Scrooge, Oliver Twist, jilted Miss Havisham, David Copperfield, Gradgrind, Lady Deadlock, all of these characters are known even to those who have never opened a novel by world-famous and never-out-of-print Charles Dickens. He lives on. He's 209 today and his books and his life still fascinate.
Married at 24, by 40, Dickens had 10 children, seven sons and three daughters. He had an affair, left his wife, wanted scarlet geraniums on his coffin, asked that his horse be shot the day that he himself died and wanted to be buried in a local churchyard in Kent, "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner".