In a fitted box. Red cloth spine with gilt title. Mottled cream boards with black ornate edging.

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812 in Portsmouth. The city is located in Hampshire, England. His parents were John and Elizabeth Dickens. Charles was the second of their eight children. John Dickens was a clerk in a payroll office of the navy.  He was born in 1785 and died in 1851.  He inspired the character of Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield.

Elizabeth Barrow was born in 1789 and died in 1863. She married John Dickens in 1809.  She inspired the characters of Mrs. Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby and Mrs. Micawber in David Copperfield. John and Elizabeth Dickens were an outgoing, social couple. They loved parties, dinners and family functions. In fact, Elizabeth attended a ball on the night that she gave birth to Charles. Finances were a constant concern for the family. The costs of entertaining along with the expenses of having a large family were too much for John’s salary. When Charles was just four months old the family moved to a smaller home to cut costs. Mary Weller was an early influence on Charles. She was hired to care for the Dickens children. Her bedtime stories, stories she swore were quite true, featured people like Captain Murderer who would make pies of out his wives.

The young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember – as a sort of introductory overture – by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in combination with this infernal Captain, that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet. – The Uncommercial Traveller – Nurse’s Stories

From a very young age Charles dreamed of becoming a gentleman. He wanted an education. His parents did have some limited funds put aside to send one of their children to a university or academy. Mr. and Mrs. John Dickens considered the talents and qualifications of all their children. They wanted to use the money earmarked for education where it would do the most good. It was as if they were placing all their bets on one child. Charles was not that child. His parents chose to send their daughter, Fanny, to school. She had a talent for music and was sent to an academy.

When he was 12 it looked like his dreams would never come true. John Dickens was arrested and sent to the Marshalsea prison for for failure to pay a debt. At that time the family sent Charles to work in Warren’s Blacking Warehouse. It was a shoe polish factory where Charles worked long hours attaching labels on pots of blacking.  He earned six shilling a week. As a side note, while employed there Dickens met Bob Fagin. Charles later used the name in Oliver Twist.

Luckily, John Dickens was able to come to an agreement with his creditors within a few months of his imprisonment. Shortly after that John Dickens ended his son’s employment at the blacking factory. Charles’s mother, Elizabeth, wanted her son to return to work at Warren’s.  John Dickens won the disagreement and Charles was sent to Wellington House Academy instead. Charles never forgot his mother’s actions.  He wrote, “I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.” Dickens was deeply marked by these experiences. He rarely spoke of this time of his life.

Charles John Huffam Dickens FRSA (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world’s best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.

Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school at the age of 12 to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison. After three years he was returned to school, before he began his literary career as a journalist. Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children’s rights, education and other social reforms.

Dickens’s literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers, a publishing phenomenon—thanks largely to the introduction of the character Sam Weller in the fourth episode—that sparked Pickwick merchandise and spin-offs. Within a few years Dickens had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire and keen observation of character and society. His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication. Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense. The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience’s reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback. For example, when his wife’s chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features. His plots were carefully constructed, and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives. Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.

His 1843 novella A Christmas Carol remains especially popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities (set in London and Paris) is his best-known work of historical fiction. The most famous celebrity of his era, he undertook, in response to public demand, a series of public reading tours in the later part of his career. The term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social or working conditions, or comically repulsive characters.