Articles on Charles Dickens and the World He Lived In

Dickens’ first experience with the law probably came in 1824 when his father, John Dickens, was arrested for debt and imprisoned in the Marshalsea Prison. After six months John Dickens was released , but Charles stored up events, people, and impressions in his memory and transformed them into materials for novels, particularly Little Dorrit. He showed that we live in an arbitrary, brutish world … [Read more...]

Charles Dickens - An Extraordinary Life 1812 – Charles John Huffam Dickens, born on February 7 in Portsmouth, England. His father, John Dickens, was a clerk in the Royal Navy Pay Office. 1812-1824 -- The family lives variously in Southsea, Sheerness, Chatham, as well as in a half-dozen houses in London, sometimes as John Dickens’s job requires, sometimes to dodge creditors, for Dickens’s … [Read more...]

When I think of Dickens, I think of him first as a novelist, but also as a reformer and a philanthropist. The first act of philanthropy I can find (outside of helping family members) is his effort to raise money to assist the family of his first publisher, John Macrone. After Macrone published Sketches by Boz, First Series in early 1836, Dickens signed an agreement and received £200 to produce a … [Read more...]

The specter of the Victorian Poorhouse haunts both history and literature. The surviving image, although not entirely accurate, is a grim reminder that not everyone flourished during an era whose very touchstones were progress and prosperity. No single historically-accurate image of the poorhouse remains, however, as each poorhouse has its own history. Each facility differed dramatically from … [Read more...]