The Life and Times of Charles Dickens 

Charles John Huffman Dickens was born on February 7, 1812 near Portsmouth, England, the second of John and Elizabeth Dickens’ eight children. His father was employed as a clerk for the Naval Pay Office, a position that required the family to move frequently. Despite his job security, John Dickens found it difficult to support his growing family of ten, which was habitually on the edge of financial ruin as John Dickens’ careless spending left them constantly in the clutches of creditors, a crime in Victorian England.

Charles Dickens was an intelligent and naturally inquisitive boy who discovered a love for books during his years at the Chatham school. His delight in education was cut short at the age of ten when his father was transferred to London and Charles was sent to work at the Warren Blacking Company, putting labels on bottles of shoe polish for six shillings a week to help support his family.

Two days after Charles’ twelfth birthday, his father’s financial floundering caught up with him, and John Dickens and the remaining family members were thrown into deptor’s prison. Abandoned, neglected and ill-treated by factory overseers, Charles Dickens worked twelve to sixteen hour days, then trekked three miles to his squalid lodgings in Camden Town, the same address that he gives the Cratchit family in A Christmas Carol.

This dark experience cast a shadow over the clever, sensitive boy and became a defining experience in his life. He would later write that he wondered “how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age”. Through his life and work, Charles Dickens would be a constant champion of children, the poor and a well-regulated legal system.

An unexpected inheritance allowed John Dickens to pay off his debt, and Charles was reunited with his family and continued his education at the Wellington House Academy until his father could no longer afford the tuition. Charles then began a series of odd jobs, including work as an office boy in a law firm and a stint as a country reporter for The Morning Chronicle in 1835, where he covered Parliamentary debates.

Dicken’s first fictional works, the satirical Sketches by Boz (1833-35), were presented in serial form and were followed by The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) which made the twenty-four year old Charles Dickens a famous author. With his novel Oliver Twist (1839), Dickens sealed his popularity and announced some of the continuing themes of his work: an indictment of a society that mistreated the poor, a condemnation of the wrongs inflicted on children by adults, and a denunciation of corruption and decay in politics and government.

In 1858, Charles Dickens separated from Catherine, his wife of twenty years and the mother of his ten children. At this personally trying time, Dickens’ restless and depressed spirit found release in the theater. Over a period of twelve years, he toured the British Isles and America (including Boston, Providence and Hartford) with his one-man grand tour — a series of dramatic readings of his most outstanding characters and poignant dramatic prose pieces. He received rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic.

Dickens would write a total of fifteen major novels and countless short stories and articles before his death on June 9, 1870. He wished to be buried, without fanfare, in a small cemetery in Rochester, but the Nation would not allow it. When he was laid to rest in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, flowers from thousands of mourners overflowed the open grave.

DISCUSSION QUESTION: What themes or characters from A Christmas Carol do you think may be inspired by events or people in Charles Dickens’ own life?