Text and Illustrations:
Charles Dickens.
The name conjures up visions of plum pudding and Christmas punch, quaint coaching inns and cosy firesides, but also of orphaned and starving children, misers, murderers, and abusive schoolmasters.
Dickens was 19th-Century London personified; he survived its mean streets as a child and, largely self-educated, possessed the genius to become the greatest writer of his age.
Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812,
the son of a clerk at the Navy Pay Office.
at Gad’s Hill Place, near Gravesend, Kent, England.
Illustration: THE CHARLES DICKENS PAGE
His father, John Dickens, continually living beyond his means, was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea Prison in 1824.
12-year-old Charles was removed from school and
sent to work at a boot-blacking factory earning
six shillings a week to help support the family.
This dark experience cast a shadow over the clever, sensitive, boy, that became a defining experience in his life, he would later write: “It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age” (Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 25).
This childhood poverty and feelings of abandonment,
although unknown to his readers until after his death, would be a heavy influence on Dickens’ later views on social reform and the World he would create through his fiction.
Dickens would go on to write 15 major novels,
including:
and his personal favourite,
He will forever be associated with the celebration of Christmas due to his Christmas Books, the most popular being
Dickens also edited, and contributed to, weekly journals Household Words and All The Year Round. Near the end of
his life, he travelled throughout Britain and America
giving public readings of his works.
Charles Dickens died an old man of fifty-seven,
worn out with work and travel, on 9 June 1870.
He wished to be buried, without fanfare, in a small cemetery
in Rochester, Kent, but the Nation would not allow it.
He was laid to rest in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey,
the flowers from thousands of mourners
overflowing the open grave.
Among the more beautiful bouquets, were many
simple clusters of wildflowers, wrapped in rags.
Forget Television.
Pick up a Charles Dickens Book and get your life back.
Read all about it at . . .
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