June 9 1870 – Author Charles Dickens Dies
The world lost a literary stalwart and a social critic on June 9, 1870, when Charles Dickens passed away after suffering a stroke at his Kent residence. Newspapers considered the loss of a “great and genial novelist” as nothing less than a “personal bereavement.” Dickens’ ‘consummate’ skill and ‘very original’ genius’ made him the one of the most quoted and celebrated writers in English after Shakespeare. The world remembers him as the creator of the Artful Dodger in ‘Oliver Twist’, Ebenezer Scrooge of ‘A Christmas Carol’, and Sam Weller of ‘The Pickwick Papers.’ His body of work is widely referred by academicians, journalists, politicians, and eminent personalities throughout the English-speaking world. Charles Dickens: The Man Who Bade an Early Goodbye to Youthful Innocence On February 7, 1812 Charles John Huffam Dickens was born to poor yet aspiring parents – John and Elizabeth Dickens. From discontinuing schooling due to financial constraints to joining a factory as a worker two days after his twelfth birthday, Dickens saw adversity from close quarters. That’s why his works smack of realism. For someone who was “so easily cast away at such a young age,” Dickens’s angst at being abandoned by his parents, became a fodder for the characters and stories he used to create. At a very tender age, he realized that there is “prodigious strength in sorrow and despair” and that became the recurring theme in his writing.