{"id":800,"date":"2021-04-24T10:09:01","date_gmt":"2021-04-24T14:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/?p=800"},"modified":"2021-08-14T14:38:52","modified_gmt":"2021-08-14T18:38:52","slug":"charles-dickens-a-brief-biography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/charles-dickens-a-brief-biography\/","title":{"rendered":"Charles Dickens: A Brief Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth on February 7, 1812 to a middle-class family. His father was a clerk in the navy pay office, a job that paid well, but due to John Dickens\u2019 extravagance, became insufficient to support the family. By 1824 Charles\u2019 father was put in debtor\u2019s prison. Charles, who had the fortune of beginning education at 9, was forced to cut it short at age 12 by working at Warren\u2019s blacking factory for 3 years. Charles resumed education after this 3-year retreat, but was soon removed once again to work as a clerk in a solicitor\u2019s office. In 1833, he became a parliamentary journalist for <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Morning Chronicle<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. There, he began writing a series of sketches under the pseudonym \u201cBoz\u201d and published the first installment of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Pickwick Papers<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> in 1836, the same year he married his wife Catherine Hogarth. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Pickwick Papers <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">became incredibly successful, launching his literary career.\u00a0 He went on to publish an autobiography, author many books, edit weekly periodicals, write plays, and lecture against slavery in the United States. In 1865, he was in a train accident from which he never recovered. Five years later he had a stroke, ending his life. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth on February 7, 1812 to a middle-class family. His father was a clerk in the navy pay office, a job that paid well, but due to John Dickens\u2019 extravagance, became insufficient to support the family. By 1824 Charles\u2019 father was put in debtor\u2019s prison. Charles, who had the fortune &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/charles-dickens-a-brief-biography\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Charles Dickens: A Brief Biography&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3603,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,16],"tags":[166,167,96],"class_list":["post-800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-charles-dickens","tag-biography","tag-child-labor","tag-dickens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3603"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":802,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800\/revisions\/802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}