“Charles” is a short sketch, originally published in Mademoiselle and eventually incorporated into Jackson’s fictionalized memoirs of family life in Bennington, Vermont, Life Among the Savages (1953).

In Shirley Jackson (1975), Lenemaja Friedman points out that when the real Laurie Hyman went to kindergarten, there actually was a boy there who performed several of the exploits that the fictional Laurie attributes to the fictional Charles. Altering this fact enhances the dramatic and thematic effects of “Charles.” The surprise discovery that Charles is Laurie’s fiction produces irony, the realization that all along the story has been meaning something other than what it has been saying. What it has been meaning becomes more interesting as well, for depths of complexity become visible in the child’s character. One result is a kind of wonder at the fiction-making powers that all people possess.

The story takes place at the beginning of the school year, probably sometime in the Leave It to Beaver era of the 1950s, for it is a time when children walk to school with friends, when children and husbands come home for lunch, and when mothers stay at home to care for their house and children and to fix lunch for their family. Lunch, then, is a family event, and in “Charles” most of the conversation occurs during this important family time. In fact, the sense of place is so contained that one can imagine the story as a contemporary sitcom, with the days going by in a linear fashion and the action taking place on one set where the family eats together. Attending only to the reports that her son gives about the events of Charles at school, the mother does not provide any visual details about this lunch setting.

However, the story is very detailed in the chronological development of events. The narrator specifically names each day of the week in tracking the stories her son tells about Charles. At lunch on Monday, the first day of school, Laurie acts insolently toward his father and mentions Charles for the first time; on Tuesday, Charles kicks the teacher; on Wednesday, he bounces the seesaw on the head of a little girl; on Thursday, he pounds his feet on the floor; and on Friday, he throws chalk. The narrator tells us that on Saturday, after this horrific first week, she asks her husband if kindergarten “is too unsettling” for Laurie, a notion her husband dismisses. The story continues with this day-by-day account of Laurie’s stories about Charles. The mother similarly lists the events for the following week on a day-by-day basis, then summarizes weeks three and four as looking “like a reformation” in Charles in that Laurie has no bad stories to report. However, she then says “on Friday of that week things were back to normal,” because Charles makes a girl in class say a bad word and then does the same himself. Finally, Monday of week five rolls around and the mother goes to the PTA meeting to meet the teacher.

With the chronology of events the most vivid aspect of story and the ambiance of a 1950s family lunch the most salient sense of place, in the background hovers the school where Charles does all the naughty things Laurie talks about. In this way, his reports indirectly construct a setting of a typical school. He mentions details such as a chalkboard, crayons, a playground with a seesaw, and so on. The PTA meeting provides a third setting, for here the mother asks the teacher about Charles and receives the news that there is, in fact, no Charles in her son’s class, leaving her to infer (to her astonishment as well as to every reader’s) that Laurie has done all that he had attributed to Charles. Again, the details of this setting are sparse: mothers and teachers drink tea, eat cake, sit down, and walk about. In short, whether the setting is a home, school, or PTA meeting, the effect of this vagueness is to create a sort of “every place” to the story—its lack of specificity suggests that these events could occur anywhere. The detailed chronology calls attention to the development of the child and the sense of time passing.

Friedman, Lenemaja. 1975. Shirley Jackson. Boston: Twayne. This book contains biographical information; discusses Jackson’s first novel, psychological novels, novel settings, memoirs, and themes within her short fiction; and contains a useful selected bibliography with annotations.

Hall, Joan Wylie. 1993. Shirley Jackson: A Study of Short Fiction. New York: Twayne. Part I discusses Jackson’s short fiction, and Part II offers biographical information.

Hoffman, Steven K. 1976. “Individuation and Character Development in the Fiction of Shirley Jackson.” Hartford Studies in Literature, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 190-208. Hoffman applies Jung’s theory of individuation to Jackson’s novels, arguing that her works involve a struggle between a developing personality against forces that would arrest its growth.

Oppenheimer, Judy. 1989. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. Hendersonville, TN: Ballentine. Although scholarly and well researched, this biography is made highly entertaining by its numerous anecdotes, collected in extensive personal interviews with friends and family of Shirley Jackson. It suggests that Jackson's own volatile lifestyle and diverse personality contributed to her early death.

Reinsch, Paul N. 2001. A Critical Biography of Shirley Jackson, American Writer. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. This book includes both reviews of Jackson’s work from the time of publication and Jackson’s critical works. The annotations and introduction contribute to Jackson scholarship by arguing that some of her fiction has been misread due to the perceived reputation of Shirley Jackson.

Rubenstein, Roberta. 1996. “House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and the Female Gothic.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 309-331. Rubenstein argues that Jackson’s fiction deserves wider recognition for its emotionally resonant literary representations of the psychology of family relationships. It explores in particular the ways in which Jackson’s gothic fiction represents the primitive and powerful emotional bonds that constitute the ambivalent attachment between mothers and daughters.