Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens is a British novelist and one of the most popular writers in world literature.
In his extensive work, he combined with master narrative, humour, irony and tragic sense, along
with an acid social criticism and a sharp description of people and places, both real and imagined.
He was born on February 7 th , 1812, in Portsmouth, and he spent most of his childhood in London
and Kent, places that appear frequently in his work.
He began to go to school when he was nine, but his studies were interrupted when his father,
a small civil servant, was jailed in 1824 for not paying their debts. Dickens had to provide for
himself, so he started working in a dye factory. This unpleasant experience, which he later will
describe in in his novel David Copperfield (1850), gave him a sense of humiliation and
abandonment that accompanied him for the rest of his life. From 1824 to 1826 returned to his
studies although most of his education was self-taught. Among his favourite books were those of
some of the great novelists of the eighteenth century, as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, whose
influence can be perceived clearly in his own writings.
In 1827 he got a job as a legal secretary and, after studying for a short time the profession,
he became a journalist at the Parliament, which will accustomed to make accurate descriptions of
events, attribute that then will apply in his narrative. At that time he met Mary Beadnell but her
family rejected him as a suitor of the young lady, so, after a four-year relationship, they parted. By
then, he was already working as a reporter for a publication of his uncle, The Mirror of Parliament,
and for the liberal daily The Morning Chronicle.
In December 1833, Dickens published, under the pen name Boz, the first of a series of short
original descriptions of everyday life in London in The Monthly Magazine, which was published by
his friend George Hogarth. After this, a London publisher asked him for a volume of notes that had
to go with the illustrations of the famous artist George Cruikshank. The success of this book, titled
Sketches by Boz (1836), allowed the novelist to marry Catherine Hogarth, this encouraged him to
prepare a similar collaboration, this time with known artist Robert Seymour. When Seymour
committed suicide, another artist, H.K. Browne, nicknamed Phiz,who would later carry out with
many of the illustrations of the latest works of Dickens. The result of this collaboration was
Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837), a work similar to comics, which success
consolidated the fame of the novelist and greatly influenced the publishing industry of the country,
for its innovative format. This fame helped to make his following woks succeed.
Charles Dickens was devoted to other activities. He edited the weekly Household News
(1850-1859) and All the Year Round (1859-1870), he wrote two travel books, American Notes
(1842) and Pictures from Italy (1846), he managed charity associations and fought for social
reforms . In 1842, he gave seminars in the United States for an international agreement on
intellectual property and against slavery. In 1843 he published A Christmas Carol, which quickly
became a classic of children's fiction.
