Charles Dickens

Dickens was twelve when his father was jailed for debt and he was pulled from school to paste labels on boot-blacking bottles ten hours a day, a humiliation he told almost no one about and poured, thinly disguised, into David Copperfield. He worked his way up through law offices and parliamentary reporting before Pickwick Papers, serialized in monthly installments from 1836, made him a phenomenon.

He wrote at a punishing serial pace for the rest of his life, editing magazines and campaigning for the poor alongside novel after novel (Bleak House, Great Expectations) while his marriage collapsed publicly in 1858 and a secret relationship with the young actress Ellen Ternan shadowed his later years. Exhausting public reading tours wore him down; he died of a stroke in 1870, mid-sentence in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.