Charles Dickens Had an Interesting Life and Once Saved Several Lives
HERE ARE A FEW FACTS TO PONDER. (That’s a painting of young Dickens.)
1. Thank Dickens for INVENTING words and phrases like butter-fingers, flummox, the creeps, dustbin, ugsome, slangular, and many more.
2. Young Charles was forced into child labor. His father, John Dickens, was not good with money management. So, he was placed in Debtors’ Prison until his debt was paid. Of course, his wife and several of his small children lived with him in the prison, outfitted kind of like a pathetic one room home. You can imagine how hard that was.
His family could come and go some. So young Charles, only 12 years old, had to work in a shoe-blacking factory applying horrid black dye to leather shoes in order to help pay down the debt. He worked long hours until he had a falling out with his employer.
3. Charles’s older sister, Fanny, was in charge of Charles and the family house while the others shared the prison lodgings. Fanny continued her studies in music at the Royal Academy of Music. She was quite talented, and the parents doted on her and paid little attention to Charles.
4.. Charles later found work when he was15-years-old as a junior clerk at the law office of Ellis and Blackmore—but instead of brushing up on legal work to later become a lawyer, he ardently studied the shorthand method of writing developed by Thomas Gurney. With this skill, he became a reporter for London papers.
5.. With a nom de plume of Boz, he began publishing short stories in the newspapers. (Yes, papers and magazines ran short stories too.) His stories were entitled, Sketches by Boz.
7. Yes, he kept his real surname despite the fact that Dickens was a nickname for the devil, as used in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor. Once people knew his real name, it didn’t bother them at all. They loved his writing.
8.. When Dickens journeyed to America (he was crazy popular here too), he loved the big cities and the trip out west, but for Washington DC, he said: “As Washington may be called the headquarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise, that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable, and soon became most offensive and sickening.” I know legislators in the nation’s capital have many other bad habits today. LOL
9. Dickens kept live ravens in his study. He named each one, “Grip,” and had them stuffed when they died. His raven is said to be the inspiration for Edgar Allen Poe’s poem.
10. Dickens had a secret door in his study.
11.Train derailment. On June 10, 1865, the train he was riding in across France derailed. His passenger car was dangling from the tracks. Several other cars landed in the river. Getting key from the conductor, Dickens waded into the water, and, for several hours, helped save a good number of lives. After that, he climbed back into his own dangling car and grabbed the only copy of his new novel, Our Mutual Friend, that he was taking to the publisher.
12 He often rearranged the furniture for odd reasons.
13. He wrote more Christmas stories. The Cricket on the Hearth (The toymaker of that story is mentioned in my new novel.) He wrote “The Chimes.” Elements of this story are hinted at in the first Scrooge and Cratchit, Detectives.
HA, HA! DID ANYONE NOTICE I SKIPPED NUMBER 6? Well, here it is. Let me know if you would like a pre-sale copy of the newest Scrooge and Cratchit, Detectives novel. This time, the dynamic crime-solvers travel to Ireland. Just email me and I’ll send you an email version of the wild and wooly novel. When the book comes out very soon, you can arrange to receive a free copy.
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