Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist (Illustrated) Charles Dickens

Publisher Marketing: Oliver Twist, an orphan, is born in a shelter for the poor where he spends his early childhood. One day, he works up the courage to ask for more food, and is made to leave. He begins work as an apprentice to an undertaker but is forced to run away from terrible work conditions. He falls in with a gang of criminals. Can he survive in this evil world? Contributor Bio:  Dickens, Charles Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation, but also the horror of the infamous debtors prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and slave factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney s clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.