charles dickens simple biography

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was a British author who penned the beloved classics Oliver Twist , A Christmas Carol , David Copperfield , and Great Expectations .

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Who Was Charles Dickens?

Charles Dickens was a British author, journalist, editor, illustrator, and social commentator who wrote the beloved classics Oliver Twist , A Christmas Carol , and Great Expectations . His books were first published in monthly serial installments, which became a lucrative source of income following a childhood of abject poverty. Dickens wrote 15 novels in total, including Nicholas Nickleby , David Copperfield , and A Tale of Two Cities . His writing provided a stark portrait of poor and working class people in the Victorian era that helped to bring about social change. Dickens died in June 1870 at age 58 and is remembered as one of the most important and influential writers of the 19 th century.

Quick Facts

Early life and education, life as a journalist, editor, and illustrator, personal life: wife and children, charles dickens’ books: 'oliver twist,' 'great expectations,' and more, travels to the united states, 'a christmas carol' and other works, pop culture adaptations.

FULL NAME: Charles John Huffam Dickens BORN: February 7, 1812 DIED: June 9, 1870 BIRTHPLACE: Portsmouth, England SPOUSE: Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1836-1870) CHILDREN: Charles Jr., Mary, Kate, Walter, Francis, Alfred, Sydney, Henry, Dora, and Edward ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth on the southern coast of England. He was the second of eight children born to John Dickens, a naval clerk who dreamed of striking it rich, and Elizabeth Barrow, who aspired to be a teacher and school director. Despite his parents’ best efforts, the family remained poor but nevertheless happy in the early days.

In 1816, they moved to Chatham, Kent, where young Dickens and his siblings were free to roam the countryside and explore the old castle at Rochester. Dickens was a sickly child and prone to spasms, which prevented him from playing sports. He compensated by reading avidly, including such books as Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones , Peregrine Pickle , and The Arabian Nights , according to The World of Charles Dickens by Fido Martin.

In 1822, the Dickens family moved to Camden Town, a poor neighborhood in London. By then, the family’s financial situation had grown dire, as Charles’ father had a dangerous habit of living beyond the family’s means. Eventually, John was sent to prison for debt in 1824, when Charles was just 12 years old. He boarded with a sympathetic family friend named Elizabeth Roylance, who later inspired the character Mrs. Pipchin in Dickens’ 1847 novel Dombey and Son , according to Dickens: A Biography by Fred Kaplan.

Following his father’s imprisonment, Dickens was forced to leave school to work at a boot-blacking factory alongside the River Thames. At the run-down, rodent-ridden factory, Dickens earned 6 shillings a week labeling pots of “blacking,” a substance used to clean fireplaces. It was the best he could do to help support his family, and the strenuous working conditions heavily influenced his future writing and his views on treatment of the poor and working class.

Much to his relief, Dickens was permitted to go back to school when his father received a family inheritance and used it to pay off his debts. He attended the Wellington House Academy in Camden Town, where he encountered what he called “haphazard, desultory teaching [and] poor discipline,” according to The World of Charles Dickens by Angus Wilson. The school’s sadistic headmaster was later the inspiration for the character Mr. Creakle in Dickens’ semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield .

When Dickens was 15, his education was pulled out from under him once again. In 1827, he had to drop out of school and work as an office boy to contribute to his family’s income. However, as it turned out, the job became a launching point for his writing career. Within a year of being hired, Dickens began freelance reporting at the law courts of London. Just a few years later, he was reporting for two major London newspapers.

In 1833, he began submitting sketches to various magazines and newspapers under the pseudonym “Boz,” which was a family nickname. His first published story was “A Dinner at Poplar Walk,” which ran in London’s Monthly Magazine in 1833. Seeing his writing in print made his eyes “overflow with joy and pride,” according to Dickens: A Biography . In 1836, his clippings were published in his first book, Sketches by Boz.

Dickens later edited magazines including Household Words and All the Year Round , the latter of which he founded. In both, he promoted and originally published some of his own work such as Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities .

Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in 1836, soon after the publication of his first book, Sketches by Boz . She was the daughter of George Hogarth, the editor of the Evening Chronicle . Dickens and Hogarth went on to have 10 children between 1837 and 1852, according to biographer Fred Kaplan. Among them were magazine editor Charles Dickens Jr., painter Kate Dickens Perugini, barrister Henry Fielding Dickens, and Edward Dickens, who entered into politics after immigrating to the Australia.

In 1851, Dickens suffered two devastating losses: the deaths of his infant daughter, Dora, and his father, John. He also separated from his wife in 1858. Dickens slandered Catherine publicly and struck up an intimate relationship with a young actor named Ellen “Nelly” Ternan. Sources differ on whether the two started seeing each other before or after Dickens’ marital separation. It is also believed that he went to great lengths to erase any documentation alluding to Ternan’s presence in his life. These major losses and challenges seeped into Dickens’ writing in his “dark novel” period.

Best known for his fiction writing, Dickens wrote a total of 15 novels between 1836 and 1870. His first was The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club , and his last was The Mystery of Edwin Drood , which went unfinished due to his death.

Dickens’ books were originally published in monthly serial installments that sold for 1 shilling each. The affordable price meant everyday citizens could follow along, though wealthier readers, such as Queen Victoria , were also among Dickens’ fans. Once complete, the stories were published again in novel form.

Dickens’ books provided a stark portrait of poor and working class people in the Victorian era that helped to bring about social change. In the 1850s, following the death of his father and infant daughter, as well as his separation from his wife, Dickens’ novels began to express a darkened worldview. His so-called dark novels are Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1857). They feature more complicated, thematically grim plots and more complex characters, though Dickens didn’t stray from his typical societal commentary.

Read more about each of Charles Dickens’ novels below:

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Serial Publication: April 1836 to November 1837 Novel Publication: 1837

In 1836, the same year his first book of illustrations released, Dickens started publishing The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club . His series, originally written as captions for artist Robert Seymour’s humorous sports-themed illustrations, took the form of monthly serial installments. It was wildly popular with readers, and Dickens’ captions proved even more popular than the illustrations they were meant to accompany.

Oliver Twist

Serial Publication: February 1837 to March 1839 Novel Publication: November 1838

While still working on The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club , Dickens began Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy’s Progress , which would prove to be one of his most popular novels. The book follows the life of an orphan living in the streets of London, where he must get by on his wits and falls in with a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the dastardly Fagin.

Oliver Twist unromantically portrayed the mistreatment of London orphans, and the slums and poverty described in the novel made for biting social satire. Although very different from the humorous tone of the Pickwick Papers , Oliver Twist was extremely well-received in both England and America, and dedicated readers eagerly anticipated each next monthly installment, according to the biography Charles Dickens by Harold & Miriam Maltz. Even the young Queen Victoria was an avid reader of  Oliver Twist , describing it as “excessively interesting.”

Nicholas Nickleby

Serial Publication: April 1838 to October 1839 Novel Publication: 1839

As Dickens was still finishing Oliver Twist , he again began writing his follow-up work in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby . It tells the story of the title character, who must support his mother and sister following the loss of their comfortable lifestyle when his father dies and the family loses all of their money.

The Old Curiosity Shop

Serial Publication: April 1840 to February 1841 Novel Publication: 1841

Taking a few months between projects this time, Dickens’ next serial was The Old Curiosity Shop . Protagonist Nell Trent lives with her grandfather, whose gambling costs them the titular shop. The pair struggles to survive after into hiding to avoid a money lender.

Barnaby Rudge

Serial Publication: February to November 1841 Novel Publication: 1841

Right on the heels of The Old Curiosity Shop came Barnaby Rudge . The historical fiction novel, Dickens’ first, follows Barnaby and depicts the chaos of mob violence. The author originated the idea years prior but is thought to have temporarily abandoned it due to a dispute with his publisher.

Martin Chuzzlewit

Serial Publication: January 1843 to July 1844 Novel Publication: 1844

After his first American tour, Dickens wrote The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit . The story is about a man’s struggle to survive on the ruthless American frontier.

Dombey and Son

Serial Publication: October 1846 to April 1848 Novel Publication: 1848

After an uncharacteristic break, Dickens returned with Dombey and Son , which centers on the theme of how business tactics affect a family’s personal finances. Published as a novel in 1848, it takes a dark view of England and is considered pivotal to Dickens’ body of work in that it set the tone for his future novels.

David Copperfield

Serial Publication: May 1849 to November 1850 Novel Publication: November 1850

Dickens wrote his most autobiographical novel to date with David Copperfield by tapping into his own personal experiences in his difficult childhood and his work as a journalist. The book follows the life of its title character from his impoverished childhood to his maturity and success as a novelist. It was the first work of its kind: No one had ever written a novel that simply followed a character through his everyday life.

David Copperfield is considered one of Dickens’ masterpieces, and it was his personal favorite of his works; he wrote in the book’s preface, “Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.” It also helped define the public’s expectations of a Dickensian novel. In The Life of Charles Dickens , biographer John Forster wrote “Dickens never stood so high in reputation as at the completion of Copperfield ,” and biographer Fred Kaplan called the novel “an exploration of himself through his art more direct, more honest, more resolute than in his earlier fiction.”

Bleak House

Serial Publication: 1852 to 1853 Novel Publication: 1853

His next work, Bleak House , dealt with the hypocrisy of British society. The first of his “dark novels,” it was considered his most complex novel yet. Drawing upon his brief experiences as a law clerk and court reporter, the novel is built around a long-running legal case involving several conflicting wills and was described by biographer Fido Martin as “England’s greatest satire on the law’s incompetence and delays.” Dickens’ satire was so effective that it  helped support  a successful movement toward legal reform in the 1870s.

Serial Publication: April to August 1854 Novel Publication: 1854

Dickens followed Bleak House with Hard Times , which takes place in an industrial town at the peak of economic expansion. Hard Times focuses on the shortcomings of employers as well as those who seek change.

Little Dorrit

Serial Publication: December 1855 and June 1857 Novel Publication: 1857

Another novel from Dickens’ darker period is Little Dorrit , a fictional study of how human values conflict with the world’s brutality.

A Tale of Two Cities

Serial Publication: April to November 1959 Novel Publication: 1859

Coming out of his “dark novel” period, Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities in the periodical he founded, All the Year Round . The historical novel takes place during the French Revolution in Paris and London. Its themes focus on the need for sacrifice, the struggle between the evils inherent in oppression and revolution, and the possibility of resurrection and rebirth.

A Tale of Two Cities was a tremendous success and remains Dickens’ best-known work of historical fiction. Biographer Fido Martin called the novel “pure Dickens, but essentially a Dickens we have never seen before. This is a Dickens who has at last captured in prose fiction the stage heroics he adored.”

Great Expectations

Serial Publication: December 1860 to August 1861 Novel Publication: October 1861

Many people consider Great Expectations Dickens’ greatest literary accomplishment. The story—Dickens’ second that’s narrated in the first person—focuses on the lifelong journey of moral development for the novel’s protagonist, an orphan named Pip. With extreme imagery and colorful characters, the well-received novel touches on wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and good versus evil. The novel was a financial success and received nearly universal acclaim, with readers responding positively to the novel’s themes of love, morality, social mobility, and the eventual triumph of good over evil.

Our Mutual Friend

Serial Publication: May 1864 to November 1865 Novel Publication: 1865

In June 1865, Dickens was a passenger on a train that plunged off a bridge in Kent, according to biographer Fred Kaplan. He tended to the wounded and even saved the lives of some passengers before assistance arrived, and he was able to retrieve his unfinished manuscript for his next novel, Our Mutual Friend , from the wreckage. That book, a satire about wealth and the Victorian working class, wasn’t received as well as Dickens’ other works, with some finding the plot too complex and disorganized.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Serial Publication: April 1870 Novel Publication: 1870

Dickins’ final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood , began its monthly serialized publication in April 1870. However, Dickens died less than two months later, leaving the novel unfinished. Only six of a planned 12 installments of his final work were completed at the time of his death, according to biographer Fido Martin.

In 1842, Dickens and his wife, Catherine, embarked on a five-month lecture tour of the United States. Dickens spoke of his opposition to slavery and expressed his support for additional reform. His lectures, which began in Virginia and ended in Missouri, were so widely attended that ticket scalpers gathered outside his events. Biographer J.B. Priestley wrote that during the tour, Dickens enjoyed “the greatest welcome that probably any visitor to America has ever had.”

“They flock around me as if I were an idol,” bragged Dickens, a known show-off. Although he enjoyed the attention at first, he eventually resented the invasion of privacy. He was also annoyed by what he viewed as Americans’ gregariousness and crude habits, as he later expressed in American Notes for General Circulation (1842). The sarcastic travelogue, which Dickens’ penned upon his return to England, criticized American culture and materialism.

After his criticism of the American people during his first tour, Dickens later launched a second U.S. tour from 1867 to 1868, where he hoped to set things right with the public and made charismatic speeches promising to praise the United States in reprints of American Notes for General Circulation and Martin Chuzzlewit , his 1844 novel set in the American frontier.

On December 19, 1843, Dickens published A Christmas Carol , one of his most timeless and beloved works. The book features the famous protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge, a curmudgeonly old miser who—with the help of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come—finds the holiday spirit. Dickens penned the book in just six weeks, beginning in October and finishing just in time for Christmas celebrations. Like his earlier works, it was intended as a social criticism, to bring attention to the hardships faced by England’s poorer classes.

The book was a roaring success, selling more than 6,000 copies upon publication. Readers in England and America were touched by the book’s empathetic emotional depth; one American entrepreneur reportedly gave his employees an extra day’s holiday after reading it. Despite its incredible success, the high production costs and Dickens’ disagreements with the publisher meant he received relatively few profits for A Christmas Carol , according to Kaplan, which were further reduced when Dickens was forced to take legal action against the publishers for making illegal copies.

A Christmas Carol was Dickens’ most popular book in the United States, selling more than two million copies in the century after its first publication there, according to Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin. It is also one of Dickens’ most adapted works, and Ebenezer Scrooge has been portrayed by such actors as Michael Caine, Albert Finney, Patrick Stewart, Tim Curry, and Jim Carrey .

Dickens published several other Christmas novellas following A Christmas Carol , including The Chimes (1844) The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man and the Ghost ’s Bargain (1848). In 1867, he wrote a stage play titled No Thoroughfare .

On June 8, 1870, Dickens had a stroke at his home in Kent, England, after a day of writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood . He died the next day at age 58.

At the time, Edwin Drood had begun its serial publication; it was never finished. Only half of the planned installments of his final novel were completed at the time of Dickens’ death, according to Fido.

Dickens was buried in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey , with thousands of mourners gathering at the beloved author’s gravesite.

When 48 Doughty Street in London—which was Dickens’ home from 1837 to 1839—was threatened with demolition, it was saved by the Dickens Fellowship and renovated, becoming the Dickens House Museum . Open since 1925, it appears like a middle-class Victorian home exactly as Dickens lived in it, and it houses a significant collection related to Dickens and his works.

Many of Dickens’ major works have been adapted for movies and stage plays, with some, like A Christmas Carol , repackaged in various forms over the years. Reginald Owen portrayed Ebenezer Scrooge in one of the earliest Hollywood adaptations of the novella in 1938, while Albert Finney played the character alongside Alec Guinness as Marley’s ghost in the 1970 film Scrooge .

Some adaptations have taken unique approaches to the source material. Michael Caine portrayed Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), with members of the Muppets playing other characters from the story, and Gonzo the Great portraying Dickens as a narrator. Bill Murray played a version of Scrooge in a modern-day comedic take on the classic story. Several animated versions of A Christmas Carol have also been adapted, with Jim Carrey playing Scrooge in a 2009 computer-generated film that used motion-capture animation to create the character.

Several more of Dickens’ works have been similarly adapted. Famed director David Lean made celebrated adaptations of both Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). The latter novel was also adapted into a successful 1960 stage musical called Oliver! , and a 1968 movie version—directed by Carol Reed—of that same musical won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Director.

More recently, The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) put a comedic spin on Dickens’ personal favorite of his own works, with Dev Patel performing the title role. Barbara Kingsolver also adapted the novel in her Pulitzer Prize winner Demon Copperhead (2022).

• The English are, as far as I know, the hardest worked people on whom the sun shines. Be content if in their wretched intervals of leisure they read for amusement and do no worse.
• I write because I can’t help it.
• Literature cannot be too faithful to the people, cannot too ardently advocate the cause of their advancement, happiness, and prosperity.
• An author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him forever.
• Nobody has done more harm in this single generation than everybody can mend in 10 generations.
• If I were soured [on writing], I should still try to sweeten the lives and fancies of others; but I am not—not at all.
• Well, the work is hard, the climate is hard, the life is hard: but so far the gain is enormous.
• Who that has ever reflected on the enormous and vast amount of leave-taking there is in life can ever have doubted the existence of another?
• I never knew what it was to feel disgust and contempt, till I traveled in America.
• My great ambition is to live in the hearts and homes of home-loving people and to be connected with the truth of the truthful English life.

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Charles Dickens online

Charles dickens biography.

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Charles Dickens summary

Discover the early life and literary career of charles dickens.

Charles Dickens , (born Feb. 7, 1812, Portsmouth, Hampshire, Eng.—died June 9, 1870, Gad’s Hill, near Chatham, Kent), British novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. The defining moment of Dickens’s life occurred when he was 12 years old. With his father in debtors’ prison, he was withdrawn from school and forced to work in a factory. This deeply affected the sensitive boy. Though he returned to school at 13, his formal education ended at 15. As a young man, he worked as a reporter. His fiction career began with short pieces reprinted as Sketches by “Boz” (1836). He exhibited a great ability to spin a story in an entertaining manner and this quality, combined with the serialization of his comic novel The Pickwick Papers (1837), made him the most popular English author of his time. The serialization of such works as Oliver Twist (1838) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) followed. After a trip to America, he wrote A Christmas Carol (1843) in a few weeks. With Dombey and Son (1848), his novels began to express a heightened uneasiness about the evils of Victorian industrial society, which intensified in the semiautobiographical David Copperfield (1850), as well as in Bleak House (1853), Little Dorrit (1857), Great Expectations (1861), and others. A Tale of Two Cities (1859) appeared in the period when he achieved great popularity for his public readings. Dickens’s works are characterized by an encyclopaedic knowledge of London, pathos, a vein of the macabre, a pervasive spirit of benevolence and geniality, inexhaustible powers of character creation, an acute ear for characteristic speech, and a highly individual and inventive prose style.

Biography Online

Charles Dickens biography

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812, to John and Elizabeth Dickens.

As a child, Charles experienced the fickle hands of fate; he was first taught at a private school before being removed because of his family’s financial hardship.

In fact, his father’s debts were so bad, the whole family (apart from the young Charles was sent to the debtor’s prison at Marshalsea – this would later be the setting for one of his novels – Little Dorrit ). However, although Charles escaped detention in the debtors’ prison, he was made to work long, 10 hour days, at a local boot-blacking factory. The hard and dangerous work left a lasting impression on Charles Dickens, who would later incorporate in his writings a sense of social injustice that was endemic in Victorian Britain.

“I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!” – from David Copperfield.

Charles managed to escape the grind of factory work, by training to be a shorthand writer and gaining employment as a journalist – reporting on court cases.

In 1833, he became a parliamentary journalist for the Morning Chronicle . The young Dickens was fascinated with the Houses of Parliament, though he was often left with a lowly impression of the MPs. Shortly after this, he began writing his first serialised stories, published under a pseudonym – Boz.

In 1836, he married Catherine Hogarth and also in that year, he saw the first publication of ‘ The Pickwick Papers.’ His first book proved to be a great seller, and this enabled him to become a full-time writer.

As well as writing popular novels, Charles Dickens took great interest in the social issues of the day. He toured both Europe and the United States speaking against slavery and the various social injustices that he saw. He even founded his own paper – The Daily News. This was its first editorial:

“The principles advocated in The Daily News will be principles of progress and improvement; of education, civil and religious liberty, and equal legislation. Principles, such as its conductors believe the advancing spirit of the time requires: the condition of the country demands: and justice, reason and experience legitimately sanction.”

The Daily News (21st January 1846)

Charles Dickens is one of the most popular writers in English. In particular, his novels are brimming with colourful and eccentric characters which leave a lasting impression. He achieved this through his vivid memory of the various people he had met through his life, but also he added a touch of fantasy and exaggeration with his vivid descriptive style.

There are various themes which run throughout his writings, which often reflect a degree of autobiography. Dickens loved the ‘rags to riches stories’, exemplified by Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. He frequently highlighted the worst excesses of Victorian society and made a passionate case for a more caring and moral society.

For his attacks on social injustice, Dickens was considered a “Radical” of his time. Though in a later essay by the socialist, George Orwell , Orwell questioned his lack of alternatives:

“In Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more he has become a national institution himself… Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.”

– George Orwell, Charles Dickens 1939

Charles Dickens had ten children with his wife, but, became estranged from her and ended his life living with his mistress Ellen Ternan. Also towards the end of his life, in  June 1865, he was involved in the tragic Staplehurst rail crash where he narrowly avoided injury.

Dickens wrote a book about Jesus Christ  The Life of Our Lord  (1849) – where he encourages others to follow the Christian faith. He professed to be a practising Christian in the Anglican faith (with also an interest in the Unitarian church). However, he could be critical of organised religion and opposed the idea of keeping the Sabbath only for church-going.

Dickens was a noted philanthropist helping to raise funds for charities, such as Great Ormond Street. He also helped to set up a home for ‘fallen women.’ The emphasis was on providing destitute women with an education and way to redeem themselves in societies eyes. Redemption was an important aspect of Dicken’s philosophy and he often criticised harsh and punitive punishments, such as solitary confinement.

Dickens died on June 8th, 1870 after a stroke. He was writing a book ‘Edwin Drood’. He had wished to be buried at Rochester Cathedral in a simple and private manner, but contrary to his wishes, he was buried at Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey.

His epitaph read:

“To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England’s most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England’s greatest writers is lost to the world.”

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Charles Dickens” Oxford,  UK.  www.biographyonline.net , 25th September 2009. Last updated 13 February 2018.

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Charles Dickens – A life

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Related pages

• Charles Dickens bio at BBC

Learn more about Charles Dickens:

• Dickens Fast Facts
• Dickens Biography
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• Illustrating Dickens
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• Dickens & Christmas
• Family and Friends
• Dickens in America
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Dickens Timelines

Discover Dickens' life and work depicted graphically .

Catherine Dickens

Catherine (Hogarth) Dickens (1815-1879) - Charles Dickens' wife, with whom he fathered 10 children. She was born in Scotland on May 19, 1815 and came to England with her family in 1834. Catherine was the daughter of George Hogarth , editor of the Evening Chronicle where Dickens was a young journalist. They were married on April 2, 1836 in St. Luke's Church, Chelsea and honeymooned in Chalk, near Chatham.

Charles was undoubtably in love at the outset but his feelings for Catherine wained as the family grew. With the birth of their last child in 1852 Dickens found Catherine an increasingly incompetent mother and housekeeper ( Johnson, 1952, p. 905-909 ) . Their separation, in 1858, was much publicized and rumors of Dickens unfaithfulness abounded, which he vehemently denied in public. Dickens and Catherine had little correspondence after the break, Catherine moving to a house in London with oldest son, Charley , and Dickens retreating to Gads Hill in Kent with Catherine's sister, Georgina , and all of the children except Charlie remaining with him. On her deathbed in 1879 she gave her collection of Dickens' letters to daughter Kate instructing her to " Give these to the British Museum, that the world may know he loved me once " ( Schlicke, 1999, p. 153-157 ) .

Katherine is buried at Highgate Cemetery , London.

Read a letter from Dickens to John Forster concerning separation from Catherine.

What Shall We Have for Dinner?

Around 1850 Catherine released a collection of recipes and bills of fare for dinners for from two to eighteen people. The book, published by Bradbury and Evans, was called What Shall We Have for Dinner? and was written under the pen name Lady Maria Clutterbuck. Charles Dickens wrote the introduction using Maria's voice ( Nayder, 2011, p. 186-189 ) . The book is referred to as the source of Christmas dinner in Thomas Keneally's novel The Dickens Boy .

Amazon.com: The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth by Lillian Nayder

The Life of Charles Dickens

An illustrated hypertext biography of charles dickens, childhood and education.

• The Law and Early Jounalism
• Early Novels
• Middle Years
• Later Years

At this point the family consisted of Charles, older sister Fanny , younger brothers Alfred and Frederick , and younger sister Letitia . Everyone except Charles and Fanny went to live in the Marshalsea with their parents. Fanny was boarding at the Royal Academy of Music, and Charles initially lodged with a landlady in Camden Town in north London. This proved to be too long a walk every day to the blacking factory and his family in the Marshalsea, so a room was found for him on Lant Street in Southwark near the prison.

Young Charles, who dreamed of growing up a gentleman, found these dreams dashed working alongside common boys at the blacking factory and later wrote "It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age." Dickens shared this painful part of his childhood through the story of David Copperfield although no one realized it was autobiographical until related by biographer John Forster after Dickens' death ( Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 22-39 ) .

Charles was to further his education at Wellington House Academy , a school run by the harsh schoolmaster William Jones , a man who delighted in corporal punishment and who Dickens later described as " by far the most ignorant man I have ever had the pleasure to know ". Charles would spend nearly three years, aged 12-15, at Wellington House, leaving in the spring of 1827 ( Slater, 2009, p. 25-27 ) . Many of his experiences at school, and the masters who taught there, would later find their way into his fiction.

The Law and Early Journalism

Charles had been fascinated with the theatre since childhood and often attended the theatre to break the monotony of reporting on parliamentary proceedings. He wrote to George Bartley, manager of the Covent Garden Theatre, in 1832 asking for an audition, which was granted. On the day of the audition Charles was ill with a bad cold and inflammation of the face and missed the appointment. He wrote to Bartley explaining the illness and that he would apply for another audition next season. He would later marvel at how near he came to a very different sort of life ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 139-140 ) .

Dickens, writing feverishly, as well as holding down the job of a reporter, now found himself in the throes of romance. He became a regular visitor to the Hogarth household and soon proposed marriage, which Catherine quickly accepted ( Slater, 2009, p. 47 ) . They were married at St. Luke's church, Chelsea on April 2, 1836. Two months previous his collection of short stories was published in book form by John Macrone entitled Sketches by Boz with illustrations by popular artist George Cruikshank ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 174 ) . Dickens' pseudonym Boz came from his younger brother Augustus's through-the-nose pronunciation of his own nickname, Moses.

The Early Novels

Upon returning home he penned the promised travel book, American Notes , a rather unflattering description of America, and followed that with Martin Chuzzlewit , published in monthly parts, in which the protagonist goes to America and is subjected to the same sort of puffed up, mercenary people Dickens found there. The story was not well received and did not sell well ( Patten, 1978, p. 133 ) . Neither had Barnaby Rudge ( Schlicke, 1999, p. 33 ) , and Dickens felt that perhaps his lamp had gone out.

Dickens found himself in dire financial straits. He had borrowed heavily from his publishers for the American trip and his family continued to grow with their fifth child, son Francis , on the way. His feckless father was borrowing money in Charles' name behind his back. He needed an idea for a new book that would satisfy his pecuniary problems ( Slater, 2009, p. 215-220 ) .

The seeds for the story that became A Christmas Carol were planted in Dickens' mind during a trip to Manchester to deliver a speech in support of education. Thoughts of education as a remedy for crime and poverty, along with scenes he had recently witnessed at the Field Lane Ragged School , caused Dickens to resolve to " strike a sledge hammer blow " for the poor ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 408-409 ) . As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He wrote that as the tale unfolded he " wept and laughed, and wept again' and that he 'walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed " ( Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 326 ) . Dickens was at odds with Chapman and Hall over the low receipts from Martin Chuzzlewit and decided to self-publish the book, overspending on color illustrations and lavish binding and then setting the cost low so that everyone could afford it ( Slater, 2009, p. 220 ) . The book was an instant success but royalties were low after production costs were paid .

Serialization of Martin Chuzzlewit came to a conclusion in July, 1844, and Dickens conceived of the idea of another travel book; this time he would go to Italy ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 426 ) . The family spent a year in Italy, first in Genoa, and then traveling through the southern part of the country. He wrote the second of his Christmas Books, The Chimes ( Slater, 2009, p. 230-231 ) , while in Genoa and sent his adventures home in the form of letters which were published in the Daily News . These were collected into a single volume entitled Pictures from Italy in May, 1846 ( Davis, 1999, p. 318 ) .

During the 1840s Dickens, with a troupe of friends and family in tow, began acting in amateur theatricals in London and across Britain. Charles worked tirelessly as actor and stage manager and often adjusted scenes, assisted carpenters, invented costumes, devised playbills, and generally oversaw the entire production of the performances ( Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 436 ) . The Dickens' amateur troupe even performed twice for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert ( Davis, 1999, p. 4 ) .

The Middle Years

In 1839 the Dickens family moved from Doughty Street to a larger home at Devonshire Terrace near Regent's Park . The family continued to grow with the addition of sons Alfred (1845), Sydney (1847), and Henry (1849).

Dickens continued to write a book for the Christmas season every year. After A Christmas Carol (1843), and The Chimes (1844), he followed with The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848). All of these sold well at the time of publication but none endured as A Christmas Carol has ( Schlicke, 1999, p. 97 ) .

Dickens had begun writing an autobiography in the late 1840s that he shared with his friend and future biographer, John Forster ( Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 22 ) . He found the writing too painful and opted instead to work his story into the fictional account of David Copperfield , which he later described as his personal favorite among his novels ( David Copperfield , p. xii ) . The story was serialized from May 1849 until November 1850. During the writing of Copperfield the tireless Dickens began another venture, a weekly magazine called Household Words . Charles worked as editor as well as contributor with additional pieces supplied by other writers. Also during the writing of Copperfield Catherine gave birth to a daughter, named for David Copperfield's wife Dora ( Slater, 2009, p. 312 ) . Dora , sickly from birth, died at 8 months old ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 627-628 ) .

Dickens followed David Copperfield with what many consider one of his finest novels, Bleak House ( Davis, 1999, p. 35 ) . Dickens used his previous experience as a court reporter to tell the story of a prolonged case in the Courts of Chancery. During the writing of Bleak House Catherine gave birth to a son, Edward (1852), nicknamed Plorn. Edward would be last of Charles and Catherine's children and the family moved again, this time to Tavistock House . Following Bleak House Dickens serialized his next book, Hard Times , in his weekly magazine, Household Words . Following Hard Times Dickens returned to the painful childhood memory of his father's imprisonment for debt with the story of Little Dorrit . Amy Dorrit's father, William , was a prisoner in the Marshalsea debtor's prison and Amy was born there.

During the 1850s Charles and Catherine's marriage started to show signs of trouble. Dickens grew increasingly dissatisfied with Catherine whom, after giving birth to ten children, had grown quite stout and lethargic. She was increasingly unable to keep up with her energetic husband ( Schlicke, 1999, p. 155 ) . The problem came to a head when Dickens became enthralled with a young actress he met during one of his amateur theatricals, Ellen Ternan . Charles and Catherine were separated in 1858 and caused a public stir mostly contributed to by Dickens' desire to exonerate himself ( Johnson, 1952, p. 922-925 ) . All of the Dickens children, with exception of Charley , would live with their father, as would Catherine's sister, Georgina . The relationship with Ternan, the depth of which is still being debated ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 914-918 ) , would continue the rest of Dickens' life.

Dickens and his children now moved into the mansion Gads Hill Place in Kent that he had purchased in 1856 near his childhood home of Chatham. As a boy, Dickens would walk by the impressive house, built in 1780, with his father who told him that with hard work he could someday live in such a splendid mansion ( Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 6 ) . In 1864 Dickens received, from actor friend Charles Fechter, a two-story Swiss chalet that Dickens had installed across the road from Gads Hill with a tunnel under the road for access ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 955-956 ) . Dickens wrote his his final works in his study on the top floor of the chalet.

The separation with Catherine also caused a rift between Dickens and his publishers, Bradbury and Evans . Bradbury and Evans also published the popular magazine Punch . When they refused to publish Dickens' personal statement , his explanation for the recent separation, Charles was furious and refused to have further dealings with them. He ceased publication of his weekly magazine, Household Words , continuing it under a new name, All the Year Round , and with his old publishers, Chapman and Hall ( Kaplan, 1988, p. 395-401 ) .

In the 1850s Dickens began reading excerpts of his books in public, first for charity, and, beginning in 1858, for profit. These readings proved extremely popular with the public and Dickens continued them for the rest of his life. The readings included excerpts from his Christmas books , David Copperfield , and Nicholas Nickleby , with A Christmas Carol , for which he wrote a condensed verion , and The Trial from Pickwick being the most popular ( Davis, 1999, p. 328 ) . He later included the dramatic murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist , the performance of which took a toll on Dickens' fragile health ( Johnson, 1952, p. 1144 ) .

The Later Years

In May, 1864, Dickens began publication of what would be his last completed novel. Published in monthly installments, Our Mutual Friend touches the familiar theme of the evils and corruption that the love of money brings. Poor health causing perhaps a stutter in his usual creative genius, Dickens found beginning the novel difficult, he wrote to Forster "Although I have not been wanting in industry, I have been wanting in invention" ( Letters, 1998, v. 10, p. 414 ) . After finally finding his footing, the monthly installments did not sell well despite a massive advertising blitz ( Patten, 1978, p. 307-308 ) .

On the 9th of June, 1865, traveling back from France with Ellen Ternan and her mother, and with the latest installment of Our Mutual Friend , the train in which they were traveling was involved in an accident in Staplehurst, Kent. Many were killed but Dickens and his companions escaped serious injury although Dickens was severely shaken. Three years later he wrote that he still experienced " vague rushes of terror even riding in hansom cabs " ( Johnson, 1952, p. 1018-1021 ) .

In the late 1850s Dickens began to contemplate a second visit to America , tempted by the money he could make by extending his public readings there. Despite pleas not to go from friends and family because of increasingly ill health ( Johnson, 1952, p. 1070 ) , he finally decided to go and arrived in Boston on November 19, 1867. The original plan called for a visit to Chicago and as far west as St. Louis. Because of ill health and bad weather this idea was scrapped and Dickens did not venture from the northeastern states ( Slater, 2009, p. 580 ) . He stayed for 5 months and gave 76 extremely popular performances for which he earned, after expenses, an incredible £19,000 ( Schlicke, 1999, p. 17 ) .

Dickens returned home in May, 1868, somewhat revitalized during the sea voyage, to a full load of work. He immediately plunged back into editing All the Year Round and, in October, began a farewell reading tour of Britain that included a new, very passionate, and physically taxing, performance of the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist ( Davis, 1999, p. 353 ) .

Monthly publication of what was to be his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood , began in April, 1870. On the evening of June 8, 1870, Dickens, after working on the latest installment of Drood that morning in the chalet at Gads Hill , suffered a stroke and died the next day ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 1076-1079 ) . The Mystery of Edwin Drood was exactly half finished and the mystery is unsolved to this day .

Dickens had wished to be buried, without fanfare, in a small cemetery in Rochester, but the Nation would not allow it. He was laid to rest in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, the flowers from thousands of mourners overflowing the open grave ( Forster, 1899, v. 2, p. 513 ) .

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Charles Dickens

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Charles Dickens Biography

Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870), probably the best-known and, to many people, the greatest English novelist of the 19th century. A moralist, satirist, and social reformer, Dickens crafted complex plots and striking characters that capture the panorama of English society.

Dickens's novels criticize the injustices of his time, especially the brutal treatment of the poor in a society sharply divided by differences of wealth. But he presents this criticism through the lives of characters that seem to live and breathe. Paradoxically, they often do so by being flamboyantly larger than life: The 20th-century poet and critic T. S. Eliot wrote, "Dickens's characters are real because there is no one like them." Yet though these characters range through the sentimental, grotesque, and humorous, few authors match Dickens's psychological realism and depth. Dickens's novels rank among the funniest and most gripping ever written, among the most passionate and persuasive on the topic of social justice, and among the most psychologically telling and insightful works of fiction. They are also some of the most masterful works in terms of artistic form, including narrative structure, repeated motifs, consistent imagery, juxtaposition of symbols, stylization of characters and settings, and command of language.

Dickens established (and made profitable) the method of first publishing novels in serial instalments in monthly magazines. He thereby reached a larger audience including those who could only afford their reading on such an instalment plan. This form of publication soon became popular with other writers in Britain and the United States.

II Early Years

Dickens was born in Portsmouth, on England's southern coast. His father was a clerk in the British Navy pay office a respectable position, but with little social status. His paternal grandparents, a steward (property manager) and a housekeeper, possessed even less status, having been servants, and Dickens later concealed their background. Dickens's mother supposedly came from a more respectable family. Yet two years before Dickens's birth, his mother's father was caught embezzling and fled to Europe, never to return.

The family's increasing poverty forced Dickens out of school at age 12 to work in Warren's Blacking Warehouse, a shoe-polish factory, where the other working boys mocked him as "the young gentleman." His father was then imprisoned for debt. The humiliations of his father's imprisonment and his labor in the blacking factory formed Dickens's greatest wound and became his deepest secret. He could not confide them even to his wife, although they provide the unacknowledged foundation of his fiction.

Soon after his father's release from prison, Dickens got a better job as errand boy in law offices. He taught himself shorthand to get an even better job later as a court stenographer and as a reporter in Parliament. At the same time, Dickens, who had a reporter's eye for transcribing the life around him, especially anything comic or odd, submitted short sketches to obscure magazines. The first published sketch, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk" (later retitled "Mr. Minns and His Cousin") brought tears to Dickens's eyes when he discovered it in the pages of The Monthly Magazine in 1833. From then on his sketches, which appeared under the pen name "Boz" (rhymes with "rose") in The Evening Chronicle, earned him a modest reputation. Boz originated as a childhood nickname for Dickens's younger brother Augustus.

Dickens became a regular visitor at the home of George Hogarth, editor of The Evening Chronicle, and in 1835 became engaged to Hogarth's daughter Catherine. Publication of the collected Sketches by Boz in 1836 gave Dickens sufficient income to marry Catherine Hogarth that year. The marriage proved unhappy.

III Literary Career

Soon after Sketches by Boz appeared, the fledgling publishing firm of Chapman and Hall approached Dickens to write a story in monthly instalments. The publisher intended the story as a backdrop for a series of woodcuts by the then-famous artist Robert Seymour, who had originated the idea for the story. With characteristic confidence, Dickens, although younger and relatively unknown, successfully insisted that Seymour's pictures illustrate his own story instead. After the first instalment, Dickens wrote to the artist he had displaced to correct a drawing he felt was not faithful enough to his prose. Seymour made the change, went into his backyard, and expressed his displeasure by blowing his brains out. Dickens and his publishers simply pressed on with a new artist. The comic novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, appeared serially in 1836 and 1837 and was first published in book form The Pickwick Papers in 1837.

The runaway success of The Pickwick Papers , as it is generally known today, clinched Dickens's fame. There were Pickwick coats and Pickwick cigars, and the plump, spectacled hero, Samuel Pickwick, became a national figure. Four years later, Dickens's readers found Dolly Varden, the heroine of Barnaby Rudge (1841), so irresistible that they named a waltz, a rose, and even a trout for her. The widespread familiarity today with Ebenezer Scrooge and his proverbial hard-heartedness from A Christmas Carol (1843) demonstrate that Dickens's characters live on in the popular imagination.

Dickens published 15 novels, one of which was left unfinished at his death. These novels are, in order of publication with serialization dates given first: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837; 1837); The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1837-1839; 1838); The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839; 1839); The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841; 1841); Barnaby Rudge (1841); Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844; 1844); Dombey and Son (1846-1848; 1848); The Personal History of David Copperfield (1849-1850; 1850); Bleak House (1852-1853; 1853); Hard Times (1854); Little Dorrit (1855-1857; 1857); A Tale of Two Cities (1859); Great Expectations (1860-1861; 1861); Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865; 1865); and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished; 1870).

Through his fiction Dickens did much to highlight the worst abuses of 19th-century society and to prick the public conscience. But running through the main plot of the novels are a host of subplots concerning fascinating and sometime ludicrous minor characters. Much of the humor of the novels derives from Dickens's descriptions of these characters and from his ability to capture their speech mannerisms and idiosyncratic traits.

A Early Fiction

Dickens was influenced by the reading of his youth and even by the stories his nursemaid created, such as the continuing saga of Captain Murderer. These childhood stories, as well as the melodramas and pantomimes he saw in the theater as a boy, fired Dickens's imagination throughout his life. His favorite boyhood readings included picaresque novels such as Don Quixote by Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes and Tom Jones by English novelist Henry Fielding, as well as the Arabian Nights. In these long comic works, a roguish hero's exploits and adventures loosely link a series of stories.

The Pickwick Papers , for example, is a wandering comic epic in which Samuel Pickwick acts as a plump and cheerful Don Quixote, and Sam Weller as a cockney version of Quixote's knowing servant, Sancho Panza. The novel's preposterous characters, high spirits, and absurd adventures delighted readers.

After Pickwick, Dickens plunged into a bleaker world. In Oliver Twist , he traces an orphan's progress from the workhouse to the criminal slums of London. Nicholas Nickleby , his next novel, combines the darkness of Oliver Twist with the sunlight of Pickwick. Rascality and crime are part of its jubilant mirth.

The Old Curiosity Shop broke hearts across Britain and North America when it first appeared. Later readers, however, have found it excessively sentimental, especially the pathos surrounding the death of its child-heroine Little Nell. Dickens's next two works proved less popular with the public.

Barnaby Rudge , Dickens's first historical novel, revolves around anti-Catholic riots that broke out in London in 1780. The events in Martin Chuzzlewit become a vehicle for the novel's theme: selfishness and its evils. The characters, especially the Chuzzlewit family, present a multitude of perspectives on greed and unscrupulous self-interest. Dickens wrote it after a trip to the United States in 1842.

B Mature Fiction

Many critics have cited Dombey and Son as the work in which Dickens's style matures and he succeeds in bringing multiple episodes together in a tight narrative. Set in the world of railroad-building during the 1840s, Dombey and Son looks at the social effects of the profit-driven approach to business. The novel was immediately successful.

Dickens always considered David Copperfield to be his best novel and the one he most liked. The beginning seems to be autobiographical, with David's childhood experiences recalling Dickens's own in the blacking factory. The unifying theme of the book is the "undisciplined heart" of the young David, which leads to all his mistakes, including the greatest of them, his mistaken first marriage.

Bleak House ushers in Dickens's final period as a satirist and social critic. A court case involving an inheritance forms the mainspring of the plot, and ultimately connects all of the characters in the novel. The dominant image in the book is fog, which envelops, entangles, veils, and obscures. The fog stands for the law, the courts, vested interests, and corrupt institutions. Dickens had a long-standing dislike of the legal system and protracted lawsuits from his days as a reporter in the courts.

A novel about industry, Hard Times , followed Bleak House in 1854. In Hard Times , Dickens satirizes the theories of political economists through exaggerated characters such as Mr. Bounderby, the self-made man motivated by greed, and Mr. Gradgrind, the schoolmaster who emphasizes facts and figures over all else. In Bounderby's mines, lives are ground down; in Gradgrind's classroom, imagination and feelings are strangled.

The pervading image of Little Dorrit is the jail. Dickens's memory of his own father's time in debtors' prison adds an autobiographical touch to the novel. Little Dorrit also contains Dickens's invention of the Circumlocution Office, the archetype of all bureaucracies, where nothing ever gets done. Through this critique and others, such as the circular legal system in Bleak House , Dickens also investigated the ways in which art makes meaning and the workings of his own narrative style.

A Tale of Two Cities is set in London and Paris during the French Revolution (1789-1799). It stands out among the novels as a work driven by incident and event rather than by character and is critical both of the violence of the mob and of the abuses of the aristocracy, which prompted the revolution. The successful Tale of Two Cities was soon followed by Great Expectations , which marked a return to the more familiar Dickensian style of character-driven narrative. Its main character, Pip, tells his own story. Pip's "great expectations" are to lead an idle life of luxury. Through Pip, Dickens exposes that ideal as false.

Dickens's last complete novel is the dark and powerful Our Mutual Friend . A tale of greed and obsession, it takes place in an ill-lit and dirty London, with images of darkness and decay throughout. Only 6 of the 12 intended parts of Edwin Drood had been completed by the time Dickens died. He intended it as a mystery story concerning the disappearance of the title character.

IV Final Years

The end of Dickens's life was emotionally scarred by his separation from his dutiful wife, Catherine, as the result of his involvement with a young actress, Ellen Ternan. Catherine bore him ten children during their 22-year marriage, but he found her increasingly dull and unsympathetic. Against the advice of editors, Dickens published a letter vehemently justifying his actions to his readers, who would otherwise have known nothing about them.

Following the separation, Dickens continued his hectic schedule of novel, story, essay, and letter writing (his collected letters alone stretch thousands of pages); reform activities; amateur theatricals and readings; in addition to nightly social engagements and long midnight walks through London. His energy had always seemed to his friends inhuman, but he maintained this activity in his later years in disregard of failing health. Dickens died of a stroke shortly after his farewell reading tour, while writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood .

V Achievement

Dickens's social critique in his novels was sharp and pointed. As his biographer Edgar Johnson observed in Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1952), Dickens's criticism was aimed not just at "the cruelty of the workhouse and the foundling asylum, the enslavement of human beings in mines and factories, the hideous evil of slums where crime simmered and proliferated, the injustices of the law, and the cynical corruption of the lawmakers" but also at "the great evil permeating every field of human endeavour: the entire structure of exploitation on which the social order was founded."

British writer George Orwell felt that Dickens was not a revolutionary, however, despite his criticism of society's ills. Orwell points out that Dickens "has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong." That instinctive feeling becomes so moving in the novels because Dickens made the injustices he hated concrete and specific, not abstract and general. His readers feel the abuses of 19th-century society as real through the life of his characters. Underlying and reinforcing that illusion of reality, however, is a rich and complicated system of symbolic imagery resulting from superb artistry.

Through his characters, Dickens also touched a range of readers, which was perhaps his greatest talent. As his friend John Forster wrote, his stories enthralled "judges on the bench and boys in the street" alike. The illiterate, often too poor to buy instalments themselves, pooled their pennies and got someone to read aloud to them.

Near the end of the serialization of The Old Curiosity Shop , crowds thronged to a New York pier to await the ship from London carrying the latest instalment. As it came to the dock people roared, "Is Little Nell dead?" The pathetic death of the novel's child-heroine, Nell Trent, became one of the most celebrated scenes in 19th-century fiction. Such public concern over Little Nell's end guaranteed that Dickens's social message would be heard, not only by his avid readers, but also by those in power.

Dickens was a careful craftsman, with a strong sense of design; his books were strictly outlined. Any current notions that Dickens's novels are long because he was paid by the word, or sloppy because he wrote them under pressure of monthly deadlines, are simply untrue. What organizes Dickens's stories is sometimes not apparent at first glance, although it makes sense in novels that emphasize character. It is the logic of psychology, the tensions and contradictions of our drives and emotions, which Dickens plumbed, laying side by side the best and the worst of the human heart. This is a very different logic from the order of realism that rests on common sense. Dickens detested common sense, seeing in its seeming obviousness a form of tyranny.

The theater was a crucial influence on Dickens's work. As a young man Dickens tried to go on stage, but he missed his audition because of a cold. Not only did Dickens later write comic plays, melodramas, and libretti (words for musical dramas), he was also often involved in amateur theatricals for good causes, and spent his last two decades reading his own stories to packed audiences. Dickens's readings were as much a sensation in England and America as was his writing, and they proved as profitable. The readings revealed the part of the man that made him a practiced magician and hypnotist as well.

Dickens's love of the theatrical makes his works lend themselves readily to media adaptations. Motion-picture or television versions exist for almost every one of them. A Christmas Carol was one of the earliest to be adapted, first appearing as the silent film Scrooge (1901), directed by Walter R. Booth. The most notable adaptations include A Christmas Carol (1938), directed by Edwin L. Marin and starring Reginald Owen, and, probably the most famous of all, A Christmas Carol (1951), directed by Brian Desmond Hart and starring Alastair Sim. A later production titled Scrooged (1988) was directed by Richard Donner and starred Bill Murray. David Lean directed the most famous of the many versions of Great Expectations (1946). The film Oliver! (1968), a musical based on Oliver Twist and directed by Carol Reed, won six Academy Awards. Nowadays people are probably more familiar with the many BBC television miniseries productions of Dickens's works.

Contributed By: Laurie Langbauer, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. Professor of English, University of North Carolina. Author of Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850-1930.

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Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England. His family moved to London in 1822. The Dickens family often had money problems. For a while Charles had to leave school to work in a factory. He later wrote about the difficult working conditions he experienced.

Dickens finished school for good at age 15 and went to work. He wrote stories and articles for magazines and newspapers. His first novel, The Pickwick Papers , was published in 1837.

He wrote many famous books. Oliver Twist (1838) tells the story of an orphan boy in London. A Christmas Carol (1843) became one of the most popular Christmas stories of all time. Another novel, called David Copperfield (1850), was based partly on Dickens’ childhood. In many of his later books, Dickens wrote about social problems that worried him. For example, his book Hard Times (1854) is about problems faced by factory workers.

In his later years, Dickens wrote less. He had grown tired. He published A Tale of Two Cities in 1859. It is a novel about the French Revolution. Great Expectations was published from 1860 to 1861. Dickens died on June 9, 1870.

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A Short Biography Of Charles Dickens

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Charles Dickens Timeline

Charles Dickens was born on February 7th in 1812 and died in 1870. Here’s a list of facts, events and dates in the life of Charles Dickens.  The timeline also includes information about the era in which he lived.

Last Updated on June 21, 2020

Here’s a list of facts, events and dates in the life of Charles Dickens.  The Charles Dickens timeline also includes information about the era in which he lived.

The War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain begins in June of 1812.

John Dickens, the father of Charles Dickens

The War of 1812 ends in February of 1815. Also, The Corn Laws (trade restrictions on imported food and grain) were introduced in Great Britain.

Illustration by Fred Bernard of young Charles Dickens at work in a shoe-blacking factory. (from the 1892 edition of Forster’s Life of Dickens)

1824 was the darkest year in Dickens’s life.   His father, John Dickens was  arrested for debt and sent to the Marshalsea prison. The family needed money and sent Charles  to work in Warren’s Blacking Factory.

In May of 1827 Charles Dickens takes a position as the clerk of an attorney.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened on September 15, 1830. It was the first railway to rely on locomotives driven by steam power, with no horse-drawn traffic.

Maria Beadnell

Dickens meets Maria Beadnell , his first love interest.

The British Factory Act of 1833 made it illegal to employ children less than 9 years old in factories.  It limited child workers aged 9 to 13 to a maximum of 9 hours work a day.

The relationship with Maria Beadnell ends.   A Dinner at Poplar Walk is published .

The British Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 stated that the able-bodied cannot receive assistance unless they enter a workhouse.

Catherine (Hogarth) Dickens

Dickens begins using the pseudonym “ Boz “.

He meets his future wife, Catherine Hogarth.

Dickens becomes engaged to Catherine.

The Pickwick Papers

The first chapters of The Pickwick Papers are published.

In April of 1836 Dickens marries Catherine Hogarth .

The first of his 10 children , Charles Culliford Boz Dickens, is born.

Mary Hogarth , Catherine’s sister, dies.

The publication of Oliver Twist begins.

Dickens and Hablot Browne travel to Yorkshire to see boarding schools. This is research for  Nicholas Nickleby .

Dickens’s  daughter, Mary , is born.

Publication of Nicholas Nickleby begins.

The world’s first commercial electric telegraph line comes into operation alongside the Great Western Railway line from London Paddington station to West Drayton.

His daughter, Kate , is born on October 29, 1839.

Queen Victoria marries Prince Albert of of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha on February 10, 1840.

Publication of The Old Curiosity Shop begins.

Frederick de Moleyns of England is granted the first patent for an incandescent lamp. The design uses platinum wires contained within a vacuum bulb.

Barnaby Rudge

Barnaby Rudge is published.  Charles and Catherine tour Scotland.  Their son, Walter , is born.

Sketch of Charles Dickens in 1842 (Small image on the bottom left is his sister, Fanny)

Charles and Catherine travel to America.  Late in 1842 or early in the next year Dickens begins work on Martin Chuzzlewit .

In September of 1843 Dickens and Clarkson Stanfield visit the Field Lane Ragged School.

A Christmas Carol is published on December 19, 1843.

Francis Jeffrey Dickens

His son Francis Jeffrey (Frank) is born on January 15, 1844.

Dickens and family travel to Italy.  Dickens treats Madame de la Rue with mesmerism .

Another son, Alfred , is born.

The Corn Laws are repealed.

Dickens and his family travel to Switzerland.  Publication of Dombey and Son begins.

Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens

His son, Sydney , is born.

Fanny Dickens around 1842

His son, Henry Fielding Dickens , is born.  The publication of David Copperfield begins.

His daughter, Dora Annie Dickens , is born.

Catherine Dickens suffers a nervous collapse.  John Dickens, the father of Charles Dickens, dies.  Dora Dickens dies when she is only eight months old.  What Shall we have for Dinner? , a cookbook by Catherine Dickens is published.

The publication of Bleak House begins. His son, Edward or “Plorn”, is born.

Dickens gives his first public reading of one of his works.

Hard Times as serialized in Household Words

Hard Times is published.

Dickens has a disappointing reunion with Maria Winter ( Maria Beadnell) .  Publication of Little Dorrit begins.

Gad’s Hill Place

Dickens works with Wilkie Collins on The Frozen Deep . Dickens purchases Gad’s Hill Place .

Hans Christian Anderson is entertained at Gad’s Hill Place . Dickens meets Ellen Ternan .

Dickens separates from Catherine , his wife.

A Tale of Two Cities is published.

Title page of first edition of Great Expectations

Publication of Great Expectations begins in All the Year Round .  His daughter, Katie , marries.  Ten days later his brother, Alfred, dies. Dickens burns his personal papers .

The American civil war begins. Also,Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria, dies.

Elizabeth Dickens, the mother of Charles Dickens

Dickens’ mother, Elizabeth, dies. Dickens begins work on Our Mutual Friend .

His son, Walter , dies in India.  The first installment of Our Mutual Friend is printed.

The American civil war ends.

The Staplehurst railway accident as depicted in the Illustrated London News

On June 9, 1865 Dickens is involved in the Staplehurst railway accident .  Ellen Ternan and her mother were also on the train with him that day.

“Charles Dickens as he appears when reading.” Illustration in Harper’s Weekly, December 1867.

Dickens tours America for the second time.

He gives his first Murder of Nancy reading.

Dickens is ordered by doctors to discontinue readings. Dickens begins writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood .

Dickens gives his final public reading.  Publication of  The Mystery of Edwin Drood begins.  Charles Dickens dies at Gad’s Hill Place on June 9, 1870.

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10 Surprising Facts About Charles Dickens!

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18 Fascinating Facts About Charles Dickens

By sean hutchinson | dec 14, 2023, 9:39 am est.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and Charles Dickens wrote it all down—the gruesome truths about Victorian England and the perils of Britain’s social class system. His unprecedented celebrity made him the most popular novelist of his century, and since then Dickens’s books have never been out of print. But the author of Great Expectations , Bleak House , A Christmas Carol , and dozens of other works was more than just a writer. Here’s what you should know about Dickens.

1. Charles Dickens was forced to work at a young age. 

The eldest son of Elizabeth and John Dickens was born in February 1812 on Portsea Island in the British city of Portsmouth, and moved around with his family in his younger years to Yorkshire and then London. He was, admittedly , a “very small and not over-particularly-taken-care-of boy."

When his father was called to London again to be a clerk in the Naval Pay Office, the elder Dickens amassed so much debt that the entire family—except for Charles and his older sister Fanny—were sent to Marshalsea debtors’ prison (later the setting of Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit ).

Left to fend for himself at only 12 years old, Dickens had to drop out of private school and work at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse along the River Thames, earning six shillings a week pasting labels onto blacking pots used for shoe polish.

2. Another job taught Dickens how to write.

In 1827 and 1828, the 15-year-old Dickens found work as a junior clerk at the law office of Ellis and Blackmore —but instead of brushing up on legal work to eventually become a lawyer, he voraciously studied the shorthand method of writing developed by Thomas Gurney . The skill allowed him to begin working as a reporter in the 1830s covering Parliament and British elections for outlets like The Morning Chronicle .

3. Dickens published works under a pseudonym. 

Dickens’s first published works appeared in 1833 and 1834 without his author’s byline. In August 1834, his short story “The Boarding-House,” published in the Monthly Magazine , featured his chosen pseudonym, “Boz.” The single-syllable name came from a childhood rendering of the character Moses from Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield , which was later mentioned in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities .

Dickens called his brother Augustus “Moses,” but later explained it was “facetiously pronounced through the nose, [and] became Boses, and being shortened, became Boz. Boz was a very familiar household word to me, long before I was an author, and so I came to adopt it.” The nom de plume became so popular that Dickens published a compilation of his essays and short fiction called Sketches by Boz in 1839.

4. He doesn’t have anything to do with the phrase what the dickens .

In the phrase what the dickens , dickens was “was a substitute for ‘the devil,’ or the deuce (a card or a dice with two spots), the doubling of the devil in short,” author John Bowen explained in his book Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit . The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word back to a work by Thomas Heywood published in 1599—more than 200 years before Dickens was born. Shakespeare also used the phrase in The Merry Wives of Windsor , which one character saying , “I cannot tell what the dickens his name is my husband had him of.”

5. Dickens might have had epilepsy.

Though any indication he might have suffered from epilepsy isn’t corroborated by contemporary medical records, Dickens did return to the neurological disorder enough times in his work that some speculate that he might have drawn from his own experiences with seizures. Characters such as Guster from Bleak House , Monks from Oliver Twist , and Bradley Headstone from Our Mutual Friend all had epilepsy.

6. America was not his favorite place.

By the time he first journeyed to America in 1842 on a lecture tour—later chronicled in his travelogue American Notes for General Circulation —Dickens was an international celebrity because of his writing, and he was received as such when he toured east coast cities like Boston and New York.

“I can do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere where I want to go, and see nothing that I want to see,” he complained in a letter about his U.S. travels. “If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude.”

Though he loved the fast-growing cities and was awed by a trip west to the American prairie, Dickens didn’t necessarily have the best time on the whole. Especially in the country's capital : “As Washington may be called the headquarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva,” he wrote, “the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise, that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable, and soon became most offensive and sickening.”

7. He helped the search for the Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition.

The author used his influence to help Lady Jane Franklin search for her husband, Sir John Franklin, who disappeared in the Arctic along with 128 crew on the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror while searching for the Northwest Passage in 1845. Dickens wrote a two-part analysis of the ill-fated voyage called “ The Lost Arctic Voyagers ,” and even lectured across Britain hoping to raise money for a rescue mission.

In the end, the missing vessels weren’t found until 2014 and 2016, respectively, and various explanations for the crew’s fate have been suggested . But at the time, Dickens gave in to racist sentiment and blamed the Inuit, writing, “No man can, with any show of reason, undertake to affirm that this sad remnant of Franklin's gallant band were not set upon and slain by the Esquimaux themselves … We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel.” Inuit oral histories and other evidence show that Franklin’s men actually died from starvation, disease, or exposure.

8. Dickens perfected the cliffhanger ending.

Most of Dickens’s novels—including classics like David Copperfield and Oliver Twist —were initially written in monthly, weekly, or infrequent installments on a subscription basis or in magazines, only to be republished in complete book form later. In doing so, Dickens employed cliffhangers from chapter to chapter to get eager readers to buy subsequent episodes.

In one 1841 incident , American readers were so anxious to know what happened in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop that they flocked to docks in New York harbor, hoping to ask passengers arriving from Europe whether they’d read the ending of the story and if the character of Nell had died. (Spoiler alert: She did.)

9. He had pet ravens.

Dickens owned a beloved raven he named Grip, and it even appears as a character in his novel Barnaby Rudge . In an 1841 letter to a friend named George Cattermole, Dickens said he wanted the titular character of the book “always in company with a pet raven, who is immeasurably more knowing than himself. To this end I have been studying my bird, and think I could make a very queer character of him.”

Following the bird’s death (likely from eating lead paint chips) later that year, Dickens replaced it with another raven, also called Grip , which inspired Edgar Allan Poe ’s poem “The Raven.” ( According to Mark Dawidziak in A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe , the author was “taken with Grip” while reading Barnaby Rudge , writing in his review, “The raven, too, intensely amusing as it is, might have been made, more than we now see it, a portion of the conception of the fantastic Barnaby. Its croakings might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama.” Dawidziak writes that Poe “filed this idea away” for his own poem .) When the second Grip also met his demise, Dickens had a taxidermist stuff and mount the bird in an elaborate wooden and glass case, which is now in the Free Library of Philadelphia’s collection.

10. Dickens had his pet cat’s paw stuffed. 

Not to be outdone by birds, companions of the feline variety also accompanied Dickens throughout his life, with the author once declaring , “What greater gift than the love of a cat?”

According to his daughter, Dickens’s cat Bob “follow[ed] him about the garden like a dog, and [sat] with him while he wrote.” When the cat died in 1862, Dickens had its paw stuffed and mounted to an ivory letter opener and engraved with “C.D., In memory of Bob, 1862.” The letter opener is now part of the Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library.

11. He loved Little Red Riding Hood.

In 1850, Dickens began editing a weekly magazine, Household Words , to which he also contributed short fiction and serialized novels. In one of his first stories for the magazine, the autobiographical “ A Christmas Tree ,” Dickens described his earliest muse as the main character in the fairytale Little Red Riding Hood —perhaps as a way of dealing with his own childhood innocence devoured by unexpected evils. “She was my first love,” he wrote. “I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. But, it was not to be.”

12. Dickens wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.

In an 1860 letter written to Florence Marryat, the daughter of his friend Captain Frederick Marryat, Dickens berated her after she asked him for writing advice and submitted a short story for a literary journal he was editing called All the Year Round .

“To read professed contributions honestly, and communicate a perfectly unprejudiced decision respecting every one of them to its author or authoress, is a task, of the magnitude of which you evidently have no conception,” Dickens told her. “I cannot […] alter what seems to me to be the fact regarding this story (for instance), any more than I can alter my eyesight or my hearing. I do not deem it suitable for my Journal,” and later telling her plainly, “I do not think it is a good story.”

13. He was a prodigious wordsmith.

Not to be outdone by the likes of William Shakespeare, Dickens was the other British writer known to create words and phrases of his own . Thank Dickens for words and phrases like butter-fingers, flummox, the creeps, dustbin, ugsome, slangular, and more.

14. Dickens started a home for “fallen women.”

With help from millionaire banking heiress Angela Coutts, Dickens set up and managed Urania Cottage , a rehabilitation home for unhoused women, ex-prisoners, and sex workers so they could (hopefully) emigrate to Britain’s colonies and reintegrate into Victorian society.

According to The Guardian , Dickens would “visit the house in Shepherd’s Bush, often several times a week, to supervise it, select inmates, consult with prison governors, hire and fire matrons, deal with the drains and the gardener, report to Coutts in detail several times a week on whatever was happening there, handle the money, keep careful written accounts of the backgrounds of the girls, and arrange their emigration to Australia, South Africa, or Canada.”

15. He was a Victorian ghostbuster.

In an era of séances and mediums, when many Victorians believed in both spiritualism and science, Dickens didn’t discriminate. In fact, along with other authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who also owned a psychic bookstore ) and William Butler Yeats (who once got into a magical duel with Aleister Crowley), he was a member of the Ghost Club , a kind of members-only group that attempted to investigate supposed supernatural encounters and hauntings, often exposing frauds in the process.

It makes sense, considering that some of Dickens’s best-known works, like A Christmas Carol , hinge on the supernatural. But unlike Conan Doyle, he remained a skeptic.

“My own mind is perfectly unprejudiced and impressible on the subject. I do not in the least pretend that such things are not,” Dickens said in a September 1859 letter to writer William Howitt. “But … I have not yet met with any Ghost Story that was proved to me, or that had not the noticeable peculiarity in it—that the alteration of some slight circumstance would bring it within the range of common natural probabilities.”

16. He wrote more Christmas stories than just the one you’re thinking of.

A Christmas Carol may be his most famous Christmas story, but Dickens was also the author of other holiday-themed tales , like  The Chimes (which, again, deals with spirits), and The Cricket on the Hearth, a story that features another main character go through a Scrooge-like transformation of the heart.

17. A train crash nearly derailed Our Mutual Friend .

On June 10, 1865, Dickens was traveling home from France when his train derailed while crossing a bridge, and his car was left dangling from the tracks. After finding a conductor to give him keys to the seven first-class train cars that had tumbled into the river below, the then-53-year-old writer helped save stranded passengers. When all was said and done, he was forced to climb back into the dangling car to retrieve a just-completed missing installment of Our Mutual Friend that he was supposed to send to his publishers.

18. Dickens was buried in Westminster Abbey against his wishes.

The author had specific plans for how he wanted to spend eternity. He initially wished to be buried next to his wife Catherine’s sister, his muse Mary Hogarth (who had died in 1837 and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery in London). He then requested to be buried in a simple grave in the cemetery of Rochester Cathedral in Kent.

Dickens collapsed from a stroke while dining with his wife's other sister, Georgina Hogarth, at his home; he died on June 9, 1870. But he didn’t end up in either of his chosen spots. Instead, he was whisked away to the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey because the Dean of Westminster, Arthur Stanley, wanted a famous writer to give some cultural significance to the Abbey at the time.

Despite stipulating in his will that “no public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial,” hundreds of thousands of people lined up to walk past his body in Westminster Abbey.

A version of this story ran in 2018; it has been updated for 2023.