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“... Only after Charles Dickens was dead did the people who thought they were closest to him realise how little they knew about him. His son Henry remembered once playing a memory game with him: My father, after many turns, had successfully gone through the long string of words, and finished up with his own contribution, ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30 Strand ...”

“... On 25 May 1851 Dickens wrote no fewer than 11 letters – or perhaps it is better to say that 11 of those he wrote have survived. Several were only a line or two, declining an invitation to a public dinner at the Royal Literary Fund, thanking a theatre manager for the use of the stage for rehearsals of his amateur players, and the like ...”

“... that even famous lives lack in the day-to-day business of living. Fred Kaplan’s 1988 life of Dickens began with the vivid scene of his incinerating ‘every letter he owned not on a business matter’ in a bonfire at his Gad’s Hill garden. What Kaplan ruefully implied by opening with the manuscript holocaust of 1860 was that there was a core of ...”

“... Dickens’s magical power over his readers has frequently expressed itself in cult objects. For Victorians, the most widely reproduced was probably Luke Fildes’s elegiac picture, The Empty Chair. This image of the vacant authorial throne conveys a sense that there can be no successor to Dickens ...”

“... The bicentenary of Charles Dickens’s birth falls on 7 February 2012, and Dickensians across the globe are stirring. Dickens, who held strong opinions about virtually everything, had his own view of such occasions. Michael Slater notes his ‘embarrassment’ and ‘irritation’ at the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1864: always for Dickens the best way for a writer or any other artist to be remembered was not through biographies, unless they redounded as much to the honour of the art concerned as did Forster’s Goldsmith, nor through celebratory odes … still less through the erection of monuments, but through the continued circulation and enjoyment of their work ...”

“... In October 1860 Dickens finally moved what remained of his family from Tavistock Square in Bloombury to Gad’s Hill Place in Kent. He’d bought it four years earlier (for £1750), steadily improved it, and it remained his home until he died there in 1870. On high ground between Rochester and Gravesend, it was the very spot, as his letters insist, where Falstaff ran away ...”

“... In 1850 Dickens invented a little game for his seventh child, three-year-old Sydney, the tiniest boy in a family of short people. Initially, in fun, Dickens had asked Sydney to go to the railway station to meet a friend; innocent and enterprising, to everyone’s amusement the boy set off through the garden gate into the street; then someone had to rush out and bring him back ...”

“... process he thrashes in methodological agony over what constitutes a ‘great writer’. Charles Dickens would certainly qualify – but what about Fanny Craddock and Harold Robbins? The less fastidious literary critic customarily cuts through this problem by a brutal triage. Commonest is some variant of Raymond Escarpit’s notion of separate ...”

“... was a reasonable expectation that she would find her place in Poets’ Corner, near the grave of Charles Dickens and the bust of Thackeray. Why has it taken a century to bring this about? In giving notice of her death her husband, John Walter Cross, who had married her in St George’s, Hanover Square, scarcely eight months before, alluded to her wish ...”

“... from her deathbed summons the girl David really loves and gives her blessing to the succession. Charles Dickens’s wife was not nearly so obliging. In 1858, between Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens sent out a press release: ‘Mrs Dickens and I have lived unhappily ...”

“... George Gissing was convinced that the year 1900 would make all the difference. Writing his study of Charles Dickens in the late 1890s, he refers to his own generation as those ‘upon whom the new centurys breaking’. And one of the things the new century would bring was the New Woman. To an extent, of course, as Gissing realised, she had already arrived ...”

“... up a single modern-dress production.In this respect, the arts have swopped places. During most of Dickens’s mature lifetime it was architecture that versed itself in pastiche and would scarcely venture out except under the veil and justification of some ‘historical’ style. The novelists, by contrast, had the nerve of the devil. On the strength of ...”

“... It was​ in Charles Dickens’s upstairs sitting room that I met the future king of England. The Duchess of Cornwall was wearing a red paisley silk coat and dress by Anna Valentine. I know that because I was peeping out of the window and heard a lady from the Daily Mail say so into her mobile phone while she stalked the pavement outside ...”

“... full of useful and unsubstantiated facts, including the information that I shared a birthday with Charles Dickens, the Appalachian banjo-player Dock Boggs, and Julius Caesar. All other authorities seem to agree, however – and it’s only just occurred to me to check this – that Julius Caesar was born in the middle of July. Unhelpfully, few of them ...”

“... My father was a wicked man – a very wicked man,’ Charles Dickens’s daughter Kate Perugini wrote. ‘My father did not understand women.’ Yet he was never simply a chauvinist. Though he would not acknowledge women’s independence, he recognised their ambitions outside the home. He admired his musical sister Fanny, and was drawn to Nelly Ternan, who became his mistress, partly because of her talents on the stage ...”