Charles Dickens resented the large family

Charles and his wife had one thing in common: they both came from big families. Dickens had eight siblings, whereas Catherine had ten. There are 237 members of the Dickens family, but just roughly 60 direct descendants alive now. The Charles Dickens Museum has coloredized eight of the author's black-and-white pictures in honor of the 150th anniversary of his passing.

The only artifacts that have revealed Dickens' complexion thus far are oil paintings, which Gerald theorizes were later "romanticized" to appease the client. Both of the great-great grandson's thought that Dickens's olive skin would remove the notion that the author was a drab and dull Victorian. "Dickens was an outdoorsman, he loved to walk and spent a lot of time outdoors," Gerald remarked. "He would work from the Medway cities of Rochester and Chatham all the way to London. When he was travelling he would make sure he got out and walked as much as he could". So we can guess taking that evidence you could assume there was a healthiness to his complexion, a sort of ruddiness as he spent a lot of time out in the sun.