He was in gainful but impecunious employ at the age of 15, working as a junior clerk in a lawyer's office. It was poverty that denied him an education and shamefully sent him instead to work in a blacking factory by Hungerford bridge when he was 12. His childhood and early adolescence were marked by a descent into ever less-genteel poverty. All writers write for money (apart from those rare few in possession of a private income) and for Dickens – whose indigent father, John, was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea – solvency and riches were in a very real sense the holy grail. One of the most fascinating undercurrents of this fascinating biography has to do with Dickens and money. Three years earlier, as a journalist, he had been producing sketches of urban life for a magazine called The Monthly, unpaid.

He was writing for four publishers and that year earned a bonus of £500 for The Pickwick Papers. The year 1836 was also significant for another reason: Dickens not only married but he began to be rich. In later life, the northern edge of Hyde Park was about as far west as he would venture and once, when he rented a house on the south side of the park in Knightsbridge, he felt decidedly uncomfortable. It was a rare venture for him into the south-west of the city – though Chelsea was effectively a village suburb in those days – as Dickens was resolutely a north London man, his 'manor' running from Somers Town and Camden south to the City, down to the Strand and Waterloo bridge, taking in Marylebone and Covent Garden. In this church, in 1836, Charles Dickens, aged 24, married Catherine Hogarth. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, won the Whitbread First Book Award, and Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self was Whitbread Book of the Year in 2002.F rom my study window, I can see the top of the square, pinnacled tower of St Luke's Church, Chelsea. He was also a ferociously hard-working writer, a philanthropist, a supporter of liberal social causes, and father of ten, and yet his genius also had a dark side.Ĭlaire Tomalin was literary editor of the The New Statesman and then the Sunday Times before becoming a full time writer. Here Tomalin portrays Dickens as a complex man, a writer who created characters who continue to endure in the popular imagination from the The Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip and David Copperfield. Today a theatrical performance changes the course of his life.Ĭlaire Tomalin's acclaimed biography of one of the nation's literary giants is broadcast to mark the 150th anniversary of his death in June 2020. Claire Tomalin's acclaimed biography of one of Britain's literary giants paints a portrait of an extraordinarily complex man.

Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin