II.

Early Years

Dickens was born in Portsmouth, on England’s southern coast. His father was a clerk in the British Navy pay office—a respectable position, but with little social status. His paternal grandparents, a steward (property manager) and a housekeeper, possessed even less status, having been servants, and Dickens later concealed their background. Dickens’s mother supposedly came from a more respectable family. Yet two years before Dickens’s birth, his mother’s father was caught embezzling and fled to Europe, never to return.

The family’s increasing poverty forced Dickens out of school at age 12 to work in Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, a shoe-polish factory, where the other working boys mocked him as “the young gentleman.” His father was then imprisoned for debt. The humiliations of his father’s imprisonment and his labor in the blacking factory formed Dickens’s greatest wound and became his deepest secret. He could not confide them even to his wife, although they provide the unacknowledged foundation of his fiction.

Soon after his father’s release from prison, Dickens got a better job as errand boy in law offices. He taught himself shorthand to get an even better job later as a court stenographer and as a reporter in Parliament. At the same time, Dickens, who had a reporter’s eye for transcribing the life around him, especially anything comic or odd, submitted short sketches to obscure magazines. The first published sketch, “A Dinner at Poplar Walk” (later retitled “Mr. Minns and His Cousin”) brought tears to Dickens’s eyes when he discovered it in the pages of The Monthly Magazine in 1833. From then on his sketches, which appeared under the pen name “Boz” (rhymes with “rose”) in The Evening Chronicle, earned him a modest reputation. Boz originated as a childhood nickname for Dickens’s younger brother Augustus.

Dickens became a regular visitor at the home of George Hogarth, editor of The Evening Chronicle, and in 1835 became engaged to Hogarth’s daughter Catherine. Publication of the collected Sketches by Boz in 1836 gave Dickens sufficient income to marry Catherine Hogarth that year. The marriage proved unhappy.