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Dickens's early reading 
The infant Dickens acquired a passion for reading from his mother, becoming, in the words of his nursemaid Mary Weller, 'a terrible boy to read'. In the Dickens family home in Chatham, Charles's father John had a small library of eighteenth-century literary classics and other books which was hugely important to Charles. It was here that he read the Arabian Nights and Tales of the Genii, Don Quixote and Gil Blas. Here he encountered Defoe, Fielding, Goldsmith, Smollett, Addison and Steele, and Mrs Inchbald's farces.
Although John Dickens was obliged to sell these books following his family's move to London, they had already fired his son's imagination: allusions and references to them, as well as to Shakespeare and the Bible, can be found throughout Charles's public and private writings, dropped in with apparently effortless recall of scenes and characters. Dickens alludes directly to his childhood reading in David Copperfield and in the preface to Nicholas Nickleby, where he pictures himself with 'a head full' of characters from Fielding, Smollett and Cervantes.
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The Tales of the Genii
James Ridley
London: J. Wallis, 1805
Courtesy of Prof. Michael Slater
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
London: Chapman and Hall, 1861
[S.L.] I [Dickens – 1861]
Ridley’s Tales of the Genii, a collection of pseudo-oriental stories purportedly translated from the Persian, captured Dickens’s imagination as a child. Encouraged by his theatre-going cousin George Lamert, Dickens composed a tragedy based on Ridley’s tale ‘The Enchanters, or Misnar the Sultan of India’ in 1821. While this does not survive, the influence of the Misnar story on Dickens can be seen at a crucial point in Great Expectations. At the end of chapter 38, about to be struck down at the height of his fortunes, Pip recalls the falling slab that crushed the enchanters ‘in the Eastern story’ as ‘the roof of my own stronghold dropped upon me’.
Arabian Nights Entertainments, Consisting of One Thousand and One Stories
London: T. Longman, 1763
[D.-L.L.] Bm.5 [Arabian Nights] SR
Dickens never lost his childhood passion for the Arabian Nights, and references to the tales are littered throughout his works. He also drew upon the structure of the Nights for his Christmas numbers, framing his contributors’ stories within an overarching story by himself. In the first number of his weekly periodical Household Words, Dickens used imagery inspired by the Arabian Nights to appeal against the ‘the iron binding of the mind to grim realities’, and he would later, in the same periodical, publish three articles entitled ‘The Thousand and One Humbugs’ brilliantly satirising Parliament, the civil service and Prime Minister Palmerston.
‘A Christmas Tree’
Charles Dickens
Household Words, 21 December 1850
PR Z
Dickens wrote this seasonal essay for the first Christmas number of Household Words, effortlessly recalling the toys and books of his ‘young Christmas days’. It includes a joyful recollection of a host of characters from the Arabian Nights, including Ali Baba, and of the relief Dickens shared with Scheherazade each time the Sultan granted a further stay of execution.
The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner
Daniel Defoe
London: Logographic Press, 1790
[D.-L.L.] (XVIII) Bc [Defoe]
Robinson Crusoe was one of Dickens’s favourite books and one which he re-read as an adult for its ‘homely force and intensity of truth’. Echoes of the work can be found in Dickens’s prologue to Wilkie Collins’s play The Frozen Deep and also in his children’s story ‘Captain Boldheart’, written for the American monthly Our Young Folks. The chanting cannibals from whom the pirate Boldheart rescues the Latin-Grammar-Master have a distinct ring of Robinson Crusoe.
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
London: Chapman & Hall, 1843
[S.L.] I [Dickens - Christmas carol - 1843]
In stave 2 of A Christmas Carol, when the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge his younger self sitting alone in a bleak schoolroom, Dickens brilliantly describes Scrooge’s excited recollection of characters from the Arabian Nights, including Ali Baba, and the parrot and eponymous hero of Robinson Crusoe.
The Vicar of Wakefield: a Tale
Oliver Goldsmith; ill. by Thomas Rowlandson
London: R. Ackermann, 1817
[S.L.] IV [Rowlandson - 1817]
Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield was much loved by Dickens, who described it as ‘that most delightful of stories’. His 1836 operetta The Village Coquettes owes not a little to Goldsmith’s plot, and there are parallels between Goldsmith’s Dr Primrose and Dickens’s Mr Pickwick, both being good men who suffer unjust imprisonment. The Vicar of Wakefield was also, indirectly, the source of the pen name ‘Boz’, which Dickens adopted when he started writing for a living. Given the nickname Moses after a character in Goldsmith’s tale, Dickens’s young brother Augustus pronounced it ‘Boses’, which the family shortened to ‘Boz’.
The Adventures of Roderick Random
Tobias Smollett
London: J. Osborn, 1750.
[S.L.] I [Smollett - 1748]
David Copperfield contains several references to Smollett’s Roderick Random. In a passage that must echo the young Charles’s own experiences of seeing his father in the Marshalsea prison, Dickens describes David’s fearful recollection of the imprisoned debtor in Roderick Random, ‘with nothing on him but an old rug’, when visiting Mr Micawber in the King’s Bench Prison.
The History of Tom Jones
Henry Fielding
London: A. Millar, 1749
[S.L.] I [Fielding - 1749]
In Dickens’s day Fielding’s Tom Jones was considered by many to be the supreme example of successful novel construction. As Dickens sought to move from periodical essayist to novelist he invoked Fielding, presenting Oliver Twist, for example, as a proper joined-up ‘history’ in the manner of Tom Jones. The division of his novels into books, adopted in Hard Times and continued thereafter, also owes something to Fielding’s practice. Dickens’s admiration for Fielding is further apparent in the name he gave his eighth child: Henry Fielding Dickens.
The Personal History of David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
London: Bradbury & Evans, 1850.
[D.-L.L.] (XIX) Bc [Dickens]
Filled with autobiographical allusions to Dickens’s childhood, David Copperfield contains a famous passage in chapter 4 in which David recollects being consoled as a child, under the tyranny of the Murdstones, by reading the books of his dead father. From these ‘Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphry Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company’.
The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to Come
John Bunyan
London: J. Barfield, 1806
76 a 14
The Old Curiosity Shop: a Tale
Charles Dickens; ill. by George Cattermole and Hablot Browne
London: Chapman and Hall, 1841
*YN D53PB 841
References to Bunyan’s great work can be found in many Dickens novels, including Hard Times, Little Dorrit and Martin Chuzzlewit. It also appears in chapter 15 of the The Old Curiosity Shop. Upon their departure from London, Little Nell and her grandfather rest in a ‘pleasant field’ overlooking the city. Surveying the scene, Little Nell recalls her readings of Pilgrim’s Progress, comparing herself and her grandfather to Christian, the pilgrim in Bunyan’s tale.
A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
Laurence Sterne
London: T. Tegg, 1809
[S.L.] IV [Rowlandson - 1809]
Sterne was another author whom Dickens greatly admired. His Sentimental Journey is referenced in Bleak House and The Pickwick Papers, in addition to the Christmas story ‘The Holly-Tree Inn’ and Sketches by Boz. Tristram Shandy was also a Dickens favourite: Sterne’s Widow Wadman, who mistakes Uncle Toby’s innocuous remarks for an amorous approach, may well have inspired the character of Mr Pickwick’s landlady, the widowed Mrs Bardell.
Animal Magnetism
Elizabeth Inchbald
London : J. Dicks, [18--]
[M.M.C.]
Elizabeth Inchbald was a prolific and highly popular dramatist whose farces Dickens enjoyed as a child. In later life he performed in Animal Magnetism, Inchbald’s witty satire on phoney doctors professing mesmeric power. Dickens was greatly interested in mesmerism, attending the controversial public demonstrations given at University College Hospital by Dr John Elliotson, whom he befriended and championed. In 1842 Dickens mesmerised his wife during a trip to Pittsburgh, magnetizing her ‘into hysterics’ and then ‘into the magnetic sleep’. He would later use this power, while in Italy, to successfully treat Mme de la Rue for her terrible hallucinations.
The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; trans. by Tobias Smollett
Dublin: T. Ewing, 1766
[D.-L.L.] Bf [Cervantes]
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
Charles Dickens
London: Chapman and Hall, 1837
[S.L.] I [Dickens – 1837]
Cervantes’s Don Quixote is referenced in several Dickens novels, including Master Humphrey’s Clock and Our Mutual Friend. Its influence on The Pickwick Papers is also apparent. As Dickens developed the character of Mr Pickwick from farcical pedant to Quixotic hero, so Sam Weller became his Sancho Panza: the sidekick keeping the hero’s feet firmly on the ground.
The Adventures of Gil Blas de Santillane
Alain René Le Sage; trans. by Tobias Smollett
London: T. McLean, 1819
[S.L.] IV [Anon. – Le Sage]
Gil Blas was one of Dickens’s favourite stories. One his earliest juvenile writings was a character sketch of an old deaf woman who cooked for the Dickens family after their move to London. Her delicate hashes with walnut ketchup put Dickens in mind of the canon’s housekeeper in Le Sage’s tale, who could season or soften dishes ‘to the most delicate or voluptuous palate’. American Notes, written in 1842, also contains several references to characters in Gil Blas.
Le Diable Boiteux, or, The Devil upon Two Sticks
Alain René Le Sage
London: J. Tonson, 1729
* XTP L55M 729
Dombey and Son
Charles Dickens
London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848
[D.-L.L.] (XIX) Bc [Dickens]
In Le Sage’s The Devil Upon Two Sticks, the devil Asmodeus rewards Don Cleofas for liberating him from a bottle by taking the young Spaniard to the top of a steeple and removing the roofs of the houses of Madrid to reveal the goings on inside. A striking reference to this episode occurs in chapter 47 of Dombey and Son, when the narrator wishes ‘for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes’.
History of Jack the Giant Killer
Glasgow: for the booksellers, [18--]
IGRS C 90 FAU 4 Gla PC
Dickens incorporated legends, fairy tales and fantasy into his satirical journalism, and many such tales are mentioned in his novels. The story of Jack the Giant Killer is a good example, being referred to in Bleak House, Hard Times, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and The Old Curiosity Shop, among others. When Dickens’s one-time collaborator, and later teetotaller, George Cruikshank issued a new Fairy Library of moralised re-workings of traditional stories, Dickens hit back with ‘Frauds upon the Fairies’, defending the integrity of time-honoured tales and the magic they wrought on young imaginations.
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