Charles Dickens is one of the world's best known authors. He was born in 1812 in Portsmouth, the second of seven children. His father, John, worked in the city as a clerk at the Navy Pay office until the need to provide for a growing family led to the family moving to Camden Town in London.
Alas moving, and even selling the family's household possessions, was not enough to stave off financial disaster, and John Dickens was arrested and imprisoned for failing to pay his creditors when Charles was twelve. John spent six months in prison until a relative died and left enough money in his will to the family to pay off the outstanding debts. During that six month period Charles worked at Warran's Blacking Factory, where he was paid six shillings a week to wrap shoe-black bottles.
After his father was released Charles was educated at Wellington House Acadamy, a local school. He was not an outstanding student and left at the age of fifteen to work as an office boy with a firm of solicitors. Although he did not enjoy the work, he found that walking home in the evening he was able to observe the people of London going about their business. He decided that he wished to become a reporter, and taught himself shorthand in order to get work as a court reporter aged sixteen.
Later he joined the Mirror of Parliment, a newspaper reporting on the daily proceedings of the House of Commons. Charles became interested in social reform and began to contribute articles to the True Sun, a radical newspaper which sold 30,000 copies each day. He argued strongly in favour of parlimentary reform.
His literary career began in 1833 when his first story was published in the Monthly Magazine. At first Dickens used the pen-name 'Boz', and a collection of short-stories published in newspapers under this name was published as a book called 'Sketches by Boz' in 1836.
His first full novel was The Pickwick Papers, which was commissioned by the publisher William Hall and published in twenty monthly installments. By 1839 Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby had both similarly been published in monthly sections Charles was the most popular writer in Britain. More novels followed including The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1), Barnaby Rudge (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) and A Christmas Carol (1843).
Dicken's social reforming instincts did not fade, and he invested some of his royalties in projects to communicate his ideas, including a commercially unsucessful newspaper, The Daily News, and weekly journals, Household Words and later All the Year Round. He campaigned for improvements in the education of the poor, against the 1834 Poor Land Amendment Act and in favour of further parlimentary reform. In these journals some of his best known novels were published, including Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. All Year Round also featured several of Wilkie Collins' novels, and Dickens still worked on this publication until he died in 1870
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