Today is the 199th birthday of Charles Dickens, one of England’s most popular authors. His parents had eight children, and his father was not good at managing his limited income, ending up in Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison shortly after Charles’s twelfth birthday. Charles found employment pasting labels on shoe polish. This unhappy episode helped to form Dickens’s later attitude towards poverty, injustice and prisons.
Dickens subsequently worked as a clerk in a law firm, then as a freelance legal reporter. His first story A Dinner at Poplar Walk was published in the Monthly Magazine in 1833 and then a series of short pieces about London life and people were published over the next few years in various newspapers as Sketches by Boz. His first novel The Pickwick Papers was published in serial form between March 1836 and October 1837.
In subsequent years, his novels Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge were published in serial form. Other notable works include A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations. He became a well-known philanthropist and defender of the poor, and he died in 1870 at the age of 58.