From a water-colour drawing, by S. Luke Fildes, R.A.
Reproduced by special permission of the Artist.
As a reader, too, Dickens stood pre-eminent. It has lately transpired that his very first public reading took place, early in the fifties, at Chatham, in aid of the Rochester and Chatham Mechanics’ Institution, and the subject of the reading was the “Christmas Carol.” He gave public readings from his own works both in Great Britain and America, and an entertaining account of these tours may be found in Mr. George Dolby’s volume, “Charles Dickens as I Knew Him.” There can be no doubt that the mental tension caused by these readings (which covered a period of some fifteen years), supplemented by the strain of literary and editorial labours, curtailed the brilliant career of England’s greatest novelist. It was at his charming rural retreat, Gad’s Hill Place, near Rochester (his home from 1856), that Charles Dickens breathed his last, on June 9th, 1870, in his fifty-ninth year. “Before the news of his death even reached the remoter parts of England,” says Forster, “it had been flashed across Europe; was known in the distant continents of India, Australia, and America; and not in English-speaking communities only, but in every country of the civilised earth, had awakened grief and sympathy. In his own land it was as if a personal bereavement had befallen everyone.” Although he himself would have preferred to lie in the small graveyard under the ancient wall of Rochester Castle, or in the pretty Kentish churchyard of Cobham or Shorne, public sentiment favoured the suggestion that the mortal remains of Charles Dickens should be interred in Westminster Abbey; and there, in Poets’ Corner, they were laid to rest, quietly and unostentatiously. What Carlyle said of him, a few days later, will meet with universal acceptance:—
“The good, the gentle, high gifted, ever friendly, noble Dickens,—every inch of him an Honest Man.”
NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS
The Birthplace of Charles Dickens, No. 387, Commercial Road, Landport, Portsea
see [page 3]
Rochester High Street, showing the “moon-faced” clock