Charles Dickens of the Westcountry

Charles Dickens was an abrupt, excitable young man driven to succeed. He would always be distressed by the humiliation he experienced as a young child, at the hands of his frivolous parents. His Parents were well off and educated coming from middle-class backgrounds and he enjoyed that standard of living. Charles was well educated, well read and enjoyed music and acting. When his parents were put into the debtor’s prison and he was sent out to work in a factory labeling and potting jar with shoe polish was for him utter degradation. What made it worse was no matter how poor they were his sister’s piano lessons were always paid for. Charles moved into scant lodgings and learnt to manage and fend for himself. His friends Green and Fagin looked out for him in those backstreet days of misery. When he was very young he had gone a school and wore an Eton type uniform and was teased by some of the boys, here he now was among the poorest who would have jeered and bullied him. All of this drove his desire to succeed, the young Charles Dickens had become self-aware of his circumstances at a very early age and these experiences created the writer Charles Dickens. This book looks at his life under a magnifying glass concentrating on the domestic side of his life in the Westcountry.