Financial Literacy Lessons from Charles Dickens

201 years ago, a 12-year-old Charles Dickens was taken out of school, and sent to work in a factory while his father was in prison for not paying his debts. He didn’t know when this would end or when he would live with his family again.

The experience traumatised him. 

Luckily, it lasted only five months, as Charles’s grandmother died and his father inherited enough money to pay off his debts, get out of jail, and get Charles out of the factory and back to school.

Imagine if that hadn’t happened. 

We would have never read about David Copperfield or sung along with the musical “Oliver!”. We wouldn’t call miserly people “scrooges”, or know about the ghost of Christmas past. 

All because of a father who borrowed a little more than he could repay.

In the video below, MAIA co-founder Michael Gilmore relates Charles’s story to our modern day problems – and how winners of the MAIAs are the Charles Dickens’s of our current times.