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.

On 9 June 1865 the Folkestone boat train derailed at Staplehurst, tipping carriages onto a viaduct under repair. For hours before help arrived, Dickens climbed among the wreckage giving brandy and hatfuls of water to the dying, then climbed back into his own precarious carriage for one last thing: the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend, still in his coat pocket.