Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1817, the son of John and Elizabeth Dickens. John Dickens was a lowly clerk who was impossibly bad with money. He landed in so much debt in fact the remedy turned out to be hard time. As for Charles, who was spared prison, he found himself an ipso facto prisoner of a factory called the Warren’s Blacking Factory. After the family’s finances were squared away, Charles, who had already been beaten down both physically and mentally, was sentenced to more time at the factory by his cold-blooded mother. This experience left an indelible stain on his creative psyche to later color and inspire his great works of betrayal, poverty, and unspeakable hardship such as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and his overarching masterpiece, Great Expectations. Once liberated from the numbing life of a factory worker, Charles Dickens, found his professional love, the art of writing, via his stint as a free-lance reporter at the House of Commons amongst other institutions. He also found romantic love in a woman called Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a banker. Sadly, his relationship with Maria fell to pieces when her parents discovered young Charles Dickens was nothing but a pauper. After lampooning her in a published story called Little Dorrit, Dickens began marching down the literary path in earnest. His newspaper career blasted him into orbit and he became known as “Boz.” His impoverished father was once again arrested for debt, and Charles had no choice but to bail him out, a pattern that would continue with other members of his family constantly after him for money almost until the end of his life. Good luck struck when after being hired to write stories to accompany illustrations by Robert Seymour, a series called “Sketches by Boz,” his partner in crime, the illustrator, killed himself. Charles took away from this the germ that would become The Pickwick Papers. This series became such a commercial success it naturally morphed into a novel. And on the heels of this notoriety, his girlfriend at the time, Catherine Hogarth, found herself unable to refuse his proposal of marriage. Although busy with many editorial and journalistic activities, from this time forward, in 1836 or ‘37 onward, with the inception of Oliver Twist on through the novel’s completion in 1839, Charles Dickens embarked on a full time career as a novelist. Meantime, he also began fathering children. In the end, there would be ten children in all! Naturally, the oldest boy was called Charles. His early works included Master Humphrey, which was began while working on a paper called Bentley’s Miscellany. Thereupon he created a few tomes that were decidedly Anti-American, although told from the inside out. They were American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, which, especially denounced the institution of slavery and the practice of chewing (and spitting!) tobacco. Traveling and writing a feverish rate, Charles Dickens produced such works as The Chimes; The Cricket and the Heath; and Pictures From Italy. He also founded a paper called “The Daily News” which he edited. Through the 1840’s until the very day he died, his capacity to write novels and stories for the papers was unstoppable. From Hard Times, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations, all of which were serialized before they became novels, illustrated a mastery of language and social complexity unparalleled in modern times. Charles Dickens’ contribution to English Literature is formidable. Legend has it that even at the very end of his life, after suffering more than one stroke, he was hard at work on a tale called The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Charles Dickens died in 1870 and was buried at Westminster Abbey.