The most famous novelist of Victorian England, who turned the misery of industrial poverty into fiction that millions read. Pulled from school at twelve to paste labels in a blacking factory while his father sat in a debtors’ prison, Dickens made that hidden wound the engine of his work. Selling his novels in cheap monthly instalments to an enormous public, he attacked the workhouse, the law’s delays, and industrial squalor — and gave the language Scrooge, Fagin, and the adjective Dickensian. His record also includes Fagin’s antisemitic caricature, which he partly revised after objection, and a cold public separation from his wife of twenty-two years.
When Charles Dickens was twelve, his father was arrested for debt and sent to prison, and the boy was put to work pasting labels on bottles in a rat-infested blacking warehouse by the river. He told almost no one about it for the rest of his life. That shame fed much of what he wrote. He became the most famous novelist of his century, a man whose monthly instalments were waited for on both sides of the Atlantic, whose readings filled halls, whose characters entered the language so completely that we still call cruelty and squalor "Dickensian." He turned the misery of factory England into stories millions read by the fire, and used those stories as weapons against the workhouse, the law, and indifference to the poor. The frightened child in the blacking factory never left him. He spent his life writing the children that England would rather not see.