Charles Dickens at 200

To mark the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens (on 7 February 1812), we present a selection of Oxford DNB biographies of men and women with close ties to the author.

Our life of Dickens, by the renowned Dickens scholar Michael Slater, provides an excellent introduction to the writer’s upbringing, family, work, and influence. Dickens was a man of huge creativity, energy, and achievement. But his life was also marked by periods of emotional crisis—as seen in his relations with some of those below. Click on a name to find out more.

Alongside writing, Dickens’s great love was the theatre. In his youth he was captivated by Charles Mathews (1776-1835) whose one-man shows influenced Dickens’s own theatrical interpretations of scenes from his novels. Other actors—among them William Macready (1793-1873), to whom Dickens dedicated Nicholas Nickleby—became life-long friends.

In 1837 Dickens met John Forster (1812–1876) and they quickly became close associates. Forster was chosen by Dickens as his biographer and, outside the immediate family circle, only Forster knew of Charles’s childhood experience of the ‘blacking factory’. For his part Forster was a dedicated adviser to Dickens, reading and commenting on his works in draft.

Hablot Knight Browne (1815–1882), artist and illustrator, was the man who brought ‘Phiz’ to Dickens’s ‘Boz’. Browne illustrated Dickens’s novels between 1836 and 1859, but was then dropped and their friendship ended following the collapse of Dickens’s marriage to Catherine Hogarth (1816-1879).

Dickens the social reformer found a fellow campaigner in the banking heiress, Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906). From the early 1840s they established, and ran, a home for ‘fallen women’ in Shepherd's Bush, London. Dickens dedicated Martin Chuzzlewit to Burdett-Coutts, who became the writer’s confidante until relations cooled in the late 1850s.

Dickens’s sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth (1827-1917) moved to the family home in 1842 and thereafter became the writer’s constant companion and confidante. The friendship of Charles and Georgina survived his abandonment of Catherine; indeed Georgina remained with Dickens during, and after, the separation.

In 1857, when he was 45 and she 18, Dickens met the actress Ellen [Nelly] Ternan (1839-1914). He was captivated, and there followed the break-up of his marriage and the alienation of many longstanding friends. The ensuing relationship, though secretive, was loving and sincere. For Dickens, Nelly comprised his ‘magic circle of one’.

Who, like Charles Dickens, was:

• born in Portsmouth?
• educated in Chatham?
• a one-time resident of Doughty Street, London
• (and lived there in the same years as Dickens?)
• familiar with the Kent seaside town of Broadstairs?
• a visitor to New York in the 1840s and the 1860s?