Dickens’s father was a poor man in the navy-pay office, at first with a yearly salary of £80. Micawber in David Copperfield was drawn from him. Even when he got as much as £350 a year he was always in debt, and finally landed in the Marshalsea, which Dickens so vividly describes in Little Dorrit. While still a child, Charles was sent to work in a blacking warehouse, described as the establishment of Murdstone & Grinby in David Copperfield. He had a terribly hard life of it. But after a while he was taken away and sent to school for a short time, finally studying shorthand and becoming a newspaper reporter of the debates in Parliament at a time when these were taken down verbatim. By the time he was twenty-four he was getting about thirty-five dollars a week. He tried a few sketches in a magazine (Sketches by Boz) which were successful in their way, and finally was asked by Chapman & Hall to write the text for some sporting pictures by a noted artist of the day. This turned out to be Pickwick, became instantly popular, and Dickens was a famous novelist before he was twenty-five. He wrote about twenty novels, and earned as much money as Scott (a million dollars), though many more copies of his novels have been published. He may be considered the most popular English novelist that ever wrote. Pickwick, Dickens’s first novel, is undoubtedly also his most humorous. It tells of the doings of a farcical club headed by Mr. Pickwick. But Pickwick’s servant, Sam Weller, is the most amusing character in it, and as a character probably the most famous in all Dickens’s works. Next to Pickwick in popularity, and by many liked much better, is David Copperfield. This is nothing less than a pathetic and intensely human autobiography of Dickens himself, with certain fictitious additions. David Copperfield is Charles Dickens (notice the reversed initials), Micawber is Dickens’s own father, and Dora was Dickens’s first love. Only a passionately sympathetic heart could have conceived this story, and only a man with an overflowing genius for work could have written it in the spontaneous and natural way that Dickens did.