Biography of Charles Dickens

About Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England on February 7th, 1812, the second
of eight children. His father was a clerk working for the Navy Pay office and was
imprisoned for debt when Charles was very young. Due to the lack of funds, Dickens
went to work at a blacking warehouse when he was twelve. His brush with hard times
and poverty affected him deeply, and he would later recount his experiences in the
semi-autobiographical David Copperfield. Furthermore, a concern for social justice
and reform which surfaced later on in his writings, grew out of the neglect and harsh
conditions he experienced in the warehouse. Although he had little formal schooling,
he was able to teach himself shorthand, leading him to a job as a parliamentary
reporter at a newspaper. While he published several sketches in magazines, it was not
until he wrote The Pickwick Papers from 1836-7 that he experienced true success. A
publishing phenomenon, The Pickwick Papers was published in monthly installments
and sold over forty thousand copies for each issue. The year 1836 also saw his
marriage to a Catherine Hogarth, who was the daughter of a fellow co-worker at the
newspaper. Their marriage was not a happy one, but the two would have ten children
together before their separation in 1858.

Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby subsequently followed; both were published in
monthly installments and reflected simultaneously Dickens' understanding of the
underclass and his comedic genius. In 1843, Dickens published one of his most
famous works, A Christmas Carol. In this story especially, it was evident how
Dickens was becoming disenchanted with the economic philosophy of the world; he
blamed much of society's ills on people's obsession with earning money and acquiring
a status based on money.

His travels abroad, first to America and then all over Europe, in the 1840s began a
different stage in his life. His writings became more serious and involved more
planning on his part. David Copperfield (1849-50) clearly paralleled his own. Within
the story, readers found the same flawed world that Dickens had discovered as a
young boy. Other novels were to follow. In the weekly periodicals he started,
"Household Words" (1850) and "All the Year Round" (1859), he published such well-
known novels as Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations.

Dickens first thought of setting a novel in the time of the French Revolution when he
read Thomas Carlyle's book The French Revolution, which was first published in
1839. He read this book faithfully every year, but used it sparingly in researching his
novels. Dickens finally came up with a way to use it in 1857, when he acted in Wilkie
Collins' play, The Frozen Deep. Dickens played a self-sacrificing lover in the play;
this role inspired him so much that he wanted to use it in his own novels. He
eventually decided to place his own sacrificing lover in the revolutionary period, a
period of great social upheaval. A year later, Dickens went through his own form of
social change as he wrote the novel; he separated from his wife, and revitalized his
career by making plans for a new weekly literary journal called All the Year Round.
In 1859, A Tale of Two Cities premiered in parts in this journal. It was popular, not
only from the fame of its author, but also for its short length and radical (for Dickens)
subject matter.

Dickens' health started deteriorating in the 1860s. The fact that he had started doing
public readings of his works in 1858 exacted even greater a physical toll on him. On
June 9, 1870, Charles Dickens died and was buried in the Poet's Corner of
Westminster Abbey. Though The Mystery of Edwin Drood was unfinished at the time
of his death, he had written fifteen substantial novels and countless shorter pieces by
then. His legacy is clear. While he pointed out problems within societyÐa blinding
and mercenary greed for money, neglect of all sectors in society, and a wrong
inequality, he offered us, at the same time, a solution. Through his books, we come to
understand the virtues of a loving heart and the pleasures of home in a flawed, cruelly
indifferent world. In the end, the lesson to take away from his stories is a positive one.
Alternately insightful and whimsical, Dickens' writings have shown readers over
generations the reward of being truly human.