Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth,
England,where his father was a naval pay clerk. When he was five
the family moved to Chatham, near Rochester, another port town. He
received some education at a small private school but this was
curtailed when his father''s fortunes declined. More significant was
his childhood reading, which he evoked in a memory of his father''s
library: ''From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine
Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don
Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to
keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something
beyond that place and time.''
When Dickens was ten the family moved to Camden Town, and this
proved the beginning of a long, difficult period. He wrote later
of his coach journey, alone, to join his family at the new
lodgings: ''I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and
it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I had
expected to find it.'' When he had just turned twelve Dickens was
sent to work for a manufacturer of boot blacking, where for the
better part of a year he labored for ten hours a day, an unhappy
experience that instilled him with a sense of having been abandoned
by his family: ''No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no
consolation, no support from anyone that I can call to mind, so
help me God!'' Around the same time Dickens''s father was jailed for
debt in the Marshalsea Prison, where he remained for fourteen
weeks. After some additional schooling, Dickens worked as a clerk
in a law office and taught himself shorthand; this qualified him to
begin working in 1831 as a reporter in the House of Commons, where
he was known for the speed with which he took down speeches.
By 1833 Dickens was publishing humorous sketches of London life
in the Monthly Magazine, which were collected in book form as
Sketches by ''Boz'' 1836. These were followed by the publication in
installments of the comic adventures that became The Posthumous
Papers of the Pickwick Club 1837, whose unprecedented popularity
made the twenty-five-year-old author a national figure. In 1836 he
married Catherine Hogarth, who would bear him ten children over a
period of fifteen years. Dickens''s energies enabled him to lead an
active family and social life, including an indulgence in elaborate
amateur theatricals, while maintaining a literary productiveness of
astonishing proportions. He characteristically wrote his novels for
serial publication, and was himself the editor of many of the
periodicals—Bentley''s Miscellany, The Daily News, Household Words,
All the Year Round—in which they appeared. Among his close
associates were his future biographer John Forster and the younger
Wilkie Collins, with whom he collaborated on fictional and dramatic
works. In rapid succession he published Oliver Twist 1838,
Nicholas Nickleby 1839, The Old Curiosity Shop 1841, and
Barnaby Rudge 1841, sometimes working on several novels
simultaneously.
Dickens''s celebrity led to a tour of the United States in 1842.
There he met Longfellow, Irving, Bryant, and other literary
figures, and was received with an enthusiasm that was dimmed
somewhat by the criticisms Dickens expressed in his American Notes
1842 and in the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit 1844.
The appearance of A Christmas Carol in 1843 sealed his position as
the most widely popular writer of his time; it became an annual
tradition for him to write a story for the season, of which the
most memorable were The Chimes 1844 and The Cricket on the Hearth
1845. He continued to produce novels at only a slightly
diminished rate, publishing Dombey and Son in 1848 and David
Copperfield in 1850; of the latter, his personal favorite among his
books, he wrote to Forster: ''If I were to say half of what
Copperfield makes me feel tonight how strangely, even to you, I
should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of
myself into the Shadowy World.''
From this point on his novels tended to be more elaborately
constructed and harsher and less buoyant in tone than his earlier
works. These late novels include Bleak House 1853, Hard Times
1854, Little Dorrit 1857, A Tale of Two Cities 1859, and
Great Expectations 1861. Our Mutual Friend, published in 1865,
was his last completed novel, and perhaps the most somber and
savage of them all. Dickens had separated from his wife in 1858—he
had become involved a year earlier with a young actress named Ellen
Ternan—and the ensuing scandal had alienated him from many of his
former associates and admirers. He was weakened by years of
overwork and by a near-fatal railroad disaster during the writing
of Our Mutual Friend. Nevertheless he embarked on a series of
public readings, including a return visit to America in 1867, which
further eroded his health. A final work, The Mystery of Edwin
Drood, a crime novel much influenced by Wilkie Collins, was left
unfinished upon his death on June 9,1870, at the age of 58.
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