The skill allowed him to begin working as a reporter in the 1830s covering Parliament and British elections for outlets like The Morning Chronicle. In 18, the 15-year-old Dickens found work as a junior clerk at the law office of Ellis and Blackmore-but instead of brushing up on legal work to eventually become a lawyer, he voraciously studied the shorthand method of writing developed by Thomas Gurney. Left to fend for himself at only 12 years old, Dickens had to drop out of private school and work at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse along the River Thames, earning six shillings a week pasting labels onto blacking pots used for shoe polish. When his father was called to London again to be a clerk in the Naval Pay Office, the elder Dickens amassed so much debt that the entire family-except for Charles and his older sister Fanny-were sent to Marshalsea debtors’ prison (later the setting of Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit). He was, admittedly, a “very small and not over-particularly-taken-care-of boy." The eldest son of Elizabeth and John Dickens was born in February 1812 on Portsea Island in the British city of Portsmouth, and moved around with his family in his younger years to Yorkshire and then London. Charles Dickens was forced to work at a young age. February 7, 1812, Portsmouth, Hampshire, EnglandĪ Christmas Carol (1843), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1861)ġ.
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