Charles Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens's works are characterized by attacks on social evils, injustice, and hypocrisy.
Charles was born at Landport, in Portsea, England, February 7, 1812, He was the second of eight children. Dickens's father was employed as a minor civil servant in the Naval Pay Office, a job that required the family to move a number of times. Dickens" family spent many of Charles's early years fairly pleasantly in Chatham but made their final move to a miserable part of London. Charles's father lived beyond his means, and floundered financially. Dickens" mother was a lady of energy and culture, and from her the Dickens received the rudiments of Latin.
Before Charles was 12, the boy had read the contents of the paternal library, which consisted of "Roderick Random," "Peregrine Pickle," "Humphrey Clinker," "Tom Jones," "The Vicar of Wakefield," "Don Quixote," "Gil Blas," "Robinson Crusoe," "The Arabian Knights," "Mrs. Inchbald's Farees," and "Tales of the Genii." He was an attentive student and so far absorbed what he read as to live the life of his favorite characters. In that early period of his life, he tried to imitate what he read, wrote a tragedy founded upon one of the "Tales of the Genii," and acquired great fame among his associates as a story teller.
Two days after Charles turned 12, his father was thrown into Marshalsea Debtor's Prison. Charles was already working at the Warren Blacking Company, pasting labels on bottles of shoe polish; he'd left school at age 10 to help support the family. Now he was on his own, while the rest of the family roomed in a jail cell with the elder Dickens. Young Dickens lived in a miserable lodging house and worked long hours in squalid conditions, supervised by cruel masters. Though Dickens lived away from his family for only four months (his father came into an unexpected inheritance), the traumatic experience shaped the rest of his life.