Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  Henry arrived from Cambridge two hours later, distraught at having been told of his father’s death by a railway porter. Dickens’s sister Letitia Austin arrived. During the night, Mamie cut a piece of hair from her father’s ‘beautiful, dead head’.32 Red geraniums and blue lobelias were brought into the dining room and banked around the body, and the windows left uncurtained to let in the sunlight. In the morning Katey went to London to tell her mother what had happened. The Queen, unaware of Dickens’s marital situation, or politely following correct usage, had sent Catherine a telegram from Balmoral. Millais came to draw Dickens’s dead face, already bound up by the undertakers, and the sculptor Thomas Woolner took a cast.

  Dolby, reading of the death in the newspaper, went straight to Gad’s Hill. He was kindly received by ‘Miss Dickens and Miss Hogarth’, who told him of Dickens’s final moments. They asked if he would like to see the body, ‘but I could not bear to do so. I wanted to think of him as I had seen him last. I went away from the house, and out on to the Rochester road. It was a bright morning in June, one of the days he had loved; on such a day we had trodden that road together many and many a time. But never again, we two, along that white and dusty way, with the flowering hedges over against us, and the sweet bare sky and the sun above us. We had taken our last walk together.’33

  The funeral arrangements were troublesome and involved more than one change of plan. Charley and Charles Collins, knowing that Dickens had expressed a wish to be buried in the part of Kent he loved so well, began by approaching the vicar of the church of St Peter and St Paul in the nearby quiet village of Shorne, and it was agreed that he should be buried in the churchyard there, on the east side.34 Then a pressing request was brought to Gad’s from the Dean and Chapter at Rochester Cathedral that Dickens should be buried there – not outside as he had wanted, which was impossible, but in the St Mary’s Chapel. Shorne was cancelled, Rochester agreed to, and a grave was dug.35 At the same time Dean Stanley at Westminster Abbey wrote to a literary friend, Frederick Locker-Lampson, to say he was ‘prepared to receive any communication from the family respecting the burial’, but had heard nothing and felt it would be inappropriate to take the initiative himself. Locker-Lampson said he forwarded Stanley’s note to Charley Dickens, but it failed to reach him. Meanwhile Forster was on his way from Cornwall, from which Georgina had summoned him by telegram. He arrived at Gad’s on Saturday morning and was able to see Dickens in the still open coffin and to kiss his peaceful face.

  On Monday The Times ran an editorial calling for Dickens to be buried in Westminster Abbey. This galvanized Forster and Charley, and at eleven o’clock they were in London to see Dean Stanley. The violence of Forster’s grief was such that at first he was hardly able to speak. When he recovered his calm, he said, ‘I imagine the article in The Times must have been written with your concurrence.’ No, said the Dean, although he had given it to be understood privately that he would consent to burial in the Abbey should it be requested, and he added that now the article in The Times had appeared no further application was needed. Forster then explained to the Dean the conditions insisted on by Dickens in his will: that there should be three plain mourning coaches only, no funeral pomp of any kind and no public announcement of the time or place of his burial. The Dean agreed, but pointed out the difficulties of preserving secrecy. He said they must bring the body to the Abbey that night after the public had left the place, that the grave would have to be dug during the night, and the few mourners must be there at nine the next morning before the usual service at ten. Most of this was agreed to.

  Accordingly at six o’clock that evening I told the clerk of the works to prepare the grave. We went into the Abbey and by the dim light chose a spot near Thackeray’s bust, and surrounded on various sides by Handel, Cumberland and Sheridan.36 It was fortunate that such a place remained vacant. I left him to make the grave, and retired to bed. At midnight there came a thundering knock at the door. My servant went to open it. It was a messenger from the Daily Telegraph, announcing that the body had been moved from Rochester, and that therefore the probability was that it was going to be buried in Westminster Abbey, and they wished to know at what time. My servant answered that I had gone to bed and could not possibly be disturbed.37

  In fact the body in its oak coffin was carried in a special train from Higham early the next morning, 14 June, to Charing Cross. The family travelled on the same train and they were met by a plain hearse and three coaches. There are slightly varying accounts of who was present, but there were certainly the four children still in England, Charley, Mamie, Katey and Henry; also Letitia Austin, Georgina, Charley’s wife Bessie and Dickens’s nephew Edmund, Alfred’s son; Forster, both the Collins brothers, Frank Beard and probably Ouvry.38 Catherine Dickens was not invited. It is unlikely that Nelly was there although just possible that she took herself to the Abbey. George Sala gave the number of mourners as fourteen, ‘with perhaps as many strangers who accidentally chanced to be present, gathered round the grave to take a last look at the coffin’ – which suggests he was there himself.39

  The great bell was tolled and the Dean and canons met the mourners and the coffin, carried through the cloisters into the nave. The doors were closed. There was no singing and no eulogy, just quiet organ music as a background to the reading of the burial service.

  ‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.’ Forster wrote afterwards, ‘The solemnity had not lost by the simplicity. Nothing so grand or touching could have accompanied it, as the stillness and silence of the vast Cathedral.’

  A friend in America found words that expressed what everyone felt. ‘Dickens was so full of life that it did not seem possible he could die,’ wrote Longfellow, and went on, ‘I never knew an author’s death to cause such general mourning. It is no exaggeration to say that this whole country is stricken with grief.’40 So America mourned with England. In London, at the Abbey, where the grave was left open for two days for the public to see the coffin lying five feet below the stone floor of Poets’ Corner, thousands filed past, bringing the heartfelt, useless notes they had written for him, and offerings of flowers that filled up and overflowed the grave. In his will he had expressed his wish to have no memorial. Instead, he said, ‘I rest my claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works, and to the remembrance of my friends upon their experience of me.’ Nothing could have been better. He was, and he continued to be, a national treasure, an institution, a part of what makes England England; and he continues to be read all over the world.

  The unadorned gravestone in Westminster Abbey: Dickens wanted nothing but his name.

  27

  The Remembrance of My Friends

  1870–1939

  Forster grieved, beyond comfort. He went to Carlyle after the funeral, in tears and ‘weeping every word’, then illness overcame him and he retreated to his bed.1 On 22 June he wrote to Charles Norton, ‘I have not been able, nor shall be, to have speech on these matters with anyone. And to you for the present I will only further say that nothing in future can, to me, ever again be as it was. The duties of life remain while life remains, but for me the joy of it is gone for ever more.’2 His duty was plain to him, and in October, while still obliged to continue his work for the Lunacy Commission, he started on his Life of Charles Dickens.

  Of Dickens’s ‘young men’ – not so young now – Sala wrote to Yates on 27 June, ‘To me he was everything … In him I have lost all that I most highly reverenced and loved; and we are neither of us at an age, dear Edmund, to be able to replace such losses.’3 He expressed a hope that Forster would write a biography, and meanwhile produced his own instant one, its best pages describing Dickens the London walker.4

  The women closest to Dickens soon scattered. Mrs Tringham was seen no more at Windsor Lodge and the last rates were paid in July. Georgina gave her the pen
Dickens had been writing with in his last days, and Forster transacted with her whatever financial business needed to be taken care of. She now had freedom and enough money to do as she pleased, and she went first to her sister Maria in Oxford, then to lodgings in Kensington, before taking the train for Paris with a maid at the end of August. If she hoped to visit friends, and the grave of a child, she was unlucky in her timing, because the Germans, at war with the French, were advancing on Paris as she arrived, and she had to leave quickly. Back in England she set off again by sea for Italy, to spend the winter with the Trollopes at Villa Ricorboli, as she had done three years before. Thomas Trollope described a gay season in Florence, with Hans von Bülow offering evenings of Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann, and sightseeing trips into the Tuscan maremma. There was some gossip: a Florentine friend wrote to Browning explaining that Mrs Trollope had been highly paid by Dickens for her novels because she was Miss Ternan’s sister, to which he replied, ‘the relationship between Mrs T. and “Miss T.” never crossed my mind.’5 Whatever conversations took place that winter between Mr T., Mrs T. and Miss T. about the man who had been a friend to all of them, they were not recorded.

  In the spring of 1871 Nelly returned to Oxford, slim and youthful-looking in her black clothes. Her sister Maria organized parties and she made an impression on the undergraduates she met, as a well-read, high-spirited girl who enjoyed poetry and horse riding, had suffered a mysterious bereavement and was delicate. In the autumn she returned to Italy, and in December Mrs Annie Fields in Boston heard ‘quite accidentally’ that ‘N. T.’ was in Rome ‘with Mrs Tilton’, a friend of the Trollopes living in the Barberini Palace. By now Mrs Fields had been told a good deal about Nelly by her husband, and she wrote, ‘I feel the bond there is between us. She must feel it too. I wonder if we shall ever meet.’6 Mysteriously she added, ‘Where is Dickens. [sic]’

  Georgina, Mamie and Katey returned to Gad’s Hill from the Abbey together, Katey leaving her husband to look after himself in London.7 Dickens had decreed that the house should be sold. The contents of the library went to Charley, all his manuscripts to Forster, and his private papers and jewellery to Georgina, along with enough capital for her to live on comfortably. Georgy busied herself sending mementos to friends, saw that all the servants were given the small legacies he had left them, and went to Wellington Street to go through his personal papers there. In July the pictures were sold at Christie’s, and at the end of the month Katey returned to her sick husband, and Georgy and Mamie left for a rented place at Weybridge, to be out of the way for the sale of furniture and wine at Gad’s on 1 August, followed by the auction of the house.

  To Georgina’s horror, Charley made a successful bid for Gad’s Hill. She complained that his presence at the auction deterred other bidders and kept the price down to £8,600, so that the sale put less into the total estate than it should have done. She did not want to see him at Gad’s where she had lived with his father, especially considering that Charley had been the only one of the children to defy him over the separation, and had married in the face of Dickens’s strongly expressed disapproval. For him to take over his father’s place seemed wrong to her, but he was not prepared to be dictated to by Gina, as he called her, who was only ten years older than him. He had to take out a mortgage and sell his father’s library, and she was angry again when he sold the chalet in which Dickens had worked, to be exhibited to the public. This she managed to prevent, and it was given to Lord Darnley and kept in Cobham Park.8

  Georgina settled in London, in a house in Gloucester Terrace, Hyde Park, in the same district where she had lived with Dickens only six months before. She was forty-three, the age Catherine had been at the time of the separation, and she became the unofficial widow, religiously observing the anniversaries of Dickens’s birth and death, choosing to spend Christmas alone to remember him, guarding his reputation and never doubting that the best part of her life was behind her. ‘Nothing will ever fill up that empty place,’ she told Annie Fields, ‘nor will life ever again have any real interest for me.’9 The Dickens children needed her care no longer, but she felt responsible for providing a home for Mamie, who, at thirty-three, came and went as she pleased, and for Henry during his university vacations. When Frank returned on leave from the Bengal Mounted Police, Georgy found him ‘affectionate and pleased to see us … but I don’t think he cares much about anyone’.10 He speculated with his inheritance, lost most of it, chose not to return to India and was soon destitute. Georgy, his sisters and Henry helped him and he was found a job with the North West Mounted Police, sent to Canada and never seen again by any of them. He did not return to England and, like several of his brothers, died suddenly, of heart failure, in Moline, Illinois, in 1886, aged only forty-two. His funeral was paid for by the people of Moline.

  Catherine Dickens told her daughter-in-law Bessie, Charley’s wife, that she had already lived twelve years of widowhood and felt there was now nobody nearer to Dickens than she was.11 She asked her daughters and sister to visit her at Gloucester Crescent, and she and Georgina spoke to one another for the first time since 1858. After this Katey was a frequent visitor, Mamie and Georgina occasional callers. Catherine needed comforting in 1872 when Sydney died at sea, only twenty-five years old, and always an affectionate son to her. Charley was devoted to his mother, and she was often at Gad’s Hill, enjoying the company of her grandchildren; her grandson Charles Walter recalled later that people came to Gad’s from all over the world ‘to visit the home of my grandfather’, and she may have felt some pride in her status then.12 Two more daughters were born to Charley and Bessie during their years there, and the family was well liked in the neighbourhood.

  Charles Collins died of cancer in 1873. The marriage had not been a success and Katey was too sensible to pretend to grieve for long. She was working hard at her painting, she had several admirers, and within six months of his death she married another fellow artist, Carlo Perugini, with whom she was happy.13 Even the loss of their only child in infancy did not darken their days permanently. They lived a hard-working and sociable life among their artistic and literary friends and, although they never made much money, by the late 1870s Katey had established herself as a painter, and her pictures were accepted by the Royal Academy.

  Forster was at Katey’s wedding to Perugini, and gave her a generous gift of £150. He had spent the years since 1870 on his biography of Dickens, the three volumes appearing in the autumns of 1872, 1873 and 1874, and arousing intense interest. Earl Russell wrote to Forster of his delight and pain in reading, adding, ‘I shall have fresh grief when he dies in your volumes.’14 The revelations about Dickens’s childhood, Forster’s memories of over thirty years and his quotations from intimate letters gave his work an authority no one else’s could have matched. On page after page he brought Dickens alive with ‘the passionate fullness of his nature’, his energy, charm and brilliance and also his anger and obsessiveness. He presented a genius but not a saint, and he suggested that the same forces that had driven him to achieve so much also drove him to break up his life – that the young Dickens’s sense that his will could achieve everything he set out to do meant that, in the later years, the same strength of will became the agent of his own destruction. He said nothing about Nelly – he had her to consider as well as the family – but at the end of the third volume he set discretion aside enough to print Dickens’s will, with its defiant naming of Ellen Lawless Ternan first among the legatees. It is a great book, as readable today as it was when it was first published, and it bears no sign that he was struggling with illness as he wrote it. His duty lovingly done, he lived less than another two years.

  Forster died on 1 February 1876, at home in Palace Gate, Kensington, round the corner from St Mary Abbot’s Church in which, on the day before, 31 January 1876, Nelly was married, in a white dress and with flowers in her hair, to one of the undergraduates she had met at Oxford in 1870. George Wharton Robinson, son of a gentleman, brought up by a widowed mother,
had been in love with her for five years, in the course of which he had graduated and become a clergyman. He was twelve years younger than Nelly, but he didn’t know it because she had reinvented herself, and she was now in her twenties. Her mother was dead, her sisters colluded with her, and she had learnt deception from a master. George was persuaded to become a schoolteacher and after a honeymoon in Italy they took over the running of a boys’ school in Margate. She recovered from her delicate health and became a robust young matron. They had two children, Geoffrey, born in 1879, the adored son who filled the place of the son she had lost, and a daughter, Gladys, in 1884. Nelly helped in the school, organized concerts and plays with the pupils, and also entertainments in the town, put on to raise money for charitable purposes. She made a particular feature of her readings, a large number of them from Dickens.

  She read A Christmas Carol, she read ‘Our Housekeeping’ from David Copperfield, she impersonated Mrs Jarley of the waxworks from The Old Curiosity Shop, she read from A Tale of Two Cities, from Nicholas Nickleby, from Bleak House, and more. This was her secret celebration of her old lover, and it went with her friendship with Georgina and Mamie, which was close enough for her to have written an elegy for the death of Mamie’s dog, the famous Mrs Bouncer beloved of Dickens, in 1874. Both visited her in Margate and were introduced to friends. For Nelly’s birthday in 1882 Mamie gave her a ‘Charles Dickens Birthday Book’ compiled by herself, inscribed ‘to Nelly Robinson with the Editor’s love and best wishes for March 3rd, 1882’.15 Like her sisters, Georgina and Mamie tacitly accepted Nelly’s new age (reduced in the 1881 census to twenty-eight, fourteen years less than her real age of forty-two). For her part, Nelly put it about that she had been a god-daughter of Dickens and a mere child when she knew him. She must have had nerves of steel in case Mamie or Georgina let drop any remark that undermined her story, but it was in all their interests to protect his reputation, and Georgina may well have appointed herself as the best person to watch Nelly and keep her from saying or doing anything to endanger it. Although Nelly’s husband and children gave her the strongest reason for keeping silent about the past, she sometimes dropped hints – that she had been at the Staplehurst accident for instance – and she undoubtedly had letters in her possession that would have been worth a small fortune had she chosen to put them on the market.