Illustrations from some of Dickens’s young characters, from left: Tiny Tim and his father in A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist himself asking for more

THE memory of living alone working 10-hour days aged just 12 while his family languished in prison would never leave Charles Dickens.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of his death and as well as the recent well-received film, The Personal History of David Copperfield, there are many events and exhibitions celebrating his life and legacy.

One small but deeply affecting exhibition is Childhood in Dickensian London, showing at Senate House Library.

Neatly divided into four sections: Master Storyteller; Want and Welfare; Criminality and Redemption; and Labour and Learning, there are more than 80 items on display.

There are first edition copies of a selection of Dickens’s best-loved novels. There are also books and documents relating to social reform in Victorian-era London and prints of some of Dickens’s most famous characters.

Some of Dickens’s personal items including one of the walking sticks he used on his “night walks” in London, where he witnessed much poverty and destitution, is on loan from the nearby Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street.

They are also contributions from Lucinda Dickens-Hawksley, the author and great-great-great granddaughter of Dickens.

Dickens’s early life saw him working in harsh conditions at Warren’s Blacking Factory in The Strand where he labelled pots of polish to earn money to support his family who had fallen on hard times.

The Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist

During this time he lived alone in lodgings while his parents and younger siblings were in the debtors’ prison, Marshalsea, in Southwark.

Dickens’s mother went to live with her husband inside the jail, taking their youngest children with her. Dickens later took a room near the prison so he could have meals with them.

His personal experience of childhood poverty, labour and inadequate education would be themes throughout his journalism, writings and novels.

Characters such as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield (the most autobiographical of his novels) and Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop highlight the often brutal and joyless existence of many children at the time.

As Lucinda says: “He never forgot what it was like to be a poor child. Both in fiction and journalism. Children in the 19th century were often at the mercy of adults.”

An inheritance meant Dickens’s father could leave the Marshalsea and eventually the young Dickens went to school at Wellington House Academy, Hampstead Road, near Mornington Crescent (at the time the Dickens family lived in nearby Johnson Street, now Cranleigh Street, in Camden Town).

Aged 15 he left education – he was deemed an unremarkable student – and worked in a solicitor’s office as a clerk. After teaching himself shorthand he became a court reporter and then a political journalist.

Charles Dickens in 1843

In this exhibition we see some examples of his campaigning journalism, including his outrage at the conditions at a paupers’ school in Tooting where there had been a cholera outbreak which he wrote for The Examiner in 1845.

But he also saw the power of fiction and realised that writing a story including some of the hideous conditions children were enduring would gain far greater traction.

In 1836 the serialisation of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, was published and his novel writing began in earnest.

Soon after he married Catherine Hogarth and they set up home in Bloomsbury.

Again and again Dickens would revisit themes of child poverty and the importance of education.

Yet it is worth noting that Dickens’s early penury did not come to light in his lifetime.

While those details are well known today, they only emerged two years after his death when biographer John Forster revealed them in The Life of Charles Dickens in 1872.

Equally, many may be unaware of how Dickens was instrumental in the establishing of Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Dickens was a father of 10 children. The loss of one, his daughter, Dora, in infancy was a great sorrow in his life.

When doctors approached him about the idea of setting up a children’s hospital he was immediately on board and wrote articles promoting it. It is said that in one evening performance gave he raised £3,000 for the cause.

Indeed, fundraising efforts were so successful that the doctors were able to buy another building next door. And so in 1852, Great Ormond Street was established as the first specialist hospital for children in the UK.

We really do owe an awful lot to Mr Charles Dickens.

As Lucinda Dickens-Hawksley attests, this exhibition reveals how he “created a better childhood for all of us.”

• Childhood in Dickensian London is at Senate House Library, 4th Floor, Senate House, WC1E 7HU. Admission free. Visit www.senatehouselibrary.ac.uk