561 (Charles Dickens) by danielweiresq under a Creative Commons licence

Charles Dickens is renowned as a master of prose. In this year marking his bicentenary, his novels are amongst the best known of any, while his characters remain literary archetypes. What is less known is his relationship with poetry: the poets he read, the lines he wrote, and the verse he inspired.

Early in his life and career, Dickens wrote poetry himself, largely pastiches and comic verse. As a young man he wrote parodies of Goldsmith and Southey for the first woman he fell in love with, Maria Beadnell. He also admired Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Swift, Wordsworth and Byron. Lines by the greats worked their way into his novels. In an early sketch, ‘The Boarding House’, Dickens depicts Septimus Hicks, a comical creation, as a ‘Byron quoter’, while, Our Mutual Friend quotes from Burns and Scott.

Dickens was a fan of Tennyson (‘a man whose writings enlist my whole heart and nature in admiration of their Truth and Beauty’) and often quoted the conclusion of ‘Mariana’ – 'I am aweary, aweary / I would that I were dead' – when in a gloomy mood. Otherwise, he wasn’t a fan of his contemporaries’ verse. As editor of Household Words, he regularly published new poetry, but wasn’t above spoofing the more sentimental examples. You may recall from The Pickwick Papers's Mrs Leo Hunter’s ‘Ode to an Expiring Frog’:

Can I unmoved see thee dying
                                  On a log,
                                  Expiring frog!

Novelists's debt to Dickens is well documented. Less is said about his influence on poets. During his lifetime, he was partly responsible for inspiring one of the more famous works of the nineteenth century. His early novel Barnaby Rudge was reviewed by Edgar Allan Poe, who enjoyed it but regretted the novel’s talking raven didn’t have a larger role. Four years after Rudge’s publication, Poe wrote The Raven.

On hearing of Dickens’s death in June 1870, Bret Harte, the American writer, delayed publication of his magazine by a day to include a hastily written tribute, ‘Dickens in Camp’, which imagines a group of cowboys sat around a campfire listening to one of their number read Little Nell. Ever since then, poets have returned to Dickens for inspiration. His characters in particular, so vivid and lifelike, draw those who seek to revive or revise them.

Great Expectations’s Miss Havisham, for example. Julia Copus’s ‘Miss Havisham’s Letter’ depicts the anti-heroine as still delusional, pining for her erstwhile suitor: ‘Pray God that you will be here soon; the furniture / is weary, my darling, of the names I am forever // fingering into its dust.’ Carol Ann Duffy, on the other hand, in ‘Havisham’ sounds a vengeful note: ‘Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then / I haven’t wished him dead.' The South American poet Olga Orozco in ‘Miss Havisham’ pictures ‘a wilted bride phosphorescent still with / vengeance and disdain’, miserly guarding a ‘luxurious vanity of disillusionment’.

If there are other Dickens-themed poems we should know about, let us know via our twitter feed (@byleaveswelive).

Category: Charles Dickens