Dickens, Charles Huffham

(1812-1870)

   He was born at 387 Mile End Terrace, Commercial Road, Landport, Portsea, Portsmouth, Hampshire. His father was a clerk in the navy pay office at Portsmouth dockyard before moving to Chatham, Kent, around 1816. The father spent some time in the debtors' prison, the "Marshalsea," described in Little Dorrit. Dickens was a reporter on the Morning Chronicle and edited two journals: Household Words and All the Year Round. He is reckoned to be the greatest novelist of Victorian England, and his novels, which are wonderful social documents of the time, appealed to a wide range of readers. He was also vocal in support for the abolition of slavery. He wrote poems, short stories and some twenty novels, several of which have been made into films. He died suddenly, leaving unfinished his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and is buried in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. Some of his poems: "A Child's Hymn," "Gabriel Grub's Song," "George Edmunds' Song," "Joe Gargery's Epitaph on His Father," "Lucy's Song," "Squire Norton's Song," "The Cannibals' Grace before Meat," "The Ivy Green," "The Song of the Wreck."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. Faber Book of Nonsense Verse. Geoffrey Grigson, ed. Faber & Faber, 1979. Encyclopedia of Britain. Bamber Gascoigne. London: Macmillan, 1994. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse. Tom Paulin, Faber & Faber, 1990. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Poems and Verse of Charles Dickens. F.G. Kitton, ed. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903. Westminster Abbey Official Guide (no date).