Charles Dickens is a famous English writer-realist, the classic of world literature. His homeland was the town of Lendport located near Portsmouth, where he was born on February 7, 1812. In 1822, the Dickens family moved to London, where they happened to live in poverty, regularly selling household belongings. A 12-year-old Charles had to work hard for the pennies at the factory, although he was a gifted child.
The poverty of the family, in which six children grew up, influenced Dickens’ childhood. When his father was taken under arrest because of debts, Charles left his school and had a job as a copyist in a lawyer’s office. Later Dickens took the place of an independent reporter who worked in a court. A 24-year-old Dickens published his first collection of essays entitled “Sketches by Boz” (his pseudonym). In 1837, he made his debut as a novelist and released “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.” When married in 1836, Dickens and his wife sailed to Boston, where people greeted him as a very famous man in American cities.
In the 1850s, the author scored a triumph: Dickens achieved fame, influence, wealth. Since 1858, he regularly arranged public readings of his books. However, everything was not smooth in the writer’s family. Constant quarrels with his wife and illnesses of his eight children led to the fact that he fell in love with a young actress. A difficult personal life was combined with intensive writing work: during this period of the biography the novels that made a significant contribution to his literary glory appeared. A troubled life did not have a good impact on his health, but Dickens worked without paying attention to numerous diseases. His latest novel, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” left unfinished: the writer died on June 9, 1870, in his estate as a result of a stroke. This English prose writer influenced the development of the genre of realism in the literature strongly, and his characters are known to the whole world today.