Charles Dickens

Born in Portsmouth in 1812, Dickens endured the defining trauma of his childhood when his father was sent to debtors' prison and twelve-year-old Charles was put to work pasting labels in a blacking factory. That humiliation fueled a lifelong championing of the poor and a genius for depicting suffering with humor. He began as a parliamentary reporter and sketch writer before the serial publication of The Pickwick Papers (1836) made him famous at twenty-four. Over the next three decades he produced a torrent of novels including Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and A Christmas Carol, serialized in magazines that kept all of England in suspense. He gave wildly popular public readings on both sides of the Atlantic, conducted a secret love affair with the actress Ellen Ternan, and drove himself to exhaustion. He died of a stroke in 1870 at fifty-eight, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.