Dickens

(See Boz.)

Dickens is a perverted oath corrupted from “Nick.” Mrs. Page says—

“I cannot tell what the dickens his name is.”—Shakespeare: Merry Wives of Windsor, iii. 2.

⁂ The three poets who express a conflagration are “Dickens! How-itt, Burns!”

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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.

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