Charles Dickens (Charles John Huffam Dickens) was born in Landport, Portsmouth, on February 7, 1812. Charles was the second of eight children to John Dickens (1786 1851), a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and his wife Elizabeth Dickens (1789 1863). The Dickens family moved to London in 1814 and two years later to Chatham, Kent, where Charles spent early years of his childhood. Due to the financial difficulties they moved back to London in 1822, where they settled in Camden Town, a poor neighborhood of London.
Charles Dickens’s first published book, Sketches by Boz is a funny and touching collection of observation, fancy and fiction showing the London he knew in all its complexity – its streets, theatres, inns, pawnshops, law courts, prisons and, of course, the river Thames. His descriptions of everyday life and people seem to anticipate characters from his great novels – garrulous matrons, vulgar young clerks, Scrooge-like bachelors – while his powers of social critique shine in his unflinching depictions of the city’s forgotten citizens, from child workers to prostitutes. This edition includes the original illustrations by George Cruikshank.
