When Charles Dickens was born in 1812, his family were living in Portsmouth, but destined to move quite frequently – to Sheerness, Chatham and Camden – and become progressively poorer and deeper in debt. When Dickens later wrote of grinding poverty, squalid streets and the meeting of haves and have-nots, he was drawing on bitter experience.
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The young Charles attended a ‘Dame’ school for a while, but his father chose to send Fanny, the eldest daughter, to the Royal Academy of Music rather than keep his son at school. Charles, already a lover of books and plays, found himself visiting pawn shops and eventually visiting his father in Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Aged twelve, Dickens went to work in Warren’s Blacking factory, pasting labels on boot black for ten hours a day in a rat-infested building by the Thames.
An improvement in family finances meant Charles could go back to school and he seized every opportunity to better his circumstances. He worked in a lawyers office and as a parliamentary reporter, taught himself shorthand and edited magazines, contributing articles and writing stories. Serialized in monthly publications, with cliff-hangers to keep his readers on tenterhooks, works such as The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist were only later published as books.
Aside of his famous novels with their implicit criticism of society and its callous treatment of the poor, Dickens made an immense contribution to cultural life in the 19th century, inspiring new readers and engaging audiences with his reading tours; supporting charities; writing plays; travelling abroad; criticizing Tory politics; and even influencing how people celebrated Christmas with A Christmas Carol.
Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in 1836 and the couple had ten children, yet separated after Charles fell in love with a young actress, Ellen Ternan. When Catherine left the family home at Gads Hill in Kent, her sister stayed on to look after the children and the house remained Dickens’ base until his death, following a stroke, in 1870. He had worked hard to get himself out of childhood poverty, harder still to keep himself successful and he worked up to the end: he was still writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood when he died, with the novel unfinished.
