It was the best of times and it was the worst of times both for the greatest novelist to ever exist on this earth.
Charles Dickens had a tough life and most of you may not be acquainted with the fact that such a brilliant mind never actually had a formal education.
Moreover, our Christmas Carol author used to have a raven as his pet.
Crazy, right? We have more of these facts crazy-unknown facts listed down below.
Today, 7 February marks the 209th birthday of Charles Dickens. Author of some of the most famous classic novels, Dickens life is full of mysteries and unknown facts!
Read to find out more about Charles Dickens-
Table of Contents
1. Charles Dickens was compelled to work at a minor age.
Elizabeth and John Dickens’ eldest son was born on 7 February in 1812 on Portsea Island and shifted with his family to Yorkshire and later to London.
When his father was assigned the job of Clerk in the Naval Party office, the Dickens family gathered so much debt that their whole family, except Charles and his sister Fanny, were sent to Marshalsea debtor’s prison.
The place was also the setting of his novel Little Dorrit.
Left to protect himself at the bare age of 12 years old, he had to leave his private school and work in Warren’s building warehouse earning six shillings a week.
2. He might have epilepsy
Though any indication that he might have been diagnosed with epilepsy do not affirm with his medical records, he did mention neurological disorder in his novel quite a few times.
Readers guess that he might have drawn the seizures from his own experiences.
3. Charles Dickens’ name is still keeping an idiom alive.
Shakespeare first mentioned the phrase “what the dickens” in his book The Merry Wives of Windsor.
John Bowen elucidated that the name “was a substitute for the devil” or the deuce which is a card or a dice with two spots hence doubling the satan in short.
Charles Dickens allegedly used the pseudonym ‘Boz’ to avoid any kind of comparison with the Devil but once the name was unveiled and the public became intimate with his work, it was impossible to keep the idiom aside.
4. A train accident almost derailed Charles Dickens.
On June 10, 1865, Charles Dickens was visiting home from France when his train derailed while traversing a bridge.
Seven first-class carriages fell straight into the river. The eight, in which Dickens was seated, was left dangling from its coupling.
After locating the conductor, he found the key to open the carriage and saved the passengers.
The fifty-three-year-old writer was writing “Our Mutual Friend” at that period and he had to go back to the dangling buggy to retrieve the instalment of his book.
Many of the people are not aware of the fact that his wife Catherine Dickens was also a published author.
5. Charles Dickens had a secret door in his residence.
There was a secret door in his house with the disguise of a fake bookshelf in his study room.
The fake books comprised of titles such as The Life of a Cat in nine volumes.
His house was at Gad’s Hill in Kent. The shelf had other phoney book names like 47 volumes of the History of a Short Chancery Suit, Socrates on Wedlock, King Henry the Eighth’s Evidence of Christianity, and the series The Wisdom of Our Ancestors: I Ignorance, II Superstition, III The Block, IV The Stake, V The Rack, VI Dirt, and VII Disease.
This door led to a room with Batman costume from the Victorian Era. What the Dickens, truly!