Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England in 1812.

He had an unhappy childhood. His father was imprisoned for debt and at the age of 12 was put to work in
a factory. As the family’s finances improved, he was sent to school in London. At the age of 15 he finds a
job as an apprentice for a lawyer. In 1832 he started working as a journalist for a newspaper.

In 1833 his first short story appeared, and in 1836, he adopted the pseudonym “Boz”, publishing Sketches
by “Boz”, a collection of articles and short stories describing the people and scenes of London, written for
the Monthly Magazine.

P Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in April 1836 and in the same year he became editor of Bentley’s
Miscellany and published the second series of Sketches by ‘Boz’. Dickens began a career as a novelist.

Oliver Twist was started in 1837 and continued in monthly installments until April 1839.

Although he was a republican he supported international copyright and the abolition of slavery.

In 1843 A Christmas Carol was published, the first of Dickens’ successful Christmas books.

The protagonists of his autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Little Dorrit, became
symbols of an exploited childhood confronted with the bitter reality of slums and factories. Other works
deal with the conditions of the poor and the working class in general. By the time of his sudden death in
1870, Dickens had attracted adoring crowds in England, Scotland and Ireland;

Personages

Dickens was the creator of characters and caricatures who live immortal in the English imagination: Mr
Pickwick, Mr Gradgrind, Scrooge and many others. His aim of him was to arouse the reader’s interest by
exaggerating the habits of his characters and the language of the lower and middle classes whose social
peculiarities, vanity and ambition he ridiculed without sarcasm. He was always on the side of the poor and
the working class.

Children are often the most important characters in Dickens’ novels. Many examples of good and wise
children versus worthless parents and other grown-ups illustrate in fiction the reverse of the natural order
of things: children become the moral teachers rather than the educated, the exemplars rather than the
imitators.

An educational purpose

This didactic attitude has been very effective, since the result has been that the more educated classes
have increased knowledge about the poorest, of whom they knew nothing before.

Dickens’ task was to sensitize the ruling classes to social problems without offending his bourgeois readers.

Style and reputation

Dickens uses a careful choice of adjectives, repetitions of words and structures, images and ideas,
hyperbolic and ironic observations. He is considered the greatest novelist in the English language.