Charles Dickens - The Man:

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Charles John Huffam Dickens was born February 7th, 1812 in a small terrace house near Portsmouth, England, He was the second of eight children born to John and Elizabeth Dickens.

His father worked as a pay clerk at the Admiralty's Portsmouth office. Towards the end of 1814 his work required moving his family to London, and later on to Chatham in Kent.

The young Charles was taught to read by his mother and he soon learned to pass happy hours devouring the marvels found in his father’s small collection of classics: The Arabian Nights, The Vicar of Wakefield', Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and the romances of Tobias Smolett and Henry Fielding. Perhaps these wonders inspired him to write his first tale, Misnar, which was based, in part, on the Tales of the Genii. He also learned to delight in the theater at this early age.

In the meantime, when he was nearing twelve years of age, his father’s carelessness in financial matters resulted in his imprisonment for debt in the Marshalsea Prison in London.

Dickens described and fully explored this prison with much pathos in his novel Little Dorrit. But while Mrs. Dickens and the other children went to live with Mr. Dickens in the Marshalsea, Charles was sent to work pasting labels on bottles at Warren’s Blacking factory. This experience, which lasted about six months, left a deep wound in his consciousness -- so deep, indeed, that in later years he told his first biographer, John Forster, that he could never speak of it to his children or closest friends. But his amazing faculties of observation and memory helped him portray what he witnessed in those months in the prison scenes of The Pickwick Papers and the degradation he felt at the blacking warehouse in the earlier part of David Copperfield.

Although Dickens’s formal education was scanty he made the most of it. At the age of fourteen, he took a position as clerk in the office of a Mr. Molloy in Lincoln's Inn. With this new job came the inspiration to start reading again. He regularly visited the British Museum where, along with his reading on a wide array of subjects, he studied short hand writing.

This led him to a job reporting House of Commons debates for a newspaper called the True Sun.. He quickly rose to become the best and quickest Parliamentary reporter of all. This led to assignments throughout the realm and he further honed his powers of observation, his ear for unique speech patterns and his quick insight into character.

Bridling with still unfulfilled ambition he also decided to study acting. Had he not been sick on the day he was supposed to audition at the Covent Garden his path might have led him to a brilliant career on the stage.
Instead, his growing renown as a reporter gave him the opportunity to write a series of articles that we now know as Sketches by Boz. From thereon the extraordinary career of Charles Dickens, the writer, is well known.