Charles Dickens was an author born in Portsmouth, England on February 7, 1812 and died at the age of 58 on June 9, 1870. Dickens was the second born of eight children and to Elizabeth and John Dickens. His father, John Dickens, was a clerk at the Naval Pay Office, so they were fairly poor. In 1824, when Charles was just 12, his father was imprisoned for debt. Due to his father’s imprisonment, he had to leave school in order to work at a shoe-blacking factory. This occupation earned him very minimal funds, but it was the all he could do to help his family. Dickens felt lonely and betrayed by his parents, which had a major impact on his writings. When his father was released from prison, he was able to continue his education at Wellington …show more content…
This made Charles very unhappy and gave him the belief that men should rule the house and not women. He left the school after two years and shortly after became a freelance reporter for a newspaper. At the age of 18 in the year 1830, Dickens found his first love, Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a banker. Unfortunately, her parents did not grant Dickens approval to marry her, so they sent her to school in Paris. In 1833, Dickens began using the pseudonym “Boz” for the many sketches and stories he created. His first major work was “Sketches by Boz,” which he published in 1836. Dickens met his first and only wife, Catherine Hogarth, in 1836. They soon got married and throughout the course of their 22-year marriage had 10 children. The next year he wrote his first significant novel, The Pickwick Papers. These were published monthly and over forty thousand copies of each issue were sold. This was the breakout novel for Dickens and it made him famous. In 1839, he wrote two successful classics, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. Dickens visited the United States and Canada for the firs time in the early 1840s. Dickens gave speeches about his desire to end slavery and for reform to occur. He was extremely idolized and famous in the United States, so his