Much of Dickens preoccupation with poverty and with cruelty to children, had to do with his own childhood. When Dickens was 12 years old, his improvident father was thrown into a debtor's prison. Young Charles was then packed off to London to work in Warren's blacking warehouse in the Strand. The humiliation and despair that he experienced during his months there, the sense that he had been abandoned by his own father, that he would never receive the education he longed for, were so traumatic that they colored his imagination forever. Dickens kept this shameful childhood experience an absolute secret, even from his wife and children, but at the center of many of his books is a neglected or abused child.
The term Dickensian in modern usage has become attached to:
a. Sentimentality (as in the fortunes of Dora, Little Nell, Tiny Tim and Lucie Manette)
b. eccentricities of character (as in Micawber, Uriah Heep, Bumble, Josiah Bounderby, Fagin, Scrooge etc;)
c.Poverty and injustice towards the poor ( Bleak House, Hard Times)
d. Exploitation of children (David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit).
~Facts on File Dictionary of Cultural and Historical Allusions.