Charles Dickens

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Born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812 on Old Commercial Road, Charles Dickens was a well-known personality and his novels proved immensely popular during his lifetime. His first full novel, The Pickwick Papers, brought him immediate fame, and this success continued throughout his career.

His father, inspiration for the character of Mr Micawber in David Copperfield, was imprisoned for bad debt. His family, all apart from Charles, were sent to Marshalsea prison for the father's crimes. Forced to leave school at the age of 12 for a job in a factory, Dickens based several of his characters on his experiences. He began working 10 hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse on Hungerford Stairs, pasting labels on blacking. The strenuous - and often cruel - work conditions for children made a deep impression on Dickens, and later influenced his fiction and essays.

In 1851 Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he would write Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1857). In 1856, the income he was earning from his writing allowed him to buy Gad's Hill Place in Higham, Kent. Major works, A Tale of Two Cities (1859); and Great Expectations (1861) soon followed and would prove resounding successes. During this time he was also the publisher and editor of, and a major contributor to, the journals Household Words (1850-1859) and All the Year Round (1858-1870).

On 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. The first seven carriages of the train plunged off a cast iron bridge under repair. Although physically unharmed, Dickens never really recovered from the trauma of the Staplehurst crash, and his normally prolific writing shrank to completing Our Mutual Friend and starting the unfinishedThe Mystery of Edwin Drood. Much of his time was taken up with public readings from his best-loved novels.

Between 1868 and 1869, Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" in England, Scotland, and Ireland, until he collapsed on 22 April 1869, at Preston in Lancashire showing symptoms of a mild stroke. After further provincial readings were cancelled, he began work on his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home, after a full day's work on The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The next day, on 9 June, and five years to the day after the Staplehurst rail crash 9 June 1865, he died at Gad's Hill Place, never having regained consciousness.

Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner, he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads: To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world.