Charles dickens childhood

Rising from a difficult childhood, Charles Dickens became one of the world's most famous writers.

With the difficult experiences of his childhood in mind, he was also a prominent social critic and used his fiction to illuminate many of the social problems of his times. Dickens described his first eleven years as idyllic, but his father's bankruptcy brought a swift end to those days.

When Dickens was twelve years old, his father was thrown into debtor's prison; and, as was customary for the times, his family joined him. He was soon boarded with a family acquaintance and found himself working ten hours a day, under cruel conditions, in a blacking factory where he was set to the task of pasting labels to pots of boot polish.

"My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round w