(Portsmouth, UK, 1812-Gad's Hill, id., 1870) British writer. In 1822, his family moved from Kent to London, and two years later his father was imprisoned for debt. The future writer then went to work in a shoe factory, where he met the harsh living conditions of the lower classes, whose complaint devoted much of his work.
Charles Dickens
Self-taught, excluding the two and a half years he spent in a private school, got a job as a trainee lawyer in 1827, but already aspired to be a playwright and journalist. He learned shorthand and, little by little, he managed to make a living with my writing, and began writing chronicles of courts to access later to a parliamentary journalist position and finally, under the pseudonym Boz, published a series of articles inspired everyday life in London (Sketches by Boz).
The same year, he married Catherine Hogarth, daughter of the director of the Morning Chronicle, the newspaper that spread, between 1836 and 1837, the saga of The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and the subsequent and Nicholas Nickleby. The serialization of virtually all his novels created a special relationship with his public, which came to exercise a significant influence, and his novels are delivered in a more or less directly on the issues of their time.
In these years, it evolved from a light style the socially engaged attitudes of Oliver Twist. These early novels gave him a huge popular success and gave him some popularity among the upper class and educated, and he was received with great honor in the United States in 1842, but was soon disabused of American society, perceiving in it all the vices of the Old World. His criticism, reflected in a series of articles and in the novel Martin Chuzzlewit, outraged in America, and the novel marked the most notorious failure of his career in the UK. However, he regained the favor of his audience in 1843, with the publication of A Christmas Carol.
After a few trips to Italy, Switzerland and France, made some inroads into the theatrical and founded the Daily News, a newspaper that would have a short life. His mature stage opened with Dombey and Son (1848), novel that reached almost perfect control of resources and whose argument novelistic planned to the last detail, thus exceeding the tendency to improvise their first titles, they gave vent to their proverbial inventiveness in creating situations and characters, sometimes responsible for the lack of unity of the work. In 1849 he founded the Houseold Words, a weekly in which, besides disseminating texts little known authors, like his friend Wilkie Collins, published Bleak House and Hard Times, two of the most successful works of the entire production. In Words Houseold pages also appeared several trials, almost always oriented toward social reform.
Despite the ten children he had in his marriage, the increasing difficulties caused by extramarital affairs of Dickens eventually led to divorce in 1858, apparently because of his passion for a young actress, Ellen Teman, which must have been her lover . Dickens had to defend the social scandal made a public statement in the same newspaper. In 1858 he undertook a tour of the UK and Ireland, where he read excerpts from his work publicly. After purchasing the house where he spent his childhood, Gad's Hill Place, in 1856, soon became his permanent residence.
The tour started in 1867 by the United States confirmed its worldwide notoriety, and so was applauded long and exhausting conference, thrilled audiences with readings of his work and even came to be received by Queen Victoria shortly before his death, accelerated by the effects that a railway accident left his already failing health.
