Charles Dickens

"Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was born at Landport, then a little suburb of Portsmouth, on Friday 7 February 1812. His father was John Dickens, a clerk in the navy pay-office, and at that time attached to Portsmouth dockyard; in 1814 he was transferred to London, and in 1816 to Chatham, where the boy, already a great reader, got some schooling. In 1821 the family fell into trouble; reforms in the Admiralty deprived the father of his post and the greater part of his income; they had to leave Chatham, and went to London, where they lived in a mean house in Camden Town. But not for long. The father was arrested for debt and consigned to the Marshalsea, and Charles, then only ten years old, and small for his age, was placed in a blacking factory at Hungerford Market, where he labeled the blacking bottles, with other poor boys. Not only were his days passed in this wretched work , but the child was left entirely to himself at night, when he had four miles to walk to his lonely bedroom in Camden Town. On Sundays he visited his father in the prison; and presently they found him a lodging in Lant Street close by. On his father’s release they all went back to Camden Town and the boy was sent again to school, an academy in the Hampstead Road for three to four years. When he was taken from school no better place could be found for him than a stool at the desk of a solicitor. Meanwhile, however, his father had obtained a post as reporter for the Morning Herald, and Charles resolved, also, to attempt the profession of journalist. He taught himself shorthand and frequented the British Museum daily to supplement some of the shortcomings in his reading. In his seventeenth year he became a reporter at Doctor’s Commons; but all his ambitions at this time were for the stage. It was not until he was twenty-two that he succeeded in getting permanent employment on the staff of a London paper as a reporter. In this capacity he was sent about the country a great deal. In December 1833 the Monthly Magazine published his Dinner at Poplar Walk Other papers followed but produced nothing for the contributor except the gratification of seeing them in print. However, they did Dickens the best service by enabling him to prove his ability and he soon made arrangements to contribute papers and sketches regularly to the Evening Chronicle, continuing to act as reporter for the Morning Chronicle, and getting his salary increased from five guineas to seven a week. The Sketches by Boz were published in the beginning of 1836, the author receiving £150 for the copyright; he afterwards bought it back for eleven times that amount. In March that same year appeared the first number of The Pickwick Papers; three days afterwards Dickens married Catherine, the daughter of his friend George Hogarth, the editor of the Evening Chronicle. She bore him seven sons and three daughters between 1837 and 1852, three of whom, predeceased him; in 1858 husband and wife separated. Success having come his way Dickens allowed himself no rest. In fulfillment of publisher’s engagements he produced Oliver Twist (1837–39, in Bentley’s Miscellany which Dickens edited for a time), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39) and Master Humphrey’s Clock, a serial miscellany which resolved itself into two stories, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) and Barnaby Rudge (1841). Thereafter a great part of Dickens’ life was spent abroad, especially notable being his visits to America in 1842 and 1867–68, his stay in Genoa in 1844–45 and at Lausanne in 1846 and his summers spent in Boulogne in 1853, 1854 and 1856. Meanwhile there came from his pen an incessant stream: American Notes (1842), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), The Christmas Tales – viz. A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1843, 1846 and 1848); Pictures from Italy (1845), Dombey and Son (1846–48), David Copperfield (1849–50), Bleak House (1852–53), The Child’s History of England (1854), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855–57), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), The Uncommercial Traveller (1861), the Christmas numbers in Household Words and All the Year Round, Great Expectations (1860–61), Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870, unfinished). To this long roll must be added public readings (1858–70), both in this country and in America, private theatricals, speeches, letters innumerable, pamphlets, plays, the conduct of a popular magazine – first (1850) called Household Words and then (1859) All the Year Round. Nevertheless he had taken irreparable toll of his vitality, and he died suddenly on 9 June 1870 at Gadshill, near Rochester (the place he had coveted as a boy and purchased in 1856), and was buried in Westminster Abbey." —Naxos Audiobooks

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