Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812 and spent part of his childhood in London and Kent. When his father was imprisoned for debt, the young Dickens was sent to work in a blacking warehouse, an experience that left a lasting impression on his understanding of poverty, humiliation and insecure childhood. He later worked as a legal clerk, parliamentary reporter and journalist, learning to observe speech, institutions and urban life before becoming a successful novelist.

Dickens published many of his novels in serial form, using suspense, memorable characters and interwoven plots to reach a broad Victorian readership. Works such as Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations expose the failures of workhouses, courts, prisons, schools and systems of debt. A Tale of Two Cities, set around the French Revolution, is his clearest historical novel, contrasting private sacrifice with political violence in London and Paris. Dickens died in 1870. Although much of his fiction was contemporary when written, it now provides an exceptionally rich imaginative record of nineteenth-century Britain and of the social reforms that transformed it.