The Author

Born in Portsmouth

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, on the southern coast of England. His father, John Dickens, was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office — a genial, improvident man who lived beyond his means and would eventually drag the family into disaster. In 1824, when Charles was twelve, John Dickens was arrested for debt and sent to the Marshalsea prison in Southwark. The family — except Charles and his sister Fanny — joined him there, as was the custom. Young Charles was sent to work at Warren's Blacking Factory, pasting labels onto pots of boot polish for six shillings a week.

The experience shattered him. For the rest of his life, he never spoke of the blacking factory — it was a secret he guarded even from his own children, revealing it only in a fragment of autobiography found after his death. But the shame, the hunger, and the casual cruelty of poverty shaped everything he wrote. The debtors' prison appears in Little Dorrit; the orphaned child in Oliver Twist; the grinding factory in David Copperfield. Every page of Dickens carries the memory of those months. He once wrote: “I know that I worked, from morning to night, with common men and boys, a shabby child.”

The Meteoric Rise

After his father's release from prison (paid by an inheritance), Dickens was able to return to school briefly. At fifteen, he became a clerk at a law office, then taught himself shorthand and became a parliamentary reporter — learning to transcribe the speeches of politicians at lightning speed. He began submitting sketches of London life to magazines under the pseudonym “Boz.” In 1836, at the age of twenty-four, he published the first installment of The Pickwick Papers. It was a sensation. Within months, Dickens was famous — the most popular writer in England, a twenty-four-year-old phenomenon whose serialized novels created a national hunger for the next installment.

The Relentless Career

Over the next three decades, Dickens wrote fifteen major novels, edited journals (including Household Words and All the Year Round), performed public readings across Britain and America that were closer to theatrical performances than mere recitations, campaigned for social reform, founded a home for “fallen women” (Urania Cottage), and worked himself to the edge of exhaustion and beyond. He was the most famous writer in the English-speaking world, a celebrity of an intensity we associate with movie stars or pop singers. When he died, a London costermonger reportedly said: “Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”

The Historical Turn

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) was a departure. It was his only historical novel, apart from Barnaby Rudge (1841). Its origins were twofold. In 1857, Dickens acted in a play called The Frozen Deep, written by his friend Wilkie Collins. The play was about self-sacrifice in the Arctic — the theme that would become the novel's engine. Dickens played a selfless hero, Richard Wardour, who gives his life so that the woman he loves may marry another man. The character haunted him, and from it Sydney Carton was born.

The second source was Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History(1837) — a book Dickens read and re-read obsessively, carrying it with him everywhere. Carlyle portrayed the Revolution as an apocalyptic event, a convulsion of history driven by mass suffering and divine retribution. The novel's vision of revolutionary violence — the wine shop running with blood, the dancing Carmagnole, the grinding inevitability of the guillotine — owes everything to Carlyle. Dickens claimed he had read Carlyle's book “for the 500th time” during the writing of the novel.

The Method of Publication

Like all of Dickens's novels, A Tale of Two Cities was published in weekly installments — in this case, in his journal All the Year Round, which he had founded the previous year. Each installment had to end with a cliffhanger to ensure readers returned the following week. This serial structure created the novel's propulsive, almost breathless rhythm — a rhythm very different from the sprawling, digressive pace of his earlier works. The novel is only about 135,000 words — remarkably short by Dickensian standards — and it moves with the speed and force of a thriller.

The Final Years

The 1860s were punishing. Dickens's marriage to Catherine had collapsed; he was involved with a young actress, Nelly Ternan; his health was failing, but he could not stop. His public readings became ever more intense — in the “Sikes and Nancy” reading from Oliver Twist, his heart rate would reach dangerous levels, and his managers pleaded with him to stop. He refused. The readings were an addiction — they gave him the immediate contact with an audience that he craved — and they killed him. On June 9, 1870, Charles Dickens died of a stroke at his home, Gad's Hill Place, at the age of 58. He left The Mystery of Edwin Droodunfinished, its ending one of literature's great unsolved puzzles. He was buried in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.