Charles Dickens Trivia
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59 free Charles Dickens trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 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.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Charles Dickens born?
Portsmouth
Portsmouth. His will asked for no monument, yet in 2014 his birthplace unveiled Britain's first full-size statue of him.
Q 02Which rambling comic mother did Dickens base on his own mother?
Mrs Nickleby
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.
Q 03Which performer, whose memoirs he later edited, did Dickens watch as a young child?
Joseph Grimaldi, the clown
Joseph Grimaldi, the clown. Dickens wrote only the preface himself, reworking a draft that another writer had made from the clown's own notes.
Q 04To which debtors' prison was John Dickens sent in 1824?
The Marshalsea
The Marshalsea. John Dickens was held in the Southwark debtors' prison over a debt, and his son later set Little Dorrit in the prison.
Q 05Whose biography, published after Dickens died, first revealed his childhood job pasting labels?
John Forster
John Forster. Dickens kept the episode secret but gave Forster a handwritten account, which Forster printed in his Life of Charles Dickens.
Q 06Which Oliver Twist character took his name from a boy Dickens befriended at the blacking factory?
Fagin
Fagin. After Jewish readers complained about the character, Dickens changed the novel's text in later editions.
Q 07Dickens never forgot his mother doing what?
Wanting to send him back to the blacking factory
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.
Q 08Which school inspired the brutal Mr Creakle's establishment in Dickens's most autobiographical novel?
Wellington House Academy
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.
Q 09Whose system of shorthand did Dickens teach himself in order to become a reporter?
Thomas Gurney's
Thomas Gurney's. Mastering it carried Dickens from the Doctors' Commons courts into the Commons press gallery and on to the Morning Chronicle.
Q 10Dickens's first love, Maria Beadnell, is thought to be the model for which character?
Dora Spenlow
Dora Spenlow. Meeting a much-changed Maria again years later, Dickens recast her as the tiresome Flora Finching in Little Dorrit.
Q 11Why did Dickens miss his 1832 acting audition at Covent Garden?
He had a cold
He had a cold. Dickens wrote that he would apply again next season, but reporting and writing soon took over and he never did.
Q 12How did the pen name 'Boz' come about?
A nickname for his youngest brother
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.
Q 13Which character's arrival turned The Pickwick Papers into a publishing sensation?
Sam Weller
Q 21Which American author headed the writers who signed Dickens's copyright petition to Congress?
Washington Irving
Washington Irving. Raising copyright cost Dickens: some American newspapers branded their celebrated guest a mercenary scoundrel.
Q 22Dickens's travelogue of his first US trip was called what?
American Notes
American Notes. Its closing attack on slavery, quoting newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves marked by their masters, offended many American readers.
Q 23In October 1843, Dickens gave a speech on educating the poor in which city?
Manchester
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.
Sam Weller. Sales soared after the cockney servant appeared, and Pickwick cigars soon turned up in the shops.
Q 14What happened to Robert Seymour, the original illustrator of The Pickwick Papers?
He took his own life
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.
Q 15Which 1834 measure did Dickens attack in Oliver Twist?
The New Poor Law
The New Poor Law. Dickens took aim at its meagre workhouse diet, the reason hungry Oliver dares to ask for more.
Q 16Which gift from the actor Charles Fechter did Dickens use as his writing study?
A Swiss chalet
A Swiss chalet. Dickens wrote in its upstairs room, and he spent his last working day there on Edwin Drood before collapsing that evening.
Q 17Dickens forbade publishing which work for his children?
Gospel stories
Gospel stories. The family held them back until his last surviving child died in 1933, and they were published the next year.
Q 18Whose death in Dickens's arms in 1837 so shocked him that he missed a Pickwick deadline?
His sister-in-law Mary
His sister-in-law Mary. Dickens slipped a ring from her finger and wore it for the rest of his life.
Q 19Dickens's pet raven Grip was the model for a bird in which novel?
Barnaby Rudge
Barnaby Rudge. When the real Grip died in 1841, Dickens soon found a new raven and named it Grip as well.
Q 20Which country did Dickens visit at the end of his 1842 American tour, acting on stage there?
Canada
Canada. In Montreal he directed and acted in three amateur plays, and back in London he went on to stage charity theatricals with friends.
Q 24Which 1843-44 novel introduced the nurse Sarah Gamp?
Martin Chuzzlewit
Martin Chuzzlewit. Mrs Gamp's ever-present umbrella gave British English 'gamp' as slang for an umbrella.
Q 25Urania Cottage, a Shepherd's Bush home Dickens helped set up, took in whom?
Women rescued from the streets
Women rescued from the streets. Dickens did not just lend his name: he gave much of his own time to running the home.
Q 26Which firm published The Pickwick Papers in monthly shilling numbers?
Chapman & Hall
Chapman & Hall. When sales of a later serial fell, the firm hinted it might cut his monthly pay, and Dickens moved to Bradbury & Evans.
Q 27Which novel did Dickens call his 'favourite child' among his books?
David Copperfield
David Copperfield. Dickens was startled when a friend pointed out that his hero's initials were his own reversed.
Q 28Which Bleak House character dies of spontaneous combustion?
Krook
Krook. When the critic George Henry Lewes declared such a death scientifically impossible, Dickens publicly insisted that it could happen.
Q 29Which Kent house that Dickens had admired as a boy did he buy in 1856?
Gads Hill Place
Gads Hill Place. His father had told him that if he persevered and worked hard, he might one day come to live in it.
Q 30Dickens's weekly journals Household Words and All the Year Round both took their titles from what?
Shakespeare
Shakespeare. When Dickens launched the second journal, he again hunted for a Shakespeare line to print above its title.