What was Charles Dickens's writing process, and how much of it transfers?

He wrote to a printer's schedule, in monthly or weekly numbers, and for the later books he kept a working sheet per number listing the names, incidents and phrases he had to place in it. That sheet is the transferable part, because it is a list of debts. Writing a book while its opening is already in a reader's hands means a plant cannot be quietly withdrawn later on, so he tracked what he had promised outside the manuscript. He also performed the work aloud in front of paying audiences, and you can hear the rehearsal in how rarely his dialogue needs an attribution to tell you who is speaking. Take the sheet and the reading aloud. Leave the schedule, which produced discipline in his case and produces panic in most others.

Why do his flat characters stay memorable when flatness is supposed to be a weakness?

Because a flat character in his hands is holding a position, and a position can be tested. Forster praised flatness for being recognisable on entry and easy to remember afterwards, then complained that people built this way cannot surprise us. James Wood's reply is that such a character has to surprise once, and can then walk off the stage for good, and his specimen is Mr Omer the undertaker in David Copperfield. For a novelist with thirty named people to manage, that arithmetic is a gift: one sentence on the introduction, one scene on the exception, and the reader will carry the person through a long book on those two deposits. Depth is one way to be alive on a page. Consistency with a single crack in it is another.

How does he get away with so much coincidence?

Partly by planting, and partly because he is usually writing comedy. Lodge makes the point that a comic novel carries a dose of coincidence which would wreck a sober realistic one, since an audience already enjoying itself will accept an improbable meeting for the fun it generates. Dickens sits on the comic side of that line even in the dark books, and it buys him room a naturalist has to do without. The rest is technique, and the technique is early physical contact. A reader who has already held the file, the letter or the leg iron recognises a connection rather than catching an author arranging one. Where he does get caught is at the climax, when a relative turns up with the timing of a stagehand and nothing earlier accounts for the entrance.

Is the sentimentality a problem, and how do you write feeling without it?

The sentimental passages have aged worst, and Little Nell's death in The Old Curiosity Shop is the usual exhibit, because the narration does the grieving on the reader's behalf and leaves him with no work to do. Set it beside Jo's death in Bleak House. There the feeling is carried by a dying boy trying to repeat the Lord's Prayer after the doctor who is saying it to him, and the narrator waits until afterwards to turn round and charge the offices that let it happen. Emotion holds up when somebody in the scene pays for it and the narration keeps its hands in its pockets. Try the test on your own draft. Cross out every sentence that tells the reader how sad the moment is, then see whether the moment is still there.

How do you write like Charles Dickens without producing pastiche?

Drop the diction and keep the engineering. What dates is the vocabulary, the confiding asides to the reader, and the habit of marrying off the survivors in the final chapter. What travels is the exterior tag with a price attached, the coincidence secured by an object the reader has already handled, the institution given a working day and a motto, and the satire spoken in the target's own words. A novel set in a hospital, a school district or a housing office can run on those four with nothing period about it. Test yourself on a single page. If a reader can date you from your syntax rather than from your subject, the costume is what you copied.

Which Charles Dickens novel should a writer study first?

Hard Times, because it is short and the whole method is visible inside a couple of evenings: Bounderby's tag and its collapse, Coketown assembled out of four repeated details, the schoolroom, the staircase Mrs Sparsit keeps walking Louisa down in her head. Then Great Expectations, for the planting, since the plot is built almost entirely from objects introduced in the opening chapters. Then Bleak House, where the twin narrators, the institution as antagonist and the address to the offices are all running at once. Read the first chapters of Bleak House twice. The first time for the fog, the second with a pencil, marking what has been left lying on the table for later use.

Fiction

Charles DickensWriting Style

Born 2/7/1812 – Died 6/9/1870

One sentence a character cannot stop saying will outwork a page of interior monologue, provided the plot eventually sends him the bill.

Write like Charles Dickens

Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Charles Dickens: voice, themes, and technique.

Josiah Bounderby tells the story of his own birth to anybody who will sit still for it. The ditch. The grandmother who drank. The boy who owed nothing to anybody and rose by his own arithmetic. He repeats it at his own dinner table in Hard Times until it stops being a story and turns into furniture, and then an old countrywoman comes into Coketown, and she is his mother, and she is proud of him, and she has kept away for years because he pays her to. Dickens has explained nothing about the man. He has presented a bill.

That is his standing answer to the problem of a person's inside. He puts it outside, in one repeatable thing, and leaves it there to be read. Uriah Heep is umble and says so. Micawber waits for something to turn up. Where George Eliot would give you the full tangle of reasons Lydgate has for calling on Rosamond Vincy, in phrasing roundabout enough to imitate a man hiding his motives from himself, Dickens gives you four words a character cannot stop saying and expects you to work out what they are defending. Both men are on the page before the chapter is warm.

The coincidences are the part that should sink him. Pip is terrified by a convict on a marsh, sent to play in a house where the clocks have been stopped, and later told a fortune is waiting for him. All three turn out to be one story. Magwitch is paying for the gentleman, Compeyson ruined Miss Havisham, and Compeyson is the man Magwitch went back to the marsh to keep from getting away. As a summary that is a machine. In order it holds, because the hardware arrives long before the meaning does: a file taken from Joe's forge, a leg iron, two convicts fighting in the mud, a stranger in a tavern stirring his rum with the file and leaving two one-pound notes behind. The reader has handled the object. He credits the connection instead of auditing it.

His largest antagonist has no face at all. Jarndyce and Jarndyce outlives most of the people it concerns, destroys Richard Carstone by giving him something to expect, and ends on the day the costs have swallowed the estate the whole case was about. No villain arranged that. A procedure did, and the narrator saves his worst voice for procedures rather than for people, which is the reason the comedy survives the anger. Read him with a pen when your own book has a cast you cannot keep straight, a system you want in the dock, or a plant that has to be honoured many chapters after you set it.

How to Write Like Charles Dickens

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Charles Dickens.

1
Write the tag, then write the bill
Choose your character's one repeatable thing tonight: a phrase, a piece of self-description, a story about himself he tells at every opportunity. Write it into three separate scenes and change not one word of the wording. Then write the fourth scene, the one with somebody in the room who knows better. Bounderby's account of the ditch he was born in survives dinner after dinner in Coketown until his mother walks in and turns out to be proud of him, at which point the story he has been living off becomes the evidence against him. The order is the whole technique. Plant, repeat, repeat, collect.
2
Let the target's own vocabulary do the mocking
Take the character you want to condemn and write his next paragraph in his own vocabulary: his euphemisms, his rank, his favourite adjective, his idea of what any sensible person already knows. Then set one plain fact down in the middle of it and walk away without commenting. Podsnap has acquired a flourish of the right arm for sweeping the world's difficulties behind him, and the narration reports the gesture in the register of a man who takes himself for the standard of everything, so the verdict belongs to the reader and arrives without a lecture. Go back over the paragraph and ask whose word each adjective is. If they all turn out to be yours, you are still explaining.
3
Give the coincidence hardware, and give it early
List the turns in your draft that depend on two people happening to be connected. For each one, find a physical object you can put on the page many chapters earlier, inside a scene about something else, and let a character pick it up. Joe's file goes out to a convict on the marsh early in Great Expectations, comes back as a stranger in a tavern stirring his drink with it, and ends up explaining where Pip's money has been coming from all along. Persuasion is being done by the object rather than by the plot. Vague foreshadowing will not do this job. The thing needs a location, an owner, and a scene in which its presence is beside the point.
4
Point the anger at the office, not at the person
Write the paragraph you are angry in, then check the address on it. Dickens hands his department a motto and lets it recite: the Circumlocution Office exists to establish how a thing is not to be done, and the Barnacles who staff it are polite, busy and unreachable. Because the target is a procedure, the clerks stay funny and the reader stays on your side. Now find the person the procedure costs. Daniel Doyce has an invention that works and cannot get it registered, and Arthur Clennam wears himself out carrying it from one Barnacle to the next until he has lost years to a building. Satire without that second person in it is a sketch.
5
Read it aloud in the voices
Read a page of your dialogue aloud in a different voice per speaker, the way Dickens did on tour, and mark the lines that could move to another mouth without loss. Those lines are where the idiolect has failed. The repair is rarely a better joke. Give the speaker a word he over-uses because it flatters him, or a construction he hides behind, and then make the habit surrender a piece of information he had meant to keep. Read it again with the attributions covered. If you cannot tell who is talking, the scene is narration wearing quotation marks.

Charles Dickens's Writing Style

Breakdown of Charles Dickens's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

Count the verbs on the first page of Bleak House. London. Michaelmas Term lately over. Implacable November weather. Whole paragraphs get built out of naming with nothing predicated, so a city arrives that nobody is acting in, and that absence of agents is the argument of the novel stated as grammar before a single character has walked on. Then the fog paragraph opens clause after clause with the same word and lets repetition carry the weight a subordinate clause would carry in another writer. Against those he sets the long periodic sentence, which marches the reader through a dozen qualifications and puts its verdict in the last three words, so that grammar and judgment land at the same instant. His third setting is the flat verdict. Four words, no ornament, closing an argument the previous forty words assembled.

Vocabulary Complexity

Two vocabularies collide on his pages, and the collision is the politics. Chancery speaks in Latin roots and subordinate clauses. Jo the crossing-sweeper has a handful of words and says he don't know nothink, and he says it under questioning by people whose language has no room in it for him. A reader hears which of the two can be understood and draws the conclusion unassisted. Hard Times puts the same joke in a classroom, where a boy defines a horse by counting its teeth, gets the definition right, and learns nothing whatever. His rare words are seldom abstract. He reaches for the exact old term for a trade, a garment or a step in a legal process, then goes plain the moment feeling is involved, which is why the suffering in his books reads faster than the paperwork does.

Tone

Two attitudes run at once in him, and they have separate targets. People get affection even while they are being laughed at. Mrs Jellyby writes letters about a settlement on the left bank of the Niger while her own small son gets his head wedged between the area railings, and the sentence that reports Peepy's head is fond of the entire household. Systems get the other voice, and there is no mercy in it anywhere. The rule underneath is worth stealing outright: comedy at the level of the person, prosecution at the level of the office. Reverse them and the page turns mean, because a narrator who goes after one invented human being is larger than his target and a reader can see it.

Pacing

Pace in Dickens is managed by images that come back at shorter and shorter intervals. Mrs Sparsit spends the back half of Hard Times watching a staircase inside her own head, with Louisa a few steps further down it each time the picture returns, and the reader's sense of speed comes from the gap between returns rather than from anything happening in the room. Nothing has to move for movement to be felt. He alternates scale on purpose too. A street, a crowd, a dinner with twenty people at it, then one body in a room with a candle, then out to the crowd again, and the pattern lets an indictment of a whole class be followed by its cost to one person without a paragraph of transition. The slow passages in his books are the satirical set pieces. They are slow by design, because the joke is that the thing being described is incapable of changing.

Dialogue Style

Each person in Dickens speaks a private language, and the language is the characterisation. Sarah Gamp credits her own opinions to a friend called Mrs Harris, who has no existence outside her mouth, which lets a woman with no allies produce a corroborating witness on demand. Joe Gargery cannot begin a sentence without which I meantersay, and the tic belongs to a man treated as slow all his life who is buying himself a moment before he commits. Alfred Jingle talks in fragments with the verbs gone, and a whole confidence trick fits inside the gaps. Twain built a novel on one voice and held it start to finish. Dickens runs a dozen in the same room and expects you to keep them apart with the attributions covered up. What stops it turning into a variety act is that each idiom protects its owner from something. Work out what, and the voice writes itself.

Descriptive Approach

Description in Dickens works by return rather than by inventory. Coketown is red brick, or brick that would have been red if the smoke and the ashes had let it be, and every later visit comes back to the same handful of facts: the chimneys, the smoke uncoiling out of them, the piston of the steam engine going up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. He adds nothing on the second pass. The shorthand takes over, and half a clause can reopen the whole town. His places also want a particular outcome. Hardy gives you a heath indifferent to the people crossing it, and Dickens gives you a fog with an interest in a lawsuit. What keeps this from being decoration is the selection made at first description, since he names what the plot is going to need. Tom-all-Alone's is a collapsing street the narrator says spreads its infection into the best houses in the kingdom, and the book keeps that promise when Esther Summerson's face is scarred by a fever carried out of it by a boy who sleeps there.

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Charles Dickens uses across their work.

An antagonist made of procedure

A process can be given the structural place of a villain, and Dickens manages it without appointing anybody to blame. Jarndyce and Jarndyce is a suit over a will that has been running long enough to become a profession for the lawyers inside it and an expectation for the young people attached to it. Richard Carstone is destroyed by having something to hope for. The case closes on the day the costs have consumed the estate, and the courtroom laughs. What makes this hard to reproduce is that the process has to act. Give it a building, a working day, a family of officials with surnames, and a victim whose loss you can price, or it stays an opinion your narrator is expressing at length.

Two narrators on different clocks

Bleak House is told twice over. One narrator works in the present tense, has no name and no body in the story, and holds the fog and the Court and the Dedlock house in place while advancing hardly at all. The other is Esther Summerson, writing afterwards in the past tense, apologising for taking up room on the page, and her chapters move. Reading the alternation, you feel a private life making progress inside a public system that has none, which is the book's argument delivered as a timetable. The price is control. Two voices mean two registers to hold steady, and a reader notices on the first page where the seam shows.

Names that have already argued

Gradgrind, M'Choakumchild, Murdstone, Podsnap, Veneering, Bounderby. The name reaches the reader before the character has opened his mouth, and it carries a verdict the prose is then spared from delivering. Dickens keeps the trick honest by matching behaviour to the label instead of explaining the joke, so a reader who caught it feels clever and a reader who missed it loses nothing. The failure mode shows up the moment you try it. A loaded name on a character who turns out to be complicated reads as a promise the book has broken, which is why his two hardest cases, Pip and Esther, were given names that argue nothing at all.

The object a damaged person returns to

Give a character one object they revert to under pressure and the reader has a gauge they can read at a glance. Doctor Manette goes back to making shoes, the trade he picked up as a prisoner in the Bastille, and each relapse in A Tale of Two Cities is reported as a bench, a last and an unfinished shoe rather than as a state of mind. Miss Havisham stopped the clocks on the morning she was jilted and has kept the dress on and the cake on the table ever since, so an entire biography sits in a room a visitor can walk across. The object beats a described feeling because other characters can pick it up. Install it late, though, and it measures nothing. It has to be standing there before the reader knows what it is for.

Rubbish that turns out to be the evidence

A comic hoard gets planted as a joke and then decides the plot. Krook's rag and bottle shop in Bleak House fills up with paper its owner cannot read, and the joke runs for a long while before a document out of that shop reaches the Court and brings the case to an end. In Our Mutual Friend, Silas Wegg reads Gibbon aloud to a man who made his fortune out of dust heaps, mangling the title of the book as he goes, and digs a later will out of one of the heaps to blackmail his employer with. Both hoards were introduced as texture. The mechanism is that a reader files them under comedy, so no suspicion attaches, and the discovery lands without the smell of arrangement on it.

The recurring dinner as a census

The Veneerings give dinners, and the same set of people keeps turning up at them. Twemlow is described as an innocent piece of dinner furniture on castors, a leaf his host inserts into his own table, and the joke doubles as a seating plan the reader can rely on. Because the occasion repeats, a change in the guest list carries plot information at no cost, and a whole class can be put in one room without anybody needing a reason to be there. Our Mutual Friend opens on one of those dinners and closes on another. The difficulty is that a repeated set piece has to shift something each time, and a novelist who stages the same dinner twice with only the jokes changed has written a sketch and charged a chapter for it.

Literary Devices Charles Dickens Uses

Literary devices that define Charles Dickens's style.

The tag in place of the inward look

A repeated exterior signal can carry the load of interior monologue, and Dickens leans on it because his casts are too crowded for anything slower. Forster made him the exhibit for the flat character, the person who fits in one sentence, and took Mrs Micawber and her refusal to abandon her husband as the specimen. Wood answered that flatness of this kind can be as alive as depth, on one condition: the tag has to disclose a stance rather than a habit. That condition is the entire craft of the device. A farmer who keeps announcing he will plough up his gorse discloses nothing. Mrs Micawber's refrain tells you she is keeping up a public performance of loyalty inside a household that is coming apart, which is a position a person can hold, and holding it costs her something on every page she appears on.

Satire in the target's own words

The narration borrows the vocabulary of the man it is taking apart and reports him in the terms he uses about himself. Pecksniff arrives in Martin Chuzzlewit as a moral man, a grave man, a man of noble sentiments, and that valuation is his own, handed over to the narrator and left standing without correction. Wood calls the general case free indirect style and puts the useful question at its centre: whose word is this? No condemnation appears anywhere on the page. The reader supplies it, which is why the paragraph can be funny and damning in the same breath. The device fails in one identifiable way. Slip in a fact only the author could know and the borrowed voice snaps back to being yours.

The address to an institution

Every so often the narration stops the story and speaks to something that cannot answer. When Jo dies in Bleak House the paragraph turns and reports the death upward, to a Majesty, to lords and gentlemen, to reverends of every order, and to the men and women born with compassion in their hearts who have been letting this happen daily. The grammar is second person and the addressee is an office. Hugo halts Les Miserables to argue with the reader about history, and Dickens halts to serve papers. It works because the target has no feelings to injure and no reply to make, so the reader is free to agree with him. Aimed at a character, the same sentence would read as a novelist beating up his own creation.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Charles Dickens.

Handing out tics and forgetting to invoice them

The tags get copied because they are the visible part, and the copy stops at the door. A character arrives with a catchphrase, produces it on schedule, and pays nothing for it. Wood's test is the one to apply here: a tag lives when it maintains a fiction the character needs, and dies when it merely labels him, which is why a farmer forever promising to plough up a patch of gorse tells a reader nothing at all. Dickens sends the bill. Bounderby's self-made history is demolished by his own mother, and Heep's umbleness comes apart in a room full of people who used to believe in it. Take that scene away and the repetition is a sound effect the reader starts skipping on its fourth appearance.

Pointing the caricature at a person instead of an office

Caricature is a weapon that recoils, and Dickens took the recoil. Fagin is the case where the exaggeration lands on a man and through him on a people, and he went back to the text in a later edition and cut a great many of the references after a reader wrote to him about them. The satire that has held up is aimed at procedures, at Chancery and the schoolroom and the department, because a procedure has no dignity to bruise and no supporters the reader will start pitying. Look at your sharpest paragraph and ask who is being punished in it. When the answer is one invented human being with no institution standing behind him, the reader stops laughing with you and starts watching you.

Taking the coincidences and leaving the plants behind

His plots run on people turning out to be related, and the machinery is bare in Oliver Twist, where a boy picked up off the street lands in the house of a man who knew his father and later finds an aunt in the woman who took him in. Lodge's remark about the Victorians stretching the arm of coincidence to the point of dislocation is fair comment. Dickens answers it in the later books with hardware and early handling rather than with fewer connections. Great Expectations has as many links in it as Oliver Twist has. It survives them because a file, an iron and a pair of banknotes had already passed between hands before the reader had any reason to care where they went. Copy the connections without the objects and each reversal arrives as an author's convenience.

Reviving the confiding address to the reader

The chatty aside is the most datable thing in his books, and it was under attack inside his own century. James objected to the novelist who admits to his reader that the two of them are making believe together, on the grounds that the admission forfeits any claim the book had to be a report on something real. A reader today hears the nudge and steps back out of the scene, which is exactly what you did not want. The part of that voice still worth having is the part whose addressee is an institution: the court, the department, the board of guardians. Keep the second person. Change who is standing in the dock.

Books

Explore Charles Dickens's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Charles Dickens's writing style and techniques.

What was Charles Dickens's writing process, and how much of it transfers?: He wrote to a printer's schedule, in monthly or weekly numbers, and for the later books he kept a working sheet per number listing the names, incidents and phrases he had to place in it. That sheet is the transferable part, because it is a list of debts. Writing a book while its opening is already in a reader's hands means a plant cannot be quietly withdrawn later on, so he tracked what he had promised outside the manuscript. He also performed the work aloud in front of paying audiences, and you can hear the rehearsal in how rarely his dialogue needs an attribution to tell you who is speaking. Take the sheet and the reading aloud. Leave the schedule, which produced discipline in his case and produces panic in most others.
Why do his flat characters stay memorable when flatness is supposed to be a weakness?: Because a flat character in his hands is holding a position, and a position can be tested. Forster praised flatness for being recognisable on entry and easy to remember afterwards, then complained that people built this way cannot surprise us. James Wood's reply is that such a character has to surprise once, and can then walk off the stage for good, and his specimen is Mr Omer the undertaker in David Copperfield. For a novelist with thirty named people to manage, that arithmetic is a gift: one sentence on the introduction, one scene on the exception, and the reader will carry the person through a long book on those two deposits. Depth is one way to be alive on a page. Consistency with a single crack in it is another.
How does he get away with so much coincidence?: Partly by planting, and partly because he is usually writing comedy. Lodge makes the point that a comic novel carries a dose of coincidence which would wreck a sober realistic one, since an audience already enjoying itself will accept an improbable meeting for the fun it generates. Dickens sits on the comic side of that line even in the dark books, and it buys him room a naturalist has to do without. The rest is technique, and the technique is early physical contact. A reader who has already held the file, the letter or the leg iron recognises a connection rather than catching an author arranging one. Where he does get caught is at the climax, when a relative turns up with the timing of a stagehand and nothing earlier accounts for the entrance.
Is the sentimentality a problem, and how do you write feeling without it?: The sentimental passages have aged worst, and Little Nell's death in The Old Curiosity Shop is the usual exhibit, because the narration does the grieving on the reader's behalf and leaves him with no work to do. Set it beside Jo's death in Bleak House. There the feeling is carried by a dying boy trying to repeat the Lord's Prayer after the doctor who is saying it to him, and the narrator waits until afterwards to turn round and charge the offices that let it happen. Emotion holds up when somebody in the scene pays for it and the narration keeps its hands in its pockets. Try the test on your own draft. Cross out every sentence that tells the reader how sad the moment is, then see whether the moment is still there.
How do you write like Charles Dickens without producing pastiche?: Drop the diction and keep the engineering. What dates is the vocabulary, the confiding asides to the reader, and the habit of marrying off the survivors in the final chapter. What travels is the exterior tag with a price attached, the coincidence secured by an object the reader has already handled, the institution given a working day and a motto, and the satire spoken in the target's own words. A novel set in a hospital, a school district or a housing office can run on those four with nothing period about it. Test yourself on a single page. If a reader can date you from your syntax rather than from your subject, the costume is what you copied.
Which Charles Dickens novel should a writer study first?: Hard Times, because it is short and the whole method is visible inside a couple of evenings: Bounderby's tag and its collapse, Coketown assembled out of four repeated details, the schoolroom, the staircase Mrs Sparsit keeps walking Louisa down in her head. Then Great Expectations, for the planting, since the plot is built almost entirely from objects introduced in the opening chapters. Then Bleak House, where the twin narrators, the institution as antagonist and the address to the offices are all running at once. Read the first chapters of Bleak House twice. The first time for the fog, the second with a pencil, marking what has been left lying on the table for later use.

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