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60 free Charles Dickens trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Charles Dickens trivia quiz covers the man behind the novels rather than plot summaries. It starts in Portsmouth and Chatham, with the father whose debts put him in the Marshalsea, the boot-blacking warehouse where a 12-year-old pasted labels for six shillings a week, the shorthand that made him a parliamentary reporter, and the head cold that turned 'Moses' into Boz. Then come the Pickwick phenomenon and the Sam Weller Bump, the marriage to Catherine Hogarth, the death of her sister in his arms and the pet raven that inspired Poe. The second half takes in the American tour and the copyright fight, the walks that produced A Christmas Carol, Urania Cottage, Household Words, Gads Hill, the separation from Catherine, Ellen Ternan, the reading tours and Great Ormond Street, the bonfire of his letters, the Staplehurst rail crash and the manuscript he went back for, the second American tour on champagne and eggs, the strokes, Edwin Drood, his last words and the burial he did not want in Westminster Abbey. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our A Christmas Carol and Mark Twain quizzes next.
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Q 01In which city was Charles Dickens born in 1812?
Portsmouth
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.
Q 02Dickens's godfather Christopher Huffam, a Royal Navy rigger, is thought to have inspired which character?
Paul Dombey
Huffam ran an established firm; Dombey and Son's Paul Dombey owns a shipping company.
Q 03Which performer, whose memoirs he later edited, did a seven-year-old Dickens see in Rochester?
Joseph Grimaldi, the clown
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.
Q 04To which debtors' prison was John Dickens sent in 1824?
The Marshalsea
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.
Q 05How much a week did the 12-year-old Dickens earn pasting labels at Warren's Blacking Warehouse?
Six shillings
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.
Q 06Which fellow boy at the blacking warehouse lent his surname to a character in Oliver Twist?
Bob Fagin
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.
Q 07Dickens never forgave his mother for what?
Wanting to send him back to the blacking factory
'I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.'
Q 08Which school inspired the brutal Mr Creakle's establishment in his most autobiographical novel?
Wellington House Academy
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.
Q 09Whose system of shorthand did Dickens teach himself in order to become a reporter?
Thomas Gurney's
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.
Q 10Dickens's first love, Maria Beadnell, is thought to be the model for which character?
Dora in David Copperfield
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.
Q 11Why did Dickens miss his 1832 acting audition at Covent Garden?
He had a cold
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.
Q 12How did the pen name 'Boz' come about?
His brother's nickname 'Moses' said through a head cold
'Moses', from The Vicar of Wakefield, became 'Boses' and then Boz.
Q 13Which character's arrival in the fourth instalment made The Pickwick Papers a phenomenon?
Sam Weller
Q 21Which American author headed the 25 writers who signed Dickens's copyright petition to Congress?
Washington Irving
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.
Q 22Dickens's travelogue of his first US trip was called what?
American Notes for General Circulation
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.
Q 23A trip to which city to see factory conditions planted the seed of A Christmas Carol?
The Paris Review called it 'the Sam Weller Bump'; the final instalment sold 40,000 copies and spawned Pickwick cigars and boot polish.
Q 14What happened to Robert Seymour, the original illustrator of The Pickwick Papers?
He killed himself after the second instalment
Dickens then hired 'Phiz', and the engravings were cut from four to two per instalment.
Q 15Oliver Twist (1838) was the first Victorian novel to feature what?
A child protagonist
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.
Q 16Whom did Dickens marry in April 1836?
Catherine Hogarth
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.
Q 17How many children did Dickens and Catherine have?
Ten
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.
Q 18Whose death in Dickens's arms in 1837 so shocked him that he missed a Pickwick deadline?
His sister-in-law Mary Hogarth
He idealised her ever after: Rose Maylie, whom he had meant to kill off, was spared, and Little Nell drew on her memory.
Q 19Dickens's pet raven Grip appears in which novel and helped inspire Poe's 'The Raven'?
Barnaby Rudge
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.
Q 20On which ship did Dickens and Catherine arrive in Boston in January 1842?
RMS Britannia
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.
Manchester
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.
Q 24Which 1843-44 novel introduced drunken nurse Sarah Gamp and an early literary private detective?
Martin Chuzzlewit
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.
Q 25Urania Cottage, which Dickens managed for ten years, was a home for what?
The redemption of fallen women
Banking heiress Angela Burdett Coutts funded it; about 100 women graduated, mostly to emigration or marriage.
Q 26Which firm published The Pickwick Papers in monthly shilling numbers?
Chapman & Hall
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.
Q 27Which novel did Dickens name as his personal favourite, calling it his most autobiographical?
David Copperfield
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.'
Q 28Bleak House is credited with introducing what to the novel?
Urban fog
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.
Q 29Which house in Kent, admired as a boy, did Dickens buy in 1856?
Gads Hill Place
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.
Q 30Dickens's weekly journals Household Words and All the Year Round both took their titles from what?
Shakespeare
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'.