Interesting Facts about Charles Dickens

ebgblog_autho — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 05:53:22 +0000

As you know, the theme of this week is Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic. Here are several interesting facts about him:

His name “Dickens” was a curse, possibly invented by Shakespeare – Instead of saying, “What the devil?” as a profanity, people exclaimed, “What the dickens?” The first usage of that word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor;
In 1846 Dickens co-founded Urania Cottage, a home for the redemption of “fallen” women where accepted candidates could learn skills, often domestic, to read and write and re-integrate into society;
Dickens was keenly interested in the paranormal, and has even been linked to the famous paranormal investigation group “The Ghost Club” of London;
In his study he had a secret door which was designed like a bookcase filled with fake books rumored to include titles like Noah’s Arkitecture and a nine-volume set titled Cat’s Lives;
The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with the first use of butter-fingers, crossfire, dustbin, fairy story, slow-coach, and whoosh. He also gets the credit for ‘boredom’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, coined in his novel Bleak House (1852-3), but this has since been traced back even earlier, to 1830;

dustbin – Blog EBE

Interesting Facts about Charles Dickens