In 1829, Dickens fell in love with Maria Beadnell, an attractive and vivacious but rather snobbish and hard-hearted banker's daughter. To better his chance with her, he began looking for a better paying and more prestigious position. In 1832, he went strongly into journalism, becoming a Parliamentary reporter for the Mirror of Parliament and a general reporter for the True Sun. Maria Beadnell found Dickens somewhat interesting but never took him seriously as a suitor. After four years, Dickens gave up on her, but the loss was a crushing and long-enduring sorrow. Dickens' best biographer, Edgar Johnson, says that "All the imagination, romance, passion, and aspiration of his nature she had brought into flower and she would never be separated from." Knowing that his failure to win Maria was largely due to his low social standing and poor financial prospects, Dickens became more determined than ever to make a name for himself and a fortune to go with it.
Prospects brightened almost at once. He had been writing some sketches of London life, and several of these were accepted and published by the Monthly Magazine and the Evening Chronicle. In March 1834, Dickens landed a job as a reporter for the important Whig (liberal) newspaper, the Morning Chronicle. Journalism kept him in practice with the written word and forced him to observe closely and report accurately; it was excellent training for a man who saw more and more clearly that he wanted to make his mark in literature. Early in 1836, Dickens' collected pieces were published as Sketches by Boz. The book was very favorably reviewed, sold well, and went through three editions by 1837.
A month after the appearance of this book, Dickens published the initial part of his first novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Immensely successful, Pickwick established Dickens at once as the most popular writer in England. He left the Morning Chronicle and became the editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a magazine in which Oliver Twist was published in installments beginning in February 1837. On April 2,1836, Dickens married Catherine Hogarth. Although the marriage produced ten children, it was never a love-match, and "Kate" never came close to meeting Dickens' ideal of romantic femininity. In Victorian England, divorce was difficult, scandalous, and often socially and financially ruinous.
