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
His father John was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office; the family moved to Chatham when Charles was four.
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
He imitated Grimaldi's clowning on several occasions in later life.
Q 04To which debtors' prison was John Dickens sent in 1824?
The Marshalsea
His wife and youngest children joined him there, as was the custom; 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
He worked ten-hour days near what is now Charing Cross station, in a rat-infested house on Hungerford Stairs.
Q 06Which fellow boy at the blacking warehouse lent his surname to a character in Oliver Twist?
Bob Fagin
He showed young Charles the trick of tying the string on the first Monday morning.
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
Dickens spent about two years there and remembered a sadistic headmaster and seedy ushers.
Q 09Whose system of shorthand did Dickens teach himself in order to become a reporter?
Thomas Gurney's
He shared a distant relative's box at Doctors' Commons for nearly four years reporting legal proceedings.
Q 10Dickens's first love, Maria Beadnell, is thought to be the model for which character?
Dora in David Copperfield
Her parents ended it by packing her off to school in Paris.
Q 11Why did Dickens miss his 1832 acting audition at Covent Garden?
He had a cold
He had prepared to imitate the comedian Charles Mathews; before another chance came, he had become a 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
Newspapers said he should be grateful for his popularity rather than complain about piracy.
Q 22Dickens's travelogue of his first US trip was called what?
American Notes for General Circulation
It contained a powerful condemnation of slavery, citing newspaper accounts of runaway slaves disfigured by their masters.
Q 23A trip to which city to see factory conditions planted the seed of A Christmas Carol?
Manchester
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
He was writing up to 90 pages a month while editing Bentley's Miscellany and writing four plays.
Q 16Whom did Dickens marry in April 1836?
Catherine Hogarth
She was the daughter of his editor George Hogarth; they had ten children before separating in 1858.
Q 17How many children did Dickens and Catherine have?
Ten
The first, Charles, was born in January 1837 shortly before the family moved 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
Tower of London ravens have been named Grip, including one for the 2012 bicentenary.
Q 20On which ship did Dickens and Catherine arrive in Boston in January 1842?
RMS Britannia
He spent a month in New York lecturing and lobbying for international copyright, to a hostile press.
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.
Q 24Which 1843-44 novel introduced drunken nurse Sarah Gamp and an early literary private detective?
Martin Chuzzlewit
'Gamp' became slang for an unwieldy umbrella because she always carried one.
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 26How long did Dickens last as editor of the Daily News in 1846?
Ten weeks
He quit from exhaustion and frustration with a co-owner; Household Words and All the Year Round were his lasting journals.
Q 27Which novel did Dickens name as his personal favourite, calling it his most autobiographical?
David Copperfield
He said so in the preface to the 1867 edition; Forster wrote that 'underneath the fiction lay something of the author's life'.
Q 28Bleak House is credited with introducing what to the novel?
Urban fog
Its opening also contains an early literary dinosaur, a Megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill.
Q 29Which house in Kent, admired as a boy, did Dickens buy in 1856?
Gads Hill Place
He was pleased the area featured in Henry IV, Part 1; he died there in 1870.
Q 30Dickens's weekly journals Household Words and All the Year Round both took their titles from what?
Shakespeare
He edited a weekly journal for twenty years in all.