Charles Dickens was born at Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, February 7th, 1812. Life in the Dickens family was not settled or stable. They moved frequently, and were always more or less uncertain as to the future. The father, as has been said, at one time was in a debtors' prison, and the family, including Charles, became familiar with the strange life of The Marshalsea which is described with exactitude in more than one of Dickens' novels, but especially in _Little Dorrit_. At other times, and even in the Marshalsea, life for the Dickens family was interesting, even exciting. Charles was unhappy because of the work to which he was put, and because he saw clearly, although he was only a little fellow, that he was losing the chance of obtaining an education. He was, however, an extraordinarily observant lad and read with passionate absorption all the books that he could find. Pictures of the strange people he met and of the queer things they {11} did remained with him throughout his life, and from this material gathered in his youth he fashioned his great novels. He had dreams of what he would be and of what he would do. The family lived for a number of years in Chatham, his father being a clerk in the navy pay-office at the dockyard, and he used to see, when he was walking with his father in the neighbouring country, a house called Gadshill Place. He planned then that some day he would own that house. It was in 1856 that he became the owner of Gadshill when he was forty-four years old, a considerable achievement for the boy of ten who had washed and re-covered blacking bottles. But many greater achievements than this were brought about by the genius of Charles Dickens. All his life these youthful days were lived over again in his stories and in his own memory. To a not inconsiderable extent they influence us, too, because of the novels which Dickens wrote. The roads of Kent, where he went walking when they lived in Chatham, are the great roads of his novels. The characters he wrote about were created from traits and habits which he had observed in people known by the boy Charles Dickens. The unjust laws and cruel customs against which he fought so powerful a battle were those whose victims had excited his pity long before he had grown up. When the family fortunes were brighter, Charles Dickens went to school again for a couple of years. But from the time he was fifteen, he earned his own living. He began as a clerk or {12} office boy. Later, he studied shorthand, and entered the reporters' gallery of the House of Commons when he was nineteen. He began to write articles and sketches soon afterwards. His first book, _Sketches by Boz_, was published when he was twenty-four. In the same year, he married Catherine Hogarth, the eldest daughter of George Hogarth, a fellow writer on _The Morning Chronicle_, who had been kind to him.