Charles Dickens

Dickens was twelve when his father was imprisoned for debt and he was sent to paste labels on pots in a blacking warehouse by the Thames. He escaped within a year, but told almost no one for the rest of his life; the story reached the public only after his death, through his biographer. Nearly every abandoned child in his fiction comes from those months.

He taught himself shorthand, reported the debates in Parliament, and at twenty-four became famous with The Pickwick Papers. What he pioneered was as much a business as a style: publication in cheap monthly parts, each ending on a hook, which put novels within reach of readers who could never buy a three-volume book. Audiences waited at docks for the next instalment.

He was also a tireless campaigner — for schools, sanitation, and a home for homeless women — and, in 1858, a man who separated from Catherine, his wife of twenty-two years and the mother of his ten children, then published a statement in the press defending himself and denigrating her. He died in 1870, at fifty-eight, with The Mystery of Edwin Drood half written.