The CharlesAuthor Dickens LIFE Charles John Huffam Dickens (18121870) is considered the greatest novelist1 of his time the Victorian Age and he certainly was the most popular. He was born in Portsmouth, a sea town in the south of England, into a large family. There were eight children and Charles was the eldest son. His father, John, was a clerk2 in a Navy office; he had a good salary, but was very bad at managing his money, so the family always had financial problems. The character of Mr Micawber in David Copperfield is largely based on the figure of John Dickens. After some years, the family moved to London, but their situation got worse because Charles s father got more and more into debt3. In 1824 he went to prison for debts in the Marshalsea debtors prison in London, where his wife and all his children, except Charles, followed him. Charles had to leave school and go to work in a shoe polish4 factory. This experience had a deep effect on the boy, who later described the horrible conditions in which children worked in several of his novels, like Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. After spending 14 weeks in prison, however, his father received some money on the death of his mother, so he could pay his debts and get out of prison, while Charles was able to return to school. His education, however, ended when he was fifteen. He began to work as a clerk in a lawyers office and in 1830, after learning stenography5, he became a parliament reporter and a journalist, writing for several newspapers. Then he began to write stories which were published in magazines and were immediately very successful. The reading public loved his humour and his spirit of observation. 1. novelist: a writer of novels. 2. clerk: a person who works in an office. 3. debt: money that is owed to someone else. 4. shoe polish: a cream or liquid used to clean shoes and make them shine. 5. stenography: a way of writing very fast by using special signs instead of whole words. 4