Elizabeth Dickens Elizabeth Dickens Elizabeth Culliford Dickens (née Barrow; 21 December 1789 – 13 September 1863) was the wife of John Dickens and the mother of English novelist Charles Dickens. She was the source for Mrs. Nickleby in her son's novel "Nicholas Nickleby" and for Mrs Micawber in "David Copperfield". One of eight children of Mary Culliford (1771–1851) and Charles Barrow (1759–1826), Elizabeth Barrow was introduced to John Dickens by her brother, Thomas Culliford Barrow, when the two men were working at the Navy Pay Office in nearby Somerset House. When John Dickens first met Elizabeth she was "a small pretty girl
Elizabeth Dickens his back, and by selling pages from his son's early manuscripts. 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. However, John Dickens merely continued to write to Charles' friends and publishers asking for money. Charles received an "unsatisfactory epistle from Mother" and both parents wrote him "hateful, sneering letters", feeling that he had exiled them. "I do swear," Charles complained, "I am sick at heart with both her and father too." In 1842 John and Elizabeth Dickens returned