Happy Birthday Charles Dickens

            This feature introduces the author’s and illustrator of The Cheshire Cheese Cat: A Dickens of a Tale to our readers and in honor of the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth we’ve included a list of noteworthy titles about this celebrated Victorian author.

Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London

Andrea Warren

In this engagingly written, meticulously researched life of Dickens, the historical author is just the hook for a study of the treatment of poor children in Victorian England. Warren has written a book that reads almost as a story with young Charles as the main character. Dickens, himself the product of a poor home (his father was chronically debt-ridden and spent time in debtor's jail), went to do factory work as a young boy. The product of a "respectable" upbringing, he was a gentleman among urchins, but learned of the hard lot of slum children in his daily experiences, even accepted by some as a peer. Because of his family situation (his mother moved the family into prison with his father to avoid the horrors of the workhouse), Dickens became self-taught, and a legal apprentice when it was still possible to work your way up to practice law. Dickens had different ambitions and wrote his first successful novel at age twenty-five. Once Warren gets into Dickens' adult years, she diverges from his life to paint a compelling picture of the lives of London's teeming slums and the children that lived there. Warren explores Dickens' commitment to reform, as well as the charitable work of his fellow artists, George Frederick Handel and artist William Hogarth. While most of British society ignored the blighted slum conditions, reformers such as Dr. Thomas Barnardo and captain Thomas Coram built foundling homes and schools to alleviate the unspeakable conditions of children "dropped" on the street to die and young women driven out of homes for being impregnated by employers. The genius of Warren's writing is that it is as compelling as a novel and seamlessly weaves Dickens life into the descriptions of his times. A top-flight example of historical storytelling. 2011, Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, Ages 10 to 16, $18.99. Reviewer: Lois Gross (Children's Literature).

ISBN: 978-0-547-39574-6