by Jim Bernhard
Dickens’s first novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, was published from 1836 to 1837 in installments, as most of his works were, and became immensely popular. He followed this with Oliver Twist, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge. Soon he was an international celebrity, and he lectured in America, from Virginia to Missouri, on a visit that yielded fees equivalent to a million and a half dollars in today’s money. The American travels also provided material for two more books, the snarky American Notes for General Circulation and The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit.
His timeless classic, A Christmas Carol, and his generally acknowledged masterpiece, David Copperfield, followed—but after the death of both his father and a daughter and his separation from his wife, Dickens’s mood turned darker with Bleak House, Hard Times, and Little Dorrit. He came out of the doldrums and produced two more first-rate novels, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations.
In 1865, Dickens was in a train wreck in which seven carriages plunged off a bridge. His was one of the only carriages that stayed on the track, and he never fully recovered from the trauma of that crash. It may have contributed to the first of several small strokes that drained his energy, and he may have also been suffering from what is known today as bipolar disorder.
Dickens’s views of death and the afterlife were based on the vaguest sort of Christianity, perhaps also influenced by his interest in Unitarianism and by the theology of the Baptist chapel that he attended in his youth. Although he disdained organized religion, he wrote a devotional book for his children, The Life of Our Lord, not published until 1934. He wrote of heaven as a place “where we hope to go, and all to meet each other after we are dead, and there be happy always together.”
He was never explicit in expressing such views in his novels. The death of little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop is treated with religious reverence, but holds out no promise of an afterlife. In a scene of which Oscar Wilde said, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing,” Dickens wrote:
For she was dead. There, upon her little bed, she lay at rest. The solemn stillness was no marvel now.
She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon. She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life; not one who had lived and suffered death.
Her couch was dressed with here and there some winter berries and some leaves, gathered in a spot she had been used to favour. ‘When I die, put near me something that has loved the light, and had the sky above it always.’ Those were her words.
She was dead. Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead. Her little bird—a poor, slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed—was stirring nimbly in its cage; and the strong heart of its child mistress was mute and motionless forever.
Dickens’s own death came at age fifty-eight, on June 9, 1870, twenty-four hours after a having paralytic stroke at Gadshill, his home in Kent. He had worked a few hours on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the novel he never finished. Then he relaxed by smoking a cigar in his new conservatory, and after that wrote some letters in the library. Then he joined his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, for an early dinner. Here is Dickens’s friend John Forster’s account of what happened next:
. . . before dinner, which was ordered at six o’clock with the intention of walking afterwards in the lanes, he wrote some letters, and dinner was begun before Miss Hogarth saw, with alarm, a singular expression of trouble and pain in his face. “For an hour,” he then told her, “he had been very ill”; but he wished dinner to go on. These were the only really coherent words uttered by him. They were followed by some, that fell from him disconnectedly, of quite other matters . . . but at these latter he had risen, and his sister-in-law’s help alone prevented him from falling where he stood. Her effort then was to get him on the sofa, but after a slight struggle he sank heavily on his left side. “On the ground” were the last words he spoke. It was now a little over ten minutes past six o’clock. His two daughters came that night with Mr. F. Beard, who had also been telegraphed for, and whom they met at the station. His eldest son arrived early next morning, and was joined in the evening (too late) by his younger son from Cambridge. All possible medical aid had been summoned. The surgeon of the neighbourhood was there from the first, and a physician from London was in attendance as well as Mr. Beard. But human help was unavailing. There was effusion on the brain; and though stertorous breathing continued all night, and until ten minutes past six o’clock on the evening of Thursday, 9 June, there had never been a gleam of hope during the twenty-four hours.
Contrary to his wishes to be buried in Kent in Rochester Cathedral “in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner,” Dickens instead was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey. To avoid a public display, his grave in Poets’ Corner, between those of George Frederick Handel and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was dug at night. The following morning at nine-thirty, three coaches and a hearse arrived for the interment, attended by only twelve mourners. The funeral service, from the Book of Common Prayer, was read by the dean, the Reverend Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, in the silent and nearly empty Abbey. The grave was then left open for two days, as thousands of people came to pay respects and throw flowers into it. It is marked by a stone inscribed with Dickens’s name in “plain, English letters,” as he instructed.
ROBERT BROWNING
Robert Browning led a relatively obscure life as an unsung poet until after the death of his more famous wife. Born to a well-to-do bank clerk and his pianist wife, a Nonconformist evangelical, on May 7, 1812, in the London suburb of Camberwell, Robert was tutored at home with lessons in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, as well as the English poets. When he was fourteen, Robert persuaded his devoutly religious mother to buy him a copy of “Mr. Shelley’s atheistic poem,” Queen Mab.
The aspiring poet began to write lyric poems and tragic dramas that were published privately by his family. Among his works of this period was Sordello, a long, convoluted, obscure poem about a thirteenth-century Lombard troubador. Browning continued to live with his parents until his marriage at the age of thirty-four to Elizabeth Barrett, a well-known poet.
The Brownings moved to Italy, where they had a son, Robert Barrett Browning, nicknamed Pen, and they remained on the Continent until Elizabeth’s death in 1861. Browning then returned to England, where he lived for a time with his son and also with his younger sister. Only then did his works begin to gain acceptance with the British public.
Among the most notable are his many short narrative poems that he called dramatic lyrics, dramatic romances, and monologues, such as “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” “The Lost Leader,” “My Last Duchess,” “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” “Rabbi Ben Ezra” (“Grow old along with me, / The best is yet to be”) and “Home Thoughts From Abroad”—with the famous line “Oh, to be in England / Now that April’s there!” The Ring and the Book, a 21,000-line dramatic poem in blank verse about an Italian murder case, was a bestseller. His drama Pippa Passes contains one of his most famous lyrical poems, which ends, “God’s in his heaven, / All’s right with the world.”
An interesting sidelight about Pippa Passes is Browning’s unwitting use in it of the word twat, a vulgar term for female genitalia. He wrote:
Then owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
Browning naïvely thought the word meant a nun’s headdress, based on his misunderstanding of a bawdy satirical poem of 1660 called “Vanity of Vanities,” in which these lines appear:
They talk’t of his having a Cardinall’s Hat,
They’d send him as soon as an Old Nun’s Twat . . .
Whether the sunny optimism expressed in much of Browning’s work is a tr
ue reflection of the poet’s religious beliefs is open to question. Most of his works are dramatic in nature, and the thoughts expressed in them are in the mouths of different characters. A professed atheist in his youth, Browning turned in later life to a vague Christianity tempered with skepticism. Once he was asked whether he was a Christian and is said to have answered with a thunderous “NO!” His most naked feelings about death are seen in “Prospice,” a poem written shortly after Elizabeth’s death, in which he contemplates his own demise and hopes to face it heroically:
Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle’s to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forebore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute’s at end,
And the elements’ rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!
Browning was on holiday at his son’s home in Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico, a restored baroque palace, when he came down with a severe case of bronchitis. The damp Venetian air worsened the disease, which, after two weeks, proved too much for his heart to withstand, and he died on December 12, 1889, at the age of seventy-seven.
In reporting his death, one British paper noted, “To many readers, indeed, Robert Browning is simply the name of a poet who wrote ‘Sordello’—a work which nobody but himself professed to understand.”
Browning’s wish to be buried next to his wife was thwarted, since the English Cemetery in Florence, where she was interred, had since been closed to new burials. Instead he was laid to rest in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, on December 31, a bleak, foggy day. The church was filled with mourners, and a wreath from Lord Tennyson was placed atop the polished pine coffin. A bevy of clergy were in attendance, including the dean and canons of the Abbey and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Music included the hymns “We All Go to Our Place,” “Meditation,” and “O God, Our Help in Ages Past”; a poem by Browning’s wife, “He Giveth His Beloved Sleep,” which had been set to music; and Handel’s “Dead March” from Saul.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Charlotte Brontë, one of three literary sisters, was born on April 21, 1816, in Thornton, Yorkshire, to Maria and the Reverend Patrick Brontë—a surname the clergyman had invented to replace the Irish and less elegant-sounding Prunty. Charlotte had four younger sisters, two of whom died of tuberculosis in childhood while enrolled at the Clergy Daughters School. Charlotte and her sister Emily were also students at the same school, but withdrew after their sisters’ deaths and attended the nearby Roe Head School, as did the youngest daughter, Anne.
After working in several positions as a governess, Charlotte established a school with her two sisters—rather unsuccessfully, as not one student enrolled. All three sisters had a literary bent, and all three achieved publication of novels in 1847, under assumed masculine names: Charlotte, as Currer Bell, published Jane Eyre; Emily, as Ellis Bell, Wuthering Heights; and Anne, as Acton Bell, Agnes Grey.
Within the next two years, both Emily and Anne died of tuberculosis, a disease that some years later also killed their only brother, Bramwell, who was beset by alcoholism as well. Charlotte continued to write and became known in literary circles. In 1854, Charlotte accepted a proposal of marriage from Arthur Bell Nicholls, a curate at her father’s church, who had first proposed nine years earlier.
As the daughter and wife of Anglican clergymen of the “low-church,” evangelical variety, Charlotte seemingly maintained adherence to the Church of England, but her skepticism simmered just below the surface. In Jane Eyre, the heroine has her doubts about the ultimate fate of her dying friend, Helen Burns. Languishing on her deathbed, Helen engages Jane in consideration of the afterlife:
“By dying young, I shall escape great sufferings. I had not qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world: I should have been continually at fault.”
“But where are you going to, Helen? Can you see? Do you know?”
“I believe; I have faith: I am going to God.”
“Where is God? What is God?”
“My Maker and yours, who will never destroy what he created. I rely implicitly on his power, and confide wholly in his goodness: I count the hours till that eventful one arrives which shall restore me to him, reveal him to me.”
“You are sure, then, Helen, that there is such a place as heaven; and that our souls can get to it when we die?”
“I am sure there is a future state; I believe God is good; I can resign my immortal part to him without any misgivings. God is my father; God is my friend: I love him; I believe he loves me.”
“And shall I see you again, Helen, when I die?”
“You will come to the same region of happiness; be received by the same mighty, universal Parent, no doubt, dear Jane.”
Again I questioned; but this time only in thought. “Where is that region? Does it exist?”
Jane harbored doubts; perhaps Charlotte did, too.
Soon after her marriage, Charlotte became pregnant, but at the same time, her health began to fail. Her friend and biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, gives this account of her final days in March of 1855:
Soon after her return [from visiting friends nearby], she was attacked by new sensations of perpetual nausea, and ever-recurring faintness. After this state of things had lasted for some time, she yielded to Mr. Nicholls’ wish that a doctor should be sent for. He came, and assigned a natural cause for her miserable indisposition; a little patience, and all would go right. She, who was ever patient in illness, tried hard to bear up and bear on. But the dreadful sickness increased and increased, till the very sight of food occasioned nausea. . . .
“I dare say I shall be glad some time,” she would say; “but I am so ill–so weary.” Then she took to her bed, too weak to sit up. Long days and longer nights went by; still the same relentless nausea and faintness, and still borne on in patient trust. About the third week in March there was a change; a low wandering delirium came on; and in it she begged constantly for food and even for stimulants. She swallowed eagerly now; but it was too late. Wakening for an instant from this stupor of intelligence, she saw her husband’s woe-worn face, and caught the sound of some murmured words of prayer that God would spare her. “Oh!” she whispered forth, “I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy.”
Early on Saturday morning, March 31st, the solemn tolling of Haworth church-bell spoke forth the fact of her death to the villagers who had known her from a child, and whose hearts shivered within them as they thought of the two sitting desolate and alone in the old grey house.
The precise cause of Charlotte’s death, at the age of thirty-eight, was officially listed as phthisis (pulmonary tuberculosis), but it has been speculated that the proximate cause was dehydration as a result of excessive vomiting in extreme morning sickness during her pregnancy. There is also evidence to suggest that she had contracted typhus,
as well as pneumonia.
Charlotte Brontë was buried in the family vault at the Church of St. Michael and All Angels in Haworth. Her father, who survived his wife and all six children by several years, published her early novel The Professor posthumously.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
If anyone ever heard a different drummer, it was Henry David Thoreau. He was born as David Henry on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts, a town near Boston, where he lived virtually all his life. His father, a pencil manufacturer, sent David to Harvard, where he graduated in the top half of his class. He taught school briefly, but gave it up and went to work in his father’s pencil factory. Since everyone called him Henry, Thoreau began to style himself as Henry David after graduating from Harvard.
His friend, neighbor, mentor, and fellow Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, invited Thoreau to live in his house, where he did odd jobs for his upkeep. He became friends with the Transcendentalist circle that included Emerson’s wife, Lidian, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, and Louisa May Alcott.
Hawthorne said of Thoreau’s appearance that he was “as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty.” For years he had a beard that grew around his neck, which he insisted women found attractive. Louisa Alcott, however, said that Thoreau’s facial hair would “assuredly deflect amorous advances and preserve the man’s virtue in perpetuity.” It apparently did exactly that, and Thoreau never married. He stayed with Emerson about two years, and then went back to the pencils and a room in his parents’ home.
