Charles Dickens

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We are going to talk about Charles Dickens who is regarded as one of the greatest novelists of the Victorian area. Many of his classic novels for example Oliver Twist and David Copperfield are still today immensely popular and a number of screen plays have been made based on these novels. There is no doubt in my mind that if Dickens lived today he would have been honored the Nobel literature price.

Charles Dickens was not only a famous novelist but he was also a social critic who fought for children’s rights and other social reforms.

He was born in Portsmouth England in 1812. Charles early childhood was very happy. His father who was working at the Naval pay office and made ok money. Already at a young age Charles loved to read books and he was also very interested in theatre.

Unfortunately his father was not very good at handling money and spent more than he made.
Soon the Dickens family’s lives would turn into a nightmare. When Charles was eleven years old he had to leave school since his parents could not pay the school fees. A year later he was sent to work at a work house which made polish for boots. He was working in a rat infested building 12 hours every day, 6 days a week under miserable conditions for 6 shillings per week. One month later his father was imprisoned for bad debts and a few months later everyone in his family except Charles and his elder sister were imprisoned.

Charles had to rent a room and take care of himself. This was the end of Charles childhood. He was devastated about his and even more about his family’s situation.

Luckily he and his family were saved by an inheritance from a relative. The debt could be paid back and his family was released from prison and Charles could go back to school. He went to school for 3 years and these years were in general happy years.

However the scars from this horrible period in his life were deep. Charles had a very rough time forgetting about the terror of being poor and the deprivation that he felt during his family’s crisis.
He could for example even as an adult not pass an old factory without crying.

Charles experiences at the work house and debtor’s prison have largely influenced the fiction and the characters in his novels. He used his own painful experiences and turned them into inspiration for his novels. Many of his novels describe the hardships of the poor often young children and how these children were explored for economic purposes. David Copperfield is regarded as his most autobiographical novel and it was largely inspired by his unhappy youth. People he met places he visited and the many obstacles he overcame he incorporated into his novels. For example one of the boys he worked with at the work house was Bob Fagin. He later used this name in the famous novel Oliver Twist.