Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was the most popular English novelist of his century and campaigned for the poor with material drawn from his own childhood. Born in Portsmouth in 1812, the second of eight children of a naval pay clerk, he was sent at twelve to paste labels on pots in a blacking factory when his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea. He worked there for months, told almost nobody for the rest of his life, and used it repeatedly. He was a solicitor's clerk, taught himself shorthand, and became a parliamentary reporter, which gave him a permanent contempt for parliament. The Pickwick Papers, serialised from 1836, made him famous at twenty-four. Serial publication shaped everything he wrote: monthly parts at a shilling, cliffhangers, a large cast, and immediate feedback from sales figures. Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations followed. The novels are also arguments. Nickleby closed the Yorkshire boarding schools where unwanted children were starved; Bleak House attacks Chancery; Little Dorrit the Circumlocution Office and debtors' prisons; Hard Times utilitarian schooling. He gave public readings that exhausted him, edited magazines, and helped found a home for former prostitutes. He separated from his wife Catherine in 1858 after twenty-two years and ten children, publishing a statement about it, and had a long relationship with the young actress Ellen Ternan. He survived the Staplehurst rail crash in 1865 and died of a stroke in 1870, leaving Edwin Drood half finished.

• Lived: 1812 CE – 1870 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: writer, journalist, social_reformer