Charles John Huffam Dickens, FRSA (IPAEng: ˈtʃɑːlz ˈdɪkɪnz; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870), pen-name "Boz", was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era. He was a vigorous social campaigner, both in his own personal endeavours as well as through the recurrent themes of his literary enterprise.

Critics George Gissing and G. K. Chesterton championed Dickens's mastery of prose, his endless invention of unique, clever personalities, and his powerful social sensibilities, but fellow writers such as George Henry Lewes, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf faulted his work for sentimentality, implausible occurrences, and grotesque characterizations.

The popularity of Dickens's novels and short stories has meant that they have never gone out of print. Many of Dickens's novels first appeared in periodicals and magazines in serialised form—a popular format for fiction at the time—and, unlike many other authors who completed entire novels before serial production commenced, Dickens often composed his works in parts, in the order in which they were meant to appear. Such a practice lent his stories a particular rhythm, punctuated by one minor "cliffhanger" after another, to keep the public looking forward to the next installment.

Early years

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, in Landport, Portsmouth, in Hampshire, the second of eight children to John Dickens (1786–1851), a clerk in the Navy Pay Office at Portsmouth, and his wife, Elizabeth (née Barrow, 1789–1863). When he was five, the family moved to Chatham, Kent. In 1822, when he was ten, the family relocated to 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town, in London.

Although his early years seem to have been an idyllic time, he thought himself then as a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy". He spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, with a particular fondness for the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. He talked, later in life, of his extremely poignant memories of childhood, and of his continuing photographic memory of the people and events that helped to bring his fiction to life. His family's early, moderate wealth provided the boy Dickens with some private education at William Giles' school, in Chatham. This time of prosperity came to an abrupt end, however, when his father, after having spent beyond his means in entertaining, and in retaining his social position, was imprisoned at Marshalsea debtor's prison. Shortly afterwards, the rest of his family (except for Charles, who boarded in Camden Town at the house of family friend Elizabeth Roylance), realizing no other option, joined him in residence at Marshalsea. This provided the setting of one of his works, 'Little Dorrit' in which the title character's father was imprisoned.

Just before his father's arrest, the 12-year-old Dickens had begun working ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station. He earned six shillings a week pasting labels on jars of thick shoe polish. This money paid for his lodgings with Mrs Roylance and helped support his family. Mrs. Roylance, Dickens later wrote, was "a reduced old lady, long known to our family," and whom he eventually immortalized, "with a few alterations and embellishments," as "Mrs. Pipchin," in Dombey & Son. Later, lodgings were found for him in a "back-attic...at the house of an insolvent-court agent, who lived in Lant Street in the borough...he was a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman...lame, with a quiet old wife; and he had a very innocent grown-up son, who was lame too"; these three were the inspiration for the Garland family in The Old Curiosity Shop.Project Gutenberg's Life of Charles Dickens (James R. Osgood & Company, 1875), by John Forster, Volume I, Chapter II, accessed 2 August 2008 The mostly unregulated, strenuous—and often cruel—work conditions of the factory employees (especially children), made a deep impression on Dickens. His experiences served to influence later fiction and essays, and were the foundation of his interest in the reform of socioeconomic and labour conditions, the rigors of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor, in pre-Industrial-Revolution England. Fact: date=August 2008