Charles Dickens was born at Portsea in 1812. His early years were happy. He had a voracious appetite for reading, loved to learn and excelled in school. His childhood was shattered in 1824, when his father was arrested for debts. At twelve, he was sent to work at Warren's Blacking Factory earning six pence a week. When his family was released from prison, his mother forced him to continue his work at the blacking company, providing him with a negative attitude towards women which he would portray in future works. At the age of fifteen, he began working for a law firm but became bored with his work there and began to write. He started out as a reporter. His first edition of The Pickwick Papers coincided with his marriage to Catherine Hogarth with whom he had ten children but after fifteen years of unhappiness the couple separated.

He continued to write and was successful but unhappy in his personal life, particularly with his sons. Some of them seemed to inherit their grandfathers knack for wasting money and seemed destined to lives of useless snobbery, much in the manner of the early Pip in Great Expectations. He was halfway through his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, when he suffered a stroke and died on June 9, 1870. He was buried in the Poet's corner of Westminster Abbey five days later.