60 Fun Facts About Charles Dickens

In which city was Charles Dickens born in 1812?

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 at 1 Mile End Terrace, Landport, Portsmouth, where his father John was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office at the dockyard.

Dickens's godfather Christopher Huffam, a Royal Navy rigger, is thought to have inspired which character?

Huffam ran an established firm; Dombey and Son's Paul Dombey owns a shipping company.

Which performer, whose memoirs he later edited, did a seven-year-old Dickens see in Rochester?

Dickens saw the clown Joseph Grimaldi perform as a small boy, imitated his clowning in later life, and in 1838 edited the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi for the publisher Richard Bentley.

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

John Dickens was committed to the Marshalsea in Southwark in February 1824 for a debt of £40 to a baker; his wife and youngest children joined him there, and Dickens later set Little Dorrit in the prison.

How much a week did the 12-year-old Dickens earn pasting labels at Warren's Blacking Warehouse?

Dickens earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking, working ten-hour days in a rat-infested house at Hungerford Stairs near the site of Charing Cross station.

Which fellow boy at the blacking warehouse lent his surname to a character in Oliver Twist?

Bob Fagin, an older boy at Warren's Blacking, taught Dickens how to tie the string on the blacking pots and once walked him home when he was ill; Dickens gave his surname to Oliver Twist's Fagin.

Dickens never forgave his mother for what?

'I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.'

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

Wellington House Academy on Hampstead Road, which Dickens attended from 1825 to 1827, had a headmaster, William Jones, whom he recalled as ignorant and sadistic; it became Salem House under Mr Creakle.

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

Dickens mastered Thomas Gurney's Brachygraphy, the shorthand used by parliamentary reporters, and used it at Doctors' Commons and then in the press gallery of the House of Commons for the Morning Chronicle.

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

Maria Beadnell, a banker's daughter Dickens courted from 1830 to 1833, became Dora in David Copperfield; her parents ended the romance by sending her to finishing school in Paris.

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

A heavy cold kept Dickens from the audition George Bartley had arranged for him at Covent Garden in 1832; he had prepared an imitation of the comedian Charles Mathews, and by the next season he was a published writer.

How did the pen name 'Boz' come about?

'Moses', from The Vicar of Wakefield, became 'Boses' and then Boz.

Which character's arrival in the fourth instalment made The Pickwick Papers a phenomenon?

The Paris Review called it 'the Sam Weller Bump'; the final instalment sold 40,000 copies and spawned Pickwick cigars and boot polish.

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

Dickens then hired 'Phiz', and the engravings were cut from four to two per instalment.

Oliver Twist (1838) was the first Victorian novel to feature what?

Oliver Twist, serialised from 1837, was the first Victorian novel with a child protagonist; Dickens wrote it at up to 90 pages a month while also finishing The Pickwick Papers.

Whom did Dickens marry in April 1836?

Catherine Hogarth, eldest daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle, married Dickens at St Luke's, Chelsea, on 2 April 1836, days after the first number of The Pickwick Papers appeared.

How many children did Dickens and Catherine have?

Dickens and Catherine had ten children, seven sons and three daughters, between 1837 and 1852; the first, Charles Culliford Boz Dickens, was born in January 1837 shortly before the move to 48 Doughty Street.

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

He idealised her ever after: Rose Maylie, whom he had meant to kill off, was spared, and Little Nell drew on her memory.

Dickens's pet raven Grip appears in which novel and helped inspire Poe's 'The Raven'?

Grip the talking raven accompanies the simple-minded Barnaby in Barnaby Rudge (1841); Poe reviewed the novel before writing 'The Raven' in 1845, and the stuffed Grip is kept at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

On which ship did Dickens and Catherine arrive in Boston in January 1842?

Dickens and Catherine crossed on Cunard's paddle steamer RMS Britannia, sailing from Liverpool on 4 January 1842 and reaching Boston on 22 January after a stormy passage; Bostonians gave him a hero's welcome.

Which American author headed the 25 writers who signed Dickens's copyright petition to Congress?

Washington Irving, who presided at the New York dinner for Dickens in February 1842, headed the 25 American authors who signed his petition to Congress for international copyright; newspapers told him to be grateful for his fame instead.

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

American Notes for General Circulation, published in October 1842, recorded the trip and ended with a powerful condemnation of slavery built on newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves bearing their masters' scars.

A trip to which city to see factory conditions planted the seed of A Christmas Carol?

In October 1843 Dickens spoke at the Manchester Athenaeum and saw the condition of the city's mill workers; he resolved to 'strike a sledge hammer blow' for the poor and wrote the Carol in six weeks.

Which 1843-44 novel introduced drunken nurse Sarah Gamp and an early literary private detective?

Martin Chuzzlewit, serialised 1843-44, gave the language 'gamp' for a battered umbrella from Sarah Gamp's habit of carrying one; its private enquiry agent Nadgett is an early fictional detective.

Urania Cottage, which Dickens managed for ten years, was a home for what?

Banking heiress Angela Burdett Coutts funded it; about 100 women graduated, mostly to emigration or marriage.

Which firm published The Pickwick Papers in monthly shilling numbers?

Chapman & Hall issued The Pickwick Papers in monthly shilling numbers from March 1836 to November 1837; Dickens left the firm for Bradbury & Evans in 1844 but returned to it in 1859.

Which novel did Dickens name as his personal favourite, calling it his most autobiographical?

In the preface to the 1867 edition Dickens wrote of David Copperfield: 'like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.'

Bleak House is credited with introducing what to the novel?

Bleak House opens in a London fog so dense that critics credit it with introducing urban fog to the novel; the same paragraph imagines a Megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill, an early literary dinosaur.

Which house in Kent, admired as a boy, did Dickens buy in 1856?

Gads Hill Place at Higham in Kent, pointed out to him by his father as a boy, became Dickens's home from 1857; Falstaff's robbery in Henry IV, Part 1 is set there, and he died there in June 1870.

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

Both titles are Shakespearean: 'Household Words' comes from Henry V's Crispin's Day speech ('familiar in his mouth as household words'), and All the Year Round's masthead quoted Othello, 'the story of our lives from year to year'.

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

The Frozen Deep, Wilkie Collins's Arctic melodrama, was staged with professional actresses in August 1857; Dickens, 45, fell for the 18-year-old Ellen Ternan, and Claire Tomalin argues she lived with him secretly for 13 years.

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

Georgina Hogarth, Catherine's younger sister, had lived with the family since 1842 and stayed on after the 1858 separation to run the household and raise the younger children; Catherine left with only the eldest son, Charley.

Dickens's public readings rescued which children's hospital from its first financial crisis?

Dickens's speech at a fund-raising dinner in February 1858 and his first public reading of A Christmas Carol that April raised about £3,000 for Great Ormond Street Hospital, whose opening in 1852 he had promoted in 'Drooping Buds'.

How many appearances did Dickens's first paid reading tour of 1858-59 include?

Across 49 towns in England, Scotland and Ireland; readings absorbed most of his energy for the next decade.

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

Dickens dedicated A Tale of Two Cities (1859) to Lord John Russell 'in remembrance of many public services and private kindnesses'; the Whig leader was the rare politician he admired.

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

Over several days in September 1860 Dickens burned most of his correspondence, twenty years of letters from friends and fellow writers, keeping only business papers; he destroyed later letters as they arrived.

'Pepper's ghost' was first shown publicly in 1862 at a production of which Dickens work?

John Henry Pepper first showed the illusion publicly on 24 December 1862 at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in a scene from Dickens's Christmas book The Haunted Man, using a sheet of glass to project a phantom onto the stage.

How much was Dickens offered in 1862 for a reading tour of Australia, which he declined?

Dickens turned down £10,000 for an Australian reading tour in 1862, though the idea of a travel book tempted him; two of his sons, Alfred and Edward, later emigrated there, and Edward sat in the New South Wales parliament.

What did Dickens go back to his dangling carriage to retrieve after the 1865 Staplehurst rail crash?

After tending the injured for hours with brandy and a hat of water, Dickens climbed back into the tilted carriage to rescue the manuscript of the latest instalment of Our Mutual Friend; ten passengers died.

Why did Dickens avoid the Staplehurst inquest?

The crash left him terrified of trains; his son saw him grip the seat in panic at every jolt.

Which Dickens ghost story drew on the Staplehurst crash?

'The Signal-Man', published in the 1866 Christmas number of All the Year Round, has a railway signalman haunted by a spectre that precedes each disaster on his line; Dickens drew on his own Staplehurst ordeal of the previous year.

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

Too ill for solid food, Dickens subsisted on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry by the end of the tour, yet gave 76 readings that netted him £19,000 despite the 'true American catarrh'.

Dickens suffered a stroke in April 1869 in which city, ending his farewell tour?

Dickens suffered a mild stroke in Chester on 18 April 1869, collapsed at Preston four days later, and the remaining farewell readings were cancelled on doctors' orders.

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

For The Mystery of Edwin Drood he visited Shadwell opium dens and met the addict 'Laskar Sal'.

What were Dickens's last words?

Collapsing at dinner on 8 June 1870 after a day's work on his last novel, Dickens was urged to lie down and answered 'Yes, on the ground'; he died the next evening without regaining consciousness.

Where had Dickens asked to be buried, before Westminster Abbey claimed him?

Dickens wished to be buried at Rochester Cathedral 'in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner'; instead he was laid in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, on 14 June 1870.

Which honour had Dickens accepted shortly before his death but which was never gazetted?

A letter Dickens wrote in March 1870 to Arthur Helps, Clerk of the Privy Council, shows he had accepted a baronetcy; he died in June before it could be gazetted, so he remained plain Mr Dickens.

How much did Dickens bequeath to each of his servants?

Dickens's will, dated 12 May 1869, left £19 19s to each of his servants, put John Forster in charge of his papers and left the bulk of the estate to his children.

Dickens named a son after which 18th-century novelist whose Tom Jones he loved?

Dickens named his eighth child Henry Fielding Dickens (born 1849) in tribute to the author of Tom Jones; other sons were named for Alfred Tennyson, Walter Landor and Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

American fans waiting at the New York docks for the next instalment famously shouted what?

Crowds on the New York waterfront reportedly shouted 'Is little Nell dead?' at the ship carrying the final instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop in 1841; Dickens had planned each fragment to fuse into 'an uninterrupted whole'.

How far did Dickens habitually walk each day?

Dickens habitually walked at least a dozen miles a day at a brisk pace, often at night through London; 'If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish,' he wrote.

Which slang word for a hypocrite entered the dictionary from a Dickens character?

Pecksniffian, meaning hypocritically high-minded, comes from Seth Pecksniff, the unctuous architect who preaches virtue while scheming for an inheritance; Dickens also gave English 'scrooge' for a miser and 'Gradgrind' for a soulless devotee of facts.

In which Kent town did Dickens spend his boyhood before moving to London in 1822?

The family lived in Chatham, where John Dickens worked at the naval dockyard, from 1817 to 1822; Charles later called those years the happiest of his childhood and set much of his fiction in the Medway towns.

Which magazine did Dickens edit for three years from 1836, until falling out with its owner?

Dickens edited Bentley's Miscellany from its first number in January 1837, serialising Oliver Twist in it, until he quarrelled with the publisher Richard Bentley and resigned in 1839.

How much annual rent did Dickens pay on his three-year lease of 48 Doughty Street?

Dickens took a three-year lease on 48 Doughty Street at £80 a year in 1837; the Bloomsbury house, his home until December 1839, has held the Charles Dickens Museum since 1925.

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

Harold Skimpole, the charming sponger of Bleak House, was modelled on the essayist Leigh Hunt, whose friends recognised him at once; Dickens toned the portrait down but Hunt was hurt.

Dickens's meeting with which foreign author may have shaped his portrait of Uriah Heep?

Hans Christian Andersen first met Dickens in 1847, and some critics see his fawning, self-abasing manner behind Uriah Heep; his 1857 visit to the Dickens household stretched to five unwelcome weeks.

Which banking heiress approached Dickens in 1846 about founding the refuge that became Urania Cottage?

Angela Burdett Coutts, heiress to the Coutts banking fortune and one of the richest women in England, wrote to Dickens in May 1846; he ran the resulting refuge, Urania Cottage, for about a decade.

Where in London did Dickens write Hard Times and Little Dorrit from 1851?

Tavistock House in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, was Dickens's home from November 1851 to 1860; there he wrote Bleak House, Hard Times and Little Dorrit and staged amateur theatricals in a schoolroom theatre.

Which author of Rookwood hosted the salon where Dickens met his first publisher?

William Harrison Ainsworth, whose highwayman novel Rookwood was a hit in 1834, kept a salon at Kensal Lodge on the Harrow Road where Dickens met the publisher John Macrone, who issued Sketches by Boz in 1836.