Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, a district of Portsmouth on the south coast of England, the second of eight children of John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and his wife Elizabeth ^[1]. The family moved several times during his childhood, following his father's postings, and settled for a period in Chatham, Kent, where the young Dickens later recalled some of his happiest years, reading avidly and roaming the Medway countryside ^[2].

That comfortable phase ended abruptly. John Dickens lived beyond his means, and in 1824 he was arrested for debt and confined in the Marshalsea prison in Southwark, where most of the family joined him, as the law of the time allowed ^[1]. Charles, then twelve, was sent to work at Warren's Blacking, a factory near the Thames at Hungerford Stairs, pasting labels on pots of boot polish for a few shillings a week ^[3]. The episode lasted around a year, yet it marked him permanently. He kept it secret from almost everyone, including his wife and children, confiding it only to his friend and future biographer John Forster, and it surfaced repeatedly in disguised form throughout his fiction ^[3].

After his father's release, secured partly by a legacy, Dickens returned to school at Wellington House Academy in London, though his formal education remained patchy. At fifteen he became a solicitor's clerk, taught himself shorthand, and moved into journalism as a reporter of parliamentary debates, first for the Mirror of Parliament and then for the Morning Chronicle ^[2]. Anyone asking who was Charles Dickens before fame should picture this driven teenager: a self-taught stenographer racing between courtrooms and the House of Commons, absorbing the voices of London.

Dickens began publishing comic sketches of London life in magazines under the pen name Boz, a family nickname, and these were collected in 1836 as Sketches by Boz ^[1]. The same year the publishers Chapman and Hall commissioned him to supply text for a series of sporting illustrations. The result, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, issued in monthly parts, began quietly but became a publishing sensation once the cockney servant Sam Weller appeared, with later numbers reportedly selling tens of thousands of copies ^[2].

Serial publication became his method for life. Issuing novels in cheap monthly or weekly instalments put fiction within reach of readers who could never afford a three-volume novel, and it bound Dickens to his audience in an unusually direct way, since he could adjust a story in response to sales and public reaction ^[4]. Oliver Twist, which he wrote while still finishing Pickwick, appeared from 1837 in the magazine Bentley's Miscellany, which he edited. Its portrait of the workhouse and of a child caught in London's criminal underworld carried an open attack on the New Poor Law of 1834 ^[1].

Nicholas Nickleby (1838 to 1839) took aim at the notorious cheap boarding schools of Yorkshire, and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840 to 1841) gripped readers on both sides of the Atlantic with the fate of Little Nell ^[2]. By his late twenties Dickens was the most famous writer in Britain. A tour of the United States and Canada in 1842 confirmed his international celebrity, though the book he produced afterwards, American Notes, and his blunt campaigning for international copyright, annoyed many American readers ^[4].

Any account of Charles Dickens achievements begins with the sheer scale of the work: fifteen novels (one unfinished), five Christmas books, hundreds of essays and stories, and two weekly journals that he founded and edited, Household Words from 1850 and All the Year Round from 1859 ^[1]. A Christmas Carol, written in a matter of weeks in 1843, sold out its first printing by Christmas Eve and did much to fix the modern popular idea of the holiday around family, charity, and goodwill ^[5].

The mature novels widened his range. David Copperfield (1849 to 1850), the book he called his favourite child, drew closely on his own early struggles, including a fictionalized version of the blacking factory ^[3]. Bleak House (1852 to 1853) built an intricate plot around the delays of the Court of Chancery; Hard Times (1854) confronted industrial conditions in a northern mill town; Little Dorrit (1855 to 1857) returned to the debtors' prison of his childhood and satirized government obstruction through the Circumlocution Office ^[2]. A Tale of Two Cities (1859), set in London and Paris during the French Revolution, and Great Expectations (1860 to 1861), the story of the orphan Pip and his mysterious fortune, remain among the most read novels in the English language ^[1].

Dickens also created a gallery of characters, from Ebenezer Scrooge and Mr Micawber to Miss Havisham, Fagin, and Uriah Heep, whose names passed into everyday speech. Critics have long noted his gift for rendering London itself, its fog, courts, prisons, and river, almost as a character ^[4]. His campaigning was practical as well as literary: with the heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts he set up and ran Urania Cottage, a home in Shepherd's Bush intended to help women leaving prostitution or prison start new lives, and he wrote journalism on sanitation, education, and public health ^[2].

In 1836 Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, daughter of George Hogarth, an editor at the Evening Chronicle. The couple had ten children between 1837 and 1852 ^[1]. Catherine's younger sister Mary, who lived with them, died suddenly in 1837 at seventeen, a loss that affected Dickens deeply and echoed in his portraits of young women who die early, most famously Little Nell ^[2].

The marriage deteriorated in the 1850s. In 1857, while organizing amateur theatricals of Wilkie Collins's play The Frozen Deep, Dickens met Ellen Ternan, a professional actress then eighteen years old. He separated from Catherine in 1858, an arrangement he defended in a public statement printed in Household Words, and most of the children remained in his household along with Catherine's sister Georgina, who ran it ^[6]. His relationship with Ternan continued discreetly for the rest of his life; its exact nature was concealed so effectively that scholars pieced it together only in the twentieth century, notably in Claire Tomalin's study The Invisible Woman ^[6].

Away from writing, Dickens was restless and sociable. He walked enormous distances, often at night through London, performed in amateur theatre, practised mesmerism, and entertained on a large scale. In 1856 he bought Gads Hill Place near Rochester in Kent, a house he had admired as a boy on walks with his father, and it became his main home for his final years ^[1].

From the late 1850s Dickens added a second career as a performer. Beginning with charity readings and turning professional in 1858, he toured Britain and Ireland giving dramatic readings from his own works, culminating in the harrowing rendition of the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist, which left audiences shaken and, by many accounts, drained the author himself ^[2]. A second American tour in 1867 and 1868 was a financial triumph but taxed his declining health ^[4].

Two shocks marked the decade. On June 9, 1865, returning from France with Ellen Ternan and her mother, Dickens was caught in the Staplehurst railway crash in Kent, in which ten passengers died. He tended the injured at the scene and rescued the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend from his carriage, but he never fully recovered his nerve for rail travel ^[6]. His last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864 to 1865), ranged across a London of dust heaps, riverside scavengers, and financial fraud ^[1].

Against medical advice he undertook a farewell reading tour in 1870 and began a new serial, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a story built around opium, obsession, and a disappearance in a cathedral city. He had completed six of the planned twelve numbers when, on June 8, 1870, he suffered a stroke at Gads Hill Place after a full day's work on the novel. He died the following day, June 9, 1870, exactly five years after Staplehurst, at the age of fifty-eight ^[1]. Although he had asked to be buried simply near Rochester, he was interred in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, where mourners filed past the open grave for days ^[5].

Few writers have shaped a language's sense of an era so completely. The word Dickensian now describes both the squalor he exposed, the workhouses, slums, and grinding poverty of industrial Britain, and the comic abundance of his imagination ^[4]. His novels have never gone out of print, and adaptations began in his own lifetime; stage, film, radio, and television versions of A Christmas Carol alone number in the hundreds ^[5].

His social influence was real if hard to measure. Contemporaries credited Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby with turning public feeling against workhouse abuses and the Yorkshire schools, several of which closed after the novel appeared, and his journalism kept sanitation and education before middle-class readers ^[2]. Later novelists as different as Dostoevsky, Kafka, and George Orwell acknowledged his mark; Orwell's long 1940 essay on Dickens remains one of the most quoted assessments of his politics and art ^[4].

The institutions of remembrance are extensive. The Charles Dickens Museum occupies his former home at 48 Doughty Street in London, where he wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby; his birthplace in Portsmouth is also a museum ^[7]. The bicentenary of his birth in 2012 was marked by exhibitions and readings worldwide, and a statue was unveiled in Portsmouth in 2014, despite his stated wish for no such memorial ^[7]. For readers coming fresh to a Charles Dickens biography, the essential Charles Dickens facts are quickly told: a debtor's son who left school at twelve, taught himself a trade, and produced a body of fiction that still defines how the world imagines Victorian England ^[1].