You never answered the question, Mr. Adams. It comes from Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor…“I cannot tell what the dickens his name is my husband had him of.”
Here’s a link to the column in question.
Just because it appears in MWW doesn’t mean it “comes from” MWW. The passage in question is a bit of straight-up prose dialog in which it would be most unlikely for Shakespeare to go to the effort of making up an original idiom. The odds are overwhelming in favor of it already being current in the spoken language.
Just to back up what John just said, Michael Quinion says much the same:
from World Wide Words: Like the dickens If Shakespeare had “invented” that phrase, the audience would not have been able to understand the joke.
Are you sure that’s a pun? I’m usually one to laugh at obsolete jokes, but unless it was established in the play that Dickens is actually the name of the man who sold Mr. Page the weathercock, it seems pretty weak to me.
It’s not a real weathercock, but a boy, and the boy was sent by Sir John Falstaff, so if it’s a pun on Dickens-the-name it is only a weak one involving the collocation of the word “name” in the sentence.