There is something about Charles Dickens' imaginative power that defies explanation in purely biographical terms. Nevertheless, his biography shows the source of that power and is the best place to begin looking for an understanding of it.

The second child of John and Elizabeth Dickens, Charles was born on February 7, 1812, near Portsmouth on England's south coast. At that time John Dickens was stationed in Portsmouth as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. The family was of lower-middle-class origins, John having come from servants and Elizabeth from minor bureaucrats. Dickens' father was vivacious and generous but had an unfortunate tendency to live beyond his means. His mother was affectionate but rather inept in practical matters. Dickens later used his father as the basis for Mr. Micawber in "David Copperfield", and his mother was portrayed as Mrs. Nickleby in "Nicholas Nickleby".

His father was transferred to London in 1814, and three years later the family moved to Chatham near Rochester in the county of Kent. Dickens was now about five, and for the next five years his life was quite pleasant. Taught to read by his mother, he devoured his father's small collection of classics, which included Shakespeare, Cervantes, Defoe, Smollett, Fielding and Goldsmith. These all left a permanent mark on his imagination, and their effect on his art was significant. Dickens also went to some performances of Shakespeare and formed a lifelong attachment to the theater. He attended school and showed himself to be a rather solitary, observant, good-natured child with some talent for comic routines, which his father encouraged. In retrospect, Dickens held this period in his life to be a kind of golden age. His first novel, "The Pickwick Papers", is in part an attempt to recreate the idyllic nature of those years; it rejoices in innocence and the youthful spirit, and its happiest scenes take place in the Chatham-Rochester area.

In the light of the family's subsequent move back to London, where financial difficulties overtook the Dickens's, the time in Chatham must have seemed glorious indeed. The family had had to move into the shabby suburb of Camden Town, and Charles was taken out of school and set to work at menial tasks about the house. In time, to help augment the family income, Dickens was given a job in a blacking factory among rough companions. His father had been imprisoned for debt, but was released after three months thanks to a small legacy. Long afterward, Dickens related to his friend John Forster that he had felt a deep sense of abandonment at this time, and the major themes of his novels can be traced back to this period. His sympathy for the victimized, his fascination with prisons and with money, the desire to vindicate his heroes' status as gentlemen, and the idea of London as an awesome, lively, and rather threatening environment all reflect his own 

At 13, Dickens went back to school for two years and then took a job in a lawyer's office. Dissatisfied with the work, he learned shorthand and in 1828 became a freelance court reporter. This job was seasonal and allowed him to do a good deal of reading in the British Museum. At the age of 20 he became a full-fledged journalist, working for three papers in succession. In the next four or five years he acquired the reputation of being the fastest and most accurate parliamentary reporter in London. The value of this period was that Dickens gained a sound, firsthand knowledge of London and the provinces.

Dickens was very active physically. He loved taking long walks, riding horses, making journeys, entertaining friends, dining well, and playing practical jokes. He enjoyed games of charades with his family, was an excellent amateur magician, and even practiced hypnotism. One tends to share George Bernard Shaw's opinion that Dickens, in his social life, was always on stage. He was like an eternal Master of Ceremonies, for the most part flamboyant, observant, quick, dynamic, and full of zest. Yet he was also restless, hot-tempered and subject to fits of depression, so that at times he must have been nearly intolerable to live with, however agreeable he was as a companion.