Dickens

It's the birthday of the novelist Charles Dickens, (books by this author) who was born in Portsmouth, England (1812). He grew up in a series of small towns on the southern coast of England, where his father worked as a naval clerk. His mother taught him to read, and he became obsessed with books. He later wrote, "[Reading] was my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life."
When he was 10 years old, his father got a promotion to a job on the outskirts of London. Dickens always remembered leaving the small coastal town where he'd grown up. At the time, London was one of the capitals of the Industrial Revolution, one of the first giant sprawling cities, full of poverty and pollution, crime and mystery. Dickens would go on to describe London as, "The great city ... like a dark shadow on the ground, reddening the sluggish air with a deep dull light, that told of labyrinths of public ways and shops, and swarms of busy people. ... Sounds arose — the striking of church clocks, the distant bark of dogs, the hum of traffic in the streets ... tall steeples looming in the air, and piles of unequal roofs oppressed by chimneys."
Dickens' father had been gathering debts for years, struggling more and more to pay them. Charles was 12 years old when his parents decided he could help the family financially if he took a job at Warren's Blacking Company, a manufacturer of boot blacking that was run by a friend of the family.
A few days after he started the job, Dickens' father was arrested for debt. Dickens was devastated. It was then that he decided that he would do whatever it took to make sure that he was never poor again. In his spare time, he began writing sketches of the people imprisoned with his father, and then began to write about other ordinary people on the streets of London, the cabdrivers, shoe shiners, pickpockets, and clowns.
Dickens eventually got a job as a journalist and began writing fiction, and he went on to become the most popular writer of his lifetime. But he also became a publishing entrepreneur by inventing a remarkably successful new form of publishing, selling his novels in serial installments. Because he couldn't wait to write a whole book before he started getting paid for it, he published each new chapter as soon as it was finished.
Most critics agree that Dickens' first real masterpiece was his most autobiographical novel, David Copperfield (1850).
Dickens' reputation among critics declined after his death. His work was considered too melodramatic and moralistic. But his reputation was revived by the critic G.K. Chesterton, and since 1950, more has been written about Dickens each year than about any other author in the English language except Shakespeare.