Pailthorpe, are revealed in a 14-volume Grangerization of Forster’s Life, held in the British Library. Additional fictionalised illustrations of Dickens’s life, created by the Dickens illustrator Frederick W. The practice of Grangerization – the art of extending and customising a published book with inserted material – was popular among Victorian readers. In doing so, he further blurs the boundaries between Dickens and the fictional Copperfield. In the novel, the young Copperfield writes that: “I mingled my tears with the water in which I was washing the bottles.” Barnard heightens and externalises the private emotion that Dickens wrote about in the autobiographical fragment to create a fictional scene. The image bears a closer resemblance to Dickens’s fictionalisation of the first day at the warehouse in David Copperfield. Yet what Barnard pictures is a scene of solitude, visible despair or perhaps exhaustion at the warehouse that is not described in this fragment. He was careful not to let them see his suffering, and to make sure that he worked as hard as them. In this autobiographical fragment, Dickens describes how he was brought down to work among other boys in the warehouse. Allingham (), CC BYĭickens wrote a private account of this time, for which Forster’s biography is our only remaining source. Among them was an emotive image of Dickens as a young boy in the blacking warehouse.ĭickens depicted as a young boy working in a blacking factory. The Household Edition of Forster’s Life, published by Chapman & Hall in 1879, included 28 new illustrations of the biography by Fred Barnard. The revelation that Dickens had performed child labour in a blacking warehouse when his father was imprisoned for debt, before rising to international fame in his twenties, gave him a life story that the press described as rivalling Dickens’s “most popular novel”.
#Charles dickens full#
However, it was only with Forster’s biography that the full extent of the similarities between Dickens and the fictional Copperfield was made public. Dickens’s Preface to his 1849–50 novel David Copperfield had encouraged readers to interpret it as semi-autobiographical. Victorian readers now had a full-length birth-to-death Dickens biography to draw on, written by a friend who had known him for his entire adulthood. It was the publication of John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens in 1872–74, though, that marked a watershed in fictionalisations of Dickens.