A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens Biography

Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England, on February 7,1812. His family moved to London before he was two, but his father had trouble making enough money to feed his large family. In 1824 Dickens' father was sent to debtor's prison, along with most of his family. Charles, who was twelve years of age, did not have to go to prison because he was already working at Warren's Blacking Factory. In later life he remembered the factory bitterly and would only talk about it with a few close friends.

The family was released from debtor's prison a few months later, thanks to an inheritance that Dickens' father, John, received when his mother died. His mother wanted Charles to continue on at the factory, but his father made provisions for him to attend school. Dickens attended school until he was fifteen, and then he worked as a clerk in a lawyer's office, studying Latin at night.

Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens.

Dickens became a freelance reporter at Doctors' Commons Courts in 1829. In 1834 he started publishing sketches of London life using the pseudonym "Boz." In 1836 these short pieces were collected in a book called Sketches by Boz. Soon after the publication of these sketches, William Hall, of the publishing firm Chapman and Hall, approached him to write humorous text to accompany a series of plates by the illustrator Robert Seymour. Immediately, Dickens conceived of Mr. Pickwick. When Seymour committed suicide, Dickens went on to turn his ideas into The Pickwick Papers. That was the start of his career as a novelist.

By 1843 he had completed four books and was in the middle of the next, Martin Chuzzlewit, when he took time out in October and November to write A Christmas Carol. He continued to write novels, most of them being published in serial form before being bound as novels.

The list of Dickens' books are familiar to any casual reader: David Copperpeld, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations, to name just a few. Dickens also did charitable work, managed a theater company, and edited magazines. When he died in 1870, he was buried at Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey, an honor reserved for England's most notable literary figures.

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