Dickens, Charles

Charles Dickens appealed to rich and poor alike, and was the most popular of all the Victorian authors. He was born into a middle-class family in the coastal town of Portsmouth in southeast England. He had a happy childhood in Chatham, a place that often features in his books. At the age of twelve, he discovered that there were other children whose lives were very different from his own. His father has been described as jovial and talkative; an unreliable and gregarious man who earned a decent income as a naval clerk, but like Mr Micawber, one of Dickens's later characters, he was unable to handle money. The family fell on hard times and the father was jailed for debt.