When John Dickens first met Elizabeth she was "a small pretty girl of about sixteen, with bright hazel eyes, an inordinate sense of the ludicrous, and remarkable powers of comic mimicry, cheerful, sweet-tempered, and well educated".

In 1810 Elizabeth's father, who also worked for the Navy Pay Office as Chief Conductor of Monies in Town, was found guilty of embezzling £5,689 3s 3d and fled to the Continent, turning up 13 years later in the Isle of Man.

According to Mary Weller, the Dickenses' servant when they were living in Chatham, Elizabeth Dickens was "a dear, good mother and a fine woman".

"[7] To help support the family financially the 12-year-old Charles Dickens, to his great humiliation, was taken from school to work at Warren's Blacking Factory where his wages were 6s a week.

When John Dickens was released from prison, Charles's mother did not immediately remove him from the boot-blacking factory which was owned by a relation of hers, James Lamert.

[10] By the early 1850s Elizabeth Dickens had grown into a stout matriarch 'with some affectations of youthfulness, particularly [in] the "juvenility of her dress" and her semicomic confusions of speech'.

Concerned about his father's financial problems, in 1839 Charles Dickens rented a cottage for his parents far from London, and, as he thought, far from temptation, at Alphington in Devon.

Charles received an "unsatisfactory epistle from Mother" and both parents wrote him "hateful, sneering letters", feeling that he had exiled them.