Top 10 facts about Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens, in his lifetime, published novels, short stories and articles on various topics. He is best known for his unique writing style and as a critic of social and economic. Below are some interesting facts you might not know about Charles Dickens.
Fact one: He helped create a home for fallen women
This is one of the facts about Charles Dickens that shows his caring and helpful side of his personality. Dickens was involved in a world where women had few options to support themselves or their families. Prostitution was a common crime in those days. However, it had a severe punishment alongside it if women were caught.
Charles helped to create Urania House where former prostitutes could go to learn to read and write as well as having somewhere to live. He was so involved in this that he personally went to prisons and workhouses to scout potential candidates. He would then interview them. Approximately 100 women graduated from Urania House which massively helped struggling women to get on their feet.
Fact two: Charles Dickens had OCD
Dickens repeatedly struggled with OCD as he had a habit of rearranging the furniture no matter where he was. He would also inspect his children’s bedrooms every single morning to check if they were clean and tidy. When he wasn’t happy with their bedrooms, he would leave notes around the room. The children would then have to act on these notes and change themselves.
Fact three: His last novel remains a mystery
This is one of the facts about Charles Dickens that is very puzzling as his very last novel remains a mystery. He wrote half a novel named The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but it was left unfinished as he passed away from a stroke in 1870.
In the half of the novel that was found, the main character Edwin Drood broke off an engagement and then disappears. The great mystery is that no one knows who killed Edwin as Dickens left no clues of what he was planning to happen in this story.
Fact four: Charles Dickens had pet ravens and kept them around after they died
In 2012, the tower of London welcomed two ravens named Jubilee and Grip. The arrivals of these ravens celebrated the queen’s jubilee and Charles Dicken’s birth. Grip was the third raven to be named after the novelist’s own pet bird.
Charles Dickens’ pet raven has been known to have an impressive vocabulary and appeared as a character in the fifth novel of ‘Barnaby Rudge’.
On January 28th , 1841, Charles wrote a letter to his friend ‘George’ explaining why he had always wanted to have a pet raven within the company. A few weeks later Dickens’ pet raven died because of eating the surfaces of the paint and drinking the paint.
Following the death of Charles Dickens’ raven, he replaced it with two new birds, with the second one being a raven and the third one being an eagle.
Fact five: He was a victorian ghostbuster
Charles Dickens had more of a love and hate relationship with ghosts. He had been obsessed with ghosts since childhood and loved to read and write ghost stories.
Charles Dickens was a Victorian ghost buster. He is most famous for his many ghost stories, including A Christmas Carol, which was first published in 1843.
Dickens was fascinated by ghosts and the supernatural, and his books often feature ghosts, spirits, and otherworldly beings. He wrote about them so often that he became known as “The Ghost Man of Literature.”
Fact six: A curse is on the Dickens name
This is one of those facts about Charles Dickens that only relates to him due to his surname. Many people started to say the phrase “what the Dickens?” instead of “what the devil?” which was considered a form of curse. This curse phrase could have been invented by William Shakespeare as it was found in his work The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Fact seven: Charles Dickens invented lots of new words
Charles Dickens is often credited with inventing many of the words and terms that we still use today. For example, dickens popularised the word ‘devil-may-care’ meaning carefree or reckless when he wrote ‘Pickwick Papers’.
Fact eight: He had a secret door in his house disguised as a bookcase
This secret door was located in the study at his Gad’s Hill country house in Kent, where Dickens lived for many years. This is an interesting fact about Charles Dickens as the door was a fake bookcase and even had fake books in it. Dickens loved the concept of this door so much that he even named the titles of the fake books that sit on it. He also decided how many volumes each fake book will have to make it look like a large, full bookcase.
Fact nine: Charles had 10 children
One of the more surprising facts about Charles Dickens is that he had 10 children with his wife, Catherine Hogarth. They married in 1836 and after having their children, they separated in 1858. Charles named many of his children after his favourite authors. Some of these names were: Henry Fielding Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton Dickens, and Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens.
Fact ten: There is a theme park named after him
Charles Dickens is the only author that has a whole theme park dedicated to him and his work. The park is called Dickens World and is situated in Chatham UK. This theme park has the longest indoor dark ride in Europe. Many of the rides are named after Dickens famous novels. Examples of these are: The Great Expectations log flume and the haunted house of Ebenezer Scrooge.
Overall, Charles Dickens was an inspiration to many. Everything from his time working in a factory to his later years writing ’A Christmas carol’, Dickens was one of the most prolific writers and thinkers of all time.
Charles Dickens is an iconic figure from the 19th century and a cultural touchstone for many English-speaking individuals of that era. Now that he has been dead for almost 150 years, his books are even more culturally significant, and their themes contain volumes’ worth of information about life in Victorian England.
If you enjoyed our top 10 facts about Charles Dickens and would like to read more take a look at our 21 wise and elegant charles dickens quotes for teachers.