Instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, Charles Dickens used discipline, exercise, and structure to produce genius.
“Dickens’s Dream” by Robert William Buss, 1875.
The much-beloved writer Charles Dickens has been widely hailed as the greatest Victorian novelist. He was the Victorian equivalent of a rock star, going on tour around England and internationally, enjoying greater popularity during his earthly years than any prior writer had.
But like many other great artists, Dickens did not stumble into his fame and success by accident. It was the result of conscious effort, discipline, and a well-balanced daily routine – combined, of course, with once-in-a-generation genius and native talent. The results were awe-inspiring and continue to captivate readers in all the 150 languages into which his work has been translated.
Inspiration Follows Discipline
Dickens treated his creative work like any other job: He was punctual and kept set hours. He didn’t wait for the muse to shower him with inspiration or for the right mood to strike him like lightning from the sky before taking up his pen. Such a romantic view of the creative process would likely have hindered his work. Dickens knew that, often, inspiration comes after knuckling down to work, not before. It joins the writer as a traveling companion only after he has begun the journey of the day’s writing quota.
In the words of Dickens’s eldest son, quoted in Mason Currey’s book “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work,” “No city clerk was ever more methodical or orderly than he; no humdrum, monotonous, conventional task could ever have been discharged with more punctuality or with more business-like regularity, than he gave to the work of his imagination and fancy.”
“Charles Dickens” by Daniel Maclise, 1839.
According to Currey, Dickens got up at 7:00, ate breakfast at 8:00, and began working in his study by 9:00. He would take a brief break for lunch – which he ate quickly and mechanically, his mind still churning over his work – and then continue on working until 2:00. Dickens often produced 2,000-4,000 words of writing during that time, but even if he didn’t get many words on paper he would stay in his study and continue to daydream or doodle. After finishing up, he would hit the streets of London for an intense 3-hour walk, his eyes roving and scanning, looking to catch any scraps or fragments of inspiration. This firsthand experience of London no doubt contributed to the novelist’s vivid and lifelike rendering of the city in his works. At 6:00, Dickens ate dinner and then relaxed, chatting with family and friends until bed around midnight.
Purpose Meets Precision
Just as Dickens was careful to keep his regular working hours regardless of whether he felt inspired and had produced much writing during that time, he was also fastidious in preparing his working environment. He required absolute silence, even going so far as to have an additional door installed to sound-proof his study. His desk needed to be set up just so, with goose-quill pens, flowers, and statuettes – one of a pair of toads dueling and another of a gentleman surrounded by puppies. He preferred black ink, though in the late 1840s he adopted blue paper and blue ink.
Dickens also carefully prepared notes and outlines for his projects. This was especially important since Dickens published virtually everything in serial format – short installments in journals and magazines appearing over the course of months or years until the novel was complete. Planning out and structuring a serial novel as you write and publish it is no easy task; with prior published installments “set in stone,” there was no revising in order to move the book in a new direction or fix a mistake. Dickens thus had to be adaptable yet also forward-thinking and methodical. He accomplished this through “Plan Sheets,” one for each installment. Michael Slater described Dickens’s Plan Sheets in his biography of the novelist:
“He prepared a sheet of paper approximately 7 x 9 inches by turning it sideways, with the long side horizontal, dividing it in two, and then using the left-hand side for what he called ‘Mems.’ These were memoranda to himself about events and scenes that might feature in the number, directions as to the pace of the narrative, particular phrases he wanted to work in, questions to himself about whether such-and-such a character should appear in this number or be kept waiting in the wings. … On the right hand side of the sheet Dickens would generally write the numbers and titles of the three chapters that make up each monthly part and jot down, either before or after writing them, the names of the main characters and events featuring in each chapter, with occasionally a crucial fragment of the dialogue.”
The Power of Good Health
One secret to Dickens’s success appears to have been his vigorous lifestyle, by which he maintained energy and vitality. In addition to the lengthy walks described above, Dickens also took daily cold plunges in winter, as he revealed in an 1865 letter to Sophie Verena. In that same letter, Dickens demonstrated the importance of keeping up good health and balancing mental work with physical exertion. Of himself, he said, “I am now 44. It looks a good deal, on paper, I find; but I believe I am very young-looking still, and I know that I am a very active vigorous fellow, who never knew in his own experience what the word ‘fatigue’ meant.”
Old photo depicting Charles Dickens’s home at Gad’s Hill Place in Higham, Kent. The house is now a school and is available for tours.
He went on to suggest that, in addition to physical exercise, a writer ought to have some other, “lighter” intellectual work to balance the mind. “Habitually, I have always had, besides great bodily exercise, some mental pursuit of a light kind with which to vary my labors as an Author.”
This balanced approach certainly seems to have worked for Dickens, who managed to produce an astonishingly large body of work (15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and articles, and thousands of letters) while also embarking on exhaustingly extensive speaking tours. Thanks to Dickens’ regular routine and rigorous lifestyle, the world has a treasure trove of his works to enjoy for centuries to come.
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Written by Walker Larson and published by The Epoch Times ~ July 27, 2005
~ the Author ~
Prior to becoming a freelance journalist and culture writer, Walker Larson taught literature and history at a private academy in Wisconsin, where he resides with his wife and daughter. He holds a master’s in English literature and language, and his writing has appeared in The Hemingway Review, Intellectual Takeout, and his Substack, The Hazelnut. He is also the author of two novels, “Hologram” and “Song of Spheres.”