Charles Dickens was a British writer born in 1812 in Portsmouth, United Kingdom. In 1822, his family moved to London and two years later his father was imprisoned for debt, forcing Dickens as a young boy to work in a shoe factory where he experienced the harsh living conditions of the lower classes. This experience influenced much of his work as his writing evolved from a light style to a more socially engaged attitude exemplified in his early novels like Oliver Twist which brought him huge popular success among both the upper and educated classes. While received with honors in the United States at first in 1842, he soon became disillusioned with American society and his criticisms of it reflected in works like Martin Chuzzlewit angered