Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens poured raw human emotion onto the page and, in doing so, changed the conscience of an age. Born on 7 February 1812 in Portsmouth, he carried the Sun in Aquarius, the sign that shines not for itself but for the tribe, for the masses of humanity; the ego that becomes a hero when it works for the collective. It fell in the fifth house, the Sun's own creative home, so his humanitarian vision arrived clothed as pure, radiant storytelling: characters so alive they walked out of the page, from Scrooge to Sam Weller. That is the marriage that made him. His Aquarian love of the whole social body found its voice through the fifth-house artist who could make a nation laugh, weep and campaign for the children in the boot-blacking factories he had known himself. His Moon in Sagittarius sits in the third house, the exalted position of the storyteller: emotion knit into words, into serialised instalments with cliffhangers that kept even the illiterate poor paying a halfpenny to hear the next chapter read aloud. Freedom-loving, restless, forever the philosopher, he wove topical truth into fiction. With Virgo rising, the meticulous craftsman met the world through the detail and the edit. A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations: the Victorian era's greatest novelist, who died in 1870 with his social conscience intact.