In the morning Charley, the eldest son, came. Steele also returned. It was suggested by Beard that another London specialist, Dr Russell Reynolds, should be summoned. The family grasped at this straw, but when he came all three doctors agreed there was no hope. The pupil of Dickens’s right eye was much dilated, that of the left contracted, his breathing stertorous and his limbs flaccid. He had suffered a large haemorrhage in the brain – what was called an apoplexy – and could not live for long.
Dickens’s old friend, Miss Mary Boyle, also summoned by telegram from Georgina, arrived in a fly from Gravesend Station with her maid – they had travelled from London, having been at a wedding earlier – and waited unnoticed on the porch of the silent house. At last Charley came out and saw her, and took her in to the library, where Georgina came and embraced her, but she departed again without seeing the dying man, feeling out of place.5 At some point Nelly also arrived, summoned by Georgina; though this is not, of course, mentioned in any official account.6 Dickens’s son Henry did not yet arrive from Cambridge, nor his one remaining sibling, Letitia Austin; both were too late to see him alive.
A little after five o’clock some convulsion occurred in the frame of the dying man; then nothing more until, at about ten past six, a tear ran down one cheek. Soon after this his breathing stopped. Georgina, Katey, Mamey, Charley, Dr Beard and (probably) Nelly were present. There was no post-mortem. The news flashed round the world, the nation and the Queen mourned. An account of the death appeared in The Times on Saturday, 11 June, preceded by a eulogy of Dickens’s work and character (‘eminently truthful, trustworthy and self-denying’); it read as follows:
During the whole of Wednesday Mr Dickens had manifested signs of illness, saying that he felt dull, and that the work on which he was engaged was burdensome to him. He came to the dinner-table at six o’clock and his sister-in-law, Miss Hogarth, observed that his eyes were full of tears. She did not like to mention this to him, but watched him anxiously, until, alarmed by the expression of his face, she proposed sending for medical assistance. He said ‘No’ but said it with imperfect articulation. The next moment he complained of toothache, put his hand to the side of his head, and desired that the window might be shut. It was shut immediately, and Miss Hogarth went to him, and took his arm, intending to lead him from the room. After one or two steps he suddenly fell heavily on his left side, and remained unconscious and speechless until his death, which came at ten minutes past six on Thursday, just twenty-four hours after the attack. As soon as he fell a telegram was dispatched to his old friend and constant medical attendant, Mr Frank Carr Beard of Welbeck Street, who went to Gad’s Hill immediately, but found the condition of his patient to be past hope. Mr Steele, of Strood, was already in attendance; and Dr Russell Reynolds went down on Thursday, Mr Beard himself remaining until the last.
On Monday, 13 June, The Times called for burial in Westminster Abbey. It had clearly already been agreed to, and followed quietly, with the barest ceremony, on 14 June. Afterwards the public came in its thousands, bearing flowers, for several days; and on the following Sunday both Jowett and Dean Stanley preached sermons on the dead man to packed congregations.
No one has ever doubted Georgina’s account, which is both circumstantial and moving. It was the basis for the version in The Times, for Forster’s biography (he was away in Cornwall and not summoned until Dickens was dead) and necessarily for all subsequent accounts. The slight discrepancies in the different versions, which occur only in the earlier part, up to the arrival of Steele, have never seemed worth troubling over – indeed, they don’t appear to have been noticed. Could Georgina have lied? I think she could. Can she be regarded as trustworthy in any conflict between truth and the reputation of Dickens? The answer to this is that she cannot. Georgina concocted a cruel and untrue letter about her sister Catherine Dickens at the time of the separation. Georgina cut and destroyed letters that might in any way be thought to dim the lustre of Dickens’s reputation. Her edition of his letters omitted any mention even of the separation from his wife. She made herself the dragon guardian of the shrine. The friendly relations she maintained with Nelly Ternan throughout her life may have rested on genuine fondness, but also, as I have suggested, to keep an eye on her and any letters from Dickens she might have in her possession. A further reason for collusion between the two women now seemed possible.
I decided to test the plausibility of the Leeson family story – could it be true? – by attempting to construct an alternative account of Dickens’s last day of consciousness, Wednesday, 8 June. What follows here is therefore largely, though not wholly, conjectural. He rises, early, for his seven thirty breakfast. He writes some letters, including one to his friend Charles Kent, saying he expects to see him in London on the following day, another to his son Henry in Cambridge, enclosing a cheque. He tells Georgina he is going to town later in the day, and will be away until Friday. She knows his ways well enough to make no inquiries; officially it is assumed that he will be based at his bachelor flat in Wellington Street, over the office of his magazine All the Year Round. He works for an hour in the chalet on Drood. Then he walks, or is driven, the mile and a half to Higham Station and takes a London train, alighting at New Cross, where he hails a cab. He arrives at Windsor Lodge, Linden Grove, in the late morning, and sits for a while with Nelly in the garden under the sumac tree, reading to her and talking. They have not seen one another for a week, probably since 2 June. Perhaps he gives her the Windsor Lodge housekeeping allowance. They go in for lunch. Some time between one and two he is taken ill. He collapses, muttering as he does so about toothache and how he must go to London, and answering her anxious suggestion that he should lie down with the words ‘on the ground’.
Now Nelly, near panic but determined to remain in command of the situation, sends one of her two servants to their usual jobmaster: a jobmaster is a man who hires out horses, carriages and cabs, and we know Dickens was in the habit of employing one in the Peckham area. In any case there are plenty of jobmasters who will hire out horse-drawn vehicles around the King’s Arms on Peckham Rye, ten minutes away.7 Nelly needs a closed carriage, with two horses.8 She also dispatches a telegram to Georgina – the post office is also on the Rye – warning her to expect her arrival within the next four hours, with Dickens seriously unwell. The carriage arrives. There is almost no one about in this half-built street of detached houses facing on to a cornfield and open country, with just a church opposite and the entrance to Nunhead Cemetery up the road; but the caretaker from the church appears, or is sent for. He is a handy man, and is asked to give his assistance in a terrible situation by a distressed young woman. He does help her and the driver to get the inert Dickens into the carriage. Nelly swears the caretaker to secrecy. Her reputation depends on it, and he is a kindly man; and indeed he keeps his vow, for although he names Dickens later, he never divulges her name or address.9 She has plenty of money for the driver who, like most drivers, has seen everything, and can draw his own conclusions as to whether the elderly man he has helped to haul in to the carriage is drunk, dead or in a fit. She joins her unconscious lover in the carriage, and pulls down the blinds.
Nelly has the spirit and resolve to organize this. All the same, the thought of that journey – the unconscious man, the terrified, watchful woman, the carriage, coachman and horses steadily moving along roads so familiar to Dickens – is a solemn and terrible one. Once they are on their way the danger is much less, and the route itself is not difficult. It is less than twenty-four miles, and should take about three hours. They are quickly in Hatcham and then New Cross; then it is the good Roman road, Watling Street, almost the whole way. The roads in 1870 are strikingly empty, their traffic taken by the railway. They go straight across Blackheath and Shooters Hill, and along through the empty Kentish countryside, passing through a few sleepy villages – Welling, Bexleyheath, Crayford – on the hot June afternoon. Nelly holds Dickens as best she can, the carriage jolting and rushing onwards. This is the ver
y route Dickens gave David Copperfield when he left London to walk to his Aunt Betsey in Dover; and the same, in reverse, he made Pip walk after Estella rejected his love.
They have done twenty miles, and now they must turn off the main road at Shorne Wood and go uphill for the last lap, the cool, concealing woods in full leaf about them. At Gad’s Hill Georgina is waiting in the porch, but in any case the dogs will not bark at Nelly. It is easy for Georgina to make sure she is alone. They have been back at Gad’s for less than a week, and the few servants are in their separate quarters away from the main house; even the cook, preparing dinner, is confined to the basement, from which all the food comes up in a dumb waiter (Dickens’s manager Dolby particularly commented on the fact that you never met a servant at Gad’s Hill except waiting at table).10 But now, in the bright light of six o’clock on a June evening, the two women, assisted only by the coachman, have to get Dickens into the house. There are five steps up to the front door, and then the hall, with first the drawing room and then the dining room on the left. They take him to the dining room with some thought that it is the most appropriate place for him to be at dinner time; and in fact Georgina has told the servants to prepare dinner for the master. But once in the room there is no question of getting him on to a chair; they can do no better than lay him on the floor.
Nelly, after a few whispered words with Georgina – she tells her what he said, how he fell to the floor at Windsor Lodge – returns to the carriage and begins the slow journey back to Peckham. Her part is over, and Georgina is fully capable now of organizing everything else. Isaac Armatage, a simple lad of sixteen, is summoned and sent off with the telegrams and a note for the doctor. Once this has been done, and Georgina’s story given to the family and the world, to The Times and to Forster, it is not likely to be questioned, or contradicted by servants. They are about to receive legacies of £19 19s. from the dead man, and a suit of mourning clothes each. Armatage also receives a great many presents and is kept in the family service, taken as a houseboy and ‘ecstatic’ at the prospect of donning livery in his new situation; and Georgina arranges a special legacy for the garden boy George Woolley, another possible witness.11
There are undoubtedly a lot of awkwardnesses and rough edges to this version, enough to make it seem indeed much too good to be true. On further consideration, Professor Collins wrote,
I remain quite unable to account for a respectable and doubtless veracious man’s having told such a plausible (as we now know) tale so early, which was at odds with the Georgie/Forster account. I remain puzzled, but less inclined to disbelieve Forster.
One of the points of my version, however, is that it makes Georgina the only one in the know (apart from Nelly, who never said anything beyond telling her daughter she was present at the death of Dickens): Forster did not need to be involved in any deception.
Going once more through everything I had mustered, I found a further piece of evidence. On 8 June (‘only the day before his death’), Dickens had gone into the Falstaff Inn, which stands opposite his house, and cashed a cheque with the landlord, Mr Trood. The cheque was for the very large sum of £22, but Trood was quite accustomed to acting as banker for his distinguished neighbour, who must have gone off with the cash in his pocket.12 The other thing I noticed was a letter from Georgina. Georgina wrote to Dickens’s solicitor Frederic Ouvry almost daily in the aftermath of the death, as she busied herself going through Dickens’s papers in her capacity as executor. She was obliged to draw on Ouvry for any money she required, for instance to have the mourning suits made for the servants, but also simply to keep the household going. She explained in one meticulous letter that money was needed for the housekeeping, since at the time of Dickens’s death there was only £1 15s. 9d. in the housekeeping purse and £6 6s. 3d. in the pocket of his coat.13
Now if Dickens cashed a cheque for £22 with Mr Trood at the Falstaff Inn, some time on 8 June, and spent the whole day working in his chalet, seeing no one but Georgina and going nowhere all day until he collapsed at six in the evening, then what happened to the £16-odd difference between the money he took with him from the inn and the £6 6s. 3d. found in his pocket when he died?
Sixteen pounds was a lot of money in 1870, when an average weekly wage for a man was less than £1, for a woman 11s., when a cab fare was 1s. a mile; when you could rent a very comfortable London house for £50 a year; when a young lawyer could get married on an annual income of £250.14 Could some of the £22 have been for Nelly? And could it then, after all, by one of the ironies of fate, have paid for the undoubtedly expensive carriage that carried Dickens home on his last journey along the Dover Road?
NOTES
1. Mr D. C. Leeson’s letter was sent to the editor of the Sunday Times on 23 November 1959. The Sunday Times did nothing to follow it up beyond passing it to Felix Aylmer, then embroiled in controversy over his book Dickens Incognito, extracts of which had appeared in the paper. Aylmer was interested, but he failed to investigate the story beyond making inquiries about undertakers in Peckham, doubtless because he had suffered such a setback over the mistakes in his book. Mr Leeson’s letters were passed to the Dickens House Museum on the death of Sir Felix in 1979.
The Revd Postans remained at Linden Grove Church until 1901, when his health failed, and he died in 1905. His daughter Mary was married to G. H. Leeson, a lay preacher and City merchant, educated at the City of London School, in the church in 1887, with her father and her brother, also a Congregational minister, officiating. Leeson’s business career was chequered, but his devotion to the Church culminated in his becoming an established minister in his old age, in 1929. He died in 1943, leaving a huge collection of books, according to his grandson J. C. Leeson, who provided this information.
2. W. R. Hughes, A Week’s Tramp in Dickens-Land (1891), pp. 369–70. Hughes was an indefatigable collector of Dickensiana who collected testimony from many people, but he appears never to have approached Nelly Ternan or her sisters, or Dickens’s two valets John Thompson and Scott, whose first name is unknown, though he was observed ‘fallen on evil days’ and living in an ‘incommodious attic’ in Shaftesbury Avenue with his aged wife, in 1895, by a curate at St Anne’s, Soho, who later became Canon Freeman and divulged this information at the age of ninety-three to The Dickensian (1949), p. 110. Hughes died in 1899.
3. The pony was named for the character in Nicholas Nickleby. The story about Armatage comes from p. 234 of The Dickensian for 1931, and was given when Sir Frederick Macmillan purchased some relics in Armatage’s possession. He had apparently been given Dickens’s travelling mirror, a case of razors, a toddy glass and ladle, a cup and saucer, a cheque [sic], an ivory paper knife and a chain purse and silk handkerchief by Georgina and Henry Dickens. He was very reluctant to part with them, and died soon after doing so, at the age of seventy-seven, on 27 February 1931; he was buried in the churchyard of St Mary’s, Higham, so was obviously a local boy. I am indebted to Mr Alan Watts, President of the Dickens Fellowship, for pointing out that Noggs was put down more than a year before Dickens’s death: see Arthur A. Adrian, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle (1957), p. 122, where we read of Georgina being advised to have ‘poor little Noggs … humanely and promptly killed’ in the spring of 1869.
4. Stephen Steele, MRCS, LSA, of Bridge House, Esplanade, Strood, was then in his early sixties; he had trained at Guy’s and St Thomas’s hospitals. He was categoric that he found Dickens on the floor, so much so that when the Dickens scholar William Hughes visited Gad’s Hill in 1888, he was shown by the current owners the exact spot where Steele, who was still alive and also spoke to Hughes, had found Dickens, and the other spot on which the sofa was placed, on the other side of the door. See W. R. Hughes, A Week’s Tramp in Dickens-Land, pp. 173–4, 243–4.
5. See Mary Boyle: Her Book (1901), p. 242.
6. See note 25 to Chapter 12.
7. Among the Thomas Wright papers at Dickens House Museum there is a letter dated 22 November 1935 from a Linden Gr
ove resident, Guy Buckeridge, claiming that his family used the same jobmaster as Dickens; he was said to be called Cox, to work from the King’s Arms area, and to have stated that he often drove Dickens, fetching him from and to Linden Grove. I have not been able to trace a Cox.
8. For information about the speed and availability of hired horse carriages I am indebted to C. J. Nicholson and to Francesca Riccini of the Science Museum.
9. The Leeson family were particularly struck by this point.
10. George Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him (1885), p. 49.
11. For Woolley’s legacy, and for Armatage’s ecstatic response to the prospect of wearing livery, see Arthur A. Adrian, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle, pp. 156–8. Armatage, who went on to become a waiter at Shoolbred’s, continued to take Georgina Hogarth an annual bouquet or pot plant until her death, according to the entry in The Dickensian already mentioned in Note 3.
12. W. R. Hughes, A Week’s Tramp in Dickens-Land, p. 207.
13. See Arthur A. Adrian, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle, p. 151 and note; the letter is dated only ‘Thursday’, which suggests it was written on 16 June.
14. This is the sum Traddles marries on in David Copperfield, installing his bride and her five unmarried sisters in his chambers; see Chapter 59.
Notes
1 ‘N’
1. The incident occurs in his story, ‘Lovel the Widower’, which appeared in the Cornhill magazine in 1860.
2. See William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘The Ravenswing’ (1843).
3. Gordon N. Ray (editor), The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray (1945-6), Vol. IV, p. 86.
4. The New York Times, 8 June 1858.
5. Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow (revised edition, 1952), pp. 64–5.
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