Fake library – Charles Dickens

Before he moved to his country home, Gads Hill Place, Charles Dickens (1812-1870) made a draft of a secret door that led to a secret chamber, which he chose to be his workroom.

The secret door was actually a fake library, whose shelves, as well as books, were fake.   While making this mask for the door, Dickens also devised a series of humorous book titles, which occupied the false shelves.

Here are some of those titles: Hansard's Guide to Refreshing Sleep, History of a Short Chancery Suit (in twenty-one volumes), Socrates on Wedlock, King Henry the Eighth's Evidences of Christianity, the series The Wisdom of Our Ancestors: I Ignorance, II Superstition, III The Block, IV The Stake, V The Rack, VI Dirt, and VII Disease.

Among those humorous titles there was also a very narrow dummy volume entitled The Virtues of Our Ancestors.

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Note from an editor – Charles Dickens

While he was an editor of the weekly magazine “Household Words”, famous English writer Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870) received a poem from a young poet with a request to publish it.

Poem’s title was “Orient Pearls at Random Strung”.

Dickens read it and decided not to publish it.  Since he didn’t wanted for the young poet to have to many hopes of publishing, he sent him a notice to inform him about his decision.

“I regret to inform you that your poem will not be published in our magazine. Too much string. Yours, Charles Dickens. “

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Cool – Charles Dickens

The phrase "cool" is widely spread among young people everywhere in the world today.  However, not many people know that among the first who used such phrase, in terms of leaving an impression on those who are present, was Charles Dickens, in 1837.

In his novel “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” (also known as The Pickwick Papers), Dickens described a scene in which a coachman is holding the reins of a horse with one hand, a remarkable feat, and then, with ease, with his other hand takes out a handkerchief from his pocket, showing others how "cool" he is.

However, this phrase didn’t spread among the young until the middle of the last century. From then and on it spread mostly thanks to jazz, Charlie Parker and the movie "West Side Story" in which members of the gang the “Jets" were so "cool”...

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