Charles Dickens, second of eight children, was born in Portsea, England, in 1812 during the new industrial age. Dickens’s father was at the time a clerk in the navy pay office. He was well paid but often ended in financial troubles. When Charles was two the family moved to London, where he had two years，schooling, and then to Chatham, where he received some education. Charles was a frail boy, and the family’s frequent moves to ever poorer housing distressed him greatly.

As a result of his father’s habit of living far beyond his means, the family was forced to sell all its possessions, down to the spoon, when Charles was 12 years old. In the same year he saw his father thrown into debtors’ prison. Young Charles had to leave school and did a five-month stretch of child labor in a shoe-polish factory. When a legacy temporarily rescued the family fortunes Charles got another two years of school, and later a job in a solicitor’s office. Ambitious and unyielding, he learned shorthand, became at 19 Parliamentary reporter for a series of London newspapers -just as David Copperfield did.

Dickens began to write sketches of London life, signed them with the pen-name Boz. The sketches were so popular that the proprietors of the Morning Chronicle regarded him with an increasing kindly eye. With the publication of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837), Dickens’ reputation was made. The book was translated into French and German. All of a sudden success and fame came to him with a smash. It swelled with each succeeding novel and never deserted him as he launched into weekly newspaper editing,amateur theatricals and public readings.

Author Dickens took a fame like a duck to water, working harder than ever. One popular success followed another from his ready pen -Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop. No plodding cultivator of a thankless Muse, Dickens enjoyed not only the fruits of his work but the work itself.

Looking back on his own childhood, Dickens saw “a very small and not over-particularly-taken-care-of boy.” That very boy grew into a astonishing amount of hard work, transformed himself into the most famous writer of his age. In April 1856, Dickens wrote to his friend of how clear it was to him that “one is driven by irresistible might until the journey is worked out!”

Despites of his hardships and bitter memories, Charles Dickens managed to become a kind of king-of-the-hill of Victorian letters. Even today he is still remembered as a greats novelist and his works enjoy a large number of readers both in China and around the world. His life-long experience has proved to us that armed with determination and resilience anyone can walk out of dark days to a bright future.