II.

Early Life

Dickens was born near Portsmouth: his father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. The happiest period of Dickens's troubled childhood was spent in Chatham, although the family moved around a great deal. By early 1824, the family was in financial trouble and the 12-year old Dickens was sent to work for a few months at a shoe-polish warehouse on the banks of the Thames. A few days later, his father was arrested for debt. Dickens recalled this painful experience in the early chapters of David Copperfield (1849-1850), and it seemed to haunt him all his life: he called it “the secret agony of my soul”. His father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea Prison and, except for Charles, who had lodgings in Camden, and his sister, who was studying music, all the family lived in the prison with him like the Dorrit family in the first part of Little Dorrit (1855-1857). In the summer of 1824, after Dickens's father's case was heard by the Insolvency Court, the family was allowed to leave the prison but Dickens continued to work in the warehouse until 1825, when his father sent him to school at Wellington House Academy.

In 1827, Dickens worked as a junior clerk for a firm of solicitors in Holborn, but he hated the law, and was drawn instead to journalism. He learnt shorthand and began freelance reporting at the Doctors' Commons Courts, and in 1831-1832 he was making shorthand reports of Parliamentary debates for the London papers. He met and wanted to marry Maria Beadnell, but she seems to have rejected him; the comic portrait of Flora Casby in Little Dorrit is said to have been inspired by Dickens's meeting with Maria again later in life. By 1832 he was writing for his uncle's publication, the Mirror of Parliament, and the liberal paper, the Morning Chronicle.