109 Fun Facts About Charles Dickens

In which city was Charles Dickens born?

Portsmouth. His will asked for no monument, yet in 2014 his birthplace unveiled Britain's first full-size statue of him.

Which rambling comic mother did Dickens base on his own mother?

Mrs Nickleby. His mother never saw the likeness: Dickens wrote that she once asked him whether he really believed such a woman had ever existed.

Which performer, whose memoirs he later edited, did Dickens watch as a young child?

Joseph Grimaldi, the clown. Dickens wrote only the preface himself, reworking a draft that another writer had made from the clown's own notes.

To which debtors' prison was John Dickens sent in 1824?

The Marshalsea. John Dickens was held in the Southwark debtors' prison over a debt, and his son later set Little Dorrit in the prison.

Whose biography, published after Dickens died, first revealed his childhood job pasting labels?

John Forster. Dickens kept the episode secret but gave Forster a handwritten account, which Forster printed in his Life of Charles Dickens.

Which Oliver Twist character took his name from a boy Dickens befriended at the blacking factory?

Fagin. After Jewish readers complained about the character, Dickens changed the novel's text in later editions.

Dickens never forgot his mother doing what?

Wanting to send him back to the blacking factory: she arranged his return after a quarrel ended the job, but his father refused and sent him to school instead.

Which school inspired the brutal Mr Creakle's establishment in Dickens's most autobiographical novel?

Wellington House Academy. In his essay Our School, Dickens told of going back to find a railway had swallowed its playground and sliced away the schoolroom.

Whose system of shorthand did Dickens teach himself in order to become a reporter?

Thomas Gurney's. Mastering it carried Dickens from the Doctors' Commons courts into the Commons press gallery and on to the Morning Chronicle.

Dickens's first love, Maria Beadnell, is thought to be the model for which character?

Dora Spenlow. Meeting a much-changed Maria again years later, Dickens recast her as the tiresome Flora Finching in Little Dorrit.

Why did Dickens miss his 1832 acting audition at Covent Garden?

He had a cold. Dickens wrote that he would apply again next season, but reporting and writing soon took over and he never did.

How did the pen name 'Boz' come about?

A nickname for his youngest brother. Dickens called little Augustus Moses, after The Vicar of Wakefield; said through the nose, it became Boses, then Boz.

Which character's arrival turned The Pickwick Papers into a publishing sensation?

Sam Weller. Sales soared after the cockney servant appeared, and Pickwick cigars soon turned up in the shops.

What happened to Robert Seymour, the original illustrator of The Pickwick Papers?

He took his own life. After a brief stand-in, Hablot Browne, known as Phiz, took over and went on to illustrate most of Dickens's later novels.

Which 1834 measure did Dickens attack in Oliver Twist?

The New Poor Law. Dickens took aim at its meagre workhouse diet, the reason hungry Oliver dares to ask for more.

Which gift from the actor Charles Fechter did Dickens use as his writing study?

A Swiss chalet. Dickens wrote in its upstairs room, and he spent his last working day there on Edwin Drood before collapsing that evening.

Dickens forbade publishing which work for his children?

Gospel stories. The family held them back until his last surviving child died in 1933, and they were published the next year.

Whose death in Dickens's arms in 1837 so shocked him that he missed a Pickwick deadline?

His sister-in-law Mary. Dickens slipped a ring from her finger and wore it for the rest of his life.

Dickens's pet raven Grip was the model for a bird in which novel?

Barnaby Rudge. When the real Grip died in 1841, Dickens soon found a new raven and named it Grip as well.

Which country did Dickens visit at the end of his 1842 American tour, acting on stage there?

Canada. In Montreal he directed and acted in three amateur plays, and back in London he went on to stage charity theatricals with friends.

Which American author headed the writers who signed Dickens's copyright petition to Congress?

Washington Irving. Raising copyright cost Dickens: some American newspapers branded their celebrated guest a mercenary scoundrel.

Dickens's travelogue of his first US trip was called what?

American Notes. Its closing attack on slavery, quoting newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves marked by their masters, offended many American readers.

In October 1843, Dickens gave a speech on educating the poor in which city?

Manchester. Soon after, while writing his next book, Dickens walked fifteen or twenty miles a night through London's black streets, weeping and laughing over it.

Which 1843-44 novel introduced the nurse Sarah Gamp?

Martin Chuzzlewit. Mrs Gamp's ever-present umbrella gave British English 'gamp' as slang for an umbrella.

Urania Cottage, a Shepherd's Bush home Dickens helped set up, took in whom?

Women rescued from the streets. Dickens did not just lend his name: he gave much of his own time to running the home.

Which firm published The Pickwick Papers in monthly shilling numbers?

Chapman & Hall. When sales of a later serial fell, the firm hinted it might cut his monthly pay, and Dickens moved to Bradbury & Evans.

Which novel did Dickens call his 'favourite child' among his books?

David Copperfield. Dickens was startled when a friend pointed out that his hero's initials were his own reversed.

Which Bleak House character dies of spontaneous combustion?

Krook. When the critic George Henry Lewes declared such a death scientifically impossible, Dickens publicly insisted that it could happen.

Which Kent house that Dickens had admired as a boy did he buy in 1856?

Gads Hill Place. His father had told him that if he persevered and worked hard, he might one day come to live in it.

Dickens's weekly journals Household Words and All the Year Round both took their titles from what?

Shakespeare. When Dickens launched the second journal, he again hunted for a Shakespeare line to print above its title.

Dickens fell in love with actress Ellen Ternan while staging which play with Wilkie Collins?

The Frozen Deep. Moved to a huge hall where amateur voices would not carry, the play needed professionals in his daughters' parts, and Ellen was one.

After the separation, which member of the household raised Dickens's children?

Catherine's sister Georgina. When Catherine moved out taking only their eldest son, her own sister stayed on with Dickens to run the house.

In 1858 Dickens spoke and read to raise funds for which struggling London hospital?

Great Ormond Street. He was already weighing paid readings when the appeal came, and a fortnight after reading for the hospital he gave his first reading for his own profit.

Alongside the Pickwick trial, Dickens's final reading featured which story?

A Christmas Carol. Though gravely ill, he closed by telling the audience he would vanish from those garish lights for evermore.

To which politician did Dickens dedicate A Tale of Two Cities?

Lord John Russell. Dickens, who had little faith in the political class, later said there was no man in England he respected more in public life.

What did Dickens burn in a bonfire behind his house in September 1860?

Letters people had sent him. Tired of seeing private letters misused in public, he went on destroying every non-business letter he received.

The stage illusion Pepper's ghost made its name in a scene from which Dickens story?

The Haunted Man. The trick bears Pepper's name, but it grew from a model by the engineer Henry Dircks, who soon accused Pepper of hogging the credit.

With America closed by the civil war, which country did Dickens consider touring for a large fee?

Australia. Tempted enough to plan a travel book about the trip, he still gave the idea up.

What did Dickens climb back into his dangling carriage to rescue after the Staplehurst crash?

His unfinished manuscript. In a postscript to Our Mutual Friend, he joked that he had climbed back to rescue its characters, much soiled but otherwise unhurt.

What appalled Dickens most when he watched a married couple hanged in public in 1849?

The behaviour of the crowd. His letter to The Times helped start a campaign that ended in 1868, when Parliament moved executions inside prison walls.

Which Dickens ghost story opens with the shout "Below there!"?

The Signal-Man. In the end the signalman is struck by a train whose driver had shouted those very words at him.

By the end of his 1867-68 American tour, Dickens was living largely on what?

Champagne and eggs in sherry. Unable to eat more than half a pound of solid food a day, he still kept up his readings until April 1868.

Why did doctors stop Dickens's farewell tour in April 1869?

Signs of a stroke. Doctors banned any readings that meant travelling, yet later let him give twelve last ones in London.

Dickens's unfinished last novel centres on John Jasper, a choirmaster addicted to what?

Opium. Dickens modelled the novel's opium den on a real one he visited in London's East End, run by a haggard old woman smoking from a pipe made of an ink bottle.

What were Dickens's reported last words?

'On the ground'. He is said to have spoken them when urged to lie down after collapsing at dinner, and he died the next evening without regaining consciousness.

How was Dickens buried in Westminster Abbey?

In a small private service. Once the news spread, the grave was left open for days as thousands came to pay their respects.

What did Queen Victoria give Dickens, with an inscription in her own hand?

Her Highlands journal. In March 1870, a few months before he died, the Queen received him in person.

Dickens named a son after which 18th-century novelist?

Henry Fielding. Dickens had first planned to name the baby after Oliver Goldsmith, then changed his mind and chose Fielding.

Which Dickens heroine did the Scottish critic Lord Jeffrey hail as the best thing since Cordelia?

Little Nell. Later critics were far less kind, and many came to find her saintly suffering ludicrously sentimental.

In his essay Night Walks, what sent Dickens walking London all night?

Insomnia. In the essay he says he beat it not by staying in bed but by going out as soon as he lay down and coming home tired at sunrise.

Which word from a Dickens character means hypocritically affecting high moral principles?

Pecksniffian. Seth Pecksniff, the architect, passed off his pupil's grammar-school design as his own.

In which Kent town did Dickens spend much of his early boyhood?

Chatham. His years there seem to have been happy, and the surrounding area gave the background for several of his novels.

Which magazine did Dickens edit from its first issue in 1837 until he fell out with its publisher?

Bentley's Miscellany. Editing it while writing a monthly serial for it left Dickens overworked, and quarrels over the novels he had promised Bentley ended in his resignation.

Which of Dickens's London homes became the Charles Dickens Museum?

48 Doughty Street. Dickens lived there less than three years before moving his growing family to a larger house near Regent's Park.

Which real-life essayist was the model for Harold Skimpole in Bleak House?

Leigh Hunt. After Hunt died, Dickens had to defend himself in print over the unflattering portrait of his old friend.

Which foreign author turned a planned short stay at Dickens's home in 1857 into five weeks?

Hans Christian Andersen. He overstayed his welcome so badly that the friendship cooled, and Dickens gradually stopped answering his letters.

Which banking heiress, whose charity work Dickens helped steer, funded a refuge he ran for years?

Angela Burdett Coutts. Dickens proposed the refuge to her himself, and while she paid for it, he took charge of its day-to-day running.

In which London home, his from 1851, did Dickens write Hard Times and Little Dorrit?

Tavistock House. Dickens staged amateur plays in a theatre he set up there, acting in them alongside his children and friends.

Which novelist introduced Dickens to his first book publisher?

William Harrison Ainsworth. That publisher later planned to reissue Dickens's early sketches, and Dickens had to buy the copyright back for far more than he sold it for.

Which jilted heiress in Great Expectations has gone on wearing her wedding dress for decades?

Miss Havisham also stopped every clock in her mansion at twenty to nine, the minute she read the letter calling the marriage off. The wedding cake is still rotting on the table.

Which dead business partner of Ebenezer Scrooge appears in chains to warn him that three spirits will come?

Jacob Marley has been dead seven years when the story opens, and the chain he drags is hung with cash boxes and ledgers. He says the visits are his old partner's one chance to escape the same fate.

Which ever-hopeful Dickens debtor, sure that something will turn up, was modelled on the author's father?

Mr Micawber is hauled off to prison for debt just as John Dickens was. The London street where the author's parents later lodged has since been renamed after the character.

Which American poet met Dickens in Philadelphia and is thought to have based a famous bird on the novelist's pet?

Edgar Allan Poe had reviewed the novel featuring Dickens's talkative raven and was said to be delighted that she was real. When she died, her owner had her stuffed and mounted in a glass case.

Which despairing English barrister goes to the guillotine in another man's place in A Tale of Two Cities?

Sydney Carton can make the swap because he looks uncannily like the condemned man. The same likeness had already saved that prisoner once, at a treason trial in England.

By what nickname is Jack Dawkins, the cocky young pickpocket who befriends Oliver Twist, far better known?

The Artful Dodger earns the name by his skill at picking pockets, yet he is finally caught with a single stolen snuff box. His friends mourn that so great a thief went down for so small a prize.

Which songwriter turned Oliver Twist into the hit 1960 stage musical Oliver! despite being unable to read music?

Lionel Bart hummed his melodies for an arranger to write down. The 1968 film of the show went on to win six Oscars, including Best Picture.

Which actor played Ebenezer Scrooge opposite Kermit the Frog's Bob Cratchit in a 1992 Muppet film?

Michael Caine took the part on one condition: he would play it as a completely serious dramatic role, never winking at the camera, as if there were no puppets around him at all.

What does the reformed Ebenezer Scrooge send anonymously to Bob Cratchit's home on Christmas morning?

A large turkey was the prize bird hanging in the poulterer's window. Goose had been Britain's traditional festive bird, and a change to turkey followed the book's publication.

Which Game of Thrones actor, the doomed Viserys Targaryen, is a great-great-great-grandson of Charles Dickens?

Harry Lloyd descends from the novelist through his mother, born Marion Dickens. He made his screen debut at 16 in a BBC adaptation of one of his ancestor's own novels.

Which escaped convict, fed by young Pip on the marshes, proves to be his secret benefactor in Great Expectations?

Abel Magwitch had been transported to New South Wales, and the fortune he made there is what secretly turns a blacksmith's apprentice into a London gentleman.

Which fawning Dickens clerk, forever calling himself humble, schemes to take over the lawyer Mr Wickfield's practice?

Uriah Heep is finally exposed as a fraudster and ends the book in prison, convicted of trying to cheat the Bank of England and still playing the meek model inmate.

Which brutal housebreaker murders his lover Nancy in Oliver Twist and dies fleeing a mob across the rooftops?

Bill Sikes loses his footing while escaping by rope and accidentally hangs himself, unnerved by a vision of his victim's eyes. His bull terrier Bull's-eye shadows him through much of the book.

Which pompous parish beadle in Oliver Twist, told a husband answers for his wife, calls the law an ass?

Mr Bumble was so vividly officious that his name passed into the language: bumbledom is the meddlesome self-importance of a petty bureaucrat.

Which implacable Paris wine-shop keeper knits the names of the condemned into her work in A Tale of Two Cities?

Madame Defarge sits knitting beside the scaffold during executions, and her stitches are a secret register of everyone the revolutionaries mean to kill.

Which Hard Times school founder opens the novel by demanding that children be taught nothing but facts?

Mr Gradgrind even named two of his younger sons Adam Smith and Malthus, after economists. His surname is now used for anyone hard and concerned only with cold figures.

Which ailing son of Bob Cratchit, who walks with a crutch, does Ebenezer Scrooge see doomed to die in a vision?

Tiny Tim survives after all: Dickens states outright that the boy did not die, and the reformed miser becomes a second father to him.

Which British director filmed both Great Expectations and Oliver Twist in the 1940s before making Lawrence of Arabia?

David Lean released the two adaptations just two years apart, and Great Expectations became the first of five films he directed to win the Oscar for cinematography.

Which scientist replaced Dickens on the back of the Bank of England £10 note when a new design arrived in 2000?

Charles Darwin took over the place Dickens had held since 1992, and in 2017 he in turn made way for another novelist, Jane Austen.

Which actor directed himself as Dickens in The Invisible Woman, a 2013 film about the novelist's secret affair?

Ralph Fiennes built the film on Claire Tomalin's biography of the young actress, who is played by Felicity Jones. The relationship lasted thirteen years, until the writer's death.

Which pen name did illustrator Hablot Knight Browne adopt on The Pickwick Papers to chime with Dickens's Boz?

Phiz was his second choice: he signed his first two Pickwick plates Nemo. He and Dickens became good friends and travelled to Yorkshire together in 1838 to see its schools.

Which caricaturist illustrated Oliver Twist and later claimed in The Times that much of the plot was his idea?

George Cruikshank made the claim in a letter printed in December 1871, when Dickens had been dead for over a year and could not answer. He had once acted in his friend's amateur theatre company.

Which rival novelist, ranked second only to Dickens in his day, hailed the tale of Scrooge as a national benefit?

William Thackeray added that the book was a personal kindness to every man or woman who read it. He himself is now remembered almost entirely for Vanity Fair.

Which novelist friend talked Dickens into rewriting the sad ending of Great Expectations before it was published?

Edward Bulwer-Lytton read the proofs and urged the change so strongly that Dickens gave way. Critics still argue over whether the hopeful second ending improved the book or spoiled it.

Which Scottish historian's account of the French Revolution did Dickens draw on heavily for A Tale of Two Cities?

Thomas Carlyle shaped the novel's rhetoric and symbolism as well as its facts. He was enthusiastic about the finished book, which left its author heartily delighted.

Dickens lived abroad for a spell in 1844 and turned the stay into a travel book of Pictures from which country?

Italy struck him, in one critic's words, as a chaotic magic-lantern show with himself as the fascinated spectator. Two years later he moved on to Switzerland and began a new novel there.

Which liberal London newspaper did Dickens launch in 1846, only to quit as its editor within weeks?

The Daily News ran until 1930, but its founder was gone almost at once, worn out and at odds with one of the co-owners. He had planned it as a radical rival to his old employer's paper.

Dickens's father John spent years as a clerk in the pay office of which branch of Britain's forces?

The Royal Navy salary paid for a few years of good schooling for young Charles. That ended in 1822, when the clerk was recalled to headquarters at Somerset House and the family moved to Camden Town.

In which American city did Dickens and his wife land in January 1842 at the start of his first US tour?

Boston welcomed the couple off the steamship Britannia. It was his first stop again in 1867, when he spent weeks there dining with Emerson and Longfellow before starting his readings.

Dickens filled his study shelves with fake books; a 21-volume history of one short lawsuit mocked which court?

Chancery delays were a favourite target, and the dummy spines carried titles he invented himself. Another was a guide to refreshing sleep credited to Hansard, the record of Parliament.

In the most famous scene of Oliver Twist, the hungry orphan asks the workhouse master for more of what?

Gruel was nearly all the boys were fed, and the request was no impulse of his own: the starving boys drew lots, and the loser had to ask.

Which eccentric great-aunt in Dover takes in the runaway boy hero of Dickens's most autobiographical novel?

Betsey Trotwood had stormed out on the day he was born, furious that the baby was not the girl she wanted. As his guardian she renames him after herself and calls him Trot.

Which beautiful but cold young woman, raised to break men's hearts, is Pip's great love in Great Expectations?

Estella turns out to be the child of a transported convict and a murderess, the very opposite of the high-born lady her suitor takes her for.

Which cheerful relative invites Ebenezer Scrooge to Christmas dinner, only to have the invitation rudely refused?

His nephew Fred is the son of Fan, the beloved sister the miser lost long ago. The story ends with the uncle turning up at the party after all.

Which Bleak House heroine, who tells half the story herself, is the only female narrator in any Dickens novel?

Esther Summerson shares the telling with an all-seeing narrator, the only double narrative Dickens wrote. Her first-person voice may owe something to Jane Eyre, published a few years before.

Which 1844 Dickens Christmas book follows the gloomy old porter Trotty Veck through a goblin vision on New Year's Eve?

The Chimes was the second of five Christmas books he wrote in the 1840s. Its title comes from the church bells that cheer Trotty on the steps where he waits for letters to deliver.

Which paranormal research society, launched in London in 1862, counted Dickens among its early members?

The Ghost Club grew out of talk among Cambridge college fellows, and one of its first cases was to challenge the Davenport brothers' spirit cabinet, a stage act claiming contact with the dead.

Before becoming a reporter, the teenage Dickens spent eighteen months as a junior clerk for what kind of employer?

A law firm at Gray's Inn took him on in 1827, and he entertained himself there by mimicking the clients, lawyers and fellow clerks around him.

Under which grand pen name did Dickens's wife publish her 1851 book of dinner menus?

Lady Maria Clutterbuck offered bills of fare for parties of two to eighteen, with only a few actual recipes. Long dismissed as a mere cookbook, it is now studied as a picture of Victorian home life.

Which Dickens novel follows a proud shipping magnate who neglects his daughter Florence until ruin brings them together?

Dombey and Son is named after the family business, but the sickly heir it was meant for dies young, leaving the father with only the daughter he brushed aside.

Which Dickens novel opens with a body hauled from the Thames and turns on a fortune made from London's dust heaps?

Our Mutual Friend was the last novel he completed. The dust is household rubbish, and Noddy Boffin, who inherits the heaps, becomes known as the Golden Dustman.

Which Dickens novel was left exactly half written, its central disappearance unsolved, when the author died in 1870?

Edwin Drood was planned in twelve instalments and only six were written, so readers have argued ever since over what became of its vanished title character.

Which malicious dwarf moneylender hunts a runaway girl and her gambling grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop?

Daniel Quilp lends the old man money, seizes the shop when it is all gambled away, and in the end dies while trying to escape his own pursuers.

Which fictional northern mill town is the setting of Hard Times, the only Dickens novel with no scenes in London?

Coketown may be partly based on Preston in Lancashire, though Dickens kept it a generic industrial town. The book is also unusual among his novels in having neither a preface nor illustrations.

Which endless lawsuit in Bleak House drags on for generations until legal costs have devoured the whole estate?

Jarndyce and Jarndyce has become a byword for interminable legal proceedings. In the novel nearly everyone who pins their hopes on the case comes to a tragic end.

At which Yorkshire boarding school does Dickens's cruel master Wackford Squeers starve and abuse unwanted children?

Dotheboys Hall comes to a fitting end: once its master is arrested and sentenced to transportation, the school is simply abandoned.

Which kindly blacksmith, married to Pip's hot-tempered sister, is the boy's first father figure in Great Expectations?

Joe Gargery stays loyal even after the boy grows into a snobbish gentleman. When illness and arrest for debt threaten, he nurses the young man back to health and quietly pays what is owed.

Which anti-Catholic London uprising of 1780 forms the backdrop of Dickens's first historical novel?

The Gordon Riots give the book its climax, when the mob storms and burns Newgate prison to free the inmates held inside, the simple-minded hero among them.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Dr Manette is recalled to life after eighteen years locked in which Paris prison?

The Bastille matters again later: a document found in the doctor's old cell is produced in court years afterwards and used to condemn his own son-in-law.

What is the name of the decaying mansion in Great Expectations where a jilted bride lets her wedding feast rot?

Satis House is where the young Pip is first sent to play as a boy, and where he later feels ashamed of the honest blacksmith who raised him.