Admired and internationally acclaimed, Charles John Huffam Dickens was born
at Portsmouth, England on February 7, 1812. His childhood is said to be miserable,
in the sense that he was subjected to abject poverty. His father went to prison and he had to leave school. In spite of being a boy of keen sensibility he had to work with low companions in factories. However, born to achieve big in life, he struggled his way through it. At the age of 15, he learned shorthand and turned to journalism. He then worked as a freelance reporter in the Morning Chronicle. His first book Sketches of Boz (1836) was a collection of stories and descriptive pieces written for various papers which was later followed by other short story collections such as The Mudfog Papers (1837) in Bentley’s Miscellany magazine, Reprinted Pieces (1861), and The Uncommercial Traveller (1860-1869).
Generally, the term ‘supernatural’ is used for experience of events and beings that are above the prevailing order of nature. They are not only difficult to believe but also stand out for being beyond the realm of the ordinary laws of cause and effect which are basics in the human world. Cuddon considers supernatural as
A very comprehensive term which may be applied to any sort of story which in some way makes use of ghosts, ghouls, specters, apparitions, poltergeists, good and evil spirits and things that go bump in the night; not to mention magic, witchcraft, marvels, talismans, the eerie atmosphere and presence of the uncanny; anything supranormal, and beyond sensory perception; what makes the flesh creep and the hair stand on the end; the ‘spooky’, the numinous; that which conveys the sense of preternatural (to use Coleridge’s word) powers. (1998, p. 880)
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