[3] As a boy, Fred attended a school in Hampstead with his brother Alfred for two years, until their father, John Dickens, could no longer afford the fees.

[5][6][7][8] His wife, Elizabeth Barrow, and her three youngest children, including the four-year-old Fred, joined her husband in the Marshalsea in April 1824.

[10] Fred went to live with Charles and his wife, Catherine Dickens, and their young family in their Doughty Street home and resided with them for a number of years.

[14] Fred married Anna on 30 December 1848 despite Charles's misgivings, but in 1858 the couple applied for a judicial separation on the grounds of adultery.

[11] Like his father before him, who had also been imprisoned for debt, Fred had gained credit from various sources by trading on his brother's fame,[15] "...rasping my very heart," Charles Dickens stated.

To his friend John Forster, Charles lamented Fred's "wasted life... but God forbid that one should be hard upon it, or upon anything in this world that is not deliberately and coldly wrong...".