Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Portsmouth, a town on the south coast of England. He was often ill as a child and did not like noisy games. But he was a very clever boy. He learned to read early and read a lot of books. When he first went to the theater, he saw a play by Shakespeare. He liked it very much. After that, he wrote a short play himself and acted in it with his friends.

When Charles was ten, his family moved to London. His father worked in an office, but he did not earn much money. The family was poor, and life was very hard. Charles had several younger brothers and sisters.

When Charles was twelve, his father went to prison because he could not pay back the money he had borrowed. His mother and the younger children went to live in the prison with him. Many years later, Dickens wrote about this prison in his novel Little Dorrit.

Charles did not live with his family at that time. He lived alone and worked in a factory. Every day he put labels on small pots of black shoe polish. He was only twelve, and he was very unhappy.

When his father left prison, Charles went back to school for about two years. At fifteen, he left school and started work in a lawyer’s office. In his free time, he read a lot of books in the library of the British Museum. He taught himself many things.

A few years later, Dickens became a newspaper reporter. In 1836, when he was twenty-four, his first book came out. It was a collection of short stories about life in London. In the same year, he started writing The Pickwick Papers. A new part of the book came out every month. Soon everyone in England knew his name, and Dickens became the most popular writer of his time.

The Pickwick Papers is a very funny book, but it also has serious and sad moments. Dickens often mixed laughter and tears in his stories. After The Pickwick Papers, he wrote Oliver Twist, the story of a poor boy without parents, and Nicholas Nickleby, which tells about a terrible school for boys. His other famous novels are Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Hard Times and Little Dorrit.

Dickens remembered his hard childhood and wrote about it in his books. He showed the lives of rich and poor people in London. He wrote about unfair things in society and always took the side of poor people. His characters seem very real, and some of them are like people from his own life. For example, Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield is a lot like Dickens’s father, and Mrs. Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby is like his mother.

In 1842, Dickens traveled to America. He stayed there for several months and visited many places. Then he wrote a book about his trip, American Notes. In it, he wrote about the good and bad things he saw there, for example, American prisons and slavery.

Later, Dickens read his books to big groups of people in theaters and halls. He played all the characters himself and even spoke in a high voice for the women. People loved these readings, and many said he could be a great actor. But Dickens worked too hard and became ill. He died in 1870, at the age of fifty-eight.

Dickens believed in the good in people and in the beauty of life. He believed that good always wins in the end. Today he is one of the greatest and most loved English writers. People all over the world still read his books. They love his humor, his interesting characters and his kindness to ordinary people.