15. CHARLES DICKENS (+1812-1870+), the most popular writer of this century, was born at Landport, Portsmouth, in the year 1812. His delicate constitution debarred him from mixing in boyish sports, and very early made him a great reader. There was a little garret in his father’s house where a small collection of books was kept; and, hidden away in this room, young Charles devoured such books as the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ and many other famous English books. This was in Chatham. The family next removed to London, where the father was thrown into prison for debt. The little boy, weakly and sensitive, was now sent to work in a blacking manufactory at six shillings a-week, his duty being to cover the blacking-pots with paper. “No words can express,” he says, “the secret agony of my soul, as I compared these my everyday associates with those of my happier childhood, and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast.... The misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more, cannot be written.” When his father’s affairs took a turn for the better, he was sent to school; but it was to a school where “the boys trained white mice much better than the master trained the boys.” In fact, his true education consisted in his eager perusal of a large number of miscellaneous books. When he came to think of what he should do in the world, the profession of reporter took his fancy; and, by the time he was nineteen, he had made himself the quickest and most accurate-- that is, the best reporter in the Gallery of the House of Commons. His first work, +Sketches by Boz+, was published in 1836. In 1837 appeared the +Pickwick Papers+; and this work at once lifted Dickens into the foremost rank as a popular writer of fiction. From this time he was almost constantly engaged in writing novels. His +Oliver Twist+ and +David Copperfield+ contain reminiscences of his own life; and perhaps the latter is his most powerful work. “Like many fond parents,” he wrote, “I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child; and his name is _David Copperfield_.” He lived with all the strength of his heart and soul in the creations of his imagination and fancy while he was writing about them; he says himself, “No one can ever believe this narrative, in the reading, more than I believed it in the writing;” and each novel, as he wrote it, made him older and leaner. Great knowledge of the lives of the poor, and great sympathy with them, were among his most striking gifts; and Sir Arthur Helps goes so far as to say, “I doubt much whether there has ever been a writer of fiction who took such a real and living interest in the world about him.” He died in the year 1870, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.