Английский язык. Часть I. Коныгина Г.И - 5 стр.

6. A man of enormous energy and wide talents, Charles Dickens engaged not
    only in novel writing but also in many other activities.
7. Thus, for the most part, Charles Dickens was self-educated being an avid
    reader of numerous books.
8. In 1845, Dickens’s amateur theatrical company made its debut.
9. In 1824, the time of prosperity came to an abrupt end and the family reached
    bottom.
10. Dickens subsequently maintained his fame with a constant stream of novels.

   Charles Dickens, in full Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870), is the
most famous and most talented of all the British Victorian novelists.
   Dickens was born February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, pre-eminent naval base
on England’s southern coast. Charles left his place of birth in infancy and spent
most of his childhood in London and Kent, both of which appear frequently in
his novels. His father was a minor civil servant in the British Navy pay office.
He was well-paid and the family was moderately wealthy. However, his ex-
travagance often brought the family to financial embarrassment. A___. Dick-
ens’s father was imprisoned for debt. Charles was withdrawn from school and
was forced to support his family by working in a shoe-polish factory. These
shocks deeply affected Charles. Much in his character and art stems from this
period. A sense of humiliation and abandonment haunted him for life. Though
abhorring this brief descent into the working class, he began to gain that sympa-
thetic knowledge of their life and privations that informed his writings. After a
while, his father's release from prison and an improvement in the family's for-
tunes made the boy's return to school possible. When Charles was 15 years old,
his formal schooling, interrupted and unimpressive, ended. B___.
   In 1827, Dickens took a job as a legal clerk in a solicitor’s office. After learn-
ing shorthand, he began working as a freelance reporter in the law courts and
Parliament thus gaining a good knowledge of the legal world often used in the
novels. These years left him with a lasting affection for journalism and contempt
both for the law and for Parliament. Being a parliamentary and newspaper re-
porter, young Dickens developed the power of precise description that made his
creative writing so remarkable.
   Charles Dickens first attracted attention of the reading public when he began
contributing stories and descriptive essays to magazines and newspapers. In De-
cember 1833, Dickens published the first of a series of sketches focusing on
London daily life under the pseudonym Boz ( rhymes with “rose” ).The success
of this volume, eventually published under the title Sketches by Boz in February
1836, was great. C___. The unexpected result was The Pickwick Papers (1836–
1837), one of the funniest novels in English literature. By July 1837, sales of the
monthly instalments exceeded 40,000 copies. Serial publication encouraged the
use of multiple plot and required that each episode be individually shaped. At
the same time it produced an unprecedentedly close relationship between author
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