Charles Dickens was one of the Britain´s most famous writers. He wrote stories about life in London,where he lived.
London was a very unpleasant place 150 years ago. Poor children used to start work when they were six. If their parents died, they used to go into ´workhouses´, where they worked ten or twelve hours a day for little food. Many children died.

Dickens had a hard life. His parents lost all their money,so he started work at the age of twelve. He used to walk ten kilometres a day to work in a factory. He earned 30p a week.
Later, he became a journalist and reported events in Parliament. He used to write his Parliamentary reports in the morning and his novels in the afternoon. (Writers in those days didn´t use to earn a lot of money.)

Dickens wrote a lot of famous novels- for example David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol, and Great Expectations. One of this most famous books was Oliver Twist, a story about a boy´s life in the workhouse and on the streets of London. Dickens lived in Doughty Street, London, from 1837 to 1839. His house is now the Dickens Museum. Charles Dickens was born in 1812 and died in 1870.