Autobiography:

Dickens was born in Portsmouth, on England’s southern coast. His father was a clerk in the British Navy pay office—a considerable & respectable position, but with little social status. His paternal grandparents, a  property manager and a housekeeper, possessed even less status, as they were  servants, and Dickens later hid their background. Dickens’s mother  came from a more respectable family. Two years before Dickens’s birth, his mother’s father was caught embezzling and fled to Europe, never to return.

The family’s increasing worse condition & poverty forced Dickens out of school at the age 12 to work in Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, a shoe-polish factory, where the other working boys gave him a nickname “the young gentleman.” His father was then taken to prison for debt. The humiliations of his father’s imprisonment and his labour in the blacking factory disturbed Dickens and became his deepest secret. He could not tell them even to his wife, although these incidents provide the unacknowledged foundation of his fiction books.

After his father’s release from prison, Dickens got a better job.  He became errand boy in law offices. He taught himself shorthand to get an even better job later as a court stenographer or as a reporter in Parliament. At that time, Dickens, who had a reporter’s eye for transcribing the life that surrounded  him, especially anything comic or odd, submitted short sketches to obscure magazines.  His first published sketch, “A Dinner at Poplar Walk” (later retitled “Mr. Minns and His Cousin”) brought tears to Dickens’s eyes when he discovered it in the pages of The Monthly Magazine in 1833. From then on his sketches, which were published under the pen name “Boz” (rhymes with “rose”) in The Evening Chronicle, gave him a modest reputation. Boz originated as a childhood nickname for Dickens’s younger brother Augustus.

 Dickens became a regular visitor at the house of George Hogarth, editor of The Evening Chronicle. In 1835 became engaged to (Hogarth’s daughter) Catherine. Publication of the collected Sketches by Boz in 1836 gave Dickens sufficient money to marry Catherine Hogarth that year. His marriage resulted to be unhappy.

 Soon after Sketches by Boz appeared in a published form, the fledgling publishing firm of Chapman and Hall asked Dickens to write a story in monthly installments. The publisher intended the story as a backdrop for a series of woodcuts by the  artist Robert Seymour, who had given the original idea for the story. With  confidence, Dickens, although younger and  unknown, successfully insisted that Seymour’s pictures illustrate his own story. After the first installment, Dickens wrote a letter to the artist he had displaced to correct a drawing he felt was not trust worthy enough to his prose. Seymour made the significant change and went into his backyard, and expressed his displeasure by blowing his brains out. Dickens and his publishers simply pressed on with a new artist they had got. The comic novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, appeared serially from 1836 to 1837 and was first published as a book  in 1837.

The runaway success of The Pickwick Papers, as it is generally known today, it clinched Dickens’s fame. There were Pickwick coats and Pickwick cigars, and the plump, spectacled hero, Samuel Pickwick, became a national figure. Four years later, Dickens’s readers found Dolly Varden, heroine of Barnaby Rudge (1841), so irresistible that they gave name of a waltz, a rose, and even a trout for her. The widespread fame of Ebenezer Scrooge and his proverbial hard-heartedness from A Christmas Carol (1843) show that Dickens’s characters live on in the popular imagination.

 Dickens published 15  novels, his one last novel was left unfinished at his death. The end of Dickens’s life was emotionally scarred by his separation from his faithful wife, Catherine, as the result of his involvement with a young, attaractive actress, Ellen Ternan. Catherine and Charles had  ten children during their 22-year marriage, but he found her increasingly dull and  not sympathetic. Against the advice of the editors, Dickens published a letter vehemently justifying his actions to his readers, who would otherwise have known not a single thing about them.

    After the separation, Dickens let his hectic schedule continue of he novel, story, essay, and letter writing (his collected letters alone stretch thousands of pages); reform activities; amateur theatricals and readings; in addition to nightly social engagements and long midnight walks through London. His energy had always seemed to his friends not human, but he continued this activity in his later years in disregard of his worse health. Dickens died of a stroke shortly after his farewell reading tour. He died while writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

 ¶¶¶ All  Stars ¶¶¶