From Blacking Factory to Bestseller: How Charles Dickens Became Victorian England's Storyteller

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was an English writer and journalist who is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. He is famous for three things above all: he created characters so vivid that their names became ordinary English words, he turned the novel into a monthly or weekly event that ordinary people waited for, and he used his stories to make comfortable readers look hard at poverty, child labour and cruel institutions. His books were wildly popular while he was alive and have never gone out of print since. If you have ever called someone "a scrooge" or described a grim workplace as "Dickensian", you have already met him.

A childhood that shaped everything

Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 in Portsmouth, the second of eight children. His father, John, was a clerk in the Royal Navy Pay Office, and the family moved several times before settling in Chatham, Kent, where young Charles read everything he could find, from Robinson Crusoe to The Arabian Nights. That happy period ended suddenly. The family fell into debt, and in 1824 John Dickens was sent to the Marshalsea debtors' prison in London.

Charles, only twelve, was taken out of school and put to work for ten hours a day at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, pasting labels on pots of boot polish for six shillings a week. The experience left a deep wound. He later wondered how he could have been "so easily cast away at such an age", and the anger he felt about the way the poor were treated became one of the main engines of his fiction. He was ashamed of this episode for most of his life, and very few people knew the details until his friend John Forster published a biography after his death.

After an inheritance freed his father, Charles went back to school for about two years. He then became a junior clerk in a law office, taught himself shorthand and worked as a freelance court reporter and later as a parliamentary journalist. Those years gave him two gifts that every page of his later work shows: a sharp ear for how people really talk, and a close view of how slow and absurd the legal system could be.

From "Boz" to Pickwick

Dickens started by writing short sketches of London life for newspapers and magazines, signing them "Boz", a family nickname. They were collected in 1836 as Sketches by Boz. The same year, a publisher asked him to write text to go with a series of comic illustrations. The result was The Pickwick Papers. Sales were slow at first, but when the witty Cockney servant Sam Weller appeared in the fourth episode, popularity shot up; the final instalment sold 40,000 copies, and shops soon offered Pickwick cigars, playing cards and figurines. Dickens, still in his mid-twenties, was suddenly a celebrity.

He followed it with Oliver Twist (1838), the story of an orphan dragged into a gang of London pickpockets. It is described as the first Victorian novel with a child as its hero. Even the young Queen Victoria read it and stayed up until midnight discussing it.

How he wrote: instalments and cliffhangers

Most of Dickens's major novels did not appear as complete books at first. They came out in monthly or weekly parts, in cheap numbers or in magazines, and were collected into volumes later. This made each story affordable to people who could never buy a full novel, and it changed the shape of the stories. Each part needed a strong ending to bring readers back next time. When The Old Curiosity Shop was being serialised, American fans reportedly waited at the New York docks and shouted to an arriving British ship, "Is little Nell dead?"

Serial writing also let Dickens watch his audience react and adjust his plans. In one well-known case, a real woman recognised herself in a character in David Copperfield and was hurt, so Dickens gave the character more positive features in later parts. Poor readers who could not read well sometimes paid a halfpenny each to hear a new episode read aloud, which helped create a whole new reading public. Critics today see the DNA of this episodic storytelling in television series and soap operas.

For twenty years he also edited weekly journals of his own, Household Words and then All the Year Round. Great Expectations, for example, first ran in All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861 before appearing in three volumes.

The major works in one view

• A Christmas Carol (1843) – the short ghost story of Ebenezer Scrooge. It did much to revive the warm, family-centred Christmas in Britain and America and remains his best-known tale.
• David Copperfield (1849–50) – his most autobiographical novel and, as he said himself, his personal favourite.
• Bleak House (1852–53) – a satire of the endless court case, often credited with bringing foggy, gloomy London into the novel.
• Hard Times (1854) – his only full-length novel about the industrial working class, where factory owners call workers "Hands".
• A Tale of Two Cities (1859) – historical fiction set in London and Paris, opening with "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
• Great Expectations (1860–61) – the coming-of-age story of the orphan Pip, with the jilted Miss Havisham and the convict Magwitch; its themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection.

Style: caricature, comedy and London itself

Dickens's prose is full of energy and invention. Satire and caricature are his strongest tools, and he worked hard on names that would stick and carry meaning: Mr Murdstone in David Copperfield suggests both "murder" and "stone". Many characters became words. A "scrooge" is a miser, "Pickwickian" and "Pecksniffian" entered dictionaries, and a "Uriah Heep" is a sycophant. He also loved to reproduce Cockney speech, with forms like ain't and dropped sounds, contrasting it with more "proper" English.

London is almost a character in its own right. Dickens walked the city constantly, often a dozen miles a day, and once wrote that if he could not walk fast and far, he would "just explode and perish". He mixed this realism with Gothic touches and big emotional scenes. Not everyone liked the sentiment: Oscar Wilde joked that one would need a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell "without dissolving into tears ... of laughter".

A writer with a social mission

Dickens was a fierce critic of poverty and social division in Victorian Britain. Through journalism he campaigned on sanitation and the workhouse, and his novels arguably did even more to change public opinion about class inequality. He also helped run Urania Cottage, a home for women trying to start new lives, and his public readings raised money for Great Ormond Street children's hospital. His record is not spotless; modern commentators point out inconsistencies and prejudices in some of his views, and when a reader rebuked him for the antisemitic portrayal of Fagin, he made changes to later printings.

The performer and the final years

Dickens loved theatre, and in his later career he toured Britain and the United States giving dramatic public readings of his own work. His first tour alone included 129 appearances in 49 towns, and audiences treated him like a modern star. His private life was less happy. He separated from his wife Catherine in 1858 after a long and painful marriage, and his relationship with the young actress Ellen Ternan remains partly a matter of speculation. In 1865 he survived the Staplehurst rail crash, comforting the injured before climbing back into the hanging carriage to rescue a manuscript.

Exhausted by reading tours, he suffered a stroke and died at his home, Gads Hill Place, on 9 June 1870, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished. He was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Why he still matters

Dickens's works have been adapted for film and television at least 200 times. Writers as different as Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jules Verne admired him, and the film director Sergei Eisenstein argued that Dickens's cross-cutting between parallel stories influenced cinema. For language learners he is a wonderful, if demanding, teacher: his sentences are long, but his dialogue is lively, his jokes still land, and many everyday English expressions come straight from his pages. A good first step is A Christmas Carol, which is short; Great Expectations is a natural next one.

Learn with Charles Dickens: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
a scrooge	a mean person who hates spending money	Don't be a scrooge – buy everyone a coffee.
Dickensian	reminding you of poor, harsh conditions in Dickens's novels	The old factory had Dickensian working conditions.
the best of times, the worst of times	a period that is both good and bad	Starting university was the best of times and the worst of times.
great expectations	strong hopes for the future	Her parents had great expectations for her.
a cliffhanger	an ending that leaves you in suspense	The episode ended on a cliffhanger.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a time in your life that was "the best of times and the worst of times", and use "a cliffhanger" in one of them.