60 Fun Facts About Charles Dickens

In which city was Charles Dickens born in 1812?

His father John was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office; the family moved to Chatham when Charles was four.

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?

He imitated Grimaldi's clowning on several occasions in later life.

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

His wife and youngest children joined him there, as was the custom; 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?

He worked ten-hour days near what is now Charing Cross station, in a rat-infested house on Hungerford Stairs.

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

He showed young Charles the trick of tying the string on the first Monday morning.

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?

Dickens spent about two years there and remembered a sadistic headmaster and seedy ushers.

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

He shared a distant relative's box at Doctors' Commons for nearly four years reporting legal proceedings.

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

Her parents ended it by packing her off to school in Paris.

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

He had prepared to imitate the comedian Charles Mathews; before another chance came, he had become a 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?

He was writing up to 90 pages a month while editing Bentley's Miscellany and writing four plays.

Whom did Dickens marry in April 1836?

She was the daughter of his editor George Hogarth; they had ten children before separating in 1858.

How many children did Dickens and Catherine have?

The first, Charles, was born in January 1837 shortly before the family moved 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'?

Tower of London ravens have been named Grip, including one for the 2012 bicentenary.

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

He spent a month in New York lecturing and lobbying for international copyright, to a hostile press.

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

Newspapers said he should be grateful for his popularity rather than complain about piracy.

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

It contained a powerful condemnation of slavery, citing newspaper accounts of runaway slaves disfigured by their masters.

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

He resolved to 'strike a sledge hammer blow' for the poor and walked London's black streets fifteen or twenty miles a night while writing it.

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

'Gamp' became slang for an unwieldy umbrella because she always carried one.

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.

How long did Dickens last as editor of the Daily News in 1846?

He quit from exhaustion and frustration with a co-owner; Household Words and All the Year Round were his lasting journals.

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

He said so in the preface to the 1867 edition; Forster wrote that 'underneath the fiction lay something of the author's life'.

Bleak House is credited with introducing what to the novel?

Its opening also contains an early literary dinosaur, a Megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill.

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

He was pleased the area featured in Henry IV, Part 1; he died there in 1870.

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

He edited a weekly journal for twenty years in all.

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

He was 45 and she 18; the passion lasted the rest of his life and Claire Tomalin argues she lived with him secretly for 13 years.

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

Catherine left in 1858 taking one child and never saw him again; he had tried to have her institutionalised.

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

One reading in February 1858 raised £3,000; his 1852 essay 'Drooping Buds' had helped launch the hospital.

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?

Russell was the only leading politician he trusted; he thought the aristocracy 'the death of England'.

What did Dickens burn in a bonfire behind Gads Hill in September 1860?

He spared only business letters; Ellen Ternan destroyed his letters to her too, so the affair remains speculative.

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

He was an early member of The Ghost Club and fascinated by the paranormal.

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

Two of his sons emigrated there anyway; Edward became a member of the New South Wales parliament.

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

He had spent three hours tending the wounded with brandy and a hat full of water; 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?

Its central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail crash.

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

He gave 76 readings for £19,000, suffered the 'true American catarrh' and slipped away from a federal tax lien.

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

He collapsed in Preston four days later and the tour was 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?

He said them when Georgina asked him to lie down after his stroke on 8 June 1870.

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

He wanted 'an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner'; he lies in Poets' Corner instead.

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

A letter to the Clerk of the Privy Council in March 1870 shows he had said yes.

How much did Dickens bequeath to each of his servants?

His £80,000 estate was entrusted to John Forster and his 'best and truest friend' Georgina Hogarth.

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

Henry Fielding Dickens described his father as a man of 'deep religious convictions'.

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

The Old Curiosity Shop was being serialised; Dickens planned each fragment to fuse into 'an uninterrupted whole'.

How far did Dickens habitually walk each day?

'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?

Gradgrind came to mean vapidly factual, Pickwickian quixotic; and a scrooge is a miser.

In which Kent town did Dickens spend his formative years, from age four to eleven?

He later described his early life there as idyllic.

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

He was finishing the last instalments of The Pickwick Papers at the time.

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

The Bloomsbury house, home from 1837 until December 1839, has housed the Charles Dickens Museum since 1925.

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

Mrs Nickleby was drawn from Dickens's mother, though she never recognised herself.

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

His wife's chiropodist recognised herself in Miss Mowcher from the same novel.

Which banking heiress approached Dickens in 1846 about founding a home for 'fallen women'?

The result was Urania Cottage, which Dickens managed for a decade.

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

He moved there in late 1851.

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

Regulars at the Harrow Road salon included Disraeli, Daniel Maclise and George Cruikshank.