English Renaissance, and that if there had been one, it had "no effect whatsoever".<br/><br/>Historians have also begun to consider the word "Renaissance" as an unnecessarily loaded word that implies an unambiguously positive "rebirth" from the supposedly more primitive Middle Ages. Some historians have asked the question "a renaissance for whom?," pointing out, for example, that the status of women in society arguably declined during the Renaissance. Many historians and cultural historians now prefer to use the term "early modern" for this period, a term that highlights the period as a transitional one that led to the modern world, but attempts to avoid positive or negative connotations.<br/><br/>Other cultural historians have countered that, regardless of whether the name "renaissance" is apt, there was undeniably an artistic flowering in England under the Tudor monarchs, culminating in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.<br/><h3>Major English Renaissance authors</h3><br/>The major literary figures in the English Renaissance include:<br/><ul><br/> <li>Francis Bacon</li><br/> <li>Thomas Dekker</li><br/> <li>John Donne</li><br/> <li>John Fletcher</li><br/> <li>John Ford</li><br/> <li>Ben Jonson</li><br/> <li>Thomas Kyd</li><br/> <li>Christopher Marlowe</li><br/> <li>Philip Massinger</li><br/> <li>Thomas Middleton</li><br/> <li>Thomas More</li><br/> <li>Thomas Nashe</li><br/> <li>William Rowley</li><br/> <li>William Shakespeare</li><br/> <li>James Shirley</li><br/> <li>Philip Sidney</li><br/> <li>Edmund Spenser</li><br/> <li>John Webster</li><br/> <li>Thomas Wyatt</li><br/></ul><br/>Sumber: Wikipedia

English Renaissance

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="500"] Foto: Istimewa[/caption] The English Renaissance was a cultural...

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Charles Dickens

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="402"]<img alt="" height="402" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKfUGfPTE83MBL6-tzWBlgp3vx0Zh6CzPxJ7fxo1uegoOtQeO5VfuLLnUKbZYN1kTcyksIr7ypjDbogjYegMAFEsZPSsuGfv12jX0TRKc2raN8CrFl55lH-3fkluTfiWoAdtGv6IjFjnRH/s1600/Charles-Dickens-9274087-2-402%5B1%5D.jpg" width="402" /> Charles Dickens[/caption]<br/><br/><strong>Charles John Huffam Dickens</strong> (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era and he remains popular, responsible for some of English literature’s most iconic characters.<br/><br/>Many of his novels, with their recurrent concern for social reform, first appeared in magazines in serialised form, a popular format at the time. Unlike other authors who completed entire novels before serialisation, Dickens often created the episodes as they were being serialized. The practice lent his stories a particular rhythm, punctuated by cliffhangers to keep the public looking forward to the next instalment.The continuing popularity of his novels and short stories is such that they have never gone out of print.<br/><br/>His work has been praised for its mastery of prose and unique personalities by writers such as George Gissing, Leo Tolstoy and G. K. Chesterton, though others, such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf, criticised it for sentimentality and implausibility.<br/><h3>Life</h3><br/><strong>Early years</strong><br/><br/>Having spent the first three years of his life in Portsmouth, Hampshire, the family moved to London  in 1815. His early years seem to have been idyllic, although he thought himself a “very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy”. He spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, especially the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. He spoke, later in life, of his poignant memories of childhood, and of his near photographic memory of the people and events, which he used in his writing. His father’s brief period as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office afforded Charles a few years’ private education at William Giles’s School, in Chatham.<br/><br/>This period came to an abrupt end when John Dickens spent beyond his means and was imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison in Southwark, London. Shortly afterwards, the rest of his family joined him – except Charles, who boarded with family friend Elizabeth Roylance in Camden Town. Mrs. Roylance was “a reduced 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…at the house of an insolvent-court agent…in Lant Street in The Borough…he was a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman, with a quiet old wife; and he had a very innocent grown-up son; these three were the inspiration for the Garland family in The Old Curiosity Shop.<br/><br/>On Sundays, Dickens and his sister Fanny, allowed out from the Royal Academy of Music, 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 began working ten-hour days at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station. He earned six shillings  a week pasting labels on shoe polish. The strenuous – and often cruel – work conditions made a deep impression on Dickens, and later influenced his fiction and essays, forming 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. As told to John Forster (from The Life of Charles Dickens):<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>After only a few months in Marshalsea, John Dickens’ paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Dickens, died and bequeathed him the sum of 450 pounds. On the expectation of this legacy, Dickens was granted release from prison. Under the Insolvent Debtors Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors, and he and his family left Marshalsea for the home of Mrs. Roylance.<br/><br/>Although Dickens eventually attended the Wellington House Academy in North London, his mother Elizabeth Dickens did not immediately remove him from the boot-blacking factory. ‘The incident must have done much to confirm Dickens’s determined view that a father should rule the family, 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 no doubt a factor in his demanding and dissatisfied attitude towards women.’ Resentment stemming from his 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!” The Wellington House Academy was not 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.’<br/><br/>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. Then, having learned Gurneys 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. This education informed works such as Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, and especially Bleak House-whose vivid portrayal of the machinations and bureaucracy of the legal system did much to enlighten the general public, and was a vehicle for dissemination of Dickens’s own views regarding, particularly, the heavy burden on the poor who were forced by circumstances to “go to law”.<br/><br/>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 effectively ended the relationship by sending her to school in Paris.<br/><strong>Journalism and early novels</strong><br/><br/>In 1833, Dickens’ first story, A Dinner at Poplar Walk was published in the London periodical, Monthly Magazine. The following year he rented rooms at Furnival’s Inn becoming a political journalist, reporting on parliamentary debate and travelling 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 Sketches by Boz, published in 1836. This led to the serialisation of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in March 1836. He continued to contribute to and edit journals throughout his literary career.<br/><br/>In 1836, Dickens accepted the job of editor of Bentley’s Miscellany, a position he held for three years, until he fell out with the owner. At the same time, his success as a novelist continued, producing Oliver Twist (1837-39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), The Old Curiosity Shop and, finally, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty as part of the Master Humphrey’s Clock series (1840-41)-all published in monthly instalments before being made into books. Dickens had a pet raven named Grip which he had stuffed when it died in 1841. (it is now at the Free Library of Philadelphia).<br/><br/>On 2 April 1836, he married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1816 – 1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk, Kent, they set up home in Bloomsbury. They had ten children:<br/><ol><br/> <li>Charles Culliford Boz Dickens (C. C. B. Dickens), later known as Charles Dickens, Jr., editor of All the Year Round, and author of the Dickens’s Dictionary of London (1879).</li><br/> <li>Mary Dickens</li><br/> <li>Kate Macready Dickens</li><br/> <li>Walter Landor Dickens</li><br/> <li>Francis Jeffrey Dickens</li><br/> <li>Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens</li><br/> <li>Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens</li><br/> <li>Sir Henry Fielding Dickens</li><br/> <li>Dora Annie Dickens</li><br/> <li>Edward Dickens</li><br/></ol><br/>Dickens and his family lived at 48 Doughty Street, London, (on which he had a three year lease at 80 pounds a year) from 25 March 1837 until December 1839. Dickens’s younger brother Frederick and Catherine’s 17 year old sister Mary moved in with them. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. She became a character in many of his books, and her death is fictionalised as the death of Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop.<br/><br/><strong>First visit to America</strong><br/><br/>In 1842, Dickens and his wife made his first trip to the United States and Canada, a journey which was successful in spite of his support for the abolition of slavery. It is described in the travelogue American Notes for General Circulation and is also the basis of some of the episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens includes in Notes a powerful condemnation of slavery, with “ample proof” of the “atrocities” he found. He called upon President John Tyler at the White House.<br/><br/>During his visit, Dickens spent a month in New York City, giving lectures, raising support for copyright laws, and recording many of his impressions of America. He met such luminaries as Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant. On 14 February 1842, a Boz Ball was held in his honour at the Park Theater, with 3,000 guests. Among the neighbourhoods he visited were Five Points, Wall Street, The Bowery, and the prison known as The Tombs. 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 her brother-in-law’s death in 1870.<br/><br/>Shortly thereafter, he began to show interest in Unitarian Christianity, although he remained an Anglican for the rest of his life. Dickens’s work continued to be popular, especially A Christmas Carol written in 1843, which was reputedly a potboiler written in a matter of weeks to meet the expenses of his wife’s fifth pregnancy. After living briefly abroad in Italy (1844) and Switzerland (1846), Dickens continued his success with Dombey and Son (1848) and David Copperfield (1849-50).<br/><br/><strong>Philanthropy</strong><br/><br/>In May 1846, Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens about setting up a home for the redemption of “fallen” women. Coutts envisioned a home that would differ from existing institutions, which offered a harsh and punishing regimen for these women, and instead provide an environment where they could learn to read and write and become proficient in domestic household chores so as to re-integrate them into society. After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named Urania Cottage, in the Lime Grove section of Shepherds Bush. He became involved in many aspects of its day-to-day running, setting the house rules, reviewing the accounts and interviewing prospective residents, some of whom became characters in his books. He would scour prisons and workhouses for potentially suitable candidates and relied on friends, such as the Magistrate John Hardwick to bring them to his attention. Each potential candidate was given a printed invitation written by Dickens called ‘An Appeal to Fallen Women’, which he signed only as ‘Your friend’. If the woman accepted the invitation, Dickens would personally interview her for admission. All of the women were required to emigrate following their time at Urania Cottage. In research published in 2009, the families of two of these women were identified, one in Canada and one in Australia. It is estimated that about 100 women graduated between 1847 and 1859.<br/><br/>In late November 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he would write Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1857). It was here he got up the amateur theatricals which are described in Forster’s Life.<br/><br/><strong>Middle years</strong><br/><br/>In 1856, his income from his writing allowed him to buy Gad’s 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.<br/><br/>In 1857, Dickens hired professional actresses for the play The Frozen Deep, which he and his protege Wilkie Collins had written. With one of these, Ellen Ternan, Dickens formed a bond which was to last the rest of his life. He then separated from his wife, Catherine, in 1858 – divorce was still unthinkable for someone as famous as he was.<br/><br/>During this period, whilst pondering about giving public readings for his own profit, Dickens was approached by Great Ormond Street Hospital to help it survive its first major financial crisis through a charitable appeal. Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked to preside by his friend, the hospital’s founder Charles West. He threw himself into the task, heart and soul (a little known fact is that Dickens reported anonymously in the weekly The Examiner in 1849 to help mishandled children and wrote another article to help publicise the hospital’s opening in 1852). On 9 February 1858, Dickens spoke at the hospital’s first annual festival dinner at Freemasons’ Hall and later gave a public reading of A Christmas Carol at St. Martin-in-the-Fields church hall. The events raised enough money to enable the hospital to purchase the neighbouring house, No. 48 Great Ormond Street, increasing the bed capacity from 20 to 75.<br/><br/>That summer of 1858, after separating from his wife, Dickens undertook his first series of public readings in London for pay which ended on 22 July. After 10 days rest, he began a gruelling and ambitious tour through the English provinces, Scotland and Ireland, beginning with a performance in Clifton on 2 August and closing in Brighton, more than three months later, on 13 November. Altogether he read eighty-seven times, on some days giving both a matinee and an evening performance.<br/><br/>Major works, A Tale of Two Cities (1859); and Great Expectations  (1861) soon followed and would prove resounding successes. During this time he was also the publisher and editor of, and a major contributor to, the journals Household Words (1850-1859) and All the Year Round (1858-1870).<br/><br/>In early September 1860, in a field behind Gad’s Hill, Dickens made a great bonfire of nearly his entire correspondence. Only those letters on business matters were spared. Since Ellen Ternan burned all of his letters as well, the dimensions of the affair between the two were unknown until the publication of Dickens and Daughter, a book about Dickens’s relationship with his daughter Kate, in 1939. Kate Dickens worked with author Gladys Storey on the book prior to her death in 1929, and alleged that Dickens and Ternan had a son who died in infancy, though no contemporary evidence exists. On his death, Dickens settled an annuity on Ternan which made her a financially independent woman. Claire Tomalin’s book, The Invisible Woman, set out to prove that Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life, and was subsequently turned into a play, Little Nell, by Simon Gray.<br/><br/>In the same period, Dickens furthered his interest in the paranormal, so much that he was one of the early members of The Ghost Club.<br/><strong>Franklin incident</strong><br/><br/>A recurring theme in Dickens’s writing reflected the public’s interest in Arctic exploration: the heroic friendship between explorers John Franklin and John Richardson gave the idea for A Tale of Two Cities, The Wreck of the Golden Mary and the play The Frozen Deep.<br/><br/>After Franklin died in unexplained circumstances on an expedition to find the North West Passage, Dickens wrote a piece in Household Words defending his hero against the discovery in 1854, some four years after the search began, of evidence that Franklin’s men had, in their desperation, resorted to cannibalism. Without adducing any supporting evidence he speculates that, far from resorting to cannibalism amongst themselves, the members of the expedition may have been “set upon and slain by the Esquimaux … We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel.” Although publishing in a subsequent issue of Household Words a defence of the Esquimaux, written by John Rae, one of Franklin’s rescue parties, who had actually visited the scene of the supposed cannibalism, Dickens refused to alter his view.<br/>Last years<br/><br/>On 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris with Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. The first seven carriages of the train plunged off a cast iron bridge under repair. The only first-class  carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was travelling. Dickens tried to help the wounded and the dying before rescuers arrived. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it. Typically, Dickens later used this experience 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 based the story around several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash of 1861.<br/><br/>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. Although physically unharmed, Dickens never really recovered from the trauma of the Staplehurst crash, and his normally prolific writing shrank to completing Our Mutual Friend and starting the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Much of his time was taken up with public readings from his best-loved novels. Dickens was fascinated by the theatre as an escape from the world, and theatres and theatrical people appear in Nicholas Nickleby. The travelling shows were extremely popular. In 1866, a series of public readings were undertaken in England and Scotland. The following year saw more readings in England and Ireland.<br/><br/><strong>Second visit to America</strong><br/><br/>On 9 November 1867, Dickens sailed from Liverpool for his second American reading tour. Landing at 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 Thomas Fields. In early December, the readings began and Dickens spent the month shuttling between Boston and New York. 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. In New York, he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall between 9 December 1867 and 18 April 1868, and four at Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims between 16 January and 21 January 1868. During his travels, he saw a significant 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 to never denounce America again. By the end of the tour, the author could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. On 23 April, he boarded his ship to return to Britain, barely escaping a Federal Tax Lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.<br/><br/><strong>Farewell readings</strong><br/><br/>Between 1868 and 1869, Dickens gave a series of “farewell readings” in England, Scotland, and Ireland, until he collapsed on 22 April 1869, at Preston in Lancashire showing symptoms of a mild stroke. After further provincial readings were cancelled, he began work on his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In an opium den in Shadwell, he witnessed an elderly pusher known as “Opium Sal”, who subsequently featured in his mystery novel.<br/><br/>When he had regained sufficient strength, Dickens arranged, with medical approval, for a final series of readings at least partially to make up to his sponsors what they had lost due of his illness. There were to be twelve performances, running between 11 January and 15 March 1870, the last taking place at 8:00 pm at St. James’s Hall in London. Although in grave health by this time, 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 to the passing of his friend, illustrator Daniel Maclise.<br/><br/><strong>Death</strong><br/><br/>On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home, after a full day’s work on Edwin Drood. The next day, on 9 June, and five years to the day after the Staplehurst crash, he died at Gad’s Hill Place never having regained consciousness. 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: “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.” Dickens’s last words, as reported in his obituary in The Times were alleged to have been:<br/><br/>Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fullfilled all the rules of art.<br/><br/>On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens’s interment 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.”<br/><br/>Dickens’s will stipulated that no memorial be erected to honour him. The only life-size bronze statue of Dickens, cast in 1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell, is located in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. The couch on which he died is preserved at the Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth.<br/>Literary style<br/><br/>Dickens loved the style of 18th century Gothic romance,[citation needed] although it had already become a target for parody.[citation needed] One “character” vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital are described over the course of his body of work.<br/><br/>His writing style is florid and poetic, with a strong comic touch. 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. Many of his characters’ names provide the reader with a hint as to the roles played in advancing the storyline, such as Mr. Murdstone in the novel David Copperfield, which is clearly a combination of “murder” and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism.<br/><h3>Characters</h3><br/>Dickens is famed for his depiction of the hardships of the working class, his intricate plots, his sense of humour. But he is perhaps most famed for the characters he created. His novels were heralded early in his career for their ability to capture the everyday man and thus create characters to whom readers could relate. Beginning with The Pickwick Papers  in 1836, Dickens wrote numerous novels, each uniquely filled with believable personalities and vivid physical descriptions. Dickens’s friend and biographer, John Forster, said that Dickens made “characters real existences, not by describing them but by letting them describe themselves.”<br/><br/>Dickensian characters-especially their typically whimsical names-are among the most memorable in English literature. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Bill Sikes, Pip, Miss Havisham, Charles Darnay, David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber, Abel Magwitch, Daniel Quilp, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers, Uriah Heep and many others are so well known and can be believed to be living a life outside the novels that their stories have been continued by other authors.[citation needed]<br/><br/>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 would brief 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.” This close working relationship is important to readers of Dickens today. The illustrations give us a glimpse of the characters as Dickens described them. Film makers still use the illustrations as a basis for characterisation, costume, and set design.<br/><br/>Often these characters were based on people he knew. In a few instances Dickens based the character too closely on the original, as in the case of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, based on Leigh Hunt, and Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield, based on his wife’s dwarf chiropodist. Indeed, the acquaintances made when reading a Dickens novel are not easily forgotten. The author, 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.”<br/><h3>Autobiographical elements</h3><br/>All authors might be said to incorporate autobiographical elements in their fiction, but with Dickens this is very noticeable, even though he took pains to mask what he considered his shameful, lowly past. David Copperfield is one of the most clearly autobiographical but the scenes from Bleak House  of interminable court cases and legal arguments are drawn from the author’s brief career as a court reporter. Dickens’s own 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. Childhood sweethearts in many of his books (such as Little Em’ly in David Copperfield) may have been based on Dickens’s own childhood infatuation with Lucy Stroughill. 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.<br/><h3>Episodic writing</h3><br/>As noted above, most of Dickens’s major novels were first written in monthly or weekly installments in journals such as Master Humphrey’s Clock and Household Words, later reprinted in book form. These instalments made the stories cheap, accessible and the series of regular cliff-hangers made each new episode widely anticipated. American fans even waited at the docks in New York, shouting out to the crew of an incoming ship, “Is little Nell dead?” Part of Dickens’s great talent was to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end. The monthly numbers were illustrated by, amongst others, “Phiz” (a pseudonym for Hablot Browne). Among his best-known works are Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, The Pickwick Papers, and A Christmas Carol.<br/><br/>Dickens’s technique of writing in monthly or weekly instalments (depending on the work) can be understood by analysing his relationship with his illustrators. The several artists who filled this role were privy to the contents and intentions of Dickens’s instalments before the general public. Thus, by reading these correspondences between author and illustrator, the intentions behind Dickens’s work can be better understood. These also reveal how the interests of the reader and author do not coincide. A great example of that appears in the monthly novel Oliver Twist. At one point in this work, Dickens had Oliver become embroiled in a robbery. That particular monthly instalment concludes with young Oliver being shot. Readers expected that they would be forced to wait only a month to find out the outcome of that gunshot. In fact, Dickens did not reveal what became of young Oliver in the succeeding number. Rather, the reading public was forced to wait two months to discover if the boy lived.<br/><br/>Another important impact of Dickens’s episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers. Since Dickens did not write the chapters very far ahead of their publication, he was allowed to witness the public reaction and alter the story depending on those public reactions. A fine example of this process can be seen in his weekly serial The Old Curiosity Shop, which is a chase story. In this novel, Nell and her grandfather are fleeing the villain Quilp. The progress of the novel follows the gradual success of that pursuit. As Dickens wrote and published the weekly instalments, his friend John Forster pointed out: “You know you’re going to have to kill her, don’t you?” Why this end was necessary can be explained by a brief analysis of the difference between the structure of a comedy versus a tragedy. In a comedy, the action covers a sequence “You think they’re going to lose, you think they’re going to lose, they win”. In tragedy, it is: “You think they’re going to win, you think they’re going to win, they lose”. The dramatic conclusion of the story is implicit throughout the novel. So, as Dickens wrote the novel in the form of a tragedy, the sad outcome of the novel was a foregone conclusion. If he had not caused his heroine to lose, he would not have completed his dramatic structure. Dickens admitted that his friend Forster was right and, in the end, Nell died.<br/><h3>Social commentary</h3><br/>Dickens’s novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. Dickens’s second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime and was responsible for the clearing of the actual London slum, Jacob’s Island, that was the basis of the story. In addition, with the character of the tragic prostitute, Nancy, Dickens “humanised” such women for the reading public; women who were regarded as “unfortunates”, inherently immoral casualties of the Victorian class/economic system. Bleak House and Little Dorrit elaborated expansive critiques of the Victorian institutional apparatus: the interminable lawsuits of the Court of Chancery that destroyed people’s lives in Bleak House and a dual attack in Little Dorrit on inefficient, corrupt patent offices and unregulated market speculation.<br/><h3>Literary techniques</h3><br/>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 incredibly moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde. “You would need to have a heart of stone”, he declared in one of his famous witticisms, “not to laugh at the death of little Nell.” (although her death actually takes place off-stage). In 1903 G. K. Chesterton said, “It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell, that I object to.”<br/><br/>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. Many of his novels are concerned with social realism, focusing on mechanisms of social control that direct people’s lives (for instance, factory networks in Hard Times and hypocritical exclusionary class codes in Our Mutual Friend).[citation needed]Dickens also employs incredible coincidences (e.g., Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper class family that randomly rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group). Such coincidences are a staple of eighteenth century picaresque novels such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones that Dickens enjoyed so much. But, to Dickens, these were not just plot devices but an index of the humanism that led him to believe that good wins out in the end and often in unexpected ways.[citation needed]<br/><h3>Legacy</h3><br/>A well-known personality, his novels proved immensely popular during his lifetime. His first full novel, The Pickwick Papers  (1837), brought him immediate fame, and this success continued throughout his career. Although rarely departing greatly from his typical “Dickensian” method of always attempting to write a great “story” in a somewhat conventional manner (the dual narrators of Bleak House constitute a notable exception), he experimented with varied themes, characterisations, and genres. Some of these experiments achieved more popularity than others, and the public’s taste and appreciation of his many works have varied over time. Usually keen to give his readers what they wanted, the monthly or weekly publication of his works in episodes meant that the books could change as the story proceeded at the whim of the public. Good examples of this are the American episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit which Dickens included in response to lower-than-normal sales of the earlier chapters.<br/><br/>Dickens continues to be one of the best known and most read of English authors, and his works have never gone out of print. At least 180 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens’s works help confirm his success. Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime and as early as 1913 a silent film of The Pickwick Papers was made. 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 quixotic, hypocritical, or emotionlessly logical. Sam Weller, the carefree and irreverent valet of The Pickwick Papers, was an early superstar, perhaps better known than his author at first. It is likely that A Christmas Carol stands as his best-known story, with new adaptations almost every year. It is also the most-filmed of Dickens’s stories, with many versions dating from the early years of cinema. This simple morality tale with both pathos and its theme of redemption, sums up (for many) the true meaning of Christmas. Indeed, it eclipses all other Yuletide stories in not only popularity, but in adding archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) to the Western cultural consciousness. A prominent phrase from the tale, ‘Merry Christmas’, was popularised following the appearance of the story. The term Scrooge became a synonym for miser, with ‘Bah! Humbug!’ dismissive of the festive spirit. Novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called the book “a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness”. Some historians claim the book significantly redefined the “spirit” and importance of Christmas, and initiated a rebirth of seasonal merriment after Puritan authorities in 17th century England and America suppressed pagan rituals associated with the holiday. 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 sought to construct Christmas as a family-centred festival of generosity, in contrast to the community-based and church-centred observations, the observance of which had dwindled during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Superimposing his secular vision of the holiday, Dickens influenced many aspects of Christmas that are celebrated today among Western nations, such as family gatherings, seasonal food and drink, dancing, games, and a festive generosity of spirit. A Christmas Carol rejuvenated his career as a renowned author. A Tale of Two Cities is Dickens best selling novel. Since its inaugural publication in 1859, the novel has sold over 200 million copies, and is among the most famous works of fiction.<br/><br/>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 at the heart of empire. 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 repression 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 both 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 that 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. As Karl Marx  said, Dickens, and the other novelists of Victorian England, “…issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together…”. The exceptional popularity of his novels, even those with socially oppositional themes (Bleak House, 1853; Little Dorrit, 1857; Our Mutual Friend, 1865) underscored not only his almost preternatural 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.<br/><br/>His fiction, with often vivid descriptions of life in nineteenth century England, has inaccurately and anachronistically come to symbolise on a global level Victorian society (1837 – 1901) as uniformly “Dickensian”, when in fact, his novels’ time span spanned from the 1770s to the 1860s. In the decade following his death in 1870, a more intense degree of socially and philosophically pessimistic perspectives invested British fiction; such themes stood in marked contrast to the religious faith that ultimately held together even the bleakest of Dickens’s novels. Dickens clearly influenced later Victorian novelists such as Thomas Hardy and George Gissing; their works display a greater willingness to confront and challenge the Victorian institution of religion. They also portray characters caught up by social forces (primarily via lower-class conditions), but they usually steered them to tragic ends beyond their control.<br/><br/>Novelists continue to be influenced by his books; for instance, such disparate current writers as Anne Rice, Tom Wolfe, and John Irving evidence direct Dickensian connections. Humorist James Finn Garner even wrote a tongue-in-cheek “politically correct” version of A Christmas Carol, and other affectionate parodies include the Radio 4 comedy Bleak Expectations. Matthew Pearl’s novel The Last Dickens is a thriller about how Charles Dickens would have ended The Mystery of Edwin Drood.<br/><br/>Although Dickens’s life has been the subject of at least two TV miniseries and two famous one-man shows, he has never been the subject of a Hollywood big screen biography.<br/><h3>Allegations of anti-Semitism and racism</h3><br/>Paul Vallely writes in The Independent that Dickens’s Fagin in Oliver Twist  -the Jew who runs a school in London for child pickpockets is widely seen as one of the most grotesque Jews in English literature, and the most vivid of Dickens’s 989 characters.<br/><br/>The mud lay thick upon the stones, and a black mist hung over the streets; the rain fell sluggishly down, and everything felt cold and clammy to the touch. It seemed just the night when it befitted such a being as the Jew to be abroad. As he glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved, crawling forth by night in search of some rich offal for a meal.<br/><br/>The character is thought to have been based on Ikey Solomon, a 19th century Jewish criminal in London, who was interviewed by Dickens during the latter’s time as a journalist. Nadia Valdman, who writes about the portrayal of Jews in literature, argues that Fagin’s representation was drawn from the image of the Jew as inherently evil, that the imagery associated him with the Devil, and with beasts.<br/><br/>The novel refers to Fagin 257 times in the first 38 chapters as “the Jew”, while the ethnicity or religion of the other characters is not mentioned. In 1854, the Jewish Chronicle asked why “Jews alone should be excluded from the ‘sympathizing heart’ of this great author and powerful friend of the oppressed.” Eliza Davis, whose husband had purchased Dickens’s home in 1860 when he had put it up for sale, wrote to Dickens in protest at his portrayal of Fagin, arguing that he had “encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew”, and that he had done a great wrong to the Jewish people. Dickens had described her husband at the time of the sale as a “Jewish moneylender”, though also someone he came to know as an honest gentleman.<br/><br/>Dickens took her complaint seriously. He halted the printing of Oliver Twist, and changed the text for the parts of the book that had not been set, which is why Fagin is called “the Jew” 257 times in the first 38 chapters, but barely at all in the next 179 references to him. In his next novel, Our Mutual Friend, he created the character of Riah (meaning “friend” in Hebrew), whose goodness, Vallely writes, is almost as complete as Fagin’s evil. Riah says in the novel: “Men say, ‘This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks.’ Not so with the Jews … they take the worst of us as samples of the best …” Davis sent Dickens a copy of the Hebrew bible in gratitude.<br/><br/>His views on the Inuit are detailed in the Franklin incident above. Dickens’s attitudes towards blacks were complex; while he fiercely opposed the inhumanity of slavery in the United States, he was also unable to conceive of Africans as equals. In American Notes, he ridicules a black driver for wearing white men’s clothes, presenting a grotesque description focused on the man’s skin colour and way of movement, which to Dickens amounts to an “insane imitation of an English coachman”. In 1868, using similar stereotypes which today would be seen as racist, Dickens railed against “the mechanical absurdity of giving these people votes”, which “at any rate at present, would glare out of every roll of their eyes, chuckle in their mouths, and bump in their heads.”<br/><br/>In The Perils of Certain English Prisoners Dickens offers an allegory of the Indian Mutiny, where the “native Sambo”, a perverted paradigm of the Indian mutineers, is a “double-dyed traitor, and a most infernal villain” who takes part in a massacre of women and children, in an allusion to the Cawnpore Massacre. Dickens was much incensed by the massacre, in which over a hundred English prisoners, most of them women and children, were killed, and on 4 October 1857 wrote in a private letter to Baroness Burdett-Coutts: “I wish I were the Commander in Chief in India. …I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested … proceeding, with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth.”<br/><br/>Perils greatly influenced the cultural reaction from English writers to the mutiny, by attributing guilt so as to portray the British as victims, and the Indians as villains.  Wilkie Collins, who co-wrote Perils, deviates from Dickens’s extremism, writing the second chapter from a less biased point of view which, quoting poet Jaya Mehta, was “parodying British racism, instead of promoting it”. Contemporary literary critic Arthur Quiller-Couch praised Dickens for eschewing any real-life depiction of the incident, for fear of inflaming his “raging mad” readership further, in favour of a romantic story “empty of racial or propagandist hatred”. A modern inference is that it was his son’s position in India, there on military service, at the mercy of inept imperial leaders who misunderstood conquered people, that may have influenced his reluctance to set Perils in India, for fear that his criticism may antagonise the son’s superiors.<br/><h3>Names: ‘Dickens’ and ‘Boz’</h3><br/>Charles Dickens had, as a contemporary critic put it, a “queer name”. The name Dickens was used in interjective exclamations like “What the Dickens!” as a substitute for “devil”. It was recorded in the OED as originating from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. It was also used as a substitute for “deuce” as in the phrase “to play the Dickens” in the meaning “to play havoc/mischief”.<br/><br/>‘Boz’ was Dickens’ occasional pen-name, but was a familiar name in the Dickens household long before Charles became a famous author. It was actually taken from his youngest brother Augustus Dickens’ family nickname ‘Moses’, given to him in honor of one of the brothers in The Vicar of Wakefield (one of the most widely read novels during the early 19th century). When playfully pronounced through the nose ‘Moses’ became ‘Boses’, and was later shortened to ‘Boz’ – pronounced through the nose with a long vowel ‘o’.<br/><strong>Siblings</strong><br/><ul><br/> <li>Frances (Fanny) Elizabeth Dickens 1810-1848</li><br/> <li>Letitia Dickens 1816-1893</li><br/> <li>Harriet Dickens 1819-1824</li><br/> <li>Frederick Dickens</li><br/> <li>Alfred Lamert Dickens</li><br/> <li>Augustus Newnham Dickens</li><br/></ul><br/><strong>Identity:</strong><br/><ul><br/> <li>Born: Charles John Huffam Dickens, 7 February 1812(1812-02-07), Landport, Portsmouth, England</li><br/> <li>Died: 9 June 1870(1870-06-09) (aged 58), Gad’s Hill Place, Higham, Kent, England</li><br/> <li>Cause of death: Stroke</li><br/> <li>Resting place: Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey</li><br/> <li>Nationality: British</li><br/> <li>Other names: Boz</li><br/> <li>Citizenship: UK</li><br/> <li>Occupation: Writer</li><br/> <li>Years active: 1833-1870</li><br/> <li>Notable works: Sketches by Boz, The Old Curiosity Shop, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge, A Christmas Carol, Martin Chuzzlewit, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, The Pickwick Papers</li><br/> <li>Spouse: Catherine Thomson Hogarth</li><br/> <li>Children: Charles Dickens, Jr., Mary Dickens, Kate Perugini, Walter Landor Dickens, Francis, Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens, Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens, Henry Fielding Dickens, Dora Annie Dickens, and Edward Dickens</li><br/> <li>Parents: John Dickens, Elizabeth Dickens</li><br/></ul><br/>Sumber: Wikipedia

Charles Dickens

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="402"] Charles Dickens[/caption] Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 Febru...

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