1. Elizabeth Culliford Dickens was the wife of John Dickens and the mother of English novelist Charles Dickens.
14 Facts About Elizabeth Dickens
1. 2.
Elizabeth Dickens was the source for Mrs Nickleby in her son's novel Nicholas Nickleby and for Mrs Micawber in David Copperfield.
3.
One of eight children of Mary Culliford and Charles Barrow, Elizabeth Barrow was introduced to John Dickens by her brother, Thomas Culliford Barrow, when the two men were working at the Navy Pay Office in nearby Somerset House.
4.
When John Dickens first met Elizabeth she was "a small pretty girl of about sixteen, with bright hazel eyes, an inordinate sense of the ludicrous, and remarkable powers of comic mimicry, cheerful, sweet-tempered, and well educated".
5.
Shortly after the marriage the couple moved to Landport in Portsmouth and here Charles Elizabeth Dickens, the second of their eight children, was born in 1812.
6.
When John Elizabeth Dickens was released from prison, Charles's mother did not immediately remove him from the boot-blacking factory which was owned by a relation of hers, James Lamert.
7.
Elizabeth Dickens did all she could to patch up the quarrel so that her son could return to work; John Dickens insisted that his son should return to school.
8.
Charles Elizabeth Dickens was educated at Wellington House Academy until 1827 when his father again fell into debt and could not pay his school fees nor those of his sister Fanny at the Royal Academy of Music.
9.
Elizabeth Dickens's son described her wardrobe as 'the attempt "of middle-aged mutton to dress itself lamb fashion"'.
10.
When Charles Elizabeth Dickens gained fame as a writer, John Elizabeth Dickens frequently embarrassed his son by seeking loans from Charles's friends and publishers behind his back, and by selling pages from his son's early manuscripts.
11.
Concerned about his father's financial problems, in 1839 Charles Elizabeth Dickens rented a cottage for his parents far from London, and, as he thought, far from temptation, at Alphington in Devon.
12.
However, John Elizabeth Dickens merely continued to write to Charles's friends and publishers asking for money.
13.
Elizabeth Dickens is buried with her husband in Highgate Cemetery.
14.
Charles Elizabeth Dickens used his mother as the source for the vain, ineffectual and verbally comic Mrs Nickleby in his novel Nicholas Nickleby and for Mrs Micawber in David Copperfield.