DAZ has launched their "Victorian Christmas" theme, and it made me start thinking about one of my favorite authors, Charles Dickens. Not many people know that Dickens, the "father of Christmas" and creator of all of those beloved tales, had something of a miserable childhood himself.

When he was only twelve years old, Charles Dickens' father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea. Charlie's mother and sister went to live with relatives in Kent, but Charlie, a boy who showed so much promise that one teacher called him a prodigy, was taken out of school and left in London. He lived alone in a seedy boarding-house and worked to support himself -- and his imprisoned father -- by pasting labels on bottles of shoe polish in a blacking factory for thirteen hours a day. He had no friends; the other boys scorned him as "the son of a gentleman", and those who had known his family in better days refused to associate with them after their disgrace.

Dickens' father was eventually released and the family recouped their fortunes somewhat. Charles was able to return to his family, and to finish his education. The misery of those days in the blacking factory never left him, though, and a fear of abandonment and a horror of failure and the poverty that went with it haunted him for the rest of his life. Some of the most powerful scenes in his books are set in debtors prisons and workhouses, and the theme of an abandoned, frightened child left to survive on its own appears in nearly all of his works.

Before the flood of Christmas card images starts, I thought I'd do a picture of little Charlie as he might have been in those sad days. He was a remarkable man who lived through suffering that would have crushed most people, and made it into art; his marvelous stories, which still enchant readers almost a hundred and fifty years later.