Questions to ask Charles Dickens

Pick which Dickens you are interviewing

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812 and died at his house, Gad's Hill Place in Kent, on 9 June 1870. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. His life splits into three clear stages, and your questions change with each.

The default for a wax museum is often the Dickens of December 1843: 31, famous, worried about money, writing A Christmas Carol in about six weeks. That Dickens knows nothing yet of 1858. If you pick the older Dickens you must be ready for questions about his marriage.

Questions about the childhood he kept secret

The record: in February 1824 his father John was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea, and Charles, aged 12, was sent to work at Warren's Blacking warehouse near Hungerford Stairs, pasting labels on pots of boot polish for six shillings a week. He told almost nobody. The story became public only in John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens (1872 to 1874), which printed his own account. Much of it went, lightly disguised, into David Copperfield.

1. What did you do each day at Warren's Blacking, and who worked beside you?
2. Why did you never tell your own children about it?
3. How did your mother's wish that you stay at the warehouse affect you?
4. Which parts of David Copperfield are your own life?
5. How did learning shorthand and reporting debates in Parliament shape how you write dialogue?

Questions about writing in monthly parts

The record: most of his novels came out in instalments, monthly parts with green covers or weekly in his own magazines, Household Words (from 1850) and All the Year Round (from 1859). Readers wrote to him while a story was still going. Oliver Twist ran in Bentley's Miscellany from 1837 to 1839. A Christmas Carol was different: a single small book published on 19 December 1843.

1. What is it like to publish a chapter before you have written the next one?
2. Did readers' letters ever change what happened to a character?
3. Where did the idea for A Christmas Carol come from, and why write it so fast?
4. Why did you make Scrooge a moneylender rather than a factory owner?
5. Which of your characters do you like best, and which did you find hardest to write?

Questions about poverty, schools and the gallows

The record: in a letter to the Daily News on 4 February 1846 he described the children of the Field Lane ragged school in London and pleaded for education. After watching the Mannings hanged before a crowd in November 1849 he wrote two letters to The Times (13 and 17 November) attacking the behaviour of the crowd and calling for executions to be held in private. With the banker Angela Burdett-Coutts he ran Urania Cottage, a home for homeless young women, from 1847.

1. What did you see at the ragged school that made you write to the newspapers?
2. Why did you argue for private executions rather than ending executions altogether?
3. Were Victorian workhouses as cruel as the one in Oliver Twist?
4. What were you trying to do at Urania Cottage?

Questions about America

The record: he toured the United States and Canada in 1842 and campaigned in speeches for an international copyright law, since American printers sold his books without paying him. American Notes (1842) condemns slavery, quoting newspaper advertisements for runaway enslaved people, and mocks tobacco spitting and the American press. He went back in 1867 to 1868 for a reading tour.

1. Why did you bring up copyright at dinners held in your honour?
2. Why did you fill a chapter of American Notes with advertisements for runaway slaves?
3. Mark Twain heard you read in New York at the end of 1867. What did you think of American audiences?

Twain reported on that reading in his travel letters to a San Francisco newspaper, the Alta California; see questions to ask Mark Twain.

The hard questions: his marriage and his prejudices

The record: he married Catherine Hogarth in 1836 and they had ten children. In 1858 he separated from her, published a statement about it, and kept up a secret relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan, who was 18 when they met in 1857. Letters found in 2019 suggest he tried to have Catherine placed in an asylum. He also wrote a contemptuous essay, The Noble Savage (Household Words, 1853), and after the Indian rebellion of 1857 wrote privately to Angela Burdett-Coutts that he wished to exterminate the people responsible. Fagin in Oliver Twist is called “the Jew” hundreds of times; after Eliza Davis wrote to him in 1863 he cut many of those references in later editions and created a kind Jewish character, Riah, in Our Mutual Friend.

1. Why did you make your separation from Catherine public?
2. How do you answer the charge that you treated your wife cruelly?
3. Why did you write so violently about India in 1857, when your novels ask readers to pity the poor?
4. What did Eliza Davis's letter make you change?

These belong in a serious interview. Let him give his own justifications, then show in your notes what the evidence says. That is fairer than either hiding these facts or letting them push out his reform work.

Sample answers from his letters

Dickens wrote thousands of letters, and they sound like his novels: quick, comic and exaggerated. Two short ones from his file make good openings.

Question: You travelled all over England as a young reporter. Where did you like least?

Question: What do you enjoy about performing to a big audience?

Question: Why do you care so much about ragged schools? A sourced answer, in paraphrase: in his Daily News letter of 4 February 1846 he described the misery of the children he met and argued that teaching them was the only way to stop them becoming criminals.

Question: You went to see a hanging. Why? A sourced answer, in paraphrase: his letters to The Times of November 1849 say the crowd's jokes and drunkenness at the Mannings' execution horrified him more than the hanging itself, and that public executions corrupted the people who watched them.

Questions he could not answer

• How The Mystery of Edwin Drood ends. He died with six of the twelve planned parts written.
• Films of A Christmas Carol, including the Muppet version, or the claim that he “invented Christmas”.
• That “Dickensian” is now an everyday adjective for squalor.
• If your interview is set in 1843: anything about Ellen Ternan, the separation, or his public readings.

Where to read Dickens in his own words

Project Gutenberg has every novel, including A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist and American Notes, and Forster's three-volume Life of Charles Dickens, where the blacking warehouse story first appeared. The Charles Dickens Letters Project publishes letters found since the twelve-volume Pilgrim Edition. Wikisource has his journalism, including pieces from Household Words.

To rehearse your questions aloud, try Yuga's Charles Dickens, an AI recreation built from his novels, letters and the historical record. It is not Dickens and can get things wrong, so check every fact you use against the sources above. For his age, see Victorian era key figures; for a contrast with the novelist he followed, see Jane Austen and Charles Dickens compared.