Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was the most popular English novelist of the nineteenth century and is still one of the most widely read. In books such as Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House and Great Expectations he created hundreds of memorable characters and drew a vivid picture of Victorian London, attacking the cruelty of workhouses, debtors' prisons, slow courts and indifferent officials.

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 at Landport, in Portsmouth, the second of eight children of John Dickens, a clerk in the navy pay office, and his wife Elizabeth. The family moved to Chatham in Kent, where Charles spent the happiest years of his childhood reading the novels of Fielding, Smollett and Defoe, and then to London. His father lived beyond his means, and in 1824 he was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea prison in Southwark, where his wife and younger children joined him, as was then usual. Charles, aged twelve, was sent to work ten hours a day at Warren's blacking factory near the Strand, pasting labels on pots of boot polish. He worked there for about a year, and although his father was released after a few months, the experience of humiliation and abandonment stayed with him. He told almost no one about it, but it fed directly into his fiction.

After some more schooling, Dickens became a solicitor's clerk at fifteen, taught himself shorthand and worked as a court and then a parliamentary reporter, covering debates in the House of Commons for the Morning Chronicle. He began publishing comic sketches of London life under the pen name Boz, collected as Sketches by Boz in 1836. In the same year a publisher asked him to write text for a series of sporting illustrations. The result, The Pickwick Papers, issued in monthly parts in 1836 and 1837, turned into a comic novel and became a sensation once Dickens introduced the cockney servant Sam Weller. In April 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a fellow journalist; they had ten children.

Dickens published almost all his novels in monthly or weekly instalments, which kept readers waiting for each part and let him respond to their reactions as he wrote. Oliver Twist (1837 to 1839) follows an orphan from the workhouse to a gang of child thieves run by Fagin, and was an open attack on the New Poor Law of 1834. Nicholas Nickleby (1838 to 1839) exposed the brutal boarding schools of Yorkshire, and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840 to 1841), with the death of Little Nell, moved readers on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1842 he toured the United States, where he was mobbed by admirers, but he was disappointed by what he saw, and his American Notes and the novel Martin Chuzzlewit offended many Americans. A Christmas Carol (1843), the story of the miser Scrooge visited by three spirits, did much to shape the modern idea of Christmas as a family festival of generosity.

His later novels are longer, darker and more carefully planned. David Copperfield (1849 to 1850), his own favourite, draws on his childhood, including the blacking factory, and on his rise as a writer. Bleak House (1852 to 1853) is built around an endless case in the Court of Chancery that ruins those caught up in it, and Hard Times (1854) satirises a northern factory town and the cold doctrines of utilitarian economics, a response to the Industrial Revolution. Little Dorrit (1855 to 1857) returns to the Marshalsea and mocks government bureaucracy in the Circumlocution Office. A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is set in London and Paris during the French Revolution, and Great Expectations (1860 to 1861) tells of the orphan Pip, whose hopes of becoming a gentleman are paid for by an escaped convict. His last completed novel was Our Mutual Friend (1864 to 1865).

Dickens also edited weekly magazines, Household Words from 1850 and All the Year Round from 1859, which published his own work and that of writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins. He took up practical causes, helping the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts run Urania Cottage, a home for women leaving prostitution, and campaigning for sanitary reform and ragged schools for poor children. He travelled widely in Europe and met leading French writers, including Victor Hugo, in Paris in 1847.

In 1858 Dickens separated from Catherine, after a marriage that had long been unhappy, and publicly defended himself in a way that hurt her and divided his friends. He had fallen in love with Ellen Ternan, a young actress, with whom he kept a secret relationship for the rest of his life. In 1856 he had bought Gad's Hill Place, near Rochester in Kent, a house he had admired as a boy, standing on the spot where Falstaff stages a robbery in a play by William Shakespeare, and it became his home. From 1858 he gave paid public readings of his works, performing the voices of his characters to huge audiences in Britain and, in 1867 and 1868, in America. The murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist was a favourite and left him exhausted. In June 1865 he survived the Staplehurst rail crash, in which ten people died, while travelling with Ternan, and he never fully recovered from the shock.

Worn out by the readings, Dickens suffered a stroke at Gad's Hill and died on 9 June 1870, aged fifty-eight, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished. He had asked for a simple private burial, but he was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. A few months earlier he had been received by Queen Victoria, who had read his early novels as a young woman.

His popularity has never faded. Critics in the twentieth century came to rank him as one of the great English novelists, admiring his comic invention, his language and the way he used the city as a living presence. His novels shaped how later generations imagined Victorian Britain, and words such as Scrooge and Dickensian, meaning squalid or poor, passed into everyday English. Leo Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were among his admirers, and his books have been adapted for stage, film and television more than those of almost any other author. They remain central to the literary and social history of the United Kingdom.