The Charlesauthor Dickens Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812 to John and Elizabeth Barrow Dickens. John Dickens was an extra clerk in the naval pay office, a job that took him and his family to London in 1814, to Chatham in 1817, and back to London in 1822. In Chatham the young Charles Dickens spent the happiest years of his childhood. But his father s inability to live within his means, coupled with the growth of the Dickens household (Charles Dickens had four brothers and sisters by 1822), brought an early end to his happiness that coincided with the family s second move to London. Just two days past his twelfth birthday, Dickens was sent to work in a warehouse to supplement the family income; eleven days later his father was arrested for debt and freed after three months thanks to a bequest. Less than a month after his father removed him from the warehouse, Dickens was enrolled as a day student at the Wellington House Academy in London. Here, between the ages of twelve and fifteen, he was already trying his hand at the kind of writing that would launch him on his professional career. He submitted what was called penny-a-line stuff to his father s employer, the British Press: information about fires, accidents, or police reports missed by the regular reporters. Several years later, obliged by his work as a clerk in a law office, he set himself the difficult task of mastering shorthand so as to return to journalism in earnest. In 1828, during his sixteenth year, he became a free-lance reporter in the London law courts. For several years he alternated reporting, exploring the London streets, and reading avidly at the British Museum. In this twentieth year, Dickens secured a job as a parliamentary reporter for the Mirror of Parliament. He worked there from 1832 to 1834. Dickens s observations of parliament committed him to reform while making him strongly critical of many reformers. These years as a journalist left Dickens with lasting affection for journalism and a strongly critical attitude towards unjust laws. Soon he became famous as Boz (Dickens took this pseudonym from his younger brother Moses, who comically mispronounced his own name), the name under which he wrote a series of tales and sketches published in different magazines (among which The Evening Chronicle). k 29