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17 Facts About Charles Dickens 51

17 Facts About Charles

Dickens

by Sean Hutchinson

It was the best of times, it was the worst of
times, and Charles Dickens wrote it all down—
the gruesome truths about Victorian England
and the perils of Britain’s social class system.
His unprecedented celebrity made him the most
popular novelist of his century, and since then
his books have never been out of print. But the
author of Great Expectations, Bleak House, and
dozens of other works was more than just a
writer. Here are 17 facts about Dickens.

1. HE WAS FORCED TO WORK AT A
YOUNG AGE.
The eldest son of Elizabeth and John
Dickens was born in February 1812 on Portsea
Island in the British city of Portsmouth, and
moved around with his family in his younger
years to Yorkshire and then London. He was,
admittedly, a “very small and not over-
particularly-taken-care-of boy." The nom de plume became so popular and was awed by a trip west to the American
When his father was called to London that he published a compilation of his essays and prairie, Dickens didn’t necessarily have the best
again to be a clerk in the Naval Pay Office, the short fiction called Sketches by Boz in 1839. time on the whole. Especially in the country's
elder Dickens amassed so much debt that the capital: “As Washington may be called the
entire family—except for Charles and his older 4. HIS FAME KEPT A CERTAIN IDIOM headquarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva,” he
sister Fanny—were sent to Marshalsea debtors’ ALIVE. wrote, “the time is come when I must confess,
prison (later the setting of Dickens’s novel Little The phrase “what the dickens,” first without any disguise, that the prevalence of
Dorrit). mentioned in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of those two odious practices of chewing and
Left to fend for himself at only 12 years Windsor, was a euphemism for conjuring the expectorating began about this time to be
old, Dickens had to drop out of private school devil. In his book Other Dickens: Pickwick to anything but agreeable, and soon became most
and work at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse along Chuzzlewit, author John Bowen explained the offensive and sickening.”
the River Thames, earning six shillings a week name “was a substitute for ‘the devil,’ or the
pasting labels onto blacking pots used for shoe deuce (a card or a dice with two spots), the 7. HE HELPED THE SEARCH FOR THE
polish. doubling of the devil in short.” LOST FRANKLIN EXPEDITION.
Dickens allegedly used the pseudonym The author used his influence to help
2. ANOTHER JOB TAUGHT HIM HOW TO Boz to deflect any unseemly comparisons to Lady Jane Franklin search for her husband, Sir
WRITE. Satan, but once his real name was revealed and John Franklin, who disappeared in the Arctic
In 1827 and 1828, the 15-year-old the public became familiar with his work, along with 128 crew on the HMS Erebus and
Dickens found work as a junior clerk at the law Dickens ended up keeping the then-200-year-old HMS Terror while searching for the Northwest
office of Ellis and Blackmore - but instead of phrase en vogue. Passage in 1845. He wrote a two-part analysis of
brushing up on legal work to eventually become the ill-fated voyage called "The Lost Arctic
a lawyer, he voraciously studied the shorthand 5. HE MIGHT HAVE HAD EPILEPSY. Voyagers," and even lectured across Britain
method of writing developed by Thomas Though any indication he might have hoping to raise money for a rescue mission.
Gurney. The skill allowed him to begin working suffered from epilepsy isn’t corroborated by In the end the missing vessels weren’t
as a reporter in the 1830s covering Parliament contemporary medical records, he did return to found until 2014 and 2016, respectively, and
and British elections for outlets like the Morning the neurological disorder enough times in his various explanations for the crew’s fate have
Chronicle. work that some speculate that he might have been suggested. But at the time, Dickens gave in
drawn from his own experiences with seizures. to racist sentiment and blamed the Inuit, writing,
3. HE PUBLISHED WORKS UNDER A Characters such as Guster from Bleak "No man can, with any show of reason,
PSEUDONYM. House, Monks from Oliver Twist, and Bradley undertake to affirm that this sad remnant of
Dickens’s first published works Headstone from Our Mutual Friend all suffered Franklin's gallant band were not set upon and
appeared in 1833 and 1834 without his author's from epilepsy. slain by the Esquimaux themselves … We
byline. In August 1834, his short story "The believe every savage to be in his heart covetous,
Boarding-House," published in the Monthly 6. AMERICA WAS NOT HIS FAVORITE treacherous, and cruel." Inuit oral histories and
Magazine, featured his chosen pseudonym, PLACE. other evidence show that Franklin’s men
“Boz.” By the time he first journeyed to actually died from starvation, disease, or
The single-syllable name came from a America in 1842 on a lecture tour -later exposure.
childhood rendering of the character Moses chronicled in his travelogue American Notes for
from Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 novel General Circulation - Dickens was an (Continued on Page 52)
The Vicar of Wakefield, later mentioned in international celebrity because of his writing,
Dickens’s own A Tale of Two Cities. and he was received as such when he toured east
“Searching for Answers
Dickens called his brother Augustus coast cities like Boston and New York.
Demanding the Truth”
“Moses,” but later explained it was “facetiously “I can do nothing that I want to do, go
pronounced through the nose, [and] became nowhere where I want to go, and see nothing
‘X’ Zone TV Channel
Boses, and being shortened, became Boz. Boz that I want to see,” he complained in a letter
was a very familiar household word to me, long about his U.S. travels. “If I turn into the street, I on
before I was an author, and so I came to adopt am followed by a multitude.” Simultv
it.” Though he loved the fast-growing cities www.SimulTV.com