Charles Dickens became one of the most popular writers of all time, creating some of the best-known characters in English literature.
He was born in Portsmouth, an important port on the south coast of England, in 1812.
His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office and for most of Charles's first ten years the family lived happily in Chatham, another naval town in Kent.
His mother encouraged him to read from an early age, and he was a good pupil at a local school.
Unfortunately, his father was not a good manager of money and the family became poorer and poorer.
When Charles was only ten years later, they were deeply, and Charles had to leave school and start to work.
For six months he worked in a factory, doing hard and dirty work for little pay.
But during those first two years in London, he walked the streets and became familiar with all the areas of that great city and with it's people, rich and poor.
He also continued his reading and, after leaving school, began to work in lawyer's offices.
He also started to write articles for newspapers and magazines about London and Londoners, using the name 'Boz'.
By the age of twenty he was a reporter in law courts and in parliament.
When he was twenty-four, his collection of short pieces was published in book form as sketches by Boz, and this was so so popular that two other collections were published later.
At twenty-five he became editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a monthly magazine, and began to write chapters for it of a story called The Parish Boy's Progress.
Under the pen-name 'Boz', he was at the same time regularly writing short, magazine, and these were becoming enormously popular.
He continued to write these Pickwick Papers until 1837.
He seemed to enjoy the pressure of work at this time, writing new stories about Pickwick, new chapters of The Parish Boy's Progress (later to be called Oliver Twist) as well as being both the editor and a writer of other pieces for his magazine.
He wrote by hand, of course, and at great speed.
His plots are often criticized for being loose and full of chance relationships and meetings.
This cannot be denied, but the great strength of his writing was in his characters, and in the descriptions of real people and places based on his years as a journalist.
