Charles Dickens (February 7, 1812 - June 9, 1870) was born in Portsmouth and was the eldest son of a Royal Navy clerk. At twelve, his father's imprisonment for debt forced him to work in a blacking factory. His education was sporadic: he taught himself shorthand, worked as a clerk in a law office, and eventually became a parliamentary correspondent for the Morning Chronicle.
Coming from a humble family, "good old Charles" did not receive formal education until he was nine, and was heavily criticized by the critics of the time for being too self-taught. His life took an unexpected turn with his father's imprisonment for debts, moving his family to live with him in jail, allowed at that time by British laws. At the age of 12, he was already considered fit to start working in a dye factory. Although his family's situation had improved, his mother insisted he keep working there, inspiring him to write one of his masterpieces, David Copperfield.
His articles, later collected in Scenes from London Life by "Boz" (1836-1837), were very successful, and with the appearance in 1837 of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Dickens became a true publishing phenomenon. Novels such as Oliver Twist (1837-1839), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), and Barnaby Rudge (1841) gained enormous popularity, as did some travel chronicles, such as Pictures from Italy (1846). With Dombey and Son (1846-1848) he began his mature period, of which good examples are David Copperfield (1849-1850), his first novel in the first person and his favorite, in which he developed some autobiographical episodes; Bleak House (1852-1853); Little Dorrit (1855-1857), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865). He died at Gad's Hill, his country house in Higham, in the county of Kent.
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