A personal ‘failure’ of charles dickens would typically be the fact that Dickens’s children led “failed lives.” Certainly their father felt that his sons lacked fire, grit, a compulsive work ethic. “I never sing their praises because they have so often disappointed me,” he once said. They struck him as weak-willed, unambitious, sometimes sweet-natured but on the whole nothing like himself. You can almost hear Dickens grousing to them, Why, when I was your age, I was already putting in a full day at the blacking factory. He does write to one, “You know how hard I work for what I get, and I think you know that I never had money help from any human creature after I was a child. You know that you are one of the many heavy charges on me” etc., etc. Fathers never change.
