The conscience of his age

A small room on the second floor of 48 Doughty Street, West London. In the centre stands an old mahogany writing desk, its leather top worn from heavy use. The man who once sat here created some of the most memorable characters in English literature. His name was Charles Dickens. In March 1837, when he moved to this Georgian terraced house with his wife and growing family, he was an ambitious but little-known writer.

Today, the building houses the Charles Dickens Museum. It celebrates the life of a man who, through his novels, travel writing, journalism and letters, came to personify 19th-century London. In a city full of Victorian contradictions, he wrote tales of humour, heroism and love, as well as poverty, neglect and cruel injustice. As he writes in A Tale of Two Cities (1859): "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

A childhood interrupted

Born on 7 February 1812 in Portsea (Portsmouth) on the south coast of England, Charles John Huffam Dickens was the eldest son of John and Elizabeth Dickens and the second of their eight children. He was a happy, energetic child who was encouraged to read from an early age. "We never tire of the friendships we form with books," he wrote later. And that friendship lasted a lifetime.

Young Charles's life changed dramatically when his father, a pay clerk in the Royal Navy, became insolvent. John Dickens was jailed in Marshalsea debtors' prison in London in 1824. Elizabeth and the youngest children joined him there.

It was a terrible experience, not least for 12-year-old Charles, who was sent to work in a blacking factory, which made shoe polish. The conditions were terrible and the work dirty and tedious for ten hours a day, six days a week. His father was released from prison after a few months, but Dickens continued to work at the factory for months after. He describes his traumatic experiences in the novel David Copperfield (1849).

Ultimately, Dickens believed the experience to be character-building. As a father, social activist and writer, he was better able to understand the damage inflicted on the poor and vulnerable. Children, and their suffering, took centre stage in many of his most popular works.

Exposing society

At the age of 15, Dickens began working in London as a law clerk in Gray's Inn (one of England's four legal societies). He used to go to the theatre almost every day. After two years, he was disenchanted with the law, and ready for change. His father was now working as a parliamentary reporter and Dickens decided to join him.

Three years later, he was gaining confidence as a journalist and actively involved in the theatre. He landed an acting audition at Covent Garden, which he missed due to illness. Theatre's loss was publishing's gain. Dickens began writing stories and produced a series of newspaper sketches of everyday London life. He got to know the editor of the Evening Chronicle, George Hogarth, and met Hogarth's daughter Catherine. The attraction was immediate. They were married on 2 April 1836.

This was a time of dramatic change in Dickens's life. Just two months earlier, his collection of illustrated short stories, Sketches by Boz, had been published in book form. Now, he was commissioned to work on a series of illustrated "sporting" stories, for which he invented the fictional Pickwick Club and its founder, Samuel Pickwick.

His tales were both a comic and serious exposé of the failings and inequalities of society and the judicial system. Most popular by far with the public was the character of Sam Weller, Mr Pickwick's cockney valet and source of endless wise sayings. The Pickwick Papers (1836) generated a range of stage plays, joke books and other merchandise, making Dickens a pioneer of his own "brand".

"Bah! Humbug!"

Dickens was on his way to becoming a household name. His next books secured his reputation and mapped the evolution of Britain and London from the late Georgian era into the early Victorian period. As was usual for the time, his novels appeared in weekly or monthly serial form, allowing the author to gauge the reaction of his readers and make changes to his plots and characters.

One epic novel followed another: Oliver Twist (1837), Nicholas Nickleby (1838), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840) and Barnaby Rudge (1841). His vast readership laughed with his characters' triumphs and wept at their tragedies. In 1842, Dickens, who was also popular in the US, went on a five-month lecture tour there, speaking out strongly against slavery.

Back in the UK, Dickens gave speeches and wrote articles and letters in favour of child welfare. He supported the Foundling Hospital and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. In A Christmas Carol (1843), he used the character of a sickly child, Tiny Tim, to symbolize the life choices facing Ebeneezer Scrooge. With its feel-good ending and unforgettable refrain of "Bah! Humbug!" the tale remains a favourite to this day.

Weaving truth and invention

In the Dickens family home, however, all was not well. Catherine was struggling to cope with the household and children, and, in letters, Dickens confessed to feeling increasingly "uneasy and unhappy" in his marriage. He poured his energy into his work, especially his most autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, which, he said, involved a "very complicated weaving of truth and invention".

Dickens was a celebrity with a huge and demanding public. He jokingly called himself "the Inimitable" and he diligently replied to the daily deluge of letters from readers and admirers. Even the poor and illiterate, whom Dickens met on his long walks around the city, were able to enjoy his novels by paying a halfpenny to have each new episode read to them.

Dickens was a relentless explorer. "Where he had travelled longest, where he had looked deepest and learned most," said the journalist George Augustus Sala, "was in inner London." Little remains today of the workhouses, filthy back streets and crowded slums that Dickens would have known. But his memory of people and places, his recall of detail and conversations means that much of his life, his London, was mapped on to the pages of the stories he wrote.

If reviewers sometimes criticized Dickens for his sentimentality and overly "good" characters, they noted a change in tone in his later novels, which tackled big themes with less frivolity: Bleak House (1852), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1855).

Perhaps one reason for the lack of humour was his difficult personal life. Dickens separated from Catherine in June 1858, following the revelation of his involvement with Ellen Ternan, a young actress with whom he continued a relationship until the end of his life.

An unforgettable legacy

Dickens lived and worked at a fast pace. As one great novel followed the next, still written with a quill and ink, it was as if he could sense the final chapter approaching. A Tale of Two Cities (1859) was followed by Great Expectations (1860) and Our Mutual Friend (1864).

After a lecture tour of the US, he commenced an exhausting series of "farewell readings" back home in the autumn of 1868. Clearly unwell, he was forced to cancel the tour after suffering a stroke. On 8 June 1870, Dickens had another stroke at his home after a full day's work on his new novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He died the next day, aged 58, and was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

He left behind an unforgettable family of characters, 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and a huge volume of letters, non-fiction articles and other writing. Often viewed as the conscience of his age, Dickens always favoured the philosophy of his "favourite child", David Copperfield: "I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world."