A few months later Charles was able to go back to school at the Wellington House Academy in North London. On receipt of an inheritance from his father’s grandmother Elizabeth, the Dickens family were able to settle their debts and leave Marshalsea. And this in-depth knowledge of the city seeped almost unconsciously into his writing, as Dickens himself said, “I suppose myself to know this large city as well as anybody in it”.ĭickens aged 12 at the Blacking Warehouse (artists impression) Pipchin”, in Dombey and Son) and later in Southwark with an insolvent court agent and his family, it was at this point that Dickens’ lifelong fondness for walking the streets of London at all hours of the day and night began. Living first with family friend Elizabeth Roylance in Camden (said to be the inspiration for Mrs.
Whilst the rest of the family joined John at Marshalsea, 12-year-old Charles was sent to work in Warren’s blacking Warehouse, where he spent 10 hours a day pasting labels onto pots of shoe polish for 6 shillings a week, which went towards his families debts and his own modest lodgings. Worse was to come when John’s propensity for living beyond his means (which is said to have inspired the character of Mr Micawber in Dickens’ novel David Copperfield) saw him thrown into debtor’s prison in 1824 at the infamous Marshalsea prison in Southwark, later to become the setting for Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit. Whilst John’s fleeting stint as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office allowed Charles to enjoy a private education at Chatham’s William Giles’s School for a time, he was abruptly plunged into poverty in 1822 when the growing Dickens family (Charles was the second of eight children) moved back to London to the less salubrious area of Camden Town. Shortly after his birth, Dickens’ parents, John and Elizabeth, moved the family to Bloomsbury in London and then to Chatham in Kent, where Dickens spent much of his childhood. Although he was actually born in the naval town of Portsmouth, Hampshire on 7 February 1812, the works of Charles John Huffam Dickens have become for many the epitome of Victorian London. The year 2012 saw the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens.