System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Charles Dickens, Author
February 7, 1812 - June 9, 1870
Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812 at No. 1 Mile End Terrace, Landport, Portsmouth. His father, John Dickens, was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. He was well paid but often ended in financial troubles. In 1814 John was transferred to Somerset House in London. In 1817 John moved his family to Chatham and worked in the naval dockyard. It was here, at Chatham in the Medway Valley, that Charles experienced his happiest childhood memories. Charles also received some education here. The schoolmaster William Giles gave special attention to Charles, who made rapid progress. John was transferred back to the London office and moved his family to Camden Town in 1822.
John Dickens, continually living beyond his means, was imprisoned for debt at the Marshalsea debtor's prison in Southwark in 1824. 12 year old Charles was removed from school and sent to work at a boot-blacking factory earning six shillings a week to help support the family. Charles considered this period to be the most terrible time in his life and would later write that he wondered 'how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age'. Later this period found its way to the novel LITTLE DORRITT (1855-57). John Dickens paid his £40 debt with the money he inherited from his mother; she died at the age of seventy-nine when he was still in prison.
This childhood poverty and feelings of abandonment, although unknown to his readers until after his death, would be a heavy influence on Dickens' later views on social reform and the world he would create through his fiction.
In 1824-27 Dickens studied at Wellington House Academy, London, and at Mr. Dawson's school in 1827. From 1827 to 1828 he was a law office clerk, and then a shorthand reporter at Doctor's Commons. After learning shorthand, he could take down speeches word for word. At the age of eighteen, Dickens applied for a reader's ticket at the British Museum, where he read with eager industry the works of Shakespeare, Goldsmith's History of England, and Berger's Short Account of the Roman Senate. He wrote for True Sun (1830-32), Mirror of Parliament (1832-34), and the Morning Chronicle (1834-36). Dickens gained soon the reputation as "the fastest and most accurate man in the Gallery". In the 1830s Dickens contributed to Monthly Magazine, and The Evening Chronicle and edited Bentley's Miscellany. These years left Dickens with lasting affection for journalism and suspicious attitude towards unjust laws. His career as a writer of fiction started in 1833 when his short stories and essays to appeared in periodicals. 'A Dinner at Poplar Walk' was Dickens's first published sketch.
Dickens would go on to write 15 major novels including A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations and countless short stories and articles before his death on June 9, 1870. The inscription on his tombstone in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey reads: "He was a sympathiser to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world".
