From the publisher
Charles John Huffam Dickens (February 7, 1812 – June 9, 1870), was one of Victorian England's most popular and prolific authors. A journalist and editor, he was also instrumental in identifying and encouraging some of his most significant writing contemporaries. Dickens' early life was financially and emotionally unstable, and when his father was imprisoned for debt, he was sent to work in a blacking factory, an experience which haunted his later fiction. Dickens worked as an office boy and court reporter before his Sketches by Boz (1836-37) brought his writing to the attention of the publishing house Chapman and Hall. After the success of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Dickens was able to found the journal Bentley's Miscellany, and from then on all his major novels were published as serial instalments in his own magazines. Dickens remained a tireless social reformer and popular figure all his life. He died suddenly, leaving his novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished.