205 years ago, on February 7, 1812, was born in Portsmouth, England, John Huff Charles Dickens, an English novelist, known for the 19th-century realism, reflected in his novels. Up to the age of 12, Dickens‘s childhood was peaceful and happy. His family belonged to the nobility and he went to a private school. His father, a bohemian character, was incarcerated in a debtor’s prison. To help his family, Charles was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. A few years later, the family received an inheritance, but Charles‘s mother, Elizabeth Dickens, did not immediately support his removal from the boot-blacking warehouse. This influenced Dickens‘s view that a father should rule the family, and a mother to find her proper sphere inside the home. His mother’s failure to request his return was a factor in his dissatisfied attitude towards women. Later on, he worked as a clerk in a lawyer’s office (in 1827), as a court stenographer and as a journalist. During the election campaign, he wrote Sketches of Boz reports. Boz was the pseudonym of Charles Dickens.

His first novel, The Pickwick Papers, was published in the Monthly Magazine in 1833. After a failed relationship with his first love, Maria Beadnell, Dickens married Catherine Hogarth. They had ten children. Although when he met Catherine he was very much in love with her, after ten years of marriage, Dickens increasingly alienates from their marriage. He was thinking she was guilty of having so many children, he had begun to criticize her more and more and to consider that she is intellectually beneath him. In 1858, after twenty-two years of marriage and ten children, Dickens decided to separate from Catherine and announces the separation in the London Times, and separately, in a private note, describes her as being an incompetent mother, always depressed and an unattractive figure. Catherine is forced to move separately, without her children and receives an annual rent of £ 600 for life. Dickens was fond of Catherine‘s sister, Mary, who lived with the couple, even requesting to be buried next to her after her death in 1837. It is said that, after Mary‘s death, Dickens removed a ring from her finger, which he wore for the rest of his life. It was, at that time, a highly controversial topic.

In 1857, Dickens meets Ellen (Nellie) Ternana, an actress as old as his younger daughter, Kate, and he falls in love with her. When they met, Charles was 45 and Ellen, 18. During this period, he decided he and Catherine move into separate bedrooms. To hide his affair, Dickens invented various Machiavellian subterfuge, including fake names and codes, and burnt all the papers, all his documents and every letter he had received from Ellen Ternana. The two had a child who died during infancy. EllenTernan was intelligent and charming, with a strong character and showing much interest in literature and theatre. Dickens called her “my magic circle“. In 1860, Ellen leaves the theatre and will be from now on financially supported by Dickens. In 1870, after his death, Dickens bequeathed her a legacy of £ 1,000 and sufficient income in a separate trust fund to ensure that she will not have to work again. The love story between Charles and Nellie can be seen it the film The Invisible Woman. Charles Dickens died on 9 June 1870 at the age of 58, following a heart attack and he is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Charles Dickens invested part of his copyright in a new newspaper at the time, the Daily News. The writer was afraid of bats, he was an insomniac and had as a pet, a raven. Dickens‘s work is the image of English society in the first half of the 19th century. The most popular of his novels are The Pickwick Papers, The adventures of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, both inspired by his childhood, A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations.

His last book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, remained unfinished. Almost three years after the death of Charles Dickens, in March 1873, after five months of work, the last six chapters of the novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood were finished by an unknown man, named Thomas James, who was an assistant printer, and who claims that Charles Dickens himself would be dictated beyond the six chapters dead end!