Pictures from Italy

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - If the readers of this volume will be so kind as to take their credentials for the different places which are the subject of its author's reminiscences, from the Author himself, perhaps they may visit them, in fancy, the more agreeably, and with a better understanding of what they are to expect. Many books have been written upon Italy, affording many means of studying the history of that interesting country, and the innumerable associations entwined about it. I make but little reference to that stock of information; not at all regarding it as a necessary consequence of my having had recourse to the storehouse for my own benefit, that I should reproduce its easily accessible contents before the eyes of my readers.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsea, England. His parents were middle-class and suffered financially. When Dickens was twelve years old, his family faced financial crisis, which forced him to quit school and work in a shoe polish manufacturing factory. Dickens's mother and siblings eventually joined him. Dickens continued to work at the factory for several months. In the factory the horrific conditions haunted him throughout his life. Dickens never forgot the day when a senior boy in the warehouse took it upon himself to instruct Dickens how to do his work more efficiently.
As a young adult, Dickens worked as a law clerk and later as a journalist. He perceived the darker social conditions of the Industrial Revolution. A collection of semi-fictional sketches entitled Sketches by Boz earned him recognition as a writer. Dickens began to make money from his writing when he published his first novel, The Pickwick Papers in 1836. The Pickwick Papers was hugely popular and Dickens became a literary celebrity at the age of twenty-five. Dickens's themes included wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. In 1836, Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, but after twenty years of marriage and their ten children, he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, an actress many years his junior. Soon after, Dickens and his wife separated. Dickens remained a prolific writer to the end of his life, and his novels - Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, and Bleak House - continued to earn critical and popular acclaim. He died of a stroke in 1870, at the age of 58.