Today, 200 years ago, Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Landport, Portsmouth, England. To celebrate his life, Google has a special worldwide logo picturing some of his famous stories.
When you click on the logo, you are not taken to Google web search, like most Google Doodles (logos). Instead, Google takes you to Google Book Search results for books written by or about Charles Dickens. The search is simply for his last name, [dickens].
Charles Dickens died at the age of 58 on June 9, 1870 at Gad's Hill Place, Higham, Kent, England.
He was married to Catherine Thomson Hogarth on April 2, 1836 and they had ten children together. The children's names were Charles Dickens, Jr., Mary Dickens, Kate Perugini, Walter Landor Dickens, Francis Dickens, Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens, Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens, Henry Fielding Dickens, Dora Annie Dickens, and Edward Dickens.
Google also has a blog post on their Google Book Search Blog where Ariel Levine, Google eBooks Associate wrote about the process of creating the Doodle. The Googler Doodler who made it is named Mike Dutton.
And Mike's doodle is full of characters! We see Nell and her grandfather in the The Old Curiosity Shop, many characters from Little Dorrit, Oliver and his friends from Oliver Twist and Estella and Pip from Great Expectations. Even a certain French aristocrat graces the doodle, sitting inside the uppercase “G” -- a reference to his eventual death by guillotine. And no tribute to Dickens would be complete without Ebenezer Scrooge and a vivid depiction of London in the background.
For more on Charles Dickens see his Wikipedia page.
Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped Forums.
