Pickwick Papers

CHARLES DICKENS, who lived from 1812 to 1870 was the first great English story-writer. His parents were poor, and he had little education. When his father was sent to prison for debt, the family went to live there with him, and young Charles was sent to work in a factory.Later, he was able to return to school, and after two years as a clerk in a lawyer's office, he became a newspaper reporter. This post gave him the chance to travel, and to gain wide experience of how other people lived, in town and country alike.He was a great observer of people and places. When "Pickwick Papers" appeared in 1836, it was an inmediate success, for it provides a true but light-hearted description of middle-class life in those times.It made Dickens rich, so that he was able to spend the rest of his life in writing more serious books. In the character of the gentle and generous Mr. Pickwick we see already the sympathy for poor people which guided all his future work.Surprisingly, however, tbis book shows nothing of the special sympathy for children, which governed nearly all his writing, from "Oliver Twist" (1838) to "David Copperfield" (1849) and "Great Expectations" (1860). He had ten children of his own. Dickens travelled widely in Europe and North Ammerica.