My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecarys shop.

Mary Dickens Kate Perugini Walter Landor Dickens Francis Dickens Alfred DOrsay Tennyson Dickens Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens Henry Fielding Dickens Dora Annie Dickens Edward Dickens Signature.

He created some of the worlds best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.

His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius.

His novels and short stories are still widely read today.

Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for childrens rights, education and other social reforms.

Within a few years he had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire and keen observation of character and society.

Charles Dickens Background Serial Publication Of

His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.

Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense.

For example, when his wifes chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features.

His plots were carefully constructed and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives.

Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.

Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London.

His 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities (set in London and Paris) is his best-known work of historical fiction.

Charles Dickens Background Series Of Public

The most famous celebrity of his era, he undertook, in response to public demand, a series of public reading tours in the later part of his career.

Dickens has been praised by many of his fellow writers from Leo Tolstoy to George Orwell, G.

K. Chesterton and Tom Wolfe for his realism, comedy, prose style, unique characterisations and social criticism.

However, Oscar Wilde, Henry James and Virginia Woolf complained of a lack of psychological depth, loose writing and a vein of sentimentalism.

His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office and was temporarily stationed in the district.

He asked Christopher Huffam, 14 rigger to His Majestys Navy, gentleman, and head of an established firm, to act as godfather to Charles.

Huffam is thought to be the inspiration for Paul Dombey, the owner of a shipping company in Dickenss novel Dombey and Son (1848).

His early life seems to have been idyllic, though he thought himself a very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy.

He read and reread The Arabian Nights and the Collected Farces of Elizabeth Inchbald.

He retained poignant memories of childhood, helped by an excellent memory of people and events, which he used in his writing.

His wife and youngest children joined him there, as was the practice at the time.

Charles, then 12 years old, boarded with Elizabeth Roylance, a family friend, at 112 College Place, Camden Town.

Mrs Roylance was a reduced impoverished old lady, long known to our family, whom Dickens later immortalised, with a few alterations and embellishments, as Mrs Pipchin in Dombey and Son.

Later, he lived in a back-attic in the house of an agent for the Insolvent Court, Archibald Russell, a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman.

To pay for his board and to help his family, Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warrens Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station, where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking.

The strenuous and often harsh working conditions made a lasting impression on Dickens and later influenced his fiction and essays, becoming the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor.

He later wrote that he wondered how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age.

As he recalled to John Forster (from Life of Charles Dickens ).

It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats.

Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again.

The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river.