Charles Dickens was born to a lower middle-class family, one of eight children and son of a Navy Pay Office clerk whose growing debts forced the Dickens family to move to the Marshalsea Debtors Prison in London when Charles was  only 12. Although his early childhood in Hampshire, London, and Kent was comfortable enough and he had some years of private education before his father's finances spiraled out of control, the family's move to the debtor's prison meant that Dickens had to leave school and go to work in London, working 10-hour, laborious days in Warren's Blacking Warehouse pasting labels on pots of boot polish. He despised this work and was outraged when his family didn't immediately liberate him from the back-breaking labor upon their release from Marshalsea. His experience at the Blacking Warehouse scarred Dickens, who was miserable and humiliated by the job and devastated, as he later wrote, that he "could have been so easily cast away at such an age." The suffering he felt and saw others feeling at the warehouse and its surrounds woke his life-long interest in the plight of the working classes, Victorian society's ill treatment of the poor, and the cruelties so often inflicted on these groups by people in power.

 After leaving the Blacking Warehouse and beginning work as a journalist, Dickens turned to novel-writing in the 1830s. In the decade leading up to the publication of A Christmas Carol in 1843, Dickens's entire life shifted: he went from scrappy journalist to celebrity author, launching his novelistic career with The Pickwick Papers in 1836-7 and Oliver Twist in 1838. These novels, like the majority of Dickens's novels, were first published serially in magazines, with sections coming out once a month while readers waited with bated breath for each new installment to arrive. There are apocryphal stories about Dickens fans storming the docks in New York in their impatience to get the final installment of The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), and it's been suggested that anticipation about the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the only modern comparison to the widespread public excitement about this final dramatic section of Dickens's novel. 

The publication of A Christmas Carol in 1843 cemented Dickens's popularity, and his career as a celebrity novelist for the next 25+ years was unmatched in the nineteenth century. In addition to the nine more novels, several novellas, and countless short stories and articles that followed Carol, Dickens conducted (edited) two major Victorian journals--Household Words (1850-1859) and All the Year Round (1859-1870)--using his editorial influence to shape both the literary tastes of English readerships and political sympathies for the sufferings of the working classes. Dickens's novels from the mid-1840s onward shift from the rollicking and overwrought melodrama of the earlier novels into more complex explorations of character, narrative voice, and the ways in which identity is inevitably shaped by the social world. 

Dickens remains a monolith of Victorian literature because his novels reveal the fissures and horrors of 19th-century British life in equal measure with its joyous weirdness and its potential for social, industrial, and aesthetic transformation. They offer us, as Dickens himself writes, "the romantic side of familiar things," as well as the grotesque truths of a modernizing world mired in colonial violence, gender, class, and racial inequality, and the beginnings of environmental decay. But Dickens endures as a staple of our own contemporary popular culture because his language and his characters refuse to let us retreat from the pleasures of feeling, or from our own ongoing responsibility to make the world a more humane, more just place for everyone to live in.

c. 1900