Charles Dickens biography

The writer Charles John Huffam Dickens, known simply as Charles Dickens, was born on February 7, 1812, in the city of Portsmouth, England, and died on June 9, 1870, in his country house (Gad’s Hill Place), located in the county of Kent, England. His narrative style is characterized mostly by the use of elements such as irony, humor and social criticism, immersed in descriptions of some extent that delve into the character and the spaces in which his story unfolds. Due to the quality of his writing is considered one of the most excellent novelists of the Victorian era, one of the most outstanding English writers and one of the most recognized worldwide.

He was born as the second child of eight in total that would have the marriage formed by the clerk John Dickens and Elizabeth Barrow. Two years after his birth the family decided to move from Portsmouth to London and after about three years they moved to the town of Chatham, the reason for this was that his father continually spent the money, constantly carrying numerous debts. Due to the fact that his home was impoverished, he could not receive formal education until he was nine years old. However, his education would be interrupted by the imprisonment of his father in 1824. As a result of this fact, he was forced to work in Warren’s boot-blacking Factory, a factory related to footwear products, in order to help support the family.

In this way Charles suffered the exploitation and deplorable treatment by adults, which would be an experience recovered later in his texts, denouncing these unjust facts. Because his working day was 10 hours each day, he began a process of self-training in the little free time he had, reading large amounts of books. In the year of 1827, he managed to work as a lawyer intern and later he was given the position of a judicial stenographer. The following year he worked as a chronicler and tried to participate in theatrical acts, however, he prevailed writing chronicles.

In 1833 he began to publish his first literary creations under the pseudonym of Boz, without neglecting the work he did as a journalist and editor. By 1836 he married Catherine Thompson Hogarth, daughter of a newspaper editor, with whom he would have a total of ten children. In 1842, he used a trip with his wife by boat to the United States to write the book American travel notes, narrating his experiences and what he observed of the society in that trip, besides, based on this for some sections that he would write in Martin Chuzzlewit. With the intention of teaching his children the vision of the religion in which he believed he wrote approximately in the year 1849 The Life of Our Lord, narrating the life of Jesus exposed in a critical way the points in which he considers lazy of the other Judeo-Christian religions.

The short stories and his novels published by short delivery were becoming increasingly known, increasing popularity and income, which led him to fulfill one of his wishes: to be the owner of a cabin that used to travel, which apparently was related to one of Shakespeare’s plays. Between1837 and 1843 he published The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Antiques Shop, Notes of America and Christmas Song, which would be his last texts that would have an unplanned structure. In order to increase the knowledge of talented authors who went unnoticed, he founded the Household Words magazine in 1849, in which he published his two most acclaimed works: Bleak House and Hard times. In this year he would also publish David Copperfield, which was his best-selling novel and the first in which a writer uses the word “detective”.

Because his editors denied his request to increase income, he broke off his relationship with them and dedicated himself to traveling, meeting writers, participating in the theater and giving lectures. After this, his health began to be affected and little by little his marriage began to dissolve, preferring the company of an old love, however, he ended up pairing with an old acquaintance named Ellen Ternan.

On June 9, 1865, he was immersed in a terrible railway accident, resulting completely unharmed. After five years of this fact Dickens suffered an attack of apoplexy that causes death and against his designs to be buried in no way ostentatious, is buried in the Corner of the Poets, belonging to the Abbey of Westminster.