Charles Dickens(1812–1870)

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born at 1 Mile End Terrace, Landport, Portsmouth, on the seventh of February 1812, second of the eight surviving children of John Dickens, a junior clerk in the Navy Pay Office at the dockyard, and Elizabeth Barrow. The family moved with the father's postings through the boy's early years: from Portsmouth to London in 1815, from London to Chatham in Kent in 1817 (the five years at Chatham were the happiest of his childhood, the country and the Medway dockyard that returned again and again in the later novels), and back to London in 1822. In 1824 his father was arrested for debt and committed to the Marshalsea Prison, and the twelve-year-old Charles was put to work pasting labels on blacking-pots in a riverside warehouse at Hungerford Stairs for six shillings a week. The four months of the blacking factory, from February to June 1824, became the central trauma and the central engine of his later imagination.

He returned to school for two years at the Wellington House Academy in Hampstead Road, left at fifteen, took clerk's work at a solicitor's office in Gray's Inn, taught himself shorthand from Gurney's manual, and at nineteen became a parliamentary reporter for the Mirror of Parliament and then the Morning Chronicle. His first published sketch, A Dinner at Poplar Walk, appeared in the Monthly Magazine in December 1833 over the pseudonym Boz, and the collected Sketches by Boz of February 1836 launched him at twenty-four as a working writer. In April 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth and at the same time began the monthly serial of the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. The early Pickwick numbers sold modestly; from the fourth number, after the introduction of Sam Weller, the sales rose to forty thousand and the Pickwick Papers became the publishing event of the late 1830s.

The fifteen novels he wrote across the next thirty-four years run from Oliver Twist (1837 to 1839) and Nicholas Nickleby (1838 to 1839) through The Old Curiosity Shop (1840 to 1841), Barnaby Rudge (1841), A Christmas Carol (1843), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843 to 1844), Dombey and Son (1846 to 1848), David Copperfield (1849 to 1850), Bleak House (1852 to 1853), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855 to 1857), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860 to 1861), Our Mutual Friend (1864 to 1865), to the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood at his death in 1870. Every one of the fifteen was published in monthly or weekly serial parts before book publication, the serial-installment model that made the Victorian three-volume novel a popular form. Bleak House, David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Little Dorrit sit on every modern list of the central works of nineteenth-century world literature.

He campaigned through his novels and his editorial work on Household Words (1850 to 1859) and All the Year Round (1859 to his death) on the social questions of the period: the Poor Law of 1834 (in Oliver Twist), the Yorkshire boarding schools (in Nicholas Nickleby), the workhouse system (in Our Mutual Friend), the Court of Chancery (in Bleak House), the industrial-towns sanitary question (in Hard Times), the Marshalsea debtors' prison (in Little Dorrit), and the abolitionist movement (in his American Notes of 1842). He took the public-reading tours that became the second arm of his fame from 1858 to his death, performing his own work to packed halls across Britain and Ireland and in two American tours of 1842 and 1867 to 1868. The reading tours, gruelling and physically exhausting, were the immediate cause of his decline.

He retired in 1869 to Gads Hill Place at Higham in Kent, the small Restoration country house above the Medway that he had bought in 1856 (the same house his father had pointed out to him as a child as the kind of place a hard-working man might one day own), and died there on the ninth of June 1870 in his fifty-ninth year, leaving the Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished at the sixth monthly number. He was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey on the fourteenth of June 1870 against his stated wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral; the grave-slab carries the plain inscription his executors composed: Charles Dickens, born February 7, 1812, died June 9, 1870. He was a sympathiser to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world. The fifteen novels have never been out of English-language print since first publication, are translated into every major language on earth, and have produced a continuous body of stage, film and television adaptation across the last hundred and fifty years. The Dickens name in modern English-language literature carries the weight of the monthly-serial publication model and the social conscience of the Victorian century.