Question

what conditions in eurpoe inspired charles dickens?

Answer 1

Charles Dickens’s Life

 The writings of Charles Dickens were exceedingly influenced by his own experiences and the social and political conditions of England in the 1800’s.  After a tumultuous childhood, Dickens devoted most of his life in a whirlwind of writing journals, novels, periodicals, and making speeches. He became the epitome of a self made man who was born into a middle class family and ascending into one of England’s most celebrated and famous writers through the wielding of his ink pen in criticism for the deteriorating social and political condition and in sympathy for all people caught up in the shifts that were occurring England during his lifetime (1812-1870). 
 Born in Portsmouth, England on February 7, 1812, Charles John Huffman Dickens would become one of England’s greatest writers and critics. He was born into a middle class family as the eldest of the Dickens’ children and spent the happiest times of his childhood with his family in Chatham, England. His father worked as a clerk but had great difficulty managing his own expenses and shortly after the family’s move to London, John Dickens was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison. 
 The devastating condition his family was thrust into forced Charles to work at a shoe-dye factory, Warren’s Blacking Factory, and live apart from his family in a lodging house. Charles was only eleven. The period during his father’s imprisonment had a drastic effect on Charles Dickens that would forever influence his life as his miserable experience “shaped his outlook as a writer and social critic (Hackenberg).”  His father’s incarceration and the horrific conditions of his factory labor had and extreme influence on Dickens’s writing as well for “many of his broad novelistic images and themes—prisons, degraded conditions of labor, children lost in the city – grew out of his traumatic childhood experience (Hackenberg).” Dickens would later become “the chronicler of afflicted children” in which he “saw in his own childhood the archetypal experience of the child frustrated by the pressures of an urban and commercialized environment (Shelston).” Charles Dickens later acknowledged the impact of this time on his life: 
  
The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more, cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life. (John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Bk I, ch. 2)

However, in little over a year, his father’s was released from prison upon the advent of inheriting a modest amount of money and Charles was again allowed to return to his education at Wellington House Academy from 1824-1827. 
 At the age of fifteen, Charles returned to work as a clerk at a law firm and eventually became a Parliamentary reporter due to the speed and accuracy of his writing. During these occupations, however, Dickens witnessed the corruption of the English government that would inspire hi