Charles Dickens, the prince of modern novelists, was born at Landsport, Portsmouth, England, in 1812.  His father was at the time a clerk in the Pay Department of the Navy, but afterwards became a reporter of debates in Parliament.  After a very hard early life and an only tolerable education, young Dickens made some progress in the study of law; but soon undertook his father’s business as reporter, in which he struggled as he has made David Copperfield to do in becoming proficient.

His first systematic literary efforts were as a daily writer and reporter for The True Sun; he then contributed his sketches of life and character, drawn from personal observation, to the Morning Chronicle:  these were an earnest of his future powers.  They were collected as Sketches by Boz, in two volumes, and published in 1836.

PICKWICK.—­In 1837 he was asked by a publisher to prepare a series of comic sketches of cockney sportsmen, to illustrate, as well as to be illustrated by, etchings by Seymour.  This yoking of two geniuses was a trammel to both; but the suicide of Seymour dissolved the connection, and Dickens had free play to produce the Pickwick Papers, by Boz, which were illustrated, as he proceeded, by H. K. Browne (Phiz).  The work met and has retained an unprecedented popularity.  Caricature as it was, it caricatured real, existent oddities; everything was probable; the humor was sympathetic if farcical, the assertion of humanity bold, and the philosophy of universal application.  He had touched our common nature in all ranks and conditions; he had exhibited men and women of all types; he had exposed the tricks of politics and the absurdity of elections; the snobs of society were severely handled.  He was the censor of law courts, the exposer of swindlers, the dread of cockneys, the friend of rustics and of the poor; and he has displayed in the principal character, that of the immortal Pickwick, the power of a generous, simple-hearted, easily deceived, but always philanthropic man, who comes through all his trials without bating a jot of his love for humanity and his faith in human nature.  But the master-work of his plastic hand was Sam Weller, whose wit and wisdom pervaded both hemispheres, and is as potent to excite laughter to-day as at the first.

In this work he began that assault, not so much on shams as upon prominent, unblushing evil, which he carried on in some form or other in all his later works; and which was to make him prominent among the reformers and benefactors of his age.  He was at once famous, and his pen was in demand to amuse the idle and to aid the philanthropic.