The woman caught the foundling nurse -- she whose lot it was to take in and name the abandoned infants from the streets of London -- as she left the place of her employment. "What can you want of me?" the nurse asked. "You will listen to my prayer? It is only to be told in two words." "This is worse and worse," said the nurse, on the edge of tears, now. "Supposing that I understand what two words you mean." "You do understand. What are the names they have given my poor baby? I ask no more than that. I have read of the customs of the place. He has been christened in the chapel, and registered by some surname in the book. He was received last Monday evening. What have they called him?" "You will never ask me anything more than the two words?" "Never! Never!" "You will never put them to a bad use, if I say them?" "Never! Never!" And then she gave the name.
One of the grand masters of Victorian literature, Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation,but also the horror of the infamous debtors' prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and "slave" factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years' formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney's clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.
