Interview

Interviewer: Hello! Today I will be interviewing Charles Dickens. Good Day, Mr. Dickens. Good to have you here.

Charles Dickens: Good day to you, too. Thank you.

Interviewer: Let us get started. What events in your early life got you interested in being a writer?

Charles Dickens: In the evening when I was a child the nursemaid told my brothers and sisters and me stories. I can remember one nursemaid who told tales of Captain Murderer, who chopped his wives into pies. Or of Tom the cat who went out at night and sucked the breath out of infants (James, 2004). This account reappears in one of my Uncommerical Traveler essays. During those happy times of my life I spent hours in my bedroom reading my father’s novels, and imagining myself as Robinson Crusoe, Roderick Random, and Peregrine Pickle (Stanley and Vennema, 1993).

Interviewer: What role did mentors play in helping you develop the interests and talents you have as an artist?

Charles Dickens: As I boy I went to school run by a scholar by the name of William Giles. He saw my intelligence and imagination. And he gave me special attention. My father was also a mentor to me even though he spent too much money. He sent me back to school and allowed be to become educated (Stanley and Vennema, 1993).

Interviewer: What was the world of writing like when you became a writer?

Charles Dickens: When I started writing my first novel Oliver Twist in 1837 no one had yet written a novel where the hero of the story was a child. I was the first one to consider a child a hero. At that time children were only featured in fairy tales. And I became the first to spend more than one or two pages on a child. The world of writing changed after that and now many people tell stories all about children (Glancy, 1999).

Interviewer: What major cultural and economic and political situations of the time impacted your work?

Charles Dickens: I often wrote about the tragedies of life around me (Champion, 2002). Before the Industrial Revolution most everyone worked on farms or as craftsmen, often living and working together as a family. However during and after the revolution men, women and children worked in factories.

Interviewer: What were your major accomplishments and the methods you used in your writing?

Charles Dickens:  I’m not one to brag, but I have had 20 novels published along with other short works. And as I said, I was the first to write a novel in which a child was the hero of the story. In my novel, David Copperfield, I mixed fairy tale with reality. The novel shows the relationships between childhood and adulthood (Glancy, 1999).

Interviewer:  What were the key opportunities that lead to turning points in your life and writing?

Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers was a turning point, it being the first thing that was not a magazine that I had in print. Another would be, in the 1850s my daughter and father both died, and my wife left me. I then went on to write some of my “darker” novels including The Bleak House, Hard Times and Little Dorrit (www. noblebiographies.com, unknown).

Interviewer: What personal choices did you make to become successful?

Charles Dickens: One evening I dropped one of my stories into the box at the office of the Monthly Magazine. That was a personal choice for me. I wrote many stories for the Monthly Magazine under the pen name Boz. I also worked on a project that a publisher wanted me to work on. He wanted me to write stories for artwork which later became the idea for The Pickwick Papers (Stanley and Vennema, 1993).

Interviewer: What hardships or roadblocks did you run into in order to become a writer?

Charles Dickens: My father was a major roadblock for me. He always spent more money then he earned.  As a 12 year old I was sent to work in a factory and was not allowed to go to school (Ayer, 1998).  I hit another road block when my sister-in-law, Mary, died. For a time I could not write. And for the first time in my life I failed to meet my deadlines (Stanley and Vennema, 1993).

Interviewer: What kind of limitations did you run into as an artist and a person?

Charles Dickens: My father, as I said before, spent more money than he had, which was his largest fault. At the point in my childhood when my father was in debt I had to stop going to school and just do household chores.  At the age of 12, I was pasting lapels on jars at a blacking factory, and earned six shillings a week which I used to support myself (Encyclopedia Americana, 1999).

Interviewer: What personal stories best illustrate how you became a successful as a writer?

Charles Dickens: One evening I fearfully dropped a letter into the editor’s box for the Monthly Magazine, the magazine often published work of beginning writers. I remember waiting for the magazine to come out, and hoping for my story to have been published. And there it was in all its glory of print. I could not go out that day for I was to full of pride. I wrote many stories for the magazine after that one under the pen name Boz. They were called the Sketches by Boz (Stanley and Vennema, 1993).

Interviewer: Thank you, Mr. Dickens. Cheerio!