A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) (127 page)

Dickens’s Birthplace

393 Old Commercial Road

Portsmouth PO1 4QL

Hampshire

England

The house in which
Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1812 is preserved as a museum furnished in the style of 1809, appropriate to the year when John and Elizabeth Dickens set up their first home. (John Dickens was transferred to Portsmouth from London when his job in the Navy Pay Office changed locations. The Dickens family stayed there until 1815, when they returned to London.)

According to the museum Web site, the furniture, ceramics, glass, household objects, and decorations are faithful to the Regency style. The museum includes three furnished rooms: the parlor, the dining room, and the bedroom where Charles was born. The exhibition room features a display on Charles Dickens and Portsmouth, as well as a small collection of memorabilia: the couch on which he died at his house in Kent, and personal effects, such as his snuff box, inkwell, and paper knife.

Dickens’s Childhood Home

No. 2 (now 11) Ordnance Terrace

Chatham, Kent

Dickens lived in this three-story Georgian house overlooking the river from 1817 to 1821. It was a favorite place for Dickens, where he learned to read and discovered his father’s collection of romantic fiction and adventure tales in the attic.

Dickens House Museum

48 Doughty Street

London WC1N 2LX

When Dickens began to have some success with his
Pickwick Papers
and as editor of
Bentley’s Miscellany
, he required a home that would reflect his rising social position. He moved in March of 1837 to a twelve-room house at 48 Doughty Street, Holborn, on a gated residential street, with his wife, Catherine, and his sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, who died there at the tragically young age of seventeen. He lived there until 1839.

Among the museum’s collection are Dickens’s desk from his Gad’s Hill Place study, a carefully restored drawing room, the Dickens family Bible, and the Dickens Reference Library, which includes rare editions and manuscripts. Original furniture and paintings are also on display.

Web site: www.dickensmuseum.com.

Dickens Residence, 1839–51

1 Devonshire Terrace

Marylebone Road

London

This home of Dickens’s, in which he completed five novels, was demolished in 1959. In its place is a bas-relief frieze depicting the author and the main characters from the novels he wrote while he lived there.

Dickens Residence, 1851–60

Tavistock House

London

A larger home than his Devonshire Terrace residence, Tavistock House had eighteen rooms and private grounds. Dickens had a large room that served as a study. His daughter recalled that its length gave Dickens plenty of space for pacing. During his tenure at this residence in fashionable west London, Dickens wrote some of his greatest novels, including
Bleak House
,
Hard Times
,
Little Dorrit
, and
A Tale of Two Cities
. It is also where he and his friend Wilkie Collins first staged
The Frozen Deep
in 1857, which gave him the idea for the substitution scene in
A Tale of Two Cities
. The original Dickens home is no longer there.

Dickens Holiday Resort

Bleak House

Broadstairs

Kent

Broadstairs was Dickens’s favorite holiday retreat, and he returned there most summers until 1851. He stayed in various hotels and houses there, until 1850, when he took the house most closely associated with him; once called Fort House, its name changed to Bleak House after he used it as the setting for his novel. Dickens completed
David Copperfield
there, and another house suggested Betsy Trotwood’s residence. Both residences now house museums, whose holdings include period furniture, letters, illustrations, and other commemorative items.

Dickens Residence, 1860–70

Gad’s Hill Place

Rochester

Kent

Dickens admired this estate as a child, when he and his father would walk in the countryside. Reputedly his father once told Dickens to work hard and one day he might own such a home (a tale retold in
The Uncommercial Traveller
). He bought the late 1770s-era brick home in 1856, and spent years converting rooms and building a conservatory. In his study he painted dummy books on a door and some of the walls with amusing titles, such as
History of a Short Chancery Suit
in nineteen volumes. It was here that he set his personal correspondence—“the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years”—ablaze in a bonfire in his garden. His daughter tried to convince him to save some of them, but he refused. He lived there until his death in 1870.

Dickens’s Grave Site

Poet’s Corner

Westminster Abbey

London SW1P 3PA

Dickens is buried alongside many other great poets and writers (either buried or commemorated) in this corner of Westminster Abbey, which holds a treasure of paintings, stained glass, textiles, sculpture, and other artifacts. Its tombs and memorials comprise the most important collection of monumental sculpture in the United Kingdom.

Web site: www.westminster-abbey.org.

If you enjoyed Dickens’s
Great Expectations
, you might also like to read other Victorian novels, many of which have successfully been adapted into films or series for television.

Dickens’s best-selling rival was William Makepeace Thackeray, whose most famous novel is
Vanity Fair
(1848). Like Dickens, Thackeray also wrote a “novel of education” titled
Pendennis
(1848–50). Wilkie Collins was Dickens’s close friend and fellow collaborator. He is best known for the sensation fiction
The Woman in White
(1860), and he was also an early practitioner of the detective novel, as in
The Moonstone
(1868). Another Victorian sensation novelist, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a prolific writer and successful magazine editor, scandalized Victorian critics with her sensation novel
Lady Audley’s Secret
(1862); her
Eleanor’s Victory
(1863) is another early example of the detective genre.

Charlotte Brontë's novels, like Dickens’s, often portrayed the lives of orphans struggling to adulthood.
Jane Eyre
(1847) is a classic novel of the Victorian period. Like
Great Expectations
,
Jane Eyre
and
Villette
(1853) are written as first-person narratives. Perhaps the most respected of the Victorian novelists, George Eliot (born Mary Anne Evans; she took a male pen name in order to be taken seriously by critics and publishers) wrote novels intended as serious art. Her
Middlemarch
(1871–72) is a masterpiece of English realism and psychological insight, and the heroine of
The Mill on the Floss
(1860), Maggie Tulliver, is still a favorite among readers. A less familiar realist writer is Elizabeth Gaskell, whose
Mary Barton
(1848), like many of Dickens’s fictions, chronicles the lives of the working-class poor;
Cranford
(1851), serialized in Dickens’s magazine,
Household Words
, sensitively chronicled the capricious effects of the economic market on middle-class women.

Another novel about a cash-conscious society, Anthony Trollope’s
The Way We Live Now
(1875), often is found on lists of the “100 best novels.”
The Warden
(1855) is the first (of six) of Trollope’s well-loved Barsetshire chronicles, set in the fictional county of Barchester. Unlike the socially conservative Trollope, Thomas Hardy’s novels took up themes, such as sexual mores, that challenged Victorian society, and they were consequently abused and misunderstood. Like Trollope, he also invented a fictional though realistic county, called Wessex, for the setting of many of his fictions. His novels, such as
The Mayor of Casterbridge
(1886), or the better-known
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
(1891), masterfully document a disappearing rural English culture. One more writer who famously scandalized Victorian society is Oscar Wilde. His novella,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891), includes a manifesto for the late-Victorian decadent art movement. But Wilde is best known for his witty dramas, comedies that satirized Victorian morality, as in
The Importance of Being Earnest
(first performed 1895; published 1898). At the end of the century, the novella
Heart of Darkness
(1899), by Joseph Conrad, is widely considered a classic text on the British imperial project, while
The Secret Agent
(1907) takes up the world of spies in late 1880s London and includes themes of anarchism and terrorism.

In broad terms, Victorian fiction tells the story of modernity in the West and the values it developed: of the emergence of representative democracy, universal education, the influence of capitalism and commercial culture, as well as Britain’s place in a globally interconnected world. For this reason, as much as for its narrative artistry and compelling accounts of individuals caught in moments of moral decision, Victorian fiction continues to captivate contemporary audiences.