Short answers, pulled from the story.
Charles Dickens was an English writer and journalist, born on the 7th of February 1812 in Portsmouth and died on the 9th of June 1870. He is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era and created some of literature's best-known fictional characters.
Charles Dickens left school at age twelve to work at Warren's Blacking Warehouse after his father John was incarcerated in the Marshalsea debtors' prison in 1824. He earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking, and the experience shaped his lifelong interest in social reform.
The Pickwick Papers took off with the introduction of the Cockney character Sam Weller in the fourth episode, an event later called the Sam Weller Bump. The final instalment sold forty thousand copies, and the phenomenon spawned merchandise including Pickwick cigars, playing cards and Weller boot polish.
Charles Dickens published most of his major novels in monthly or weekly instalments in journals, pioneering the serial publication of narrative fiction that became the dominant Victorian mode. His cliffhanger endings kept readers in suspense, and the format let him modify plots based on audience reaction.
Charles Dickens fell in love with the actress Ellen Ternan in 1857, when he was forty-five and she was eighteen, and the passion lasted the rest of his life. He separated from his wife Catherine, burned most of his correspondence in 1860, and Claire Tomalin's book The Invisible Woman argues Ternan lived with him secretly for his last thirteen years.
Charles Dickens was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. This went against his own wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral in an inexpensive, unostentatious and strictly private manner.