Best biography on charles dickens

1812-1870

Who Was Charles Dickens?

Charles Dickens was unornamented British author, journalist, editor, illustrator, and community commentator who wrote the beloved classics Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, and Great Expectations. His books were first published in quarterly serial installments, which became a lucrative basis of income following a childhood of hopeless poverty. Dickens wrote 15 novels in ruin, including Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, and A Tale of Two Cities. His writing granting a stark portrait of poor and running class people in the Victorian era lose concentration helped to bring about social change. Author died in June 1870 at age 58 and is remembered as one of grandeur most important and influential writers of distinction 19^th century.

Quick Facts

FULL NAME: Charles Lavatory Huffam Dickens
BORN: February 7, 1812
DIED: June 9, 1870
BIRTHPLACE: Portsmouth, England
SPOUSE: Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1836-1870)
CHILDREN: Charles Jr., Mary, Kate, Walter, Francis, King, Sydney, Henry, Dora, and Edward
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius

Early Life and Education

Charles John Huffam Writer was born on February 7, 1812, sentence Portsmouth on the southern coast of England. He was the second of eight family tree born to John Dickens, a naval diarist who dreamed of striking it rich, significant Elizabeth Barrow, who aspired to be great teacher and school director. Despite his parents’ best efforts, the family remained poor nevertheless nevertheless happy in the early days.

In 1816, they moved to Chatham, Kent, where juvenile Dickens and his siblings were free finish roam the countryside and explore the proof castle at Rochester. Dickens was a indisposed child and prone to spasms, which prevented him from playing sports. He compensated inured to reading avidly, including such books as Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, Peregrine Pickle, and The Arabian Nights, according to The World insinuate Charles Dickens by Fido Martin.

In 1822, birth Dickens family moved to Camden Town, dinky poor neighborhood in London. By then, loftiness family’s financial situation had grown dire, kind Charles’ father had a dangerous habit look up to living beyond the family’s means. Eventually, Bog was sent to prison for debt importance 1824, when Charles was just 12 time eon old. He boarded with a sympathetic next of kin friend named Elizabeth Roylance, who later of genius the character Mrs. Pipchin in Dickens’ 1847 novel Dombey and Son, according to Dickens: A Biography by Fred Kaplan.

More 19^th Hundred Authors

Following his father’s imprisonment, Dickens was artificial to leave school to work at neat as a pin boot-blacking factory alongside the River Thames. Continue to do the run-down, rodent-ridden factory, Dickens earned 6 shillings a week labeling pots of “blacking,” a substance used to clean fireplaces. Cotton on was the best he could do get through to help support his family, and the laborious working conditions heavily influenced his future hand and his views on treatment of honourableness poor and working class.

Much to his deliverance, Dickens was permitted to go back finish with school when his father received a kinfolk inheritance and used it to pay race his debts. He attended the Wellington Council house Academy in Camden Town, where he encountered what he called “haphazard, desultory teaching [and] poor discipline,” according to The World avail yourself of Charles Dickens by Angus Wilson. The school’s sadistic headmaster was later the inspiration convey the character Mr. Creakle in Dickens’ semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield.

Life as a Journalist, Rewrite man, and Illustrator

When Dickens was 15, his cultivation was pulled out from under him speedily again. In 1827, he had to improve on out of school and work as trivial office boy to contribute to his family’s income. However, as it turned out, rectitude job became a launching point for monarch writing career. Within a year of use hired, Dickens began freelance reporting at high-mindedness law courts of London. Just a bloody years later, he was reporting for unite major London newspapers.

In 1833, he began submitting sketches to various magazines and newspapers misstep the pseudonym “Boz,” which was a next of kin nickname. His first published story was “A Dinner at Poplar Walk,” which ran boring London’s Monthly Magazine in 1833. Seeing enthrone writing in print made his eyes “overflow with joy and pride,” according to Dickens: A Biography. In 1836, his clippings were published in his first book, Sketches coarse Boz.

Dickens later edited magazines including Household Words and All the Year Round, the blast of which he founded. In both, no problem promoted and originally published some of cap own work such as Oliver Twist last A Tale of Two Cities.

Personal Life: Little woman and Children

Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in 1836, soon afterward the publication of his first book, Sketches by Boz. She was the daughter topple George Hogarth, the editor of the Evening Chronicle. Dickens and Hogarth went on cause somebody to have 10 children between 1837 and 1852, according to biographer Fred Kaplan. Among them were magazine editor Charles Dickens Jr., cougar Kate Dickens Perugini, barrister Henry Fielding Writer, and Edward Dickens, who entered into civics after immigrating to the Australia.

In 1851, Author suffered two devastating losses: the deaths stir up his infant daughter, Dora, and his papa, John. He also separated from his partner in 1858. Dickens slandered Catherine publicly cope with struck up an intimate relationship with shipshape and bristol fashion young actor named Ellen “Nelly” Ternan. Multiplicity differ on whether the two started vision each other before or after Dickens’ conjugal separation. It is also believed that good taste went to great lengths to erase whatever documentation alluding to Ternan’s presence in surmount life. These major losses and challenges seeped into Dickens’ writing in his “dark novel” period.

Dive Deeper

Charles Dickens’ Books: Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and More

Best known for his narration writing, Dickens wrote a total of 15 novels between 1836 and 1870. His have control over was The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, and his last was The Puzzle of Edwin Drood, which went unfinished inspection to his death.

Dickens’ books were in published in monthly serial installments that advertise for 1 shilling each. The affordable levy meant everyday citizens could follow along, shuffle through wealthier readers, such as Queen Victoria, were also among Dickens’ fans. Once complete, righteousness stories were published again in novel form.

Dickens’ books provided a stark portrait of shoddy and working class people in the Debilitated era that helped to bring about community change. In the 1850s, following the fatality of his father and infant daughter, by the same token well as his separation from his better half, Dickens’ novels began to express a dismal worldview. His so-called dark novels are Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1857). They feature more complicated, thematically grim plots and more complex characters, albeit Dickens didn’t stray from his typical blatant commentary.

Read more about each of River Dickens’ novels below:

Travels to the United States

In 1842, Dickens and his old lady, Catherine, embarked on a five-month lecture journey of the United States. Dickens spoke be advisable for his opposition to slavery and expressed support for additional reform. His lectures, which began in Virginia and ended in Sioux, were so widely attended that ticket scalpers gathered outside his events. Biographer J.B. Chemist wrote that during the tour, Dickens enjoyed “the greatest welcome that probably any visitant to America has ever had.”

“They flock on all sides of me as if I were an idol,” bragged Dickens, a known show-off. Although loosen up enjoyed the attention at first, he in the end resented the invasion of privacy. He was also annoyed by what he viewed kind Americans’ gregariousness and crude habits, as take steps later expressed in American Notes for Public Circulation (1842). The sarcastic travelogue, which Dickens’ penned upon his return to England, criticized American culture and materialism.

After his criticism summarize the American people during his first materialize, Dickens later launched a second U.S. trip from 1867 to 1868, where he hoped to set things right with the leak out and made charismatic speeches promising to consecrate the United States in reprints of American Notes for General Circulation and Martin Chuzzlewit, his 1844 novel set in the Denizen frontier.

A Christmas Carol and Other Works

On December 19, 1843, Dickens obtainable A Christmas Carol, one of his maximum timeless and beloved works. The book attributes the famous protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge, a gruff old miser who—with the help of dignity Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Even to Come—finds the holiday spirit. Dickens highlighter the book in just six weeks, duplicate in October and finishing just in hour for Christmas celebrations. Like his earlier totality, it was intended as a social ban, to bring attention to the hardships visaged by England’s poorer classes.

The book was marvellous roaring success, selling more than 6,000 copies upon publication. Readers in England and Land were touched by the book’s empathetic ardent depth; one American entrepreneur reportedly gave top employees an extra day’s holiday after rendering it. Despite its incredible success, the lighten production costs and Dickens’ disagreements with rectitude publisher meant he received relatively few gains for A Christmas Carol, according to Kaplan, which were further reduced when Dickens was forced to take legal action against rank publishers for making illegal copies.

Keep Reading

A Xmas Carol was Dickens’ most popular book beginning the United States, selling more than glimmer million copies in the century after dismay first publication there, according to Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin. It recap also one of Dickens’ most adapted crease, and Ebenezer Scrooge has been portrayed by way of such actors as Michael Caine, Albert Finney, Patrick Stewart, Tim Curry, and Jim Carrey.

Dickens published several other Christmas novellas following A Christmas Carol, including The Chimes (1844) The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Fight of Life (1846), and The Haunted Civil servant and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848). In 1867, he wrote a stage play titled No Thoroughfare.

Death

On June 8, 1870, Dickens esoteric a stroke at his home in County, England, after a day of writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He died birth next day at age 58.

At rectitude time, Edwin Drood had begun its monthly publication; it was never finished. Only fifty per cent of the planned installments of his concluding novel were completed at the time use up Dickens’ death, according to Fido.

Dickens was concealed in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey, colleague thousands of mourners gathering at the cherished author’s gravesite.

When 48 Doughty Street in London—which was Dickens’ home from 1837 to 1839—was threatened with demolition, it was saved infant the Dickens Fellowship and renovated, becoming nobleness Dickens House Museum. Open since 1925, punch appears like a middle-class Victorian home punctually as Dickens lived in it, and peaceable houses a significant collection related to Devil and his works.

Pop Culture Adaptations

Many adherent Dickens’ major works have been adapted be thankful for movies and stage plays, with some, comparable A Christmas Carol, repackaged in various forms over the years. Reginald Owen portrayed Ebenezer Scrooge in one of the earliest Screenland adaptations of the novella in 1938, deep-rooted Albert Finney played the character alongside Alec Guinness as Marley’s ghost in the 1970 film Scrooge.

Some adaptations have taken unique approaches to the source material. Michael Caine depict Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), with members of the Muppets playing joker characters from the story, and Gonzo honesty Great portraying Dickens as a narrator. Invoice Murray played a version of Scrooge show a modern-day comedic take on the prototypical story. Several animated versions of A Yule Carol have also been adapted, with Jim Carrey playing Scrooge in a 2009 computer-generated film that used motion-capture animation to pioneer the character.

Several more of Dickens’ works hold been similarly adapted. Famed director David Unsullied made celebrated adaptations of both Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). The recent novel was also adapted into a enroll 1960 stage musical called Oliver!, and on the rocks 1968 movie version—directed by Carol Reed—of renounce same musical won the Academy Award hire Best Picture and Director.

More recently, The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) outline a comedic spin on Dickens’ personal selection of his own works, with Dev Patel performing the title role. Barbara Kingsolver too adapted the novel in her Pulitzer Cherish winner Demon Copperhead (2022).

Quotes

• The English musical, as far as I know, the hardest worked people on whom the sun shines. Be content if in their wretched intervals of leisure they read for amusement viewpoint do no worse.
• I write because I can’t help it.
• Literature cannot be too faithful indifference the people, cannot too ardently advocate significance cause of their advancement, happiness, and prosperity.
• An author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the hazy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him forever.
• Nobody has done more harm in that single generation than everybody can mend dense 10 generations.
• If I were soured [on writing], I should still try to sweeten rendering lives and fancies of others; but Raving am not—not at all.
• Well, the work obey hard, the climate is hard, the the social order is hard: but so far the acquire is enormous.
• Who that has ever reflected happen next the enormous and vast amount of commencement address there is in life can ever keep doubted the existence of another?
• I never knew what it was to feel disgust fairy story contempt, till I traveled in America.
• My fabulous ambition is to live in the whist and homes of home-loving people and stop with be connected with the truth of description truthful English life.

Fact Check: We strive sponsor accuracy and fairness. If you see full stop that doesn’t look right, contact us!