1. He did not calm down, get over himself, stop banging on, or "chill".
2. His characters burst out of his stories like rabbits out of a sack.
3. His plots were insane and no one cares.
4. He was the king of day jobs: reporter, actor, writer, editor, philanthropist and pater familias.
5. He looked like a cross between Rasputin and Father Christmas.
6. People still love his books: In The Big Read carried out by the BBC in 2003, five of Dickens's books were named in the Top 100. A Tale of Two Cities has sold more than 200 million copies since it was published in 1859.
7. He sent proper written invitations to "fallen women" to come to his college to be educated.
8. He put the City of London on acid.
9. He didn't want to be buried in Poet's Corner but asked to be buried in Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner".
10. This description:
"Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds."
Bleak House, Chapter One, In Chancery
Whatever it is, this thing we writer people are trying to do when we are sitting there, trying to do it, this is the thing.
