Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England on February 7, 1812. He was the second of eight children in the family. Dickens’ father, John Dickens, was a naval clerk. Throughout John Dickens’ life, he did everything in his power to become wealthy. His mother, Elizabeth Barrow, desired to become a school teacher. Despite his parent’s desire, Charles Dickens’ family was always poor. Shortly after Charles’ birth, the family moved to Kent. There, Charles Dickens spent a lot of his time outdoors. During this period of his childhood, the hobby of choice for Charles was reading. In 1822, when Charles was ten years old, the family moved to a poor neighborhood in London. The family struggled greatly financially, and Charles’ father, John, often tried to live like he was wealthy and like he had more money than he actually did. In 1824, this terrible tendency came back to bite him when he was sent to prison for debt. At this point in his life, Charles Dickens was just twelve years old, and he felt like his family didn’t do what they were supposed to in order to raise him properly. When he was twelve, he was sent to live with a family friend, Elizabeth Roylance, in Camden Town. Mrs. Roylance, along with her family, would later show up in some of Charles’ writing. Throughout his childhood, Charles was forced to drop out of school numerous times in order to work and help support his family financially. One of these jobs that Dickens started was a job as an office boy. This job actually ended up becoming the first step of his writing career. Shortly after being hired as an office boy, Charles began freelance reporting at the London law courts. Within a few years, he was reporting for two major newspapers in London. Dickens had also began publishing a magazine called Bentley’s Miscellany. In this magazine Charles Dickens started to publish his first novel, Oliver Twist. This is a story following the life of a young orphan living in the streets. This story was inspired by Dickens’ childhood. Like the boy in the story, Dickens did not receive good parenting, and therefore, he was forced to get by on his own. Oliver Twist was well liked by readers in both England and America. At the age of eighteen, Dickens fell in love for the first time with Maria Beadnell. Maria is the model for the character, Dora, in Dickens’ David Copperfield. Charles Dickens ended up marrying his wife, Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a newspaper editor, in 1836. Catherine’s seventeen year old sister, Mary, moved in with them in 1837. Dickens developed a great relationship with her, and he became deeply upset when she died in his arms. Mary ended up becoming a character in many of his books. In 1842, Charles and his wife, Kate, took a five month tour of the United States. This trip influenced the writing of American Notes for General Circulation, which is a sarcastic book criticizing American culture and its materialistic ways. The marriage between the two was a very happy one at first, but it began to go downhill, until the two ended up separating in 1858. Dickens didn’t like the fact that he had to support ten children, and that Catherine was not as energetic or as intellectually advanced as he was. During his life, Charles Dickens had very complex political and religious views. Dickens was raised by a family who was Anglican, but not overly religious. As he grew older, he began to dislike the
