| 1811 | Jane Austen publishes Sense and Sensibility, arguably the first modern English novel. |
| 1812 | Charles John Huffam Dickens is born at Portsmouth to John and Elizabeth (née Barrow) Dickens. The government orders a group of Luddites, an organized band of laborers opposed to the industrialized machinery that threatens to replace them, to be shot down. |
| 1817 | The Dickens family moves to Chatham, in Kent. Charles be gins reading the books in his father’s library; his favorites in clude the works of Miguel de Cervantes, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett. |
| 1822 | The Dickens family moves again, this time to Camden, in North London. Charles quickly and fastidiously learns the landscape of London, an invaluable resource for his later writing. |
| 1824 | Charles is sent to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory, a manu facturer of boot-blacking. His father is arrested for debt and imprisoned for three months, and while the rest of the fam ily stays with John Dickens in prison, Charles lodges else where and continues pasting labels onto bottles of blacking at Warren’s. |
| 1825 | John Dickens retires on a naval pension, and Charles attends Wellington House Academy, a private school where he wins a prize in Latin. |
| 1827 | He becomes a clerk in a solicitor’s office. |
| 1829 | After learning shorthand, he establishes himself as a reporter for the law courts, Parliament, and various London news papers. He meets Maria Beadnell and falls in love with her. |
| 1831 | Dickens joins the journalistic staff of the Mirror of Parliament; he transcribes speeches by the members of Parliament on such |
| topics as factory conditions, penal reform, education reform, the Poor Law Commission, and the First Reform Bill of 1832. |
| 1833 | After four arduous years, Dickens’s affair with Beadnell dissolves in the face of her family’s disapproval. He publishes his first story, “A Dinner at Poplar Walk,” in the Monthly Magazine. The British Parliament passes the Factory Act, which regulates child labor and forces children to attend school until age thirteen. |
| 1834 | Dickens becomes a journalist for the Morning Chronicle, a job that requires frequent travel and attendance at political meet ings. He continues to publish stories and sketches in periodi cals. The Poor Law Amendment Act ends out-of-door relief (aid given to the poor in their own homes) and compels those in need of assistance to enter workhouses, where con ditions are very harsh. |
| 1835 | Dickens becomes engaged to Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle. |
| 1836 | Dickens writes in several different genres and achieves signif icant literary success. Adopting the pseudonym “Boz,” based on his pronunciation as a young child of Moses as “Boses,” Dickens publishes in volume form Sketches by Boz, a collection of his earlier writings. He marries Catherine Hogarth; the couple eventually will have ten children. Dickens becomes in tensely and unceasingly prolific, continuing to write fever ishly throughout his life. He begins The Pickwick Papers, his first novel, which sets the precedent of serialization that he will follow for nearly all of his novels. He meets his future biogra pher John Forster. |
| 1837 | Victoria is crowned queen. Dickens becomes the editor of Bentley’s Miscellany and begins publishing installments of his novel Oliver Twist in the journal. |
| 1838 | Oliver Twist is published in three volumes, while the serial pub lication in Bentley’s continues. The novel is extremely popular, and three dramatic versions are produced in London theaters in the winter of 1838-1839. |
| 1839 | Nicholas Nickleby is published. Because of tension with Richard Bentley, Dickens resigns his editorship and devotes himself fully to writing. The Dickens family moves to Devonshire Terrace. |
| 1840 | Dickens establishes his own weekly miscellany, Master |
| Humphrey’s Clock, and writes all the content himself. After eigh teen months, sales fall off, and he is forced to abandon the periodical. To generate capital, he quickly begins serial publication of The Old Curiosity Shop. |
| 1841 | Dickens publishes Barnaby Rudge. He publicly denounces the child-labor laws and abysmal factory conditions of the times; he lambastes the Tories, who oppose humane labor laws. |
| 1842 | Accompanied by Catherine, an exhausted Dickens travels to America, where he is lionized. His popularity there falters upon the publication of American Notes, a chronicle that records his negative reactions to the United States. |
| 1843 | Dickens publishes the most famous and best-loved of his an nual Christmas books, A Christmas Carol, which had taken him only a matter of weeks to write. |
| 1844 | The Dickens family relocates to Genoa, Italy, where they re main for a year. |
| 1846 | Dickens signs on as the first editor of the Daily News but soon leaves because of disagreements with the publishers. The fam ily moves to Switzerland, then Paris, and remains abroad for six months. |
| 1847 | Upon his return to London, Dickens helps Miss Angela Burdett Coutts start a home for reformed prostitutes, which he later runs. William Makepeace Thackeray begins publishing Vanity Fair in monthly parts. |
| 1848 | Dombey and Son, published in one volume, heralds Dickens’s more mature and decidedly dark period, which over the next two decades yields such major works as David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1857), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1865). Dickens begins to run a private the ater, in which he acts and performs for charity. His company of amateurs includes painter Augustus Egg, who depicts scenes from novels by Sir Walter Scott, Thackeray, and other writers. |
| 1850 | Realism becomes a conscious agenda among artists working in media such as painting, literature, and theater. Dickens es tablishes his weekly magazine Household Words, which is suc |
| ceeded by the end of the decade by his publication All the Year Round. |
| 1851 | Dickens’s father dies. The author meets landscape painter Wilkie Collins, who has a gift for mystery writing and whom Dickens admires greatly. Dickens’s theater troupe performs be fore Queen Victoria. |
| 1857 | Dickens’s marriage becomes increasingly strained. The Frozen Deep, a melodrama written jointly by Dickens and Collins, stars Dickens and the enchanting actress Ellen Ternan, with whom he falls in love. Ternan, twenty-seven years Dickens’s junior, haunts the author’s fiction from this time on. Dickens tours Switzerland and Italy with Collins and Egg. |
| 1858 | Dickens embarks on an exhausting series of public readings, which earn money but take a toll on his physical health. He and Catherine separate. |
| 1859 | A Tale of Two Cities is published. |
| 1860 | Dickens settles in rural Gadshill, his residence for the rest of his life. |
| 1861 | Great Expectations is published in three volumes. Dickens begins a second series of public readings that lasts two years. |
| 1863 | Dickens’s mother dies, followed by his son Walter’s death in India. After quarreling with Thackeray, Dickens reconciles with him just before Thackeray’s death. The world’s first sub way, the Metropolitan Railway, opens in London. |
| 1865 | A shaken Dickens survives a disastrous train accident after he returns from France with Ellen Ternan, who is rumored to be his mistress. |
| 1867 | Dickens journeys again to America, where he reads publicly in Boston, New York, and Washington. |
| 1868 | After returning to England, Dickens continues to give public readings despite his declining health. |
| 1870 | Dickens begins his last series of readings in London. He pub lishes six parts of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but the novel’s com position is halted by his sudden death in June. Charles Dickens is buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. |