Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born at Portsmouth in 1812, the son of a free-spending clerk in the Navy Pay Office. When he was twelve his father was imprisoned for debt, and the boy was taken out of school and sent to work in a blacking factory, pasting labels on pots of boot-blacking in a rat-infested warehouse, a humiliation he never forgot. He later worked as an office boy in a solicitor's office, a court shorthand reporter and a parliamentary journalist, and at twenty-four became famous overnight with The Pickwick Papers. Most of his novels then appeared in monthly instalments, eagerly awaited; American readers are said to have crowded the New York docks shouting to the incoming ship from England, 'Is Little Nell dead?' In later years he gave exhausting public readings of his works across Britain and America, and he died of a stroke at fifty-eight; he is buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.