Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on February 7, 1812 at Portsmouth, England. Dickens possessed the talent of using personal life experiences in his writings. Dickens's greatest influence to his stories was the life-changing event of his father being imprisoned on account of debt. To earn money for his family, Dickens was pulled out of school and sent to work at a boot blackening factory at age twelve. Dickens expresses his feelings for this and several other episodes cleverly in his novels. Some well-known writings such as Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and A Christmas Carol define his success as a novelist. Dickens later died of a paralytic stroke on June 9, 1870.