Excerpt from Charles Dickens Charles dickens was born at Landport, outside Portsmouth, On the 7th of February 1812. He was the eldest son and the second child of John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office and the original of Mr. Micawber, his mother appearing in his novels as Mrs. Nickleby. The family a year or two after his birth moved to London, and when Dickens was be tween four and five years Old his father was given an appointment in Chatham Dockyard, and he and his family lived at Chatham until the novelist was nine. In after years he recalled himself as a very small and not over particularly taken care of boy. He was too sickly to be much good at games, and long before he was in his teens he was a prodigious reader. John Forster says that the account of the early reading of David Copperfield is literally auto-bio graphical, and that Charles Dickens' boy's imagina tion was quickened by Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Torn J ones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Robinson Crusoe, and The Arabian Nights. His reading enthused him. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.