Charles begins reading books in his father’s library. His favorite authors include Miguel de Cervantes, Daniel Defoe, Henry Field- ing, and Tobias Smollett. 

1822   Troubled by financial difficulties, the Dickens family moves again, this time to Camden Town, in north London. Charles comes to know the city intimately, and this knowledge becomes an invaluable resource in his later writing. 
1824   Early in the year, Charles is sent to work at Warren’s Blacking Fac- tory, a manufacturer of boot-blacking. His father is arrested for debt and imprisoned for three months, and, while the rest of the family stays with John Dickens in prison, Charles lodges else- where and continues the humiliating work of pasting labels onto bottles of blacking at Warren’s. 
1825   The first passenger railway, the Stoughton-Darlington line, opens in England. John Dickens retires on a naval pension, and Charles attends Wellington House Academy, a private school where he wins a prize in Latin. 
1827   Dickens’s formal schooling ends, and he becomes a solicitor’s clerk. 
1829   After learning shorthand, he establishes himself as a reporter in the law court of Doctors’ Commons. 
1830   Dickens acquires a pass to the British Museum, where he reads Shakespeare. He meets and falls in love with Maria Beadnell. Their romance, which lasts three years, is eventually brought to an end by Maria’s father, who takes a dim view of Dickens’s prospects. 
1831   Dickens joins the staff of the Mirror of Parliament,  for which he transcribes parliamentary speeches on central topics of the time, including the condition of factory workers and of the poor,
   penal and educational reform, and the extension of the franchise beyond the landed upper classes. 
1832   The First Reform Bill is passed, granting voting rights to the middle classes. Dickens, who considers a career in the theater, misses an audition due to illness. 
1833   Slavery is abolished throughout the British Empire. Dickens pub- lishes his first story, “A Dinner at Poplar Walk,” in the Monthly Magazine. 
1834   The Poor Law Amendment Act (known as the “New Poor Law”) is passed. Dickens will agitate, both in his later writings and in person, against the harsh bureaucratic system created by the law. He becomes a journalist for the Morning Chronicle, a liberal news- paper that rivals the Times.  Here, and in other periodicals, he publishes sketches and stories under the pseudonym “Boz,” based on the childhood pronunciation of a brother’s pet name, Moses, as “Boses.”
1835   Dickens becomes engaged to Catherine Hogarth, whose father, editor of the Evening Chronicle,  encourages Dickens’s literary ef- forts.
1836   Dickens marries Catherine. They will have ten children together. He meets John Forster, who becomes his closest friend and fu- ture biographer. Dickens’s output of various short fictions in- creases. He also writes theatrical farces, as well as a political pamphlet, Sunday Under Three Heads, in which he criticizes legisla- tion that would curtail the Sunday amusements of the poor and laboring classes. Resigning from the Morning Chronicle, he agrees to become the editor of Bentley’s Miscellany, a new monthly journal to which he contributes many humorous and satirical pieces over the course of the next two years. Dickens publishes the first se- ries of Sketches by Boz in volume form, and he begins The Pickwick Papers  (1836-1837),the monthly serial that launches him to fame. All his subsequent novels will be published in monthly or weekly installments before being issued as volumes.
1837   Victoria is crowned queen. While continuing to write installments of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens begins Oliver Twist (1837-1838), which is serialized monthly in Bentley’s Miscellany . Unauthorized stage adap- tations as well as outright piracies of Dickens’s writings begin to proliferate and will continue to vex him throughout his career. Mary Hogarth, Catherine Dickens’s sister, dies suddenly, leaving Dickens grief-stricken. Her image haunts him and reappears in his idealized depiction of feminine purity in many novels.
1838   Dickens makes an expedition to Yorkshire and visits the notori- ously poorly run schools there. The experience figures in Nicholas 
   Nickleby (1838-1839),another monthly serial, which overlaps for some time with the production of Oliver Twist. 
1839   Dickens resigns his editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany . The Dickens family moves from Doughty Street to Devonshire Place, Regent’s Park, where they will remain until 1851.
1840   The Penny Post is introduced. Dickens establishes his own weekly miscellany, Master Humphrey’s Clock, where he begins the se- rialization of The Old Curiosity Shop  (1840-1841) .
1841   He writes Barnaby Rudge, another novel that appears as a weekly se- rial in Master Humphrey’s Clock. 
1842   Accompanied by Catherine, Dickens travels to America, where he is initially lionized and then criticized for his promotion of proposed international copyright legislation. He publishes Amer- ican Notes for General Circulation, which records his disillusionment with the young republic. He begins Martin Chuzzlewit  (1842-1843), which also draws on his American experience.
1843   He publishes A Christmas Carol, the first of many Christmas stories, including The Chimes (1844) and The Cricket on the Hearth  (1845).
1844   The Dickens family moves to Italy for a year. 
1845   Dickens begins to write his autobiography, which he eventually abandons. He and other writers and artists perform Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour.  Amateur theatricals, often produced to benefit a variety of causes, will continue to preoccupy Dickens throughout his career.
1846   The repeal of the Corn Laws signals an important victory for proponents of free-trade capitalism. Dickens edits the Daily News for two months and then resigns after a dispute with the pub- lishers. He publishes Pictures from Italy and begins the monthly se- rialization of Dombey and Son  (1846-1848), his most carefully and consciously crafted novel to date.