Charles Dickens was born in 1812 at Portsmouth ,where his father was a clerk in Navy Pay Office. But Dickens didn't live long in Portsmouth. When he was about four years of age his family moved to Chatham, and the five years he spent there were the happiest of all his boyhood. Just as young Shakespeare resolved that some day he would return to Stratford and buy the big house, New Place, there, so little Charles dreamed that some day, perhaps, he might live in a big house that he loved, Gadshill Place, at Rochester. And one day the dreams of both of them came true. But at the time there seemed little chance of it for Dickens. He was the oldest of a large family, eight in all, and his father, a happy-go-lucky, irresponsible man, was, like Mr.Micawber, always "waiting for something to turn up". What schooling Dickens had, he got at Chatham at a small day-school, and from his mother, who was a well-educated woman. The one day in a room upstairs, he found a pile books, Robinson Crusoe, Roderick Random, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield - rather strong meat for a boy of nine, but Dickens was delighted; the key to the treasure-house of English literature has been put in his hannd and his own imagination was wakened. In 1821 the Dickens family moved to Camden Town, London, into "a mean small house". Mr.Dickens was heavily in debt and didn't know which way to turn for money. The few possessions that they had were sold one by one, but things got no better, and finally Mr. Dickens was taken to the Marshalsea Prison, London, for debt. You will find the Marshalsea fully described in Little Dorrit. Dickens knew it only too well from bitter experience, for when all the goods had been sold, Mrs.Dickens and the younger children went to the prison, too, to join the father. Meanwhile, Charles had got a job in an under-ground cellar at blacking factory at old Hungerford Stairs in the East End of London. This was the most unhappy time of all his life. he was lonely and hungry. He hated the coarse, rough boys with whom he had to work and who cared for none of the things that he loved. But his fortunes took a turn for the better. He was able to leave the blacking factory and he entered a lawyer's office in Lincoln's Inn. He learned shorthand and was taken on the staff of newspaper, the Mourning Chronicle, and his life-work of writing had really begun.

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