Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812, the second of eight children, to a family whose financial situation was chronically unstable. The crisis came when he was twelve: his father was imprisoned for debt at Marshalsea, and Dickens was pulled from school and sent to work at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, pasting labels on pots of shoe polish. He worked there for somewhere between four and six months. His father was eventually released through an inheritance, and Dickens was returned to school — but the experience, which he kept secret for most of his life, shaped the work that followed. The blacking warehouse appears, transformed, in David Copperfield and Great Expectations; the Marshalsea prison appears in Little Dorrit; the humiliation of poverty and the contingency of respectability are themes he returned to throughout a career spanning thirty-five years.

He worked as a court reporter and journalist before his first book, The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), made him famous almost overnight. From then until his death, he produced at a rate that seems impossible: fifteen major novels, five novellas (including A Christmas Carol), several travel books, and enormous quantities of journalism. He also edited and largely wrote Household Words and All the Year Round, weekly periodicals that published fiction, essays, and social commentary. Most of his novels appeared first in serial installments — monthly or weekly — a format that shaped their pace and structure, the cliffhanger endings and multiplying subplots that kept readers buying the next number.

His concerns were consistent: the brutality of the legal system (Bleak House, Pickwick Papers), the horror of industrial child labor (Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop), the prisons and workhouses (David Copperfield, Little Dorrit), the hypocrisy of respectability (Our Mutual Friend, Dombey and Son), and always the question of what money does to people and what people do to get it. He was not a systematic social theorist — he had contempt for abstraction and for the political economists who dismissed individual suffering in favor of aggregate statistics. His method was emotional: make the reader feel what it is like to be a workhouse boy or a debtor's prisoner, and the argument would follow.

The late novels are the most demanding and the most rewarding: Bleak House (1852–53), with its dual narrators and its portrait of a legal system that destroys everything it touches; Great Expectations (1860–61), the most perfectly plotted of his books, about class illusion and the corrupting effects of acquired wealth; Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), about the literal economics of death (bodies pulled from the Thames) and the social performance of respectability. David Copperfield (1849–50), partly autobiographical, was his own favorite among his works.

His personal life was messier than his public image suggested. He separated from his wife Catherine in 1858 after twenty-two years and ten children, conducting a long relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan that he concealed from readers who saw him as the embodiment of domestic virtue. The separation was announced in the press in terms that blamed Catherine, and several of his friends — including Thackeray — sided with her. He continued working at a pace that eventually killed him: he died at fifty-eight, mid-novel, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished.