Charles dickens 5
Charles dickens 5Charles Dickens was an English novelist and one of the most popular writers in the history of literature. In his enormous body of works, Dickens combined masterly storytelling, humor, pathos, and irony with sharp social criticism and acute observation of people and places, both real and imagined. (Encarta, 1998)
Charles Dickens was born on Friday, February 7, 1812 at No. 1 Mile End Terrace, Landport, Portsmouth. His father, John Dickens, was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. In 1814 John was transferred to Somerset House in London. In 1817 John moved his family to Chatham and worked in the naval dockyard.
It was here, at Chatham in the Medway Valley, that Charles experienced his happiest childhood memories. John was transferred back to the London office and moved his family to Camden Town in 1822.
John Dickens, continually living beyond his means, was finally imprisoned for debt at the Marshalsea debtor's prison in Southwark in 1824. 12 year old Charles was removed from school and sent to work at a boot-blacking factory earning six shillings a week to help support the family. Charles considered this period as the most terrible time in his life and would later write that he wondered 'how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age'.
This childhood poverty and adversity contributed greatly to Dickens' later views on social reform in a country in the throes of the Industrial Revolution and his compassion for the lower class, especially the children.
Dickens would go on to write 15 major novels and countless short storys and articles before his death in 1870. The inscription on his tombstone in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey reads: He was a sympathiser to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world.
The storys, characters, and places he wrote about will live forever.
Dickens 1842
On January 3, 1842 Charles Dickens sailed from Liverpool on the steamship Britannia bound for America. Dickens was at the height of his popularity on both sides of the Atlantic and, securing a year off from writing, determined to visit the young nation to see for himself this haven for the oppressed which had righted all the wrongs of the Old World. The voyage out, accompanied by his wife, Kate, and her maid, Anne Brown, proved to be one of the stormiest in years and his cabin aboard the Britannia proved to be so small that Dickens quipped that their portmanteaux could "no more be got in at the door, not to say stowed away, than a giraffe could be forced into a flowerpot".
The violent seas on the journey can best be described by Dickens' comical account of trying to administer a little brandy...
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