Charles Dickens seems to have had an odd view of what would make his son happy. With his father's encouragement, Walter became an army cadet and at age 16 was stationed in India with the armies of the East India Company, arriving just before the Indian Mutiny.
His father saw his son off at the dock. After the rebellion was suppressed, Walter remained in India served in the British Army where he attained the rank of lieutenant.
Walter fell heavily in debt and his health suffered. He was to return home to England on medical leave, but died before he could return. Because of the slow communications between England and India at that time, the news of Walter's death did not reach Charles Dickens until Dickens' birthday.
Soon after, Dickens received his son's unpaid bills. Chickenstalker in the book The Chimes which Charles Dickens was writing at the time of his son's birth. Most people new him as "Frank". Frank was a rather tragic failure, struggling to make a life for himself in the shadow of his famous father. As a young man, Frank went to Germany to study medicine, but he did not graduate. Frank joined the force when he was about age 30 and served until he was about 42, when he was discharged from the ranks due to ill health.
Despite being the son of a rich and successful man, Frank spent the remainder of his life in the ugly wastes of Canada's western frontier. He served during the Northwest Rebellion of , though he did not distinguish himself much during his career. He was for the most part known as an alcoholic and incompetent officer. Growing increasingly deaf and suffering from many infirmities, Frank was released from the force.
Looking for a way to earn a living, Frank was set to embark on a speaking tour but he died of a heart attack at age 42 before giving any lectures. His father nicknamed him "Sampson Brass" and "Skittles". Like most of the Dickens children, Alfred failed to achieve much in his life.
He received a good education, and considered going into the army, medicine, and business but failed to pursue any of these careers. A constant financial drain on his father, Dickens eventually encouraged him to emigrate to Australia to find his fortune. At age 19, Alfred left for Australia where he would remain for the next 45 years. He was soon joined by his younger brother Edward Dickens. After his father's death, Alfred purchased Wangagong station, with his share of his father's estate, but suffered financial losses when the country was hit by a depression.
To earn a living, Alfred toured Europe and America giving lectures about his father, whom he had not seen since he was He died while on a lecture tour of acute indigestion. The seventh child of Charles Dickens was a Royal Navy officer, but he too did not amount to much.
Dickens fell in love with Maria in and courted her unsuccessfully for 4 years as Maria's parents objected to the relationship. Thomas Beard Journalist and Dickens' oldest friend. Dickens and Beard were reporters together at the Morning Chronicle and Beard was best man at Dickens wedding. Beard's younger brother Francis was Dickens' personal physician and was with him when he died. Their stormy relationship ended in when Dickens bought out of his contract and purchased the rights to Oliver Twist.
William Bradbury Partner in Bradbury and Evans , Dickens' printers when he was published by Chapman and Hall , and then his publisher when he broke with Chapman and Hall in Dickens then broke with Bradbury and Evans in when they refused to print his explanation for the separation with Catherine in their magazine, Punch.
Hablot Knight Browne Phiz Dickens' major illustrator through most of his career. Browne and Dickens developed an excellent working relationship and Browne took the nickname Phiz to complement Dickens' Boz. Browne would go on to illustrate Dickens' work for 23 years.
Dickens association with Browne cooled after the somewhat disappointing illustrations for A Tale of Two Cities. He never worked for Dickens again. It was Bulwer-Lytton who persuaded Dickens to change the ending of Great Expectations from one where Pip and Estella part, to one where they apparently live happily ever after.
Angela Burdett-Coutts Wealthy philanthropist for whom Dickens helped to find suitable charitable projects such as Urania Cottage, a home for homeless women, and support for the Field Lane Ragged School , which provided education to the very poor. Thomas Carlyle Scottish novelist and historian History of the French Revolution and a major influence and close friend of Dickens.
Chapman was the more literary of the partners and it was he who originated the idea to issue The Pickwick Papers in monthly parts, a method which Dickens used throughout his career and contributed to his success. He took over the business when Edward retired in After Dickens' death in Chapman secured the copyrights to all of Dickens' works. Collin's sickly brother, Charles, married Dickens' daughter Kate. Cruikshank also acted in Dickens' amateur theatrical company. Their friendship cooled when Cruikshank, formerly a heavy drinker, became a fanatical teetotaler in opposition to Dickens' views of moderation.
Cruikshank later claimed that the idea for Oliver Twist had been his. Dickens loved Dolby's ability to take charge and get things done and the two became close friends. Dolby died in a paupers' hospital in Mary Anne wrote fiction under the name George Eliot and lived for more than 20 years with author George Henry Lewes while Lewes was still married to another woman.
Lewes was an old friend of Dickens and had been a member of Dickens' amateur theatrical troupe. Dickens enjoyed Eliot's first fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life , recognizing immediately that it was written by a woman. Dickens approached Eliot for a piece for his weekly, All the Year Round , in which Eliot had to decline due to other obligations. Both Eliot and Lewes were physically unattractive and Dickens privately referred to them as "the ugliest couple in London". When the firm refused to print a statement by Dickens concerning his separation with Catherine the angry Dickens broke with the firm and went back to his original publishers, Chapman and Hall.
When Dickens' son Charles married Evans' daughter Bessie in , Dickens refused to attend the wedding. Augustus Egg Artist and actor in Dickens theatricals for which he also designed costumes. He proposed to Dickens' sister-in-law, Georgina , which she refused. He and Dickens set up the "Guild of Literature and Art", a philanthropic organisation intended to provide welfare payments to struggling artists and writers.
John Forster An accomplished journalist, biographer, and historian, Forster was Dickens' best friend, literary advisor, and biographer. Forster proof-read nearly all of Dickens' works in progress. A man of great common sense, Forster provided the frequently impetuous Dickens sound personal, literary, and business advise.
Dickens relied heavily on Forster to take care of business during his frequent trips away from London. Forster was also one of the players in Dickens' amateur acting troupe. Forster was drama critic and later editor of the Examiner , putting him in the center of London literary life.
After Dickens' death in , Forster published The Life of Charles Dickens , drawn heavily on hundreds of letters from Dickens through the years and still the definitive Dickens biography although some facts about Dickens' life were suppressed. Forster also wrote biographies of Goldsmith, Defoe, and Swift among others. Elizabeth Gaskell Dickens was so impressed with Gaskell's novel Mary Barton that she was one of the first authors he solicited to contribute to his weekly magazine HouseHold Words.
She became a regular contributor to the magazine. She disapproved of the way Dickens handled his separation with Catherine but continued to contribute to Dickens next weekly, All the Year Round.
Dickens visited Gaskell and her husband on trips to Manchester. William Hall Partner in the firm of Chapman and Hall, publisher of Dickens' works from and from Hall was the business expert in the firm, his partner, Edward Chapman , was the literary expert. George Hogarth Dickens' father-in-law, educated in the law at Edinburgh, he once served as legal Advisor to Sir Walter Scott.
He met Dickens in when they worked together at the Morning Chronicle. Hogarth later edited the Evening Chronicle for which Dickens contributed articles. Dickens married his daughter Catherine in Washington Irving First American author to gain worldwide recognition. Dickens was an admirer and early Dickens' works were compared to Irving's writings. They met during Dickens' trip to America where Irving supported Dickens' views on international copyright.
The relationship cooled with the publication of Dickens' American Notes , which was critical of America. Also an actor in Dickens' amateur theatricals. Mark Lemon Editor of the satirical magazine Punch. Lemon contributed articles to Dickens' weekly Household Words and adapted several Dickens' stories for the stage.
Dickens and Lemon's friendship was another victim of Dickens' separation from Catherine , the two did not speak from to when they were reconciled at the graveside of mutual friend Clarkson Stanfield. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow American poet and professor of modern languages at Harvard. Dickens met Longfellow during his first American visit in and the two became fast friends. Longfellow visited Dickens in London later in and stayed at Dickens' home at Devonshire Terrace, Dickens took Longfellow on a tour of the London slums.
Longfellow visited Dickens in England again in and Daniel Maclise Artist and close friend of Dickens early in his career. He painted several pictures of the Dickens family including the famous Nickleby Portrait , painted in He was commissioned to provide frescos for the rebuilt Houses of Parliament. William Macready Distinguished actor and manager of the Covent Garden theater. An intimate friend of the Dickens family, Macready took responsibility for Dickens' children when he and Catherine went to America in He provided Dickens with instruction in the amateur theatricals.
From the start, he broke the mould of his siblings, for his father did not name him after influential, artistic, or powerfully-connected godfathers; rather, the boy was given a name with a strictly literary connection, to the eighteenth-century novelist Henry Fielding — one of his father's and David Copperfield's favourite authors. Dickens had apparently thought about naming him after another still-popular eighteenth-century writer, Oliver Goldsmith , but may have considered that at school the boy would then have to endure taunts of " Oliver asking for more.
In , Dickens father sent the boy to join his brothers at Mr. Gibson's boarding school for English boys in Boulogne-sur-mere; Henry hated the experience. When his parents separated in , he took his father's side against his mother, putting him at odds with his sister Katie in particular.
Dickens insisted that all of his children live with him at Gad's Hill , near Rochester in Kent. Nine-year-old Henry was now cared for by his twenty-year-old sister, Mamie , and his maternal aunt, Georgina Hogarth. Like his brothers, he was moved to Rochester Grammar School in But, unlike his brothers, he appears not to have been damaged by the harrowing breakup.
He was a scholarly child who did not succumb to the lures of gambling and alcohol:. As Claire Tomalin describes in her acclaimed biography Charles Dickens , , Charles had planned for Henry to take the Indian civil service examination — but the boy announced that he wanted to study at Cambridge. Henry was allowed to study for a further three years, and had private tutors in a number of skills, including mathematics and fencing.
So it happened that the future Henry Fielding Dickens distinguished himself in the profession that his father loved to satirize, perhaps from his own experience as a clerk in the Doctors' Commons. The son with the eminently literary name made his mark socially and professionally above all the other Dickens children, but not as a writer: Henry Fielding Dickens, King's Counsel, was the only one of the Dickens children to graduate from university and enter one of the learned professions.
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