Hard Times: Dickens

Utilitarianism, Fact and Fancy

Hard Times, a Victorian novel by Charles Dickens, is the most famous attack on Bentham’s alleged antipathy to imagination called Utilitarian gloom, or Gradgrindian Education. The famous caricature of Benthamite rationality is Gradgrind who asserts that—“now, what I want is, Facts.” At the very early, it is stated, for example, that “Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts.”

From parliament to Coketown to the Gradgrind family, England is affiliated by an obsession with means and ends that has cast out the pleasuers of imagination and smile human affection. As a result, the imaginative or aesthetic subjects are absent from the curriculum, and higher emphasis is laid upon analysis, deduction and mathematics:

“No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what you are!”

Gradgrind’s own son Tom revolts against his upbringing, and becomes a gambler and a thief. While, Louisa, his daughter, becomes emotionally stunted, virtually soulless: both as a young child, and as an unhappily married woman. Bitzer, who adheres to Gradgrind’s teachings, becomes an uncompassionate egotist. Sissy, the circus performer’s daughter, does badly at school, failing to remember the many facts she is taught, but is genuinely virtuous and fulfilled.

If fact is represented by Gradgrind, then Fancy, the opposite of Fact, is epitomised by the grotesque community of Sleary’s circus, the last vestige of a world held together by bonds of mutual affection and respect. Sleary, who is reckoned a fool by both Gradgrind and Bounderby, understands the need of amusement to escape from everyday drudgery. Utilitarianism links future of sympathy to a more thoroughgoing alienation, which is suspicious of any form of mental life—not obviously ‘useful.’

After all, the maximisation of pleasure was the central aim of utilitarian ethics.

Industrialization

When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were establishing their social critique, Charles Dickens took up the cause of ordinary working class in Hard Times (1854), which is surely “the harshest of his stories” as mentioned by GK Chesterton in Appreciations and Criticisms (1911). Though there was an ample precedent in the eighteenth century fiction for the social dynamics, yet an industrial order, to adapt Carlyle phrase, was ‘unexampled’ in this novel.

Following by-now conventional gesture of the “social problem” novel, it focused on the inner struggle of a single working class character, Stephen Blackpool—a weaver by profession. He was not only caught between the warring claims of labour and capital, but also mistreated by aptly named industrialist Joseph Bounderby. Later, he was wrongly accused of theft, exiled by the trade union, made redundant, and finally falls down an old mine shaft only to dies a disrespected death. His stoic forbearance is summed up in his feeble conclusion as “a muddle.”

The grave situation of workers which were depicted by Dickens were, in the words of Walter Allen, an unsurpassed “critique of industrial society,” which was later superseded by works of DH Lawrence. Though the novelist remained unsuccessful in projecting the correct and comprehends the politics of the time—which forced Thomas Macaulay to brand it a product of “sullen socialism,”—yet was able to find good words from John Ruskin, George Orwell, and FR Leavis.

While the narrator urge his middle class readers to appreciate that the workers were “gravely, deeply, faithfully in earnest” and “through their very delusions, showed great qualities” in fact the memorized union organisers received almost much voices as. Slackbridge’s trade unionism has played more “symbolic” role than a “realist’ function, as mentioned by David Lodge in Working with Structuralism (1981). It is why perhaps George Bernard Shaw was saddened by Dickens’ inaccurate depiction of “trade unionism.” And Yet, as brutal and as unjust as conditions were, and however accurate Gaskell and Dickens were in reflecting these problems, in reality the new industrial system proved to be hugely successful in terms of their overall contribution to the Victorian economy and the way that they sealed Britain’s reputation around the world.

Victorian literature dealt with the industrial epoch in a range of ‘industrial novels,’ which were often called ‘social problem’ or ‘condition of England novels.’

As a sub-genre, the industrial novel peaks during 1840s and 1850s, and then goes into decline after the 1860s. Titles includes Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong: The Factory boy (1839); Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1844); Benjamin Disraeli’s two novels Coningsby (1844) and Sybil, or the Two Nations (1846); Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848); Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley (1849); Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, and George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical (1849). Although Industrial strife is also reflected in the work of Victorian women poets such as Caroline Norton and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

In this world of moral and emotional bankruptcy, ambition has curdled into mechanical routine, emotional numbness, and brute domination.

Dickens' "Oliver Twist"

Note: This post is a collection of three various articles, the link of which is given in the sections. It is only text version

Section A

LINK: http://missdaydreamersplace.blogspot.in/2014/04/oliver-twist-by-charles-dickens-1838.html

In an unnamed town a penniless young woman stumbles into a workhouse, gives birth to a baby boy, and then dies soon after. The parish beadle, Mr Bumble, gives the child the name of Oliver Twist and the next ten years of Oliver's life are spent in the squalor of the workhouse. When Oliver then dares to ask for some more food Mr Bumble sells Oliver to an undertaker called Mr Sowerberry. Oliver's life isn't any better there and he soon decides to run away and seek his fortune in the great city of London. Upon his arrival, Oliver meets a cunning pickpocket called the Artful Dodger. The Dodger introduces Oliver to a man called Fagin who is the leader of a criminal gang that consists of pickpockets, prostitutes and burglars although Oliver is unaware of this. Fagin offers Oliver work but when Oliver goes out on his "first job" he finds himself being arrested. Fortunately, a kind man called Mr Brownlow takes pity on Oliver. He takes the boy into his home and cares for him. Oliver becomes very fond of Mr Brownlow and his housekeeper Mrs Bedwin but this happiness is short-lived. Fagin fears that Oliver will inform on him so he arranges for Bill Sikes, one of his criminal associates, to kidnap the boy. The only person with the power to save Oliver from the clutches of Fagin's gang is Bill's abused girlfriend Nancy.

After A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist is probably Dickens' most famous and adapted work. Back in 2012 I was fortunate enough to see a touring production of Oliver! The Musical which I absolutely loved :) But now that I've finally got round to reading Charles Dickens' novel I realise that my love for that particular stage production was more to do with the Lionel Bart songs and Samantha Barks' performance as Nancy than its story. Oliver Twist is my fifth Dickens book and it's unquestionably my least favourite. I really didn't like this one. Whereas the Fagin of the Lionel Bart musical is mostly used to provide comic relief, the Fagin of Dickens' book is a far more evil and sinister character. He has no redeeming features whatsoever and is constantly referred to as "The Jew". Fagin isn't a villain who just so happens to be Jewish either. His villainy and Jewishness always seem to be linked. I know that prejudice towards Jews was rife in Dickens' time but I still found the racism in the book rather upsetting. Another issue that I had with this book was Oliver Twist himself. He's so cloying! He always says and does the right thing, doesn't appear to have any flaws, is completely pure and innocent, and even talks in a more refined way than the other child characters do in this book. He's so good that it's sickening! Urgh! And my third and final problem with Oliver Twist was all of those massive coincidences. Mr Brownlow turn out to be the best friend of Oliver's father, Rose Maylie turns out to be the younger sister of Oliver's mother, and Monks turns out to be Oliver's evil half-brother! I know that London was a lot smaller back in Dickens' time but how many long-lost relatives can Oliver keep bumping into?! I could have accepted Oliver meeting just one long-lost relative but three?! 

Having said all that, I have to say that I didn't hate this book because I was still able to find a couple of things about it that I liked: namely the visual imagery and atmosphere of London and the character of Nancy - who might well be a 17 year old heavy drinking prostitute but is by far the most well-rounded, interesting and complex character in the entire book. Nancy has an inner kindness and strength that sets her apart from Fagin and the other members of his gang. She strikes me as being the female equivalent of Sydney Carton.

Section B

Link: https://www.charlesdickensinfo.com/novels/oliver-twist/

Oliver Twist was the second novel of Charles Dickens.  It was initially published in monthly installments that began in February of 1837 and ended in April of 1839.  The publication of Oliver Twist began before the monthly publication of The Pickwick Papers ended. The two novels overlapped for nine months.  Additionally  Dickens started Nicholas Nickleby (also issued in monthly installments) before Twist finished publication.  Those two novels overlapped for nine months as well.

Oliver Twist – Dickens’s Life At The Time

• In early 1836 the first chapters of The Pickwick Papers are published. On April 2nd Dickens marries Catherine Hogarth.

• During January of 1837  the first of his 10 children is born. The next month publication of Oliver Twist begins. On May 7th of that year Mary Hogarth, Catherine’s sister, dies.

• In 1838 the publication of Nicholas Nickleby begins.

Fagin

Charles Dickens did not have a happy childhood.  The low point came when he was twelve.  His father, John Dickens,  was arrested and sent to jail for failure to pay a debt.  Worst of all, young Charles Dickens was sent to work in a blacking (shoe polish) factory.

It was at the blacking factory that Dickens met Bob Fagin.  Bob was another employee at the factory.  However unlike some of the others Bob never teased young Dickens.  In fact, Fagin defended Dickens when the other boys taunted him.  He also taught Dickens how to wrap and tie the bottles of polish.  He even helped Dickens when he was ill at work.

Why would Dickens remember someone who had showed him such kindness by naming such villain after him?   The time Dickens spent at the blacking factory was the worst time of his entire life.  His shame over the incident made him keep it a secret from all but a few people.  So perhaps it was just that Bob Fagin introduced him to the ways of the factory in the same way that the other Fagin showed Oliver the correct way to pick pockets.  Maybe both men, the real Bob Fagin and the imaginary one, showed young boys, Charles Dickens and Oliver Twist, the darker side of life.

Once in a Lifetime

In June of 1837 something happed that only occurred once in Dickens’s career.  He missed a deadline.  He was writing two serialized novels at once, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist.  However in June of 1837 there was no Pickwick.  There was no Oliver Twist.  Instead there was a funeral.

In 1837 Mary Hogarth was seventeen, pretty and living with her sister Catherine and Catherine’s husband, Charles Dickens.  Mary was a favorite with the couple and had become like a little sister to Charles.

On the evening of May 6th Mary went with the couple to the St. James Theatre.  The group returned late in the evening and Mary retired for the night.  Shortly after that Dickens heard a cry from Mary’s room.  She was ill.  Despite her doctor’s care Mary passed away in Dickens’s arms on May 7th.

Charles was devastated.  The June installments of Twist and Pickwick were not published due to “the sudden death of a very dear young relative to whom he was most affectionately attached and whose society had been for a long time the chief solace of his labours.”

The character Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist was inspired by Mary Hogarth.

Themes in Oliver Twist

In Oliver Twist Dickens attacks the New Poor Law of 1834.  The New Poor Law was really a series of measures that were enacted in 1834.  Supposedly these laws were to provide aid and assistance to impoverished people.  However the system had serious flaws.

People with no means of support were sent to workhouses. The system was designed with the idea that the workhouses would be unpleasant.  It was thought that this would provide added incentive for people to be self sufficient.

As a result of that thinking the food in the workhouses was meager and meals were to be eaten in silence.  Upon entering the workhouse families were separated and  assigned to same-sex quarters.  Also, the children were separated from the adults.  Infants were sent to “baby farms”.

Rather than finding this treatment motivational it broke the spirit of many people forced to live there.  The adventures of young Oliver Twist make this point.  Dickens also touches on this topic in other works.  In  A Christmas Carol  Scrooge says that “those who are badly off” must got to workhouses or other places like them.  The reply is, “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

Charles Dickens used his novel to point out truths about Victorian England that polite society tried to ignore.  After reading the novel Lord Melbourne protested, “It is all among workhouses and pickpockets and coffinmakers.  I do not like those things: I wish to avoid them.  I do not like them in reality and therefore do not like to see them represented.”

“Oliver Twist has asked for more!”

Oliver Twist Resources

• Learn About Oliver Twist

• Play the Oliver Twist Picture Scramble

• See quotes from Oliver Twist

Part C

Link: https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/oliver-twist-and-the-workhouse

Oliver Twist and the workhouse

• Article by:Ruth Richardson

• Themes:London, Poverty and the working classes, The novel 1832–1880

• Published:15 May 2014

The hardships of the Victorian workhouse led Oliver Twist utter the famous phrase ‘Please Sir, I want some more’. Here Ruth Richardson explores Dickens’s own experiences of poverty and the social and political context in which he was writing.

Most people nowadays know about the Poor Law and its workhouses from Oliver Twist - whether from the book, film or the musical. The image of the skinny neglected little boy asking for more has become a classic. For Charles Dickens, writing a novel about the Poor Law was a thoughtful intervention in a contemporary national debate. You can hear in his tone of voice - occasionally heavy with satire or irony - that he regarded the Poor Law as profoundly un-Christian.

Dickens intended Oliver Twist, first published in monthly instalments between February 1837 and April 1839, to show the system's treatment of an innocent child born and raised in the workhouse system, where no 'fault' could be ascribed to the child. He shows the boys neglected, ill-treated, and experiencing hunger so bad that one child threatens to eat one of the others if he isn't better fed. Oliver has the temerity to ask for more food only because the hungry boys had cast lots to decide who would have to do it - and he had drawn the short straw. In the famous illustration by George Cruikshank, the poor orphan Oliver stands utterly alone - with the fearful threat of cannibalism right behind him, and facing him, the bully of a workhouse master preparing to unleash his powers of retribution. The pauper woman helper in the background recognises the danger of what Oliver has done, throwing up her hands in horror.

Usage terms: : Public Domain

The description of Oliver's punishments for his request - a natural entreaty from a growing boy - occupies quite a chunk of the following chapter. The sheer brutality of the system is exposed. Oliver is maligned, threatened with being hanged, drawn and quartered; he is starved, caned, and flogged before an audience of paupers, solitarily confined in the dark for days, kicked and cursed, hauled up before a magistrate and sent to work in an undertaker's, fed on animal scraps, taunted, and forced to sleep with coffins.

The New Poor Law

Dickens was disgusted by Parliament. Before becoming a successful novelist, he had worked as parliamentary reporter. He had watched politicians at very close quarters, rapidly taking down their speeches word for word in shorthand notes, and then transcribing them for daily newspaper reports. He had listened carefully to many debates, and he was sickened by the attitudes MPs expressed towards their fellow human-beings. When Dickens planned and penned Oliver Twist, new legislation was just beginning to be implemented across the country.

The Poor Law (Amendment) Act of 1834, otherwise known as the 'New' Poor Law, established the workhouse system. Instead of providing a refuge for the elderly, sick and poor, and instead of providing food or clothing in exchange for work in times of high unemployment, workhouses were to become a sort of prison system. The government's intention was to slash expenditure on poverty by setting up a cruelly deterrent regime. The old parish poorhouses and almshouses were to be completely changed, no cash support whatever would henceforth be given out - whatever the hardship or the season - and the old gifts in kind (food, shoes, blankets) which could help a family survive together, were now disallowed. The only option would be hard work, forced labour, and only inside the workhouse (which meant entering there to live, full time) in exchange for a thin subsistence. Homes were broken up, belongings sold, families separated.

Groups of parishes - called Poor Law Unions - were formed under the new system, and a network of workhouses was established across the country. They were run by 'Guardians' who were usually local business people. The regime inside these places was deliberately intended to deter everyone but the most desperate. Children were separated and sent away, heads were shaved, clothes boiled, uniforms issued. Although centrally-controlled through the Poor Law Board, each workhouse was administered locally. Dickens shows that the administration was run by self-satisfied and heartless men: the 'man in the white waistcoat' personifies the smug viciousness of the guardians in Oliver Twist's workhouse (ch. 2).[1] This is likely to have been something Dickens knew about: he had probably reported on such matters in London, and many accurate details in Oliver Twist show that Dickens did a lot of research before he wrote the story. It is true that the workhouse system was patchy: in some places - especially in parts of the North of England - more charitable notions among the 'guardians' of the poor meant that management could be kinder. In general, though, the system was harsh and austere. The poor - even if sick, old or dying - were treated punitively, as if their predicament was entirely of their own making, and they were deserving of punishment. This was at a time when there was no National Health Service to help the sick get well, no pension scheme to help the elderly remain at home, no unemployment pay for people with no work, no social services at all for those in need.

The workhouse system was hated, and people did everything they could to avoid becoming subject to it, so those who ended up there were either the most vulnerable, or the most hardened and brazen. Sadly, these groups were often housed in the same wards. Charitable hospitals generally refused access to those suffering from chronic (incurable) conditions, dying patients, and paupers. So workhouse inmates were often people whose medical conditions were regarded as hopeless at the time, and whose social status debarred them from other kinds of help. The Victorian Poor Law system effectively warehoused people the Nazis would have liked to liquidate: the sick, elderly and infirm, people who were chronically ill or incurable, physically deformed, diseased, maimed, lunatic, demented or mentally handicapped.

Dickens was only 25 when he started writing Oliver Twist in the winter of 1836-37. Because of his own life-experience he understood that accidents of birth or circumstance could make ordinary individuals vulnerable to desperation, hunger, cruelty and crime. His secret (which was only revealed after his death) was that when he was a child, his own family had been imprisoned in a debtors' prison. However terrible that experience was for him - and it marked him for life - he knew it was actually preferable to being incarcerated in a workhouse. In a debtors' prison, the family was at least allowed to remain together.The Dickens family had also twice lived only doors from a major London workhouse (the Cleveland Street Workhouse), so they had most likely seen and heard of many sorrowful things. The family's lodgings were above a food shop, and it is quite possible that young Dickens felt deeply sensitive about the suffering he knew was going on inside the institution close by. As an adult, Dickens knew that he himself had been fortunate to avoid a fate like Oliver Twist's.

The diet at the Cleveland Street Workhouse

Recent historical research has shown that the picture of the Poor Law that Dickens created in Oliver Twist closely resembles the real thing as it operated inside the workhouse in Cleveland Street. The punishing regime used to discipline Oliver is very like that which prevailed at the time in Cleveland Street. The clearest instance of a parallel is perhaps that the official workhouse regulations published by Covent Garden Parish specifically forbade second helpings of food. 

A 'new-modelled diet table' ordered gruel every day for breakfast, and an allowance of bread (no mention of butter) with 'a portion' of boiled meat on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. On each day following, the main meal was only soup, made from the broth in which the previous day's meat had been boiled. On Saturday neither meat nor soup was given, but only a small portion of cheese. Tea, sugar, porter (ale), mutton or mutton broth, were permitted only on a doctors' prescription. Fish was not mentioned, and pork made an appearance only once a year on Christmas Day, along with the only appearance of baked plum pudding. On Good Friday an Easter treat was allowed: 'cross buns one to each'. Unless expressly prescribed by the Medical Attendant, and entered by him in the ledger devoted to that purpose, it was specifically emphasised twice that there was to be: 'no addition to the above allowance in any case', and 'on no account any additional allowance to be given'.

Everyone knows what Dickens did with this: “Please Sir, I want some more”.

The four-storey Workhouse in Cleveland Street and its burial ground were in active use throughout both periods that Dickens was living only a few doors away. The Workhouse inhabited an enclosed space, but it was not an entirely closed institution: what went on there influenced the locality in more ways than we can imagine. The many windows of the building’s frontage overlooked the street, so from across the road faces might be seen behind the glass, and perhaps human voices heard. The life of the entire institution was coordinated by the regular clang of the workhouse bell, which punctuated the working day within the institution at the hours of rising, working, dining and sleeping. A great workhouse bell intended to be heard in every ward and across the backyard and forecourt of this large institution can hardly have been inaudible in the surrounding streets. Other sounds might also have escaped beyond the walls of the institution: both the lying-in (maternity) ward and the ward for lunatics were at the front of the building, so on occasions moans and wails might have mingled and merged audibly outside. The overpowering smell of the place, which even Poor Law correspondents, who generally understated institutional shortcomings, referred to as ‘fetid exhalations’ was commented upon by Dr Rogers (the reforming doctor and Poor Law Medical Officer in the Workhouse), who also spoke with disgust of the choking clouds of dust from the paupers’ carpet-beating and stone-breaking, particles from which must surely have freighted the air in the streets nearby.

The Workhouse gate was usually kept firmly shut. The gateman, whose double gatehouse stood on each side of the entrance, was expected to keep firm control over access. He required a written order from arrivals before opening the gate, searched visitors individually for ‘spiritous liquors’ as they entered, accepted and documented deliveries, checked all those who left the House, and noted everything in a great ledger. We do not know whether he was summoned by bell or knocker, but either would have been audible on the street as well as inside his gatehouse. Tradesmen, visitors, pauper funerals arriving for the graveyard, and pauper applicants for admission would all have had to wait outside until he verified their credentials. There would have been times, no doubt, when the queue was long.

Dickens’s inspiration

Further material has also come to light which suggests that Dickens used details from the locality of the Cleveland Street Workhouse in his writings, most especially in Oliver Twist. For example, Oliver's cap is described as being of brown cloth - the same as the boys' uniform in the Cleveland Street Workhouse, and the novel's plot pivots on the possibility that the workhouse matron could be observed from the women's wing of a workhouse, going to visit a pawnbroker's. In Dickens's day, a well-established pawnbroker's shop stood at the top end of Norfolk Street, diagonally between the Workhouse and the corner house in which the Dickens family were lodgers. It was clearly visible from the windows of both places. If you stand on the same corner today, where the pawnbroker's shop used to be, you can still see both Dickens's old home (which now has a blue plaque) and the upstairs windows of the Workhouse's women's wards, from where the elderly female inmates could have secretly scrutinised the matron's errand.

But perhaps the most convincing evidence that Dickens used Cleveland Street in Oliver Twist is that right opposite the Workhouse, was a tallow-chandler's shop selling candles and cheap rushlights made of animal fat (tallow). The signboard outside is likely to have been painted with the proprietor's business and his name. Who was he? A man named Bill Sykes, just the same as the murderer in Oliver Twist.

Footnotes

[1] The ‘man in the white waistcoat’ is Mr Limbkins, Chair of the Board of the workhouse.

• Written by Ruth Richardson

• Ruth Richardson is an independent scholar, a Visiting Fellow at King’s College London and Visiting Professor at Hong Kong University. A devoted reader in the British Library’s Rare Books Room, she is the author/editor of several books including Death, Dissection and the Destitute, Vintage Papers from the Lancet, Medical Humanities, The Making of Mr Gray’s Anatomy and most recently, Dickens and the Workhouse. She has published many papers in learned journals, created online exhibitions for King's College Special Collections and for the Bishopsgate Institute, and is a frequent contributor to The Lancet. She is currently working on a study of marginalia and topography in Dickens and Tennyson, and working to preserve the Cleveland Street Workhouse.

Great Expectations

According to George Orwell, the biggest problem with Dickens is that he simply doesn't know when to stop. Every sentence seems to be on the point of curling into a joke; characters are forever spawning a host of eccentric offspring. "His imagination overwhelms everything," Orwell sniffed, "like a kind of weed."

That's hardly an accusation that could be levelled against Great Expectations. If some of Dickens's novels sprawl luxuriously across the page, this one is as trim as a whippet. Touch any part of it and the whole structure quivers into life. In Chapter 1, for example, Pip recalls watching Magwitch pick his way through the graveyard brambles, "as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in". Not until the final chapters do we realise why Pip is so haunted by the convict's apparent reluctance to stay above ground, but already the novel's key narrative method has been established. To open Great Expectations is to enter a world in which events are often caught only out of the corner of the narrator's eye. It is a world of hints and glimpses, of bodies disappearing behind corners and leaving only their shadows behind. Whichever of Dickens's two endings is chosen, it's hard to finish the last page without thinking of how much remains to be said. Of course, none of this occurred to me when I first read Great Expectations as a child. In the 1980s this story of class mobility and get-rich-quick ambition resonated with all the force of a modern parable. The revelation that there was another story behind the one I was enjoying was as much a shock to me as it is to Pip, but that only increased my admiration for a novelist who treats his plot rather as Jaggers treats Miss Havisham in her wheelchair, using one hand to push her ahead while putting "the other in his trousers-pocket as if the pocket were full of secrets".

I suspect that's one reason why Great Expectations is such a popular novel. Readers grow up with it. It's probably also why so many of them sympathise with Pip, whose narrative voice involves the perspective of a wide-eyed child coming up against that of his wiser, sadder adult self. Anyone who first reads the story as a child and returns to it in later years is likely to feel a similar mixture of nostalgia and relief. But it isn't only individual readers who have grown up with Great Expectations. Our culture has too. Dickens once claimed that David Copperfield was his "favourite child" and that Great Expectations was a close second. It's no coincidence that both novels are about how easily children can be warped or damaged, but of the two it is the shorter, sharper Great Expectations that has aged better.

Few works of fiction have enjoyed such a lively creative aftermath. Peter Carey has rewritten it in Jack Maggs. Television shows from The Twilight Zone to South Park have echoed it in ways that range from loving homage to finger-poking parody. Even the title has settled in the public consciousness, with shops such as "Grape Expectations" (wine) and "Baked Expectations" (cakes). It's hard not to be fond of a novel that so perfectly reflects its author's restless, rummaging imagination.

Hard Times

Facts and figures. In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens. I've not revisited any of his novels in the 34 years since, except A Christmas Carol andHard Times. A Christmas Carol because I wrote a foreword for it, andHard Times because there was something unDickensian about it that intrigued me. Set in a northern mill-town rather than Dickens's usual London, Hard Times tackles politics in an uncharacteristically rigorous fashion, bringing it closer to Disraeli's Sybil than Pickwick Papers. Dickens seizes on utilitarianism – a philosophy most of us recognise as benign and socially progressive – and vilifies it as a great evil that poisons the human spirit. He expresses his loathing for trade unions, too. It's all rather problematic, but Dickens just about pulls it off through sheer force of will, creating those unforgettable (and weirdly Kafkaesque) schoolroom scenes in which zombie-like pupils spout verbiage like "Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive."

My affinity, as a novelist, with Dickens has been overstated. I relish the way everything in his prose pulsates with life force, and I'm in debt to him every time I invest inanimate objects with uncanny animism. But his female characters annoy me. Not the grotesque ones – Miss Havisham, Mrs Micawber and other delicious monsters. It's the nubile, noble heroines I find irksome. Their vapidity and sexlessness is often attributed, by pundits whose acquaintance with Victorian literature is scant, to the moral climate of the era. Yet other Victorian authors managed to sneak eroticism into their work, and if Dickens had put his titanic talents to the challenge of sublimated sex prose, he could easily have out-porned Bram Stoker. He just didn't want to.

Which brings me to another reason for recommending Hard Times: it contains the closest thing to a real, complex woman in Dickens' s fiction. Louisa Gradgrind may be as neutered as the rest of his heroines, but she's aware of her passionlessness, and blames it on the repressed upbringing she's been subjected to. In Great Expectations, Dickens created a femme fatale, but Estella is icily secure in her fataleness. Louisa remains achingly vulnerable, a cold fish who longs to be a warm mammal.

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

In 1836, Charles Dickens, aged 24, married Catherine Hogarth. It was a rare venture for him into the south-west of the city – though Chelsea was effectively a village suburb in those days – as Dickens was resolutely a north London man, his "manor" running from Somers Town and Camden south to the City, down to the Strand and Waterloo bridge, taking in Marylebone and Covent Garden. In later life, the northern edge of Hyde Park was about as far west as he would venture and once, when he rented a house on the south side of the park in Knightsbridge, he felt decidedly uncomfortable. The year 1836 was also significant for another reason: Dickens not only married but he began to be rich. He was writing for four publishers and that year earned a bonus of £500 for The Pickwick Papers. Three years earlier, as a journalist, he had been producing sketches of urban life for a magazine called The Monthly, unpaid.

Dickens lived well – in his pomp, he calculated that he needed around £9,000 a year (£630,000) to provide for his extended family and dependents, and to keep him in the style he was accustomed to. Among one of the last things he did before he died was carry out an inventory of his extensive cellars at his big house, Gad's Hill, in Kent, noting entries for sherry, brandy, rum and one "cask very fine Scotch whisky, 30 gallons". Dickens, in addition, was a heavy drinker, though probably not an alcoholic.

That "probably" is key. Leon Edel, biographer of Henry James, defined a biographer as "a novelist, on oath". It's a valid aphorism and worth bearing in mind, particularly when dealing with a writer as famous and as shrouded with legend and anecdote as Dickens. One of the reasons why it's so intriguing to learn how much money he made is that it strips away some mythic veils – Dickens was a great artist, but he was also a very human being. Tomalin's biography – always scrupulous about what we can know, what we can deduce and what is mere speculation – paints a portrait of a complex and exacting man. He was at once vivacious and charming, charismatic and altruistic and possessed of superabundant energies – "Dickens kept going," Tomalin notes, "by taking on too much" (for example, in 1838 he was writing Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nicklebysimultaneously). But he was also, equally – to an almost schizoid degree – tormented, imperious, vindictive and implacable, once wronged.

These matters are particularly focused when it comes to the story of Dickens's marriage and his long affair with the young actress Nelly Ternan. Dickens, aged 45, fell for Ellen Ternan when she was 18. It was simply – like Pip's love for Estella in Great Expectations – because she was "irresistible", he claimed. Dickens had long been unhappy in his marriage – a union that had produced 10 children by this time – and his infatuation with Nelly brought out the worst in him. He publicly separated from Catherine, humiliating her in the cruellest manner, and, after a form of courtship with Nelly – who did not yield to his importuning immediately – set her up as his mistress in a series of houses on the outskirts of London. This was done in the greatest secrecy, and it's something of a miracle that we know about this side of Dickens's life at all.

However, by the time he had succeeded in finally establishing this new menage to his satisfaction, Dickens was ageing and ailing. Perhaps the strain of living this lie in Victorian England provoked undue stress – we must never forget how internationally famous he was – but by his early 50s Dickens was prematurely aged, suffering from terrible gout (he could often hardly walk), piles, neuralgia and, later, the effects of a minor stroke. George Eliot described him in 1870 as "dreadfully shattered". He had been an enthusiastic cigar smoker since the age of 15 and the late photographs show a raddled, smoker's face with grizzled beard and deep lines. Probably the worst thing he could do as his health gave way was to embark on a punishing series of tours giving public readings from his novels. He was so weak he sometimes had to be helped on and off the stage, but he fed off the adoration of the thousands of his readers who turned out to hear him at home and in America. Yet, while the relentless schedule may have hastened his death, it was also a great succour to his ego and his bank balance – "Think of it," he once said gleefully to his manager, "£190 a night [£14,000]." He died in 1870 from a cerebral haemorrhage, aged 58, with his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished.

The work remains and endures – and Tomalin analyses the novels with great acuity – but what is so valuable about this biography is the palpable sense of the man himself that emerges. Tomalin doesn't hesitate to condemn Dickens when his behaviour demands it, yet she writes throughout with great sympathy and unrivalled knowledge in the most limpid and stylish prose. She has the gift of being able to set a scene and a time with compelling vividness. This is a superb biography of a great writer – and is a beautifully produced book, it should be said, with copious illustrations. It is worthy to stand beside Richard Ellmann on Joyce, Donald Rayfield on Chekhov and Jean-Yves Tadie on Proust – all three writers who deserve that rarest of accolades, genius. Like Dickens, they were complicated and often extremely difficult and demanding individuals. The more we learn about them as people – paradoxically – the greater their art resonates with us.