Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, and spent the first nine years of his life living in the coastal regions of Kent, a county in southeast England. Dickens's father, John a clerk in the Naval Pay Office, was a kind and likable man, but he was incompetent with money and piled up tremendous debts throughout his life. When Dickens was nine, his family moved to London. When he was twelve, his father was arrested and taken to debtors' prison. Dickens's mother moved his seven brothers and sisters into prison with their father, but she arranged for the young Charles to live alone outside the prison and work with other children pasting labels on bottles in a blacking warehouse (blacking was a type of manufactured soot used to make a black pigment for products such as matches or fertilizer). Dickens, already scarred psychologically by the experience, found the three months he spent apart from his family highly traumatic.
Charles Dickens, a former resident of Lant Street.
Dickens at the Blacking Warehouse. Charles Dickens...
Photo of illustration form novel "The Pickwick pap...Not only was the job itself miserable, but he considered himself too good for it, earning the contempt of the other children. His father, however, rescued him from that fate, and between 1824 and 1827 Dickens was a day pupil at a school in London. At fifteen, he found employment as an office boy at an attorney's, while he studied shorthand at night. His brief stint at the Blacking Factory haunted him all of his life -- he spoke of it only to his wife and to his closest friend, John Forster -- but the dark secret became a source both of creative energy and of the preoccupation with the themes of alienation and betrayal which would emerge, most notably, in David Copperfield and in Great Expectations. He eventually became a law clerk, then a court reporter, and finally a novelist.