Dickens, Charles - Life (3)

Charles Dickens

He was born in Portsea in 1812. He had an unhappy childhood caused by the financial difficult of his family: his father went to prison for debts and he had to work in a factory at the age of twelve.
The realty he sperimented in his life is presented in his novels. At nineteen he became a journalist for “Mirror of Parliament” newspaper. He married Kate Hogarth and they had ten children.
He began to write sketches (short stories and description of English life). In 1836 he published his first novel “The Pickwick Papers” which appeared in a magazine every month. This was the first of many best-selling novels, published in parts every month in a magazine, among them "Oliver Twist" (1837-38), "Nicholas Nickleby" (1854), "David Copperfield" (1849-50), "Hard Times" (1854) and "Great Expectations" (1860-61).
But Dickens did many other things. In the course of his life, he was a magazine editor, an amateur actor, a writer of plays, articles, and hundreds of letters. He also liked to travel, and lived in Italy (1844-44), Switzerland (1846-7) and Paris in 1847. In 1842 he visited North America, where he returned in 1867-8 to read his books in public. It was a huge success, but it was hard work and became ill, died in 1870 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
He always attacked the materialism of Victorian society and tried to show how caused poverty and other social problems.