Charles Dickens

Biography

A childhood spent chasing the Naval Pay Office across Plymouth, London, and Chatham gave young Charles Dickens a ringside seat to genteel poverty. One of eleven mouths to feed, he watched his clerk-of-a-father juggle ledgers that never quite balanced; in 1823 the arithmetic collapsed and John Dickens was dragged to debtors’ prison. Twelve-year-old Charles was handed a pot of glue and a crate of bottles, paid six shillings a week to paste labels in a blacking factory—an apprenticeship in squalor he never forgot. When the family finances crawled upright he returned to school, then slipped into the inky world of law as a solicitor’s dogsbody. Nights were spent mastering the squiggles of shorthand; soon he was dashing through courtrooms and the corridors of the Commons as a reporter for the Morning Chronicle. April 1836 brought a sudden burst of fame: a loose, rollicking serial called The Pickwick Papers landed like a firecracker and kept exploding month after month. Readers clamoured for more, and Dickens obliged—Oliver Twist in 1837, Nicholas Nickleby from 1838-39, Barnaby Rudge in 1841. That autumn he crossed the Atlantic, praised American energy, then enraged its newspapers by calling slavery a moral stain; the press bit back. The 1840s sharpened his pen: humour turned acidic, satire turned scalpel. In 1858, after twenty-two years and ten children, his marriage to Catherine Hogarth snapped; he walked away, bruised and vilified. Yet the novels kept coming—David Copperfield (1849-50), the twin cities of London and Paris guillotined in 1859, Pip’s dreams and nightmares etched in 1860-61—each one tightening his grip on the century’s imagination. He died mid-sentence, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood forever unfinished, its pages like a slammed gate in the fog.