Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was an English writer, one of the greatest English-language prose writers of the nineteenth century, a humanist, and a classic of world literature.

Chesterton’s characterization of Dickens is close to the truth: “Dickens was a vivid voice,” writes this English writer, in many respects akin to him, “a kind of spokesman for the universal inspiration, impulse, and intoxicating enthusiasm that had taken hold of England, calling everyone and anyone to lofty aims. His best works are an exultant hymn to freedom. His entire творчество shines with the reflected light of revolution.”

Dickens’s prose is imbued with wit, which influenced the originality of the national character and way of thinking known in the world as “English humor.”

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in the town of Landport, near Portsmouth. His father was a fairly well-to-do official, a rather frivolous man, but cheerful and good-natured, who enjoyed the comforts and cosiness that every prosperous family in old England valued so highly. Mr. Dickens surrounded his children, and especially his favorite Charlie, with care and affection. Little Dickens inherited from his father a rich imagination and facility with words, apparently adding to these a certain seriousness about life inherited from his mother, on whose shoulders fell all the practical worries of preserving the family’s well-being.

The boy’s rich abilities delighted his parents, and his artistically inclined father literally tormented his little son, making him act out various scenes, recount his impressions, improvise, recite poems, and so on. Dickens turned into a little actor filled with self-love and vanity.

However, the Dickens family suddenly fell into ruin. His father was thrown into debtor’s prison for many years, and his mother had to struggle with poverty. Spoiled, frail, fanciful, and self-absorbed, the boy found himself in the harsh conditions of exploitation in a factory producing blacking.

For the rest of his life Dickens regarded this family ruin and this period of blacking manufacture as the greatest insult to him, an undeserved and humiliating blow. He did not like to talk about it; he even concealed these facts, but it was from this place, from the depths of need, that Dickens drew his ardent love for