Charles Dickens

Fire and water take three of his ten planets each, with two apiece in earth and air, and five of the ten are mutable. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind, and Jupiter was the only retrograde planet. The record says Dickens wrote serially, for money, at enormous speed, and produced the most durable portrait of Victorian poverty anybody has managed, and that he had been sent to a blacking factory at twelve and never quite left it.

That record is unusual in this set, because it has already drawn its own line of cause: a factory at twelve, and then a body of work about poverty that never got away from it. The chart has nothing to add to that and should not pretend otherwise. What it does have is the Sun in quiet contact with Pluto at three fifths of a degree, power that is usable rather than overwhelming: resilience, the ability to start again after a loss, and an instinct for what is really going on beneath a situation. That last clause is a fair description of a novelist's working equipment, and also a compliment almost any chart could be paid.

Venus sits a fifth of a turn from Saturn at under half a degree, the closest contact here, steady affection: relationships that last, and an unfashionable preference for the durable over the exciting. Venus also sits conjunct Pluto at just over a degree, total attraction: relationships that transform the person, and an all-or-nothing approach to love that leaves very little room for the ordinary. Those two are flatly opposed, they both run through Venus, and the record contains nothing at all about his private life, so this entry prints the pair and declines to choose between them.

Saturn sits a fifth of a turn from Pluto at under seven tenths of a degree, durable strength: rebuilding after loss, and authority that has genuinely been earned. Mars stands at an awkward angle to Uranus at under a degree, action without warning, and the Moon in easy contact with that Mars at just over a degree, feelings translating into action cleanly, with its sign certain at eight degrees of Sagittarius. He died at Higham on 9 June 1870, at fifty eight. Jupiter stood sixty degrees from his natal Mars at seven hundredths of a degree that day and the Moon square his natal Mercury at under a quarter. The Moon was at its first quarter and seventy eight per cent lit, a phase that acts decisively and often has to break something to do it.