How old was dickens when he died

Charles Dickens ( 1812-1870).

be in debt- быть в долгах

describe – описывать; description – описание

Charles Dickens is one of the greatest novelist in the English language. He wrote about the real world of Victorian England and many of his characters were not rich, middle-class ladies and gentlemen, but poor and hungry people.

His family lived in London. His father was a clerk in an office. It was a good job, but he always spent more money than earned and was often in debt. There were eight children in the family so life was hard.

Charles went to school and his teachers thought he was very clever. But suddenly, when he was only eleven, his father went to prison for his debts and the family went, too. Only Charles didn’t go to prison. He went to work in a factory, where he washed bottles. He worked ten hours a day and earned six shillings (30p) a week. Every night, after work, he walked four miles back to his room. Charles hated it and never forgot the experience. He used it in many novels, especially “David Copperfield” and “Oliver Twist”.

When he was sixteen, he started work for a newspaper. He visited law courts and the Houses of Parliament. Soon he was one of the “Morning Chronicles” ’ best journalists. He also wrote short stories for magazines. These were funny description of people that he met. Dickens characters were full of colour and life – good people were very, very good and bad people were horrible. His books became popular in many countries and he spent a lot of time abroad, in America, Italy, and Switzeland.

Dickens had ten children, but he didn’t have a happy family life. He was successful in his work but not at home, and his wife left him. He never stopped writing and traveling, and he died very suddenly in 1870.

-You are not quite right.

-As far as I know…

1. Charles Dickens wrote novels.

2. He wrote only about the lives of rich and famous people.

3. His father had a good job.

4. Charles never went to school.

5. He went to prison when he was eleven.

6. His first job was in a factory.

7. He became a journalist when he was fifteen.

8. He got never married.

Exercise 2.Answer the questions.

1. How old was Dickens when he died?

2. How many brothers and sisters did he have?

3. Was he good at school?

4. Why did he leave school when he was eleven?

5. Who was in prison?

6. What did Charles do in his first job?

7. What was his next job?

8. Was he happy at home?

9. When did he stop writing?

Famous Russian Generals.

to fight (fought) – воевать, сражаться

to inspire – вдохновлять

All Russian people know the names, Alexander Suvorov and Michael Kutuzov. They are two famous generals. Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov was born in 1729. He was a highly-educated man who had a good knowledge of eight languages, mathematics and history. When he was sixteen, he entered a military school and in some years became an officer. He was a noble, honest man, devoted to his country and his people. Suvorov took part in many wars. He had a lot of victories because he knew army life very well. Suvorov was not a kind general, but he had a kind heart. He loved his soldiers and they loved him. His soldiers were never hungry and his officers took care of the soldiers, though certainly their life was not at all easy. Suvorov taught his soldiers and officers to be brave; he taught them to win in the battles against the enemy. He knew that in war the principal weapon was the man and that morale was of the greatest importance. His soldiers were never afraid of the enemy, even when the enemy was very strong. When he was seventy he was Generalissimo of all the armed forces of Russia. His name was the symbol of victory.

Michael Kutuzov was Suvorov’s pupil. He was born in 1745 in St. Petersburg. His father was an engineer in the Russian army. Little Michael was a kind, clever boy. Their family was very hospitable. Michael had a lot of friends and was an excellent pupil. He was good at maths, and knew many foreign languages. When he became an officer he took part in many battles. He was a brave and honest officer. Kutuzov believed in Russian soldiers. He taught them the art of winning.

When Kutuzov was forty-five years old he became a general. During the war of 1812 Kutuzov fought a lot of battles. He was an old man by then, but he won practically all of them. The famous battle of Borodino was the first Russian victory of that war. After that it took Kutuzov only three months to win the war completely. When the Russian people fought against Napoleon the Russian Army led by Kutuzov was inspired by the memory of Suvorov and his fighting traditions. Napoleon ran away from Russia. Russia again became free and independent.

Exercise 1.Answer the questions.

1. When was Suvorov born?

2. When did he enter a military school?

3. What was Suvorov like?

4. Did he love his soldiers?

5. What did Suvorov teach his soldiers?

6. How old was Suvorov when he became Generalissimo?

7. Who was Suvorov’s pupil?

8. When was Kutuzov born?

9. What did his father do?

10. Was he an excellent pupil?

11. When did he become a general?

12. What was the first Russian victory of the war 1812?

Exercise 2.Tell your friend everything you know about A. Suvorov,

Newsround

9 Jun 2020 9 June 2020

Charles Dickens is one of Britain’s most famous authors.

He wrote about things that many people before him had avoided writing about, like the lives of poorer people.

He died in 1870, making 2020 the 150th anniversary of his death, so we thought we’d take a look at who Charles Dickens was, and why his books were so influential.

Want more?

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in 1812, in Portsmouth on England’s south coast, and was one of eight children. His family moved around though, and he grew up in London and Kent.

When Charles was 12 his father was sent to prison because of financial problems. This meant Charles had to go to work, and he got a job at a shoe polish factory pasting the labels on to bottles.

Did you know?

Many experts have said this period in his life had a lot of influence on the stories he went on to write.

Charles Dickens wrote 15 novels, five novellas and hundreds of short stories.

Novels like Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities are still sold today.

Some books you might recognise:

But his most famous work is probably A Christmas Carol. It was first published just before Christmas in 1843, and its first print of 6,000 copies sold out in just 8 days.

The story of Ebenezer Scrooge learning about the spirit of Christmas is still well known and the BBC made a new television adaptation of it just last year.

Oliver Twist was turned into a musical that is still being performed now, and there have been several film versions of Great Expectations.

Away from television adaptations and stage shows, many people still read his books. They have never been ‘out-of-print,’ which means, even all these years later, book shops are selling enough copies to need new ones printed.

Dickens wrote about topics that lots of other authors ignored.

Change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast.

Many of his characters were based on real people and their lives. That made people understand his stories more, and reflect on what Britain was like at that time.

He was often challenging and spoke out about laws he didn’t agree on, especially the ‘new poor law,’ a law the British Library describes as an attempt to, «slash expenditure on poverty.» Dickens thought the law was harsh, and that poor people needed help, not to be forced to work in awful conditions in factories.

However, he is also remembered as a great pioneer who pushed for real changes in society.

Did you know?

His books are still affecting authors today and he has a museum dedicated to him and there is a statue of him in Portsmouth, where he was born.

Have you read any of his books or seen film adaptations? What did you think? Let us know in the comments.

Charles Dickens

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Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

Among Charles Dickens’s many works are the novels The Pickwick Papers (1837), Oliver Twist (1838), A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853), and Great Expectations (1861). In addition, he worked as a journalist, writing numerous items on political and social affairs.

Charles Dickens is considered the greatest English novelist of the Victorian era. He enjoyed a wide popularity, his work appealing to the simple and the sophisticated. The range, compassion, and intelligence of his view of society and its shortcomings enriched his novels and made him one of the great forces in 19th-century literature.

Charles Dickens’s father, a clerk, was well paid, but his failings often brought the family trouble. In 1824 Charles was withdrawn from school and did manual factory work, and his father went to prison for debt. Those shocks deeply affected Charles. After a brief return to the classroom, his schooling ended at age 15.

Read a brief summary of this topic

Charles Dickens, in full Charles John Huffam Dickens, (born February 7, 1812, Portsmouth, Hampshire, England—died June 9, 1870, Gad’s Hill, near Chatham, Kent), English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian era. His many volumes include such works as A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend.

Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity during his lifetime than had any previous author. Much in his work could appeal to the simple and the sophisticated, to the poor and to the queen, and technological developments as well as the qualities of his work enabled his fame to spread worldwide very quickly. His long career saw fluctuations in the reception and sales of individual novels, but none of them was negligible or uncharacteristic or disregarded, and, though he is now admired for aspects and phases of his work that were given less weight by his contemporaries, his popularity has never ceased. The most abundantly comic of English authors, he was much more than a great entertainer. The range, compassion, and intelligence of his apprehension of his society and its shortcomings enriched his novels and made him both one of the great forces in 19th-century literature and an influential spokesman of the conscience of his age.

Early years

Dickens left Portsmouth in infancy. His happiest childhood years were spent in Chatham (1817–22), an area to which he often reverted in his fiction. From 1822 he lived in London, until, in 1860, he moved permanently to a country house, Gad’s Hill, near Chatham. His origins were middle class, if of a newfound and precarious respectability; one grandfather had been a domestic servant, and the other an embezzler. His father, a clerk in the navy pay office, was well paid, but his extravagance and ineptitude often brought the family to financial embarrassment or disaster. (Some of his failings and his ebullience are dramatized in Mr. Micawber in the partly autobiographical David Copperfield.)

In 1824 the family reached bottom. Charles, the eldest son, had been withdrawn from school and was now set to manual work in a factory, and his father went to prison for debt. These shocks deeply affected Charles. Though abhorring this brief descent into the working class, he began to gain that sympathetic knowledge of its life and privations that informed his writings. Also, the images of the prison and of the lost, oppressed, or bewildered child recur in many novels. Much else in his character and art stemmed from this period, including, as the 20th-century novelist Angus Wilson has argued, his later difficulty, as man and author, in understanding women: this may be traced to his bitter resentment against his mother, who had, he felt, failed disastrously at this time to appreciate his sufferings. She had wanted him to stay at work when his father’s release from prison and an improvement in the family’s fortunes made the boy’s return to school possible. Happily, the father’s view prevailed.

His schooling, interrupted and unimpressive, ended at 15. He became a clerk in a solicitor’s office, then a shorthand reporter in the lawcourts (thus gaining a knowledge of the legal world often used in the novels), and finally, like other members of his family, a parliamentary and newspaper reporter. These years left him with a lasting affection for journalism and contempt both for the law and for Parliament. His coming to manhood in the reformist 1830s, and particularly his working on the Liberal Benthamite Morning Chronicle (1834–36), greatly affected his political outlook. Another influential event now was his rejection as suitor to Maria Beadnell because his family and prospects were unsatisfactory; his hopes of gaining and chagrin at losing her sharpened his determination to succeed. His feelings about Beadnell then and at her later brief and disillusioning reentry into his life are reflected in David Copperfield’s adoration of Dora Spenlow and in the middle-aged Arthur Clennam’s discovery (in Little Dorrit) that Flora Finching, who had seemed enchanting years ago, was “diffuse and silly,” that Flora, “whom he had left a lily, had become a peony.”

Beginning of a literary career

Much drawn to the theatre, Dickens nearly became a professional actor in 1832. In 1833 he began contributing stories and descriptive essays to magazines and newspapers; these attracted attention and were reprinted as Sketches by “Boz” (February 1836). The same month, he was invited to provide a comic serial narrative to accompany engravings by a well-known artist; seven weeks later the first installment of The Pickwick Papers appeared. Within a few months Pickwick was the rage and Dickens the most popular author of the day. During 1836 he also wrote two plays and a pamphlet on a topical issue (how the poor should be allowed to enjoy the Sabbath) and, resigning from his newspaper job, undertook to edit a monthly magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, in which he serialized Oliver Twist (1837–39). Thus, he had two serial installments to write every month. Already the first of his nine surviving children had been born; he had married (in April 1836) Catherine, eldest daughter of a respected Scottish journalist and man of letters, George Hogarth.

For several years his life continued at this intensity. Finding serialization congenial and profitable, he repeated the Pickwick pattern of 20 monthly parts in Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39); then he experimented with shorter weekly installments for The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and Barnaby Rudge (1841). Exhausted at last, he then took a five-month vacation in America, touring strenuously and receiving quasi-royal honours as a literary celebrity but offending national sensibilities by protesting against the absence of copyright protection. A radical critic of British institutions, he had expected more from “the republic of my imagination,” but he found more vulgarity and sharp practice to detest than social arrangements to admire. Some of these feelings appear in American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44).

Novels from The Pickwick Papers to Martin Chuzzlewit

His writing during these prolific years was remarkably various and, except for his plays, resourceful. Pickwick began as high-spirited farce and contained many conventional comic butts and traditional jokes; like other early works, it was manifestly indebted to the contemporary theatre, the 18th-century English novelists, and a few foreign classics, notably Don Quixote. But, besides giving new life to old stereotypes, Pickwick displayed, if sometimes in embryo, many of the features that were to be blended in varying proportions throughout his fiction: attacks, satirical or denunciatory, on social evils and inadequate institutions; topical references; an encyclopaedic knowledge of London (always his predominant fictional locale); pathos; a vein of the macabre; a delight in the demotic joys of Christmas; a pervasive spirit of benevolence and geniality; inexhaustible powers of character creation; a wonderful ear for characteristic speech, often imaginatively heightened; a strong narrative impulse; and a prose style that, if here overdependent on a few comic mannerisms, was highly individual and inventive. Rapidly improvised and written only weeks or days ahead of its serial publication, Pickwick contains weak and jejune passages and is an unsatisfactory whole—partly because Dickens was rapidly developing his craft as a novelist while writing and publishing it. What is remarkable is that a first novel, written in such circumstances, not only established him overnight and created a new tradition of popular literature but also survived, despite its crudities, as one of the best-known novels in the world.

His self-assurance and artistic ambitiousness appeared in Oliver Twist, where he rejected the temptation to repeat the successful Pickwick formula. Though containing much comedy still, Oliver Twist is more centrally concerned with social and moral evil (the workhouse and the criminal world); it culminates in Bill Sikes’s murdering Nancy and Fagin’s last night in the condemned cell at Newgate. The latter episode was memorably depicted in an engraving by George Cruikshank; the imaginative potency of Dickens’s characters and settings owes much, indeed, to his original illustrators (Cruikshank for Sketches by “Boz” and Oliver Twist, “Phiz” [Hablot K. Browne] for most of the other novels until the 1860s). The currency of his fiction owed much, too, to its being so easy to adapt into effective stage versions. Sometimes 20 London theatres simultaneously were producing adaptations of his latest story, so even nonreaders became acquainted with simplified versions of his works. The theatre was often a subject of his fiction, too, as in the Crummles troupe in Nicholas Nickleby. This novel reverted to the Pickwick shape and atmosphere, though the indictment of the brutal Yorkshire schools (Dotheboys Hall) continued the important innovation in English fiction seen in Oliver Twist—the spectacle of the lost or oppressed child as an occasion for pathos and social criticism. This was amplified in The Old Curiosity Shop, where the death of Little Nell was found overwhelmingly powerful at the time, though a few decades later it became a byword for what would be referred to, broadly, as “Victorian sentimentality.” In Barnaby Rudge he attempted another genre, the historical novel. Like his later attempt in this kind, A Tale of Two Cities, it was set in the late 18th century and presented with great vigour and understanding (and some ambivalence of attitude) the spectacle of large-scale mob violence.

To create an artistic unity out of the wide range of moods and materials included in every novel, with often several complicated plots involving scores of characters, was made even more difficult by Dickens’s writing and publishing them serially. In Martin Chuzzlewit he tried “to resist the temptation of the current Monthly Number, and to keep a steadier eye upon the general purpose and design” (1844 Preface). Its American episodes had, however, been unpremeditated (he suddenly decided to boost the disappointing sales by some America-baiting and to revenge himself against insults and injuries from the American press). A concentration on “the general purpose and design” was more effective in the next novel, Dombey and Son (1846–48), though the experience of writing the shorter, and unserialized, Christmas books had helped him obtain greater coherence.

Last years of Charles Dickens

Final novels: A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend

Tired and ailing though he was, Dickens remained inventive and adventurous in his final novels. A Tale of Two Cities (1859) was an experiment, relying less than before on characterization, dialogue, and humour. An exciting and compact narrative, it lacks too many of his strengths to count among his major works. Sydney Carton’s self-sacrifice was found deeply moving by Dickens and by many readers; Dr. Manette now seems a more impressive achievement in serious characterization. The French Revolution scenes are vivid, if superficial in historical understanding. Great Expectations (1860–61) resembles David Copperfield in being a first-person narration and in drawing on parts of Dickens’s personality and experience. Compact like its predecessor, it lacks the panoramic inclusiveness of Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend, but, though not his most ambitious, it is his most finely achieved novel. The hero Pip’s mind is explored with great subtlety, and his development through a childhood and youth beset with hard tests of character is traced critically but sympathetically. Various “great expectations” in the book prove ill founded—a comment as much on the values of the age as on the characters’ weaknesses and misfortunes. Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), Dickens’s final completed novel, continues this critique of monetary and class values. London is now grimmer than ever before, and the corruption, complacency, and superficiality of “respectable” society are fiercely attacked. Many new elements are introduced into Dickens’s fictional world, which renders the novel a large and inclusive one, but his handling of the old comic-eccentrics (such as Boffin, Wegg, and Venus) is sometimes tiresomely mechanical.

How the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) would have developed is uncertain. Here again Dickens left panoramic fiction to concentrate on a limited private action. The central figure was evidently to be John Jasper, whose eminent respectability as a cathedral organist was in extreme contrast to his haunting low opium dens and, out of violent sexual jealousy, murdering his nephew. It would have been his most elaborate treatment of the themes of crime, evil, and psychological abnormality that recur throughout his novels; a great celebrator of life, he was also obsessed with death.

How greatly Dickens personally had changed in his final years appears in remarks by friends who met him again, after many years, during the American reading tour in 1867–68. “I sometimes think…,” wrote one, “I must have known two individuals bearing the same name, at various periods of my own life.” But just as the fiction, despite many developments, still contained many stylistic and narrative features continuous with the earlier work, so, too, the man remained a “human hurricane,” though he had aged considerably, his health had deteriorated, and his nerves had been jangled by travelling ever since his being in a railway accident in 1865. Other Americans noted that, though grizzled, he was “as quick and elastic in his movements as ever.” His photographs, wrote a journalist after one of the readings, “give no idea of his genial expression. To us he appears like a hearty, companionable man, with a deal of fun in him.” But that very day Dickens was writing, “I am nearly used up,” and listing the afflictions now “telling heavily upon me.” His pride and the old-trouper tradition made him conceal his sufferings. And, if sometimes by an effort of will, his old high spirits were often on display. “The cheerfullest man of his age,” he was called by his American publisher, J.T. Fields; Fields’s wife more perceptively noted, “Wonderful, the flow of spirits C.D. has for a sad man.”

His fame remained undiminished, though critical opinion was increasingly hostile to him. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, noting the immense enthusiasm for him during the American tour, remarked: “One can hardly take in the whole truth about it, and feel the universality of his fame.” But in many respects he was “a sad man” in these later years. He never was tranquil or relaxed. Various old friends were now estranged or dead or for other reasons less available; he was now leading a less social life and spending more time with young friends of a calibre inferior to his former circle. His sons were causing much worry and disappointment; “all his fame goes for nothing,” said a friend, “since he has not the one thing. He is very unhappy in his children.” His life was not all dreary, however. He loved his country house, Gad’s Hill, and he could still “warm the social atmosphere wherever he appeared with that summer glow which seemed to attend him.” T.A. Trollope (contributor to Dickens’s All the Year Round and brother of the novelist Anthony Trollope), who wrote that, despaired of giving people who had not met him any idea of

the general charm of his manner.…His laugh was brimful of enjoyment.…His enthusiasm was boundless.…He was a hearty man, a large-hearted man,…a strikingly manly man.

Farewell readings

His health remained precarious after the punishing American tour and was further impaired by his addiction to giving the strenuous “Sikes and Nancy” reading. His farewell reading tour was abandoned when, in April 1869, he collapsed. He began writing another novel and gave a short farewell season of readings in London, ending with the famous speech, “From these garish lights I vanish now for evermore…”—words repeated, less than three months later, on his funeral card. He died suddenly in June 1870 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Critical opinion and scholarship

Ralph Waldo Emerson, attending one of Dickens’s readings in Boston, “laughed as if he must crumble to pieces,” but, discussing Dickens afterward, he said:

I am afraid he has too much talent for his genius; it is a fearful locomotive to which he is bound and can never be free from it nor set to rest.…He daunts me! I have not the key.

There is no simple key to so prolific and multifarious an artist nor to the complexities of the man, and interpretation of both is made harder by his possessing and feeling the need to exercise so many talents besides his imagination. How his fiction is related to these talents—practical, journalistic, oratorical, histrionic—remains controversial. Also, the geniality and unequalled comedy of the novels must be related to the sufferings, errors, and self-pity of their author and to his concern both for social evils and for the perennial griefs and limitations of humanity. The novels cover a wide range, social, moral, emotional, and psychological. Thus, he is much concerned with very ordinary people but also with abnormality (e.g., eccentricity, depravity, madness, hallucinations, dream states). He is both the most imaginative and fantastic and the most topical and documentary of great novelists—certainly of the Victorian era, perhaps of all time. He is unequal, too; a wonderfully inventive and poetic writer, he can also, even in his mature novels, write with a painfully slack conventionality.

Biographers have only since the mid-20th century explored the complexity of Dickens’s nature. Critics have always been challenged by his art, though from the start it contained enough easily acceptable ingredients, evident skill and gusto, to ensure popularity. The earlier novels—The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, A Christmas Carol, and David Copperfield—were Dickens’s most popular works, and, by and large, they remained so throughout the 20th century. During Dickens’s lifetime, critics began to demur against the later novels, deploring the loss of the freer comic spirit, baffled by the more symbolic mode of his art, and uneasy when the simpler reformism over isolated issues became a more radical questioning of social assumptions and institutions. Dickens was not neglected or forgotten and never lost his popularity, but for 70 years after his death he received remarkably little serious attention (George Gissing, G.K. Chesterton, and George Bernard Shaw being notable exceptions). F.R. Leavis, later to revise his opinion, was speaking for many, in 1948, when he asserted that “the adult mind doesn’t as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness”; Dickens was indeed a great genius, “but the genius was that of a great entertainer.”

What can be labeled “modern” Dickens criticism dates from 1940–41, with the very different impulses given by George Orwell, Edmund Wilson, and Humphry House. In the 1950s, a substantial reassessment and re-editing of the works began, and critics found his finest artistry and greatest depth to be in the later novels: Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations—and (less unanimously) in Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend. During the second half of the 20th century, scholars explored his working methods, his relations with his public, and the ways in which he was simultaneously an eminently Victorian figure and an author “not of an age but for all time.” Biographically, aside from his relationship with Ellen Ternan, little had been added to John Forster’s massive and intelligent Life (1872–74) until Edgar Johnson’s Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph was published in 1952. The centenary in 1970 of Dickens’s death demonstrated a critical consensus about his standing second only to William Shakespeare in English literature, which would have seemed incredible 40 or even 20 years earlier. At the turn of the 21st century, Dickens remained a compelling figure for biographers, scholars, television and film producers, and everyday readers.

12 Interesting Facts about Charles Dickens.

Charles Dickens is a titan of English-language literature, having penned numerous works which are now considered essential. From Oliver Twist to A Christmas Carol or Great Expectations, his appeal continues in modern times as his works have often been adapted for television and cinema.

Moreover, the stories Dickens wrote have led to multiple popular culture references and are now part of common speech, known around the world.

Although many of us have studied at least one of Dickens’ works in school, how much do you really know about this amazing author himself?

Read on to find out 12 little known facts about Charles Dickens!

Charles Dickens Facts

1. Dickens supported the rehabilitation of prostitutes

In the 1800s, prostitution was often a resort for women who couldn’t support themselves and their families. However, it was also a grave crime. Dickens tried to help such women after an appeal from heiress Angela Coutts, by creating “Urania House” where they could try and learn skills to get them away from a criminal life, an important fact about Charles Dickens. There are records of some 100 women who learned to read, write, and keep house at Urania House. Dickens had gone searching for them in prisons and workhouses himself.

2. Charles Dickens also saved lots of people from a train crash

While travelling in first class in a train that derailed over a bridge, Dickens’ carriage was the only one that didn’t fall into the river. However, he found the key to open up and free friends of his in other carriages, and then made his way to other carriages to pass on water and brandy to the trapped people awaiting rescue.

Moreover, Dickens apparently climbing back up into his carriage to retrieve a manuscript he had just finished writing. Interestingly, this was never big news during his lifetime as he was travelling with his mistress and didn’t want any public recognition as a result.

3. He might have had obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)

We hear a lot about people suffering with OCD nowadays, but in the 19 th century, this wasn’t really a recognized illness. One of the biographies of Charles Dickens indicates that he would re-arrange the furniture in hotel rooms he would stay in, and he would check his children’s bedrooms and leave them notes with anything he didn’t deem to be tidy enough, an interesting fact about Charles Dickens. This might be a sign of OCD.

4. “Dickens” – the Shakespearean insult

In William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, we encounter the word “dickens” used instead of the “devil” in the phrase “What the dickens?”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this was the first use of the word. Fast forward a few hundred years, and Dickens’ name becomes famous, possibly still meaning an insult really.

5. He had 10 children and gave them all funny nicknames

Charles Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in 1836 and they went on to have no fewer than 10 children! The nicknames recorded for his children are all quite strange, ranging from “Lucifer Box” to “Skittles” and “Chickenstalker”.

6. Dickens was a member of “The Ghost Club”

“The Ghost Club” was a London-based club which has continued to this day, with its aim to hunt for ghosts. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was also part of it. Dickens was among the first to join when the club was founded, an interesting fact about Charles Dickens.

7. He kept a pet raven

Not only did Dickens give his children unusual nicknames, but he also had an unusual pet. His raven was called Grip and stayed with the family even after his death, as Dickens had him stuffed! He also purchased another raven and an eagle to replace Grip.

8. He left behind The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Charles Dickens’ last piece of work was a novel entitled The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Unfortunately, ne ever published it or came to the end of it before he died. No one knows how it should end and the novel is itself a mystery story.

9. Dickens always slept facing north

For some reason, he thought that this would make him a better writer, an interesting fact about Charles Dickens. It did seem to help as he was such a prolific high-quality writer after all!

10. Writers’ rivalry

Even though he was appreciated widely during his lifetime, Dickens also had an interesting writers’ rivalry with the poet William Wordsworth. The latter would brag about not giving Charles Dickens’ writing a chance, and considering him too talkative and “vulgar.” As for Dickens, he publicly called Wordsworth “a dreadful Old Ass” in retaliation.

11. Dickens was a Francophile

Dickens often went to France on holiday and he was a known Francophile. He once called the French “the first people in the universe” in a speech in 1846.

12. Dickens was buried in Westminster Abbey – but didn’t want this!

During his lifetime, Dickens was very clear on what he wanted to be done with his body once he passed away. Originally, he wanted to be buried next to his wife Catherine’s sister, Mary Hogarth, reportedly his muse. She had died in 1837 and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London. Later on, he asked to be buried in a simple grave in Kent, at the Rochester Cathedral cemetery.

However, he ended up in the famous Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey because the Dean of Westminster saw it as a good way for the abbey to add to its significance (as Dickens was such a famous writer when he died), a fun fact about Charles Dickens.

Dickens had also asked for no public announcement to be made of his burial but, instead, hundreds of thousands of people came to Westminster Abbey to see him off.

Conclusion

Charles Dickens was a celebrated author during his lifetime and an iconic figure of Victorian Britain. With his numerous quirks, his private life makes for interesting reading alongside his many successful novels. Having found success relatively early on as well, his private life was more visible than most writers’. There you have the top 12 interesting facts about Charles Dickens, the legendary writer who influenced many!

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