Charles Dickens: A Life (66 page)

In the afternoon he walked into Rochester with his dogs and posted his letters. He also went down into the cellar with a notebook in which he entered details of the casks kept there, heading it ‘Details of Contents of Casks in the Cellar – an account being kept on a slate in the cellar of what is drawn daily from each cask – and added together in this Book at the end of every week beginning 6th June 1870’. On the first page he made seven entries for sherry, brandy, rum and Scotch whisky, giving the number of gallons and when purchased, e.g., ‘Cask Very Fine Scotch Whiskey 30 gallons – came in 1st January 1869’. On page 2 he noted that three quarts of sherry had been used in the previous week, and on page 3 that a pint each of old pale brandy and dark brandy had been drawn. On page 5 he wrote that two gallons of his ‘Very Fine Scotch Whiskey’, stored in casks and stone jars, had been used in London.
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On Tuesday he worked at
Drood
again and wrote more letters, one to Luke Fildes telling him he would be at Gad’s from Saturday, 11 June – i.e., not before then – until the following Tuesday or Wednesday, and inviting him down for the next weekend. After lunch he and Georgy went in the carriage to Cobham Woods, where he got out in order to walk home alone; later he hung Chinese lanterns in the conservatory, and they both admired them in the evening. He had his breakfast served early again, at 7.30, on Wednesday, 8 June, and one of the maids left to be married that morning. A few letters written that day said he would be in the office in London on Thursday, and during the morning he looked in at the Falstaff Inn opposite to cash a cheque from the landlord, Mr Trood, as he often did, on this occasion for £22.
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After this Georgina was the only person known to have seen him until after six in the evening. In the servants’ hall below stairs there was the cook Catherine, the maid Emma, and the young house boy Isaac Armitage, and somewhere about outside were the groom George Butler, the new gardener Mr Brunt and some under-gardeners, local boys who would go home in the evening. Georgina said that Dickens came to the house in the middle of the day for an hour’s rest and to smoke a cigar, and then went back to work in the chalet, contrary to his usual habit, returning to the house in the late afternoon to write letters and entering the dining room at six, looking unwell. He sat down and she asked him if he felt ill and he replied, ‘Yes, very ill; I have been very ill for the last hour.’ On her saying she would send for a doctor, he said no, he would go on with the dinner, and go afterwards to London. He made an effort to struggle against the fit that was coming on him, and talked incoherently and soon very indistinctly. Georgina gave several versions of what happened, and she told Forster that he mentioned a sale at a neighbour’s house and something about Macready before stating his intention of going to London immediately. In another version, when she suggested calling the doctor, he said no, complaining of toothache, holding his jaw, and asking to have the window shut, which she did.
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In every version she gave their final exchange, her ‘Come and lie down’, and his reply, ‘Yes, on the ground’, as he collapsed on the floor and lost consciousness.
²⁸
Haunting last words. Now at last the core of his being, the creative machine that had persisted in throwing up ideas, visions and characters for thirty-six years, was stilled.

Forster, who like everyone else took his account from Georgina, describes her as trying to get him on to a sofa, but there was no sofa in the dining room. She said she got the servants from below, where they always remained unless sent for, to bring a sofa from the drawing room, on to which he was lifted. Yet Steele, the local doctor who was summoned by Isaac, the house boy, stated with certainty that Dickens was on the floor when he arrived and that it was he who asked for the sofa to be brought into the dining room and he who lifted him on to it; and later he would point out the exact place where he had found Dickens lying. We all know that memories of such events are likely to be uncertain and unreliable: for instance, Isaac said later that he had gone to fetch the doctor on the pony Noggs, although that particular pony had been put down a year before.

There is another possible version of the events of Wednesday, 8 June. In this, Dickens left for Higham Station after he had cashed the cheque with Mr Trood and made the familiar journey by train and cab to Peckham. At Windsor Lodge he gave Nelly her housekeeping money. Sometime soon after this he collapsed. Nelly, with the help of her maids, of the good-natured caretaker of the church opposite – sworn to secrecy – and of a hackney cabman, got the unconscious man into a big two-horse brougham supplied by the local job-master, used to driving Nelly and Dickens, and drove with him to Gad’s Hill. She knew that Dickens’s reputation, and her own, depended on her action, and one of her two maids could have sent a telegram to Georgina warning her to expect them, while the other could have gone with her to help. The journey must have taken several hours, but the roads were empty because the railway handled all the traffic now: Dickens had just written in
Drood
of ‘high roads, of which there will shortly be not one in England’. Getting an inert or semi-conscious man into Gad’s Hill would be a problem, but it was managed, and the dining room was where he would be expected to be at this time of day, between six and seven o’clock. It seems a wild and improbable story, but not an entirely impossible one, given what we know of Dickens’s habits. It is supported by the fact that Georgina, a careful and efficient person, wrote to their solicitor Ouvry in a letter dated ‘Thursday’ to say she found £6.6
s
.3
d
. in the pockets of his suit after his death. Given that he had cashed a cheque for £22 on the morning of 8 June, where did the £15.13
s
.9
d
. go?
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Yet Georgina’s account, even with its slight variants, carries conviction; and in any case, sometime after six o’clock in the evening the two versions become one again. Nelly returned to Peckham. Dr Steele arrived, had a sofa brought into the dining room and the patient lifted on to it. He saw that he was past help and held out no hopes of recovery but went through some palliative medical procedures and said he should be kept warm. Katey and Mamie, summoned by telegram, arrived about midnight. ‘Directly we entered the house I could hear my father’s deep breathing. All through the night we watched him, taking it in turns to place hot bricks at his feet, which were so cold,’ wrote Katey.
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Frank Beard had come with them. He was no more hopeful than Steele, and Steele left. Beard stayed, and in the morning Charley arrived. The London specialist they sent for came and said there had been a brain haemorrhage, and everyone understood there could be no good outcome. Mary Boyle appeared, was seen by Charley and Georgina, and went away again. Nelly arrived, or returned, in the afternoon, and remained.
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A long day went by. Soon after six in the evening Dickens gave a sigh, a tear appeared in his right eye and ran down his cheek, and he stopped breathing.

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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.