Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, in Landport, Portsmouth, in Hampshire, the second of eight children. When he was five, the family moved to Chatham, Kent. In 1822, when he was ten, the family relocated to 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town, in London.
Although his early years seem to have been an idyllic time, he thought himself then as a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy". He spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously. He talked, later in life, of his extremely poignant memories of childhood, and of his continuing photographic memory of the people and events that helped to bring his fiction to life. His family's early, moderate wealth provided the boy Dickens with some private education at William Giles' school, in Chatham. This time of prosperity came to an abrupt end, however, when his father, after having spent beyond his means in entertaining, and in retaining his social position, was imprisoned at Marshalsea debtor's prison. Shortly afterwards, the rest of his family (except for Charles, who boarded in Camden Town at the house of family friend Elizabeth Roylance), realizing no other option, joined him in residence at Marshalsea.
Just before his father's arrest, the 12-year-old Dickens had begun working ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station. He earned six shillings a week pasting labels on jars of thick shoe polish. This money paid for his lodgings with Mrs Roylance and helped support his family. Mrs. Roylance, Dickens later wrote, was "a reduced old lady, long known to our family". The mostly unregulated, strenuous—and often cruel—work conditions of the factory employees (especially children), made a deep impression on Dickens. His experiences served to influence later fiction and essays, and were the foundation of his interest in the reform of socioeconomic and labour conditions, the rigors of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor, in pre-Industrial-Revolution England.
Oliver Twist is the first novel in the English language to centre throughout on a child protagonist and is also notable for Dickens' unromantic portrayal of criminals and their sordid lives.
An early example of the social novel, the book calls the public's attention to various contemporary social evils, including the Poor Law that states that poor people should work in workhouses, child labour and the recruitment of children as criminals. Dickens mocks the hypocrisies of the time by surrounding the novel's serious themes with sarcasm and dark humour.