Charles Dickens

Dickens was the son of a Royal Navy wages clerk, and the family lived in different seaports, including Portsmouth, Plymouth, London, and Chatham. Like Mr Micawber, Dickens’s father spent more money than he had, and in 1823 he was arrested for debt. Charles had to leave school and start his first job, in a bottling works. He later returned to school, then started work as a trainee clerk in a solicitor's office, where he learned shorthand. As a result, he got more work as a court reporter for the Morning Chronicle newspaper, moving on to reporting speeches from the House of Commons.

In 1836 Dickens published his first books, Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, and many more followed.

Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in 1836, and they had ten children before separating in 1858. Several of their children were named after famous writers. Charles Culliford Boz Dickens was born in 1837, then Mary Dickens (1838), Kate Macready Dickens (1839), Walter Savage Landor Dickens (1841), Francis Jeffrey Dickens (1844), Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens (1845) Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens (1847), Henry Fielding Dickens (1849), Dora Annie Dickens (1850) and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens (1852).

Charles Dickens's books are -

Sketches by Boz (1836)
Sunday under Three Heads (1836)
The Village of Coquettes (1836)
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836)
Oliver Twist (1838)
Sketches of Young Gentlemen (1838)
The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi (1838)
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838)
Sketches of Young Couples (1840)
Master Humphrey's Clock (1840)
The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)
Barnaby Rudge (1841)
American Notes for General Circulation (1842)
Martin Chuzzlewit (1843)
A Christmas Carol (1843)
The Chimes (1845)
The Cricket on the Hearth (1846)
The Battle of Life: a Love Story (1846)
Pictures from Italy (1846)
Dombey and Son (1848)
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848)
The Personal History of David Copperfield (1849)
A Child's History of England (1852)
Bleak House (1852)
Hard Times (1854)
Little Dorrit (1855)
A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Great Expectations (1861)
The Uncommercial Traveller (1861)
Our Mutual Friend (1864)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) (unfinished)