Biography
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 in Portsmouth, Hampshire, the second of eight children. His father John was a naval pay clerk whose chronic debts led to the family's imprisonment in Marshalsea Debtors' Prison when Dickens was twelve. During this period Dickens was sent to work in a blacking warehouse, pasting labels on bottles — an experience of humiliation and abandonment that he never entirely recovered from and that shaped virtually everything he wrote.
He left school at fifteen and worked as a law clerk, then as a court reporter, before becoming a journalist and parliamentary reporter. His first book, Sketches by Boz (1836), was followed immediately by The Pickwick Papers — initially published in serial form — which made him the most celebrated author in England almost overnight.
For the next thirty years Dickens dominated British literature. He wrote fifteen major novels, published in serial form and then as books: The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished).
Dickens was also a committed social reformer, journalist, editor and public speaker. He campaigned against the Poor Law, against child labour, for educational reform and for improved sanitation in London's slums. His fiction was directly political: Oliver Twist was an attack on the New Poor Law; Hard Times an attack on utilitarian industrial capitalism; Bleak House an attack on the Court of Chancery.
He died on 9 June 1870 at Gad's Hill Place in Kent, leaving Edwin Drood unfinished. He was buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.