He wrote about orphans finding love and redemption.

But when his own 16-year-old son didn’t meet his expectations, Charles Dickens exiled him to Australia—and never spoke to him again.

This is the story of Plorn Dickens—the boy who couldn’t live up to being Charles Dickens’s son.

The year was 1868, and Edward “Plorn” Dickens was sixteen years old, standing on a dock in London, about to board a ship to Australia.

His father, Charles Dickens—the most famous writer in the English-speaking world—stood beside him, not to say goodbye with warmth, but to make sure his disappointing son actually left.

Plorn was terrified. He’d never been away from home. He’d never worked a real job. He was a shy, gentle boy who loved reading but hadn’t shown the ambition or brilliance his father demanded.
And now he was being sent to the other side of the world—alone—because he wasn’t good enough.

Charles Dickens, the man who wrote Oliver Twist about an orphan boy seeking love and belonging, was essentially orphaning his own son.

Charles Dickens had ten children with his wife Catherine.

Ten children in seventeen years—each one another mouth to feed, another person to live up to the Dickens name.
And Charles Dickens had very specific ideas about what his children should become.

The boys, especially, were expected to be ambitious, disciplined, hardworking—everything Dickens had made himself after a childhood of poverty and humiliation.
But most of his sons disappointed him.

They weren’t literary geniuses. They weren’t business titans. They were just… ordinary young men trying to figure out their lives.
To Charles Dickens, “ordinary” was failure.

Plorn—nicknamed as a baby and the name stuck—was the youngest son, born in 1852.
From early childhood, it was clear Plorn wasn’t like his father.

He was quiet. Dreamy. Sensitive. He struggled in school. He had no clear career ambitions.
Charles looked at his youngest son and saw weakness.

By the time Plorn was a teenager, Dickens had made a decision: if his sons wouldn’t make something of themselves in England, he’d send them away where they could either succeed or fail out of his sight.

Several of Plorn’s older brothers had already been shipped off to military positions in India, business opportunities in China, or farming ventures in Australia.
Now it was Plorn’s turn.

In 1868, at sixteen years old—barely more than a child—Plorn was told he was going to Australia to work on a sheep station (farm).
No discussion. No choice. Just: “You’re going.”

Dickens arranged everything. Bought the ticket. Made the arrangements. Wrote letters of introduction.
He did everything except show love.

On the day Plorn left, September 26, 1868, Dickens wrote in a letter:
“Plorn has gone to Australia. I am not sorry, though I am very fond of him.”
“I am not sorry.”

His sixteen-year-old son was leaving forever, and Dickens was “not sorry.”

Plorn boarded the Susa and sailed for Australia—a journey that took months through dangerous seas.

He arrived in Melbourne in December 1868, alone, knowing no one, completely unprepared for the harsh reality of Australian frontier life.
He was sent to work on a sheep station in rural New South Wales—backbreaking labor, isolation, extreme weather, and none of the comforts of his London childhood.
Plorn tried. He worked hard. He did everything he could to prove himself.

But he wasn’t cut out for it. He was a gentle, bookish boy trying to be a rough frontier farmer because his father demanded it.

Over the years, Plorn moved between different jobs—sheep farming, working in government administration, trying desperately to make something of himself.

He wrote letters home to his siblings. He asked about his father. He hoped for some word of approval, some sign that he was forgiven for not being brilliant.

Charles Dickens, meanwhile, was at the height of his fame.

He was touring America, giving public readings to adoring crowds. He was writing his final novels. He was celebrated as the greatest novelist in the English language.
But he never wrote to Plorn.

Not once.
His other children would mention Plorn in their letters to their father: “Have you heard from Plorn? Should we send him money?”
Dickens’s response was always cold: “He must learn to support himself.”

For Plorn, living on the other side of the world, his father’s silence was devastating.
He’d been sent away as punishment for not being good enough. And now he was being ignored as confirmation that he’d never be worth his father’s attention.

On June 9, 1870, Charles Dickens died suddenly of a stroke.

He was 58 years old, at the peak of his fame, beloved by millions.
But Plorn—still in Australia, still trying to make his father proud—didn’t learn about the death for weeks.

By the time the news reached him, the funeral had long passed. The tributes had been written. The world had mourned.
Plorn grieved alone on a sheep farm in rural Australia.

And then he discovered something even more painful:
His father had left him nothing in his will. Not money. Not property. Not even a personal message.
Other children received inheritances, personal items, words of love.

Plorn received silence.
Even in death, Charles Dickens couldn’t forgive his son for being ordinary.

Plorn Dickens spent the rest of his life in Australia.

He married. He had children of his own. He worked various jobs—none of them remarkable, none of them impressive.
He lived as an ordinary man—which is exactly what his father had considered failure.
But here’s what makes Plorn’s story so heartbreaking:

He never stopped trying to prove himself.
Even decades after his father’s death, Plorn would tell people he was Charles Dickens’s son—hoping for some reflected glory, some validation that his life mattered because of whose son he was.
He carried the weight of his father’s disappointment for his entire life.

In 1902, Plorn Dickens died in Moree, New South Wales, Australia.
He was 49 years old—eleven years younger than his father had been when he died.

His death barely made the newspapers. No grand tributes. No public mourning.
He was buried in Australia—as far from his father as he’d been in life.

The boy who was exiled for not being extraordinary enough died as an ordinary man.
Exactly what his father feared most.

But here’s the cruelty at the heart of this story:
Charles Dickens spent his entire career writing about children who deserved love and compassion.

Oliver Twist—an orphan boy abused by the system, who finally finds a family that loves him unconditionally.

David Copperfield—a semi-autobiographical character who survives a harsh childhood through resilience and eventually finds happiness.
A Christmas Carol—where Scrooge learns that love and generosity matter more than wealth and success.

Dickens’s entire literary legacy is built on the idea that children deserve kindness, second chances, and unconditional love.
But he couldn’t give that to his own son.

Why was Charles Dickens so cruel to his children—especially his sons?
The answer lies in his own childhood.

When Dickens was twelve, his father was sent to debtors’ prison. Charles was pulled out of school and forced to work in a blacking factory—pasting labels on bottles of shoe polish for ten hours a day.

The humiliation, the poverty, the sudden fall from middle-class respectability—it traumatized him for life.
Dickens clawed his way out of that poverty through pure determination and talent. He made himself into a success.

And he was terrified—absolutely terrified—that his children would fall back into the poverty and shame he’d escaped.
So he pushed them. Demanded perfection. Refused to accept ordinary.

But what he saw as tough love was actually cruelty born from his own unhealed trauma.

Dickens also treated his wife, Catherine, with shocking cruelty.

After twenty-two years of marriage and ten children, Dickens fell in love with an eighteen-year-old actress named Ellen Ternan.
In 1858, he separated from Catherine—and then publicly humiliated her.

He published a statement in newspapers claiming Catherine was mentally unstable and a bad mother. He forced their children to choose sides. He spread rumors about her.
Catherine was exiled from her own life—just as Plorn would be exiled a decade later.

The man who wrote beautifully about compassion showed none to the people closest to him.

Today, Charles Dickens is remembered as one of the greatest novelists in history.

His books are taught in schools. His characters are iconic. His social criticism changed Victorian England.
But his children—especially Plorn—are footnotes.

Plorn Dickens’s story is barely known. He’s a tragic detail in biographies of his famous father.
And that’s the final cruelty:

Even in history, Plorn is defined by his failure to live up to Charles Dickens’s expectations.

But maybe it’s time to tell Plorn’s story differently.

Maybe Plorn Dickens wasn’t a failure.

Maybe he was a boy who deserved a father’s love and never received it.
Maybe he was someone who worked hard, raised a family, lived a decent life—and that should have been enough.
Maybe the failure wasn’t Plorn’s.

Maybe the failure was Charles Dickens’s.

Because here’s the truth:

You can be a genius and a monster.

You can write beautifully about compassion and show none in your personal life.

You can create immortal characters who teach us about love—while failing to love your own children.
Charles Dickens did all of this.

And Plorn paid the price.

Plorn Dickens was sixteen when his father sent him away.

He was forty-nine when he died—thirty-three years of living with the knowledge that he’d never been good enough for Charles Dickens.
He never came home. He never received his father’s approval. He never stopped carrying the weight of that rejection.

And Charles Dickens—the man who wrote A Christmas Carol about redemption and second chances—never gave his own son either.

The next time you read Dickens, remember Plorn.

Remember the gentle boy who loved his father and was never loved back.
Remember that Oliver Twist found a happy ending.

But Plorn Dickens never did.

He wrote about orphans finding love.

But he orphaned his own son—emotionally first, then literally.
Charles Dickens gave the world beautiful stories about compassion.

But he couldn’t give his son the one thing every child deserves:
Unconditional love.

Plorn Dickens deserved better.
And maybe his story—the story Charles Dickens never wrote—is the most important one of all.

Because it’s the truth behind the fiction.