CHARLES DICKENS

Date of Birth: February 7, 1812
Date of Death: June 9, 1870
Birthplace: Portsmouth, Hampshire, England
Education: Minimal formal education

Most writers of fiction write partly from their experience and partly from their imagination. . . I have had recourse to both sources.
-Charles Dickens, to J.S. Cummings, September 7, 1852

It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the close of a two years' imaginative task; or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him for ever... I cannot close this Volume more agreeably to myself, than with a hopeful glance towards the time when I shall again put forth my two green leaves once a month, and with a faithful remembrance of the genial sun and showers that have fallen on these leaves of David Copperfield, and made me happy.
-Charles Dickens, 1850, David Copperfield, Preface

Dickens was not only a genius, but he had the volcanic activity, the perturbed restlessness, the feverish excitability of genius. What he created, that he was. His personages were...an integral part of his life...
-Edmund Yates, Recollections and Experiences, 1884