Who Was Charles Dickens?

1. Portsmouth, Chatham and the blacking factory

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 at Portsmouth, the second of eight children of John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and Elizabeth Barrow. The family moved to London in 1815 and to Chatham, Kent, in 1817, where the boy spent some of the happiest years of his childhood. Chatham gave him two things that stayed with him: a love of the Kent countryside and of the Thames estuary, which would appear in Great Expectations and other novels, and a memory of happiness against which the years that followed would be measured. He was, by his own account, a happy child until the age of twelve, and the happiness made what came next worse.

In 1824 his father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors' prison in Southwark, and Charles, aged 12, was put to work pasting labels on bottles of blacking at Warren's factory in London for ten-hour days, six shillings a week. The experience — the shame of it, the debtors' prison, the child labour — stayed with him and became the material of his novels. He never spoke of it in public during his lifetime, and his wife and children did not know the full story until after his death. The secrecy is itself revealing: the blacking factory was the wound at the centre of his life, and the novels are, among other things, an attempt to make sense of it. David Copperfield, the most autobiographical of his books, tells the story directly, with the factory renamed and the details changed, but the shame intact.

His father was released after a few months, Dickens returned to school, and in 1827 he became a solicitor's clerk, then a freelance shorthand reporter in the law courts and Parliament. The reporting years were his real education. He learned shorthand, he learned how courts and Parliament worked, and he learned to observe: the faces in the gallery, the habits of the lawyers, the absurdities of the legal system. The law courts of Bleak House, the debtors' prison of Little Dorrit, and the workhouse of Oliver Twist all come from what he saw in those years. He had only a few years of formal schooling, interrupted when his father was imprisoned, but he educated himself through reading and through his work, and by the time he was twenty-four he was ready to write the book that would make him famous.

2. Pickwick and the invention of the serial novel

Dickens began as a journalist. Sketches by Boz, published in 1836, his portraits of London life, led to The Pickwick Papers, serialised from March 1836 and an immediate success. The Pickwick Papers was originally commissioned as a series of sporting sketches to accompany illustrations, and Dickens turned it into something else entirely: a comic novel about a club of well-meaning gentlemen and their servant Sam Weller, whose Cockney wit became the most popular voice in England. The book sold in enormous numbers, and Dickens, at twenty-four, was a celebrity. He married Catherine Hogarth in April 1836 and edited Bentley's Miscellany while writing Oliver Twist, published from 1837 to 1839.

The serial form was Dickens's great innovation, and it shaped his art. His novels were published in monthly parts, usually twenty in number, and readers waited for each instalment the way modern audiences wait for the next episode of a television series. The form built suspense, it let him respond to readers' reactions, and it made his characters part of the public conversation: people discussed Mr Pickwick and Oliver Twist as if they were real people, and they wrote to Dickens to ask what would happen next. The form also shaped his style. Serial novels need cliffhangers, memorable characters who can be recognised in a single scene, and plots that can sustain themselves over many months. Dickens mastered all three, and his imitators, in England and America, copied the form for the rest of the century.

Oliver Twist, the novel that followed Pickwick, was a different kind of book. It was a story about a workhouse boy, a criminal gang and a murder, and it was the first novel in English to make a child the hero of a serious social story. It attacked the workhouse system, the criminal underworld and the hypocrisy of respectable society, and it did so in a form that ordinary readers could enjoy. The Artful Dodger, Fagin and Bill Sikes became part of the language, and the novel's famous opening line — asking for more — became a proverb. The book established the pattern of Dickens's career: a popular story that was also a social argument, told in a voice that could make readers laugh and then make them angry.

3. The great novels: Copperfield, Bleak House and the middle years

The novels followed in quick succession: Nicholas Nickleby in 1838-1839, The Old Curiosity Shop in 1840-1841, Barnaby Rudge in 1841, A Christmas Carol in 1843, David Copperfield in 1849-1850, Bleak House in 1852-1853, Hard Times in 1854, Little Dorrit in 1855-1857, A Tale of Two Cities in 1859, Great Expectations in 1860-1861 and Our Mutual Friend in 1864-1865. The list is the most productive run in the history of the English novel, and it is worth pausing over, because the sheer output is part of the achievement. Dickens wrote fifteen novels, edited journals, gave public readings and campaigned for social reform, all in thirty-four years. No other novelist of his standing produced so much, so fast, and so consistently well.

David Copperfield, published in 1849-1850, is the novel Dickens liked best, and it is the one most readers return to. It is the story of a boy who loses his mother, is sent to work, is rescued by his aunt, and grows up to become a writer. The autobiographical elements are plain: the blacking factory, the debt, the struggle to become a writer. But the novel is more than autobiography: it is a portrait of England, from the seaside at Yarmouth to the law courts of London, and it contains some of Dickens's greatest comic creations, including Mr Micawber, whose faith that something will turn up has become a proverb. The novel's famous opening — whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else — is one of the great first lines in English fiction.

Bleak House, published in 1852-1853, is the darkest and most ambitious of the middle novels. It attacks the Court of Chancery, the legal system that could keep a case running for decades while the people involved grew old and died, and it does so through two narrators: an omniscient voice that describes the fog and the mud of London, and Esther Summerson, a young woman whose quiet goodness holds the novel together. The book's opening, with its fog creeping into the court and into the lives of the characters, is one of the most famous passages Dickens ever wrote. Hard Times, published in 1854, is his shortest novel and his most direct attack on industrial society, on the philosophy that reduces human beings to facts and figures. Together the middle novels show a writer who had moved beyond comedy and into a sustained critique of the institutions of his age.

4. A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations: the late masterpieces

A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859, is Dickens's most famous novel outside England, and it is the one most often read in schools. It opens with one of the most quoted passages in English literature — it was the best of times, it was the worst of times — and it tells the story of the French Revolution through two men who look alike: Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat who has renounced his family, and Sydney Carton, a dissolute English lawyer who redeems himself by taking Darnay's place at the guillotine. The novel is shorter and more tightly plotted than Dickens's other books, and it shows a writer who could work in a historical mode as well as a contemporary one. Its final line, in which Carton imagines a future he will not live to see, is one of the great endings in fiction.

Great Expectations, published in 1860-1861, is the novel most critics now regard as his masterpiece. It is the story of Pip, an orphan in the Kent marshes, who is given money by a mysterious benefactor and goes to London to become a gentleman, only to discover that his benefactor is Magwitch, an escaped convict he helped as a boy. The novel is a study of ambition, shame and snobbery, and it contains the most haunting character Dickens ever created: Miss Havisham, the woman who was jilted on her wedding day and has sat ever since in her wedding dress, in a room where the clocks have stopped. The novel's ending, in which Pip and Estella meet again in the ruined garden, is one of the most discussed passages in Dickens, and he rewrote it at the suggestion of his friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The original ending, in which Pip and Estella do not meet again, is darker, and many readers prefer it.

Our Mutual Friend, published in 1864-1865, was his last completed novel, and it is a darker, more complex book than its predecessors, a study of money, greed and the Thames, the river that runs through all of Dickens's London. The novels of the late period are more sombre than the early ones, and they show a writer who had grown more pessimistic about the possibility of reform. The comedy is still there, but it is darker, and the villains are more plausible. The late Dickens is the Dickens that modern readers most admire, because he is the one who seems most like a modern novelist: interested in psychology, in the inner life, and in the ways that people deceive themselves.

5. A Christmas Carol and the reinvention of Christmas

A Christmas Carol, a short book written in six weeks and published in 1843, reshaped how Christmas is celebrated in the English-speaking world. The story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a miser who is visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, and who wakes on Christmas morning a changed man, is the most widely read of all Dickens's works, and it has been adapted for stage, film and television more often than any of his novels. The book's influence is so great that it is hard to separate the modern idea of Christmas — the family dinner, the generosity, the goodwill — from Dickens's version of it. The historian's question is how much of that influence is real, and how much is legend. The fair answer is that Dickens did not invent Christmas, but he gave it a story, and the story gave the holiday a meaning that it has kept ever since.

The book was written for a practical reason: Dickens needed money, and a Christmas book was a reliable seller. But it was also written from conviction. Dickens believed that Christmas was a time when the rich should remember the poor, and the book's most famous line — that the poor should be allowed to enjoy the holiday — is a social argument disguised as a ghost story. The character of Tiny Tim, the crippled child who may not live to see another Christmas, is the emotional centre of the book, and the line God bless us, every one is the most quoted sentence Dickens ever wrote. The book's success was immediate: the first edition sold out, and it has never been out of print.

The Carol's afterlife is as interesting as its origin. It has been filmed dozens of times, from the silent era to the present, and it has been adapted into every medium imaginable. The character of Scrooge has passed into the language as a word for a miser, and the phrase Bah, humbug is recognised around the world. The book is also the reason Dickens is associated with Christmas more than any other writer, and it is the reason his reputation has survived among readers who have never read his novels. A child who has never heard of Bleak House knows who Scrooge is, and that is a kind of immortality that few writers achieve.

6. Journalism, readings and the public man

Dickens was not only a novelist. He founded and edited the weekly journals Household Words in 1850 and All the Year Round in 1859, and from the 1850s he gave public readings of his works in Britain and America. The readings were a new kind of literary celebrity: Dickens performed his novels, acting out the characters, doing the voices, and holding audiences of thousands in silence and then in laughter. The readings made him rich, and they made him famous in a way that no novelist before him had been. They also exhausted him, and they contributed to the ill health of his last years. He toured America twice, in 1842 and in 1867-1868, and the second tour, in which he gave more than seventy readings, left him visibly weakened.

His journalism and his campaigning were part of the same public role. He wrote about the workhouse, the debtors' prison, the law courts and child labour, and his descriptions helped turn public opinion against the institutions he attacked. The question of how much his novels actually changed the law is a fair one, and historians are cautious about claiming too much. The workhouse was not abolished because of Oliver Twist, and the Court of Chancery was not reformed because of Bleak House. But Dickens changed the way people thought about those institutions, and that change in opinion made reform possible. His novels gave the poor a human face, and that face was harder to ignore than a statistic.

His private life was less happy than his public one. He separated from his wife Catherine in 1858, after twenty-two years of marriage and ten children, and the separation was a public scandal. He later formed a relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan, which he kept secret during his lifetime. The details of his private life were not known to his readers, and they do not change the quality of the novels, but they do complicate the image of Dickens as a warm and generous man. He could be generous, and he was, to his friends and to the poor; he could also be harsh, to his wife and to those who disappointed him. The biographies of Dickens, from John Forster's Life, published after his death, to the modern scholarly lives, have wrestled with that contradiction, and they have not resolved it.

7. Death, reputation and the afterlife of the novels

In June 1865 Dickens survived the Staplehurst rail crash, in which a train he was travelling on derailed and ten people were killed. The crash left him shaken, and he never fully recovered his nerve for travel. His last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was left half finished when he died of a stroke at Gad's Hill Place, near Rochester, Kent, on 9 June 1870. He was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, beside the writers he had admired. The unfinished novel has fascinated readers ever since, and the question of how it would have ended — who killed Edwin Drood, and why — has produced a small industry of solutions, none of them certain.

Dickens is generally considered the greatest novelist of the Victorian era and one of the greatest in English literature. His novels have never been out of print; his characters and phrases — Scrooge, the Artful Dodger, Miss Havisham, the best of times, the worst of times — are part of the language. The house at 48 Doughty Street, London, where he lived from 1837 to 1839 and wrote The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, is preserved as the Charles Dickens Museum, and Gad's Hill Place, his last home, still stands near Rochester. His reputation has survived the changes of literary fashion: the modernists who dismissed him, the critics who called him sentimental, and the readers who found him too long. Each generation has found something new in the novels, and that is the mark of a classic.

The comparison with other great novelists helps to place him. William Shakespeare, who wrote for the theatre, is the greater writer; Jane Austen, who wrote about a small world with perfect precision, is the finer artist; Mark Twain, who wrote about America with a similar blend of comedy and anger, is his closest counterpart; Leo Tolstoy, who wrote about Russia on a scale Dickens never attempted, is the greater novelist of ideas. But no one else did what Dickens did: make the novel the great popular art of an age, give a whole society its characters and its phrases, and write books that are still read, still adapted and still loved a century and a half after his death. For readers who want to go further, the biography on this site gives the verified facts of his life, and the best place to start reading is David Copperfield, or, for a shorter introduction, A Christmas Carol.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Charles Dickens
• Wikipedia — Charles Dickens
• Project Gutenberg — Charles Dickens
• Charles Dickens Museum — official site

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• Who Is Warren Buffett? — Warren Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway from a struggling textile mill into a vast conglomerate, and his letters taught generations value investing.
• Who Is Wasim Akram? — Wasim Akram is Pakistan's greatest fast bowler, the first to 500 ODI wickets and hero of the 1992 World Cup final, famed as the master of swing.
• Who Is Xi Jinping? — Xi Jinping has led China since 2012 as general secretary of the Communist Party and since 2013 as president, shaping its policies and vision.
• Who Is Zinedine Zidane? — Zinedine Zidane won the World Cup as a player and three Champions Leagues as a manager, and in July 2026 was appointed head coach of France.
• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.