English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the victorian period. Dickens's works are characterized by attacs on social evil, injustice and hypocrisy. He had also experienced in his youth oppression when he was forced to end school in early teens and work in a factory. Dickens's good, bad, and comic characters such as the cruel miser Scrooge, the aspiring novelis David Copperfield, or the trusting and innocent Mr. Pickwick, have facinated generations of readers.
Charles Dickens was born in Landport, hampshire, during the new industrial age, which gave birth to theories ok Karl Marx. Dickens's father was a clerck in the navy pay office. He was well paid but often ended in financial troubles. In 1814 Dickens moved to London, and then to Chatham, where he received some education, and he made rapid progress. In 1824 Dickens was sent to work for some months at a blacking factory, Hungerford Market, London, while his father John was in Marshalea debtor's prison. "My father and mother were quite satisfied," Dickens remember. "They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge''. John Dickens paid his £40 debt with the money he inherited from his mother; she died at the age of seventy-nine when he was still in prison.
