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Dickens:--

'Dickens, Charles, the most popular writer of his time, was born in
February 1812, at Landport, Portsmouth. His father, the late Mr John
Dickens, in the earlier part of his life, enjoyed a post in the Navy Pay
Department, the duties of which required that he should reside from time
to time in different seaports: now at Plymouth, now at Portsmouth, and
then at Sheerness. "In the glorious days" of the war with France, these
towns were full of life, bustle, and character; and the father of "Boz"
was at times fond of dilating upon the strange scenes he had witnessed.
One of his stories described a sitting-room he once enjoyed at
Blue-town, Sheerness, abutting on the theatre. Of an evening, he used to
sit in this room, and could hear what was passing on the stage, and join
in the chorus of _God save the King_, and _Britannia rules the
Waves_--then the favourite songs of Englishmen. The war being at an end,
amongst those who left the public service with a pension was the father
of our novelist. Coming to London, he subsequently found lucrative
employment for his talents on the press as a reporter of parliamentary
debates. Charles Dickens may, therefore, be said to have been in his
youth familiarised with "copy;" and when his father, with parental
anxiety for his future career, took the preliminary steps for making his
son an attorney, the dreariness of the proposed occupation fell so
heavily upon the mind of the future author, that he induced his father
to permit him to resign the law, and join the parliamentary corps of a
daily newspaper. His first engagement was on the _True Sun_, an
ultra-liberal paper, then carrying on a fierce struggle for existence,
from the staff of which he afterwards passed into the reporting ranks of
the _Morning Chronicle_. On that paper, he obtained reputation as a
first-rate man--his reports being exceedingly rapid, and no less
correct. In the columns of the _Chronicle_ he soon gave proofs of other
talents than those of a reporter; for in the evening edition of that
journal appeared the _Sketches of English Life and Character_,
afterwards collected to form the two well-known volumes of _Sketches by
Boz_, published respectively in 1836 and 1837. These at once attracted
considerable notice, and obtained great success; and the publisher of
the collected edition, anxious to make the most of the prize which had
fallen to his lot, gladly came to an arrangement with Mr Dickens and
Seymour