Charles Dickens was born at 387 (now 393) Old Commercial Road, Portsmouth on 07.02.1812. The address is sometimes given as Mile End Terrace. His father, John, and mother, Elizabeth, had rented the house when John began work at the Royal Navy Dockyards. However, they moved to Hawke St a few months after Charles’s birth.

The house is now the Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum. The museum have created a Dickens trail showing the various locations in the city with connections to the author You will also find thirteen locations with Dickens connections included on this Portsmouth Literature map.

Michael Allen, author of Charles Dickens’ Childhood (1988), writes of Dickens’s birthplace:

‘The house at Mile End Terrace had been hastily built, with little regard for lasting qualities. It comprised a cellar, which contained a kitchen, coal store and pantry; a ground floor, with a narrow entrance hall which led to the centre of the house, a parlour or withdrawing room – the main family room of the house – overlooking the street and the small front garden, and the dining room at the rear; the first floor, reached by a narrow winding stair which stretched from the cellar to the attic, containing two bedrooms, the front one of which was the birthroom of Charles Dickens; and, at the top of the house, two rather cramped garret rooms off a small square landing. The privy was at the bottom of the garden. There was no running water, this being carried through the streets and bought a halfpenny a bucket. Oil and candles were used to light the house’ (p. 18).

Allen is sceptical of claims by other writers ‘that John Dickens had to leave Mile End terrace because he could not afford the rent’, arguing that these claims arise because of knowledge of John Dickens’s later financial travails and because of an underestimation of his salary. Rather than being £110 per annum, as widely reported, the salary for 1809-12 grew from £201 to £226, ‘a substantial salary and one that quite justified a rent of £35’. More likely, Allen suggests, is that the family moved because it was growing too large for the terrace; and the subsequent move ‘seems to have been very smooth’ (p. 20). He adds that in moving, there was ‘little saving on rent’ and that because of the proximity of the new property in Hawke St to the dockyards which were ‘just around the corner, two minutes away’, ‘it is possible that the move was made out of convenience, not necessity’. The new property ‘was part of a terrace, having three floors and a basement and possibly giving more room to the growing family’ (p, 22).

Charles Dickens (b. 7 Feb. 1812; d. 9 Jun..1870) was the most popular British novelist of all time. His works are widely read and are frequently adapted as films and TV series. Dickens published 15 novels, 5 novellas, and numerous short stories during his lifetime, as well as a host of journalistic pieces. His first short stories were published in The Morning Chronicle from 1833, and due to their popularity were published as Sketches by Boz (1836). The enormous success of the serialisation of his first novel, Pickwick Papers (1836-7) cemented Dickens’s fame. His other works include Oliver Twist (1839), A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853), Little Dorrit (1857), Great Expectations (1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1865). He worked as a reporter for the Morning Chronicle in the early 1830s, and was editor of [Bentley’s Miscellany] (http://www.victorianweb.org/periodicals/bentley.html), Daily News, Household Words, and All The Year Round.

Achieving a level of literary celebrity not seen since Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, Dickens’s works were eagerly-awaited and widely-read, and his reading tours attracted enormous audiences. Stylistically his works are unique and powerful, his love of drama and the influence of the macabre stories he heard in early childhood being evident in the psychologically-heightened theatricality of which he was capable. He is nonetheless also one of the key figures in nineteenth-century realism, his work marked by a commitment to the belief in the possibility of conveying complex representations of the social life of his era. Alongside other major writers of the period, such as George Eliot, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, Dickens was capable of forging extended multiple plots, and wide casts of characters from across the social classes. His work probes the human condition and often turned a critical eye on the major social issues of the day, particularly education, crime, sanitation, disease, and poverty, but rarely engage in sustained political analyses. Instead, his social vision often turns on individuals and on a sentimental appeal to readers’ emotions. Dickens remains the most prominent figure in modern Victorian Studies within English Literature scholarship.

Dickens was strongly involved in a range of charitable causes and in 1847, with Angela Burdett-Coutts, founded the Urania Cottage home for ‘fallen women’. Dickens was involved in theatrical productions, often alongside his friend and writing colleague, Wilkie Collins, and it was during a production of The Frozen Deep (1857) that he began a relationship with the actress Ellen (Nellie) Ternan, (1839–1914) who became his mistress, and who is buried in Highland Cemetery, Portsmouth. Dickens’s relationship with his wife, Catherine Dickens (1815–79), and some of his eight children was strained and difficult. Dickens died on 09 June 1870 at Higham, Kent, leaving his final work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished.

Dickens’s Portsmouth connections are primarily related to his earliest years, during which he lived at three addresses in the city before his family left for the capital in 1815. From 1809 to 1815, Dickens’ father was a clerk in the Royal Navy pay office, Portsmouth. After leaving Portsmouth Dickens lived in London, Sheerness, Chatham, and Gad’s Hill. Dickens visited Portsmouth in 1838, 1858, and 1866, but appears to have had little affection for it, as a letter to a correspondent suggests:

‘I was born at Portsmouth, an English seaport town principally remarkable for mud, Jews, and Sailors, on the 7th of February 1812. My father holding in those days a situation under Government in the Navy Pay Office, which called him in the discharge of his duties to different places, I came to London, a child of two years old’ (The letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim edition, Vol. 1: 1820-1839, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. p. 465).

University of Portsmouth staff who specialise in Dickens or who have worked on Dickens projects include Dr Chris Pittard and Dr Mark Frost (English Literature), Dr Alison Habens (Creative Writing), and Professor Brad Beaven (History).

If you have any comments, corrections, or suggestions in relation to the map please contact Dr Mark Frost, English Literature Department, University of Portsmouth: mark.frost@port.ac.uk