A Famous Writer – The Story of Charles Dickens

In the country of Kent in England, not far from the town of Gravesend and near the river Thames, which bears the same name? More than a hundred years ago a small boy and his father, in their frequent walks towards Gravesend, often passed by the house. The boy was never tired to looking at it, and of fancying what it would be like inside. To him it seemed to be the finest house in the world, and he longed to have it for his own. He told his father so, and received the reply: “If you were to be very persevering and were to work very hard, you might someday come to live in it.”

Little Charles Dickens, for that was the boy’s name, kept the words in mind. When he grew up, all through his busy life as a writer, he was most persevering and a very hard worker; and when, later in life, he was the author of some of the most famous stories in English, he was able to buy Gad’s Hill Place, the house of his dream, and to make it his home.

Charles Dickens had, however, many difficulties and hardships to meet and overcome before that time came. His boyhood was not an easy one. When Charles was only twelve, poverty and debt forced his father to give up his home’ and the boy had to work in the London warehouse of a blacking factory for a wage of six or seven shillings a week. “What would I have given, if I had anything to give,” he said once, years after, when thinking of those unhappy, anxious times, “to have been sent to any school, to have been taught something somewhere!” For little Charles loved reading and books.

At the warehouse, he stuck labels on blacking bottles all day long, hating his work, but at the same time taken an odd pride in doing it as well as he could, and keenly noticing everyone and everything about him.

Yet matters soon mended. In a little while Mr. Dickens had more money to spend upon his family; they had a home once again, and Charles was sent to school for two years. Though he was not a very good scholar, he liked nothing better than to write stories for his schoolmates and to help to produce plays and act in them.

When Charles left school, he worked for eighteen months in a lawyer’s office; in his spare time, he taught himself shorthand and did some acting in private plays. He did not care much for the law, so, when an evening newspaper offered him a post as reporter, he accepted the work gladly. A few years later, he received a more important position of the same kind.

Newspaper reporting is not easy work, but it taught Dickens many things. He learnt to work hard and steadily, and he met and came to know all kind of odd people and their ways. Many a man or woman who amused him then has been made to live again for us in his stories.

He had to travel up and down the country, too, in stagecoaches and post-chaises. Here he met more strange people of all classes, and later on, he was able to give to his readers the clearest pictures of the old coaching days that went forever when railways became common, and of the quaint old inns of England where travelers upon the highroads mingled and became friends.

The young reporter had many adventures, both pleasant and unpleasant, in those days. “I have been belated,” he once wrote, “on muddy by-roads, in the small hours of the morning, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheel less carriage, with worn –out horses, and have got back in time for my paper. I have had to charge for the damage of a greatcoat from the drippings of a blazing wax candle, in writing through the smallest hours of the night in a swift-flying carriage and pair. I have had to charge for all sorts of breakages-broken hats, broken luggage, broken chaises –everything but a broken head.”

Before he was twenty-four Dickens began to write stories, which have made his name famous. Among them are The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, David copper-field, The Old curiosity Shop, and The Christmas Carol. These are but a few of his work, which are read almost as eagerly today as when they were first published.

Dickens created all kinds of odd, amusing, and delightful people in his stories. They seem to us, as we read of them, to live and to become our friends, as real as the folk whom we meet every day. His novels did great deal of good also, for in many of them public wrongs and shames were held up to scorn. People read the novels and thought deeply about the lessons they taught, and as a result, many an evil in England was either cured or destroyed altogether.

Dickens died suddenly in the year 1870, and as one of England’s most famous sons, he was buried in Westminster Abbey. To those who knew him best he was a good companion, with a bright, happy nature and one of the biggest and kindest hearts in the world. ‘To do unto all men as I would they should do unto me’ was his motto all his life, and Charles Dickens faithfully followed it.

– By Dorothy King