Qualla: Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Maclise, Public domain. When the warehouse moved to Chandos Street in Covent Garden, the boys were placed in a room where the window opened onto the street. Small audiences would gather to watch them work, pasting labels onto pots of boot-blacking. The Dickens biographer Simon Callow has called the public display "a new refinement added to his misery." Charles was twelve years old. His father was in the Marshalsea debtors' prison a few miles south. The other children labelling pots that summer of 1824 would forget the room. Charles would spend the rest of his life writing about it.

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Image: Daniel Maclise | Public domain

Charles Dickens: Twelve, in Covent Garden

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit w:Fred Barnard, died 1896., Public domain. John Dickens had been a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, comfortably middle-class, until debt overtook him. In February 1824, he was sent to the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark, taking his wife and youngest children with him. Charles, the second of eight children, was put to work at ...

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Image: w:Fred Barnard, died 1896. | Public domain

Charles Dickens: Walking the City

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"), Public domain. London became, for the rest of his life, the place he walked. He covered eight, ten, twelve miles in a night. He worked out plot problems on foot. He absorbed the city the way other writers absorbed books: the lamplighters and chop-houses, the river fogs along Wapping, the rottin...

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Image: Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz") | Public domain

Charles Dickens: The Performer

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ser Amantio di Nicolao, CC BY-SA 3.0. Dickens was, before he was anything else, a performer. He nearly went on the stage as a young man; he gave amateur theatricals all his life; he loved costumes and accents and dramatic effect. In 1858, he began the public readings that would, in the end, kill him. He toured the Br...

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Image: Ser Amantio di Nicolao | CC BY-SA 3.0

Charles Dickens: Compassion and Reform

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geof Sheppard, CC BY-SA 4.0. Dickens used his fame for causes. He worked with the heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts on Urania Cottage, a home for women trying to leave prostitution, designing the regime himself and interviewing prospective residents. He campaigned against ragged-school neglect, against the abuse...

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Image: Geof Sheppard | CC BY-SA 4.0

Charles Dickens: What Covent Garden Remembers

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Chandos Place runs east-west off St Martin's Lane, a short walk from Trafalgar Square. The warehouse is long gone, replaced by buildings that come and go in the way of central London. A plaque on Chandos Place marks the approximate site. The Marshalsea prison, in Southwark, was c...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain