URIAH HEEP, THE unctuous clerk at David Copperfield’s ’umble service. Miss Havisham, the old spinster in a wedding dress, locked in her mansion full of stopped clocks. Fresh-faced Nicholas Nick-leby, making his way in the world. Eccentric Betsy Trotwood and sweetly naive Dora Spenlow. Coldhearted Ebenezer Scrooge and poor little Tiny Tim. Charles Dickens (1812–1870) peopled his fifteen novels—ten of which weigh in at more than eight hundred pages!—with one of the most colorful and memorable casts of characters in all of literature. Test your knowledge of Charles Dickens by figuring out which of the statements below are true—if they’re false, just say “Bah, humbug!”
TRUE OR FALSE?
1. Novels like Oliver Twist, with their harsh realism, spawned the colloquialism “as the dickens”—as in, for instance, “It’s cold as the dickens in here!”
2. In Dickens’s time, England’s New Poor Law actually contained feeding regulations—the ones that Oliver Twist violates when he asks Mr. Bumble for “more.”
3. In the Victorian spirit of charity, Dickens helped found and run a home for former prostitutes called “Urania Cottage.”
4. Charles Dickens ends many of his chapters with cliff-hangers and nail-biters—this is because most of his work was published in serial form, one episode or installment at a time.
ANSWERS
1. False. “Dickens” is simply a euphemism for “devil,” and the word first appears in print in the work of another English literary titan: William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Winsor.
2. True.
3. True.
4. True.