Augustus Dickens Augustus Dickens Augustus Newnham Dickens (10 November 1827 – 4 October 1866) was the youngest brother of English novelist Charles Dickens, and the inspiration for Charles's pen name 'Boz'. Augustus Dickens was the son of Elizabeth ("née" Barrow) and John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office at Portsmouth. Charles Dickens's pen name, 'Boz', was actually taken from his youngest brother's family nickname 'Moses', given to him in honour of one of the brothers in "The Vicar of Wakefield" (one of the most widely read novels in the early 19th century), which when playfully pronounced through the nose became
Charles Dickens of inculcating his faith to his children and family. Dickens disapproved of Roman Catholicism and 19th-century evangelicalism, and was critical of what he saw as the hypocrisy of religious institutions and philosophies like spiritualism, all of which he considered deviations from the true spirit of Christianity. Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky referred to Dickens as "that great Christian writer". In December 1845, Dickens took up the editorship of the London-based "Daily News", a liberal paper through which Dickens hoped to advocate, in his own words, "the Principles of Progress and Improvement, of Education and Civil and Religious Liberty and Equal