[mturmon]

You are right that it is not known for a fact that the Maunder sunspot minimum was responsible for the Little Ice Age recorded in Europe and elsewhere.

It started out as an interesting speculation and has remained there.

This was earlier than Dickens' time -- it was mid 1600s. Galileo and others first saw and drew sunspots in 1610 (due to the invention of the telescope). So their disappearance happened very close in time to their first definitive sighting (they had been seen earlier, but only huge ones, and not clearly, so it was not systematic at all, they were confused with planetary transits).

The original article in the Register was trash, actually. Utter trash.