The Story of Westminster Abbey

by Violet Brooke-Hunt

CHAPTER XXI

DICKENS, BROWNING, AND TENNYSON

It is impossible to wander round the Poets' Corner without a longing that the Abbey could claim as her own all the great singers and seers who have made the literature of our country. Chaucer and Spenser indeed we have, with other writers of the Elizabethan and Stuart periods; but many familiar names are missing altogether, or marked only by a bust or slab. John Philips, Matthew Prior, John Gay, and Thomas Campbell—these were the last poets buried in Westminster for many a long day. Shakespeare, Milton, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Burns, Keble, Wordsworth, Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Kingsley, Ruskin, have monuments, and so we have their names; but how many a one is there for whom we look in vain in this national temple of honour. Langland, Herrick, Herbert, Sidney, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Bunyan, Sir Thomas More, Defoe, and Swift are unknown English writers so far as the Abbey is concerned.

Towards the latter end of the nineteenth century, however, there came a change. Macaulay and Grote, historians, were both buried within its walls, and when Charles Dickens died in 1870, Dean Stanley at once suggested Westminster to his family, who declined the offer. Then there appeared an article in the Times declaring that the Abbey was the one place worthy to receive so distinguished a writer. Still his family hesitated, and at last only consented on the condition that the ceremony should be entirely private. So it came to pass that, one evening after dark, when the Abbey was closed, a grave was dug in the Poets' Corner close to Thackeray's bust, and in the early summer morning the funeral took place in solitary simplicity. But in a few hours the news had spread, and before the day was over thousands of persons had been to take a last look at the grave of the writer they loved, many of them the very poorest people, who yet brought with them a few flowers or some other humble token of remembrance.

There was no aspect of their life he had not understood and sympathised with, for his boyhood's days had been spent in their midst. His father, unable to pay his debts, had been cast into prison at Marshalsea, so the Dickens family had settled in the neighbourhood, little Charles supporting himself by pasting labels on to blacking-pots, and making the acquaintance of all those queer people and odd characters with whom his writings have taught us to be familiar. "David Copperfield" is to a great extent an autobiography of Charles Dickens himself, who started life "a prey to the cruel chances of the London streets, and who, for all the care that was taken of him, might easily have become a little robber or vagabond, but for the mercy of God," to use his own words. However, brighter days were in store for him, for the elder Dickens managed to get clear of his debts and became Parliamentary reporter to the Morning Herald; and Charles, after a few years at school, during which he had managed to learn as much as was possible, decided to take up newspaper work, though in many ways stage life was what attracted him most. "I was always an actor and a writer from a mere baby," he said.

Fortunately regular work was offered him on the staff of the Morning Chronicle, and before long he had made his name as the "best Parliamentary reporter in the Peers' Gallery." From henceforward he determined that writing should be his career, and under the name of Boz he launched a book of Sketches, "illustrating everyday life and everyday people," into the world. The sketches were just what they claimed to be, but it was a master-hand that had drawn them, and these everyday people were described with such a perfect touch that the general public, delighted and greatly entertained, at once set the young author on a pedestal of popularity.

The "Pickwick Papers," which followed shortly afterwards, increased his reputation and established his position. Here was a writer bubbling over with a fresh, keen sense of humour, and in every page of his book the humour came out, never strained or forced, always natural, kindly, and infectious. From "Pickwick" he turned to quite a different style, for in "Oliver Twist" he gave to the world a brilliant picture of the "dregs of life." The subject was sad enough, and Dickens, before all things a truthful writer, did not seek to conceal anything, and yet so wonderful was his sympathy with all humanity, even the most degraded, that he never failed to recognise goodness and nobleness however deep down they might be hidden away. He saw below the surface, and in all that he wrote he forced his readers to think the better of mankind. Dickens went on from one success to another; he thoroughly understood his public and his own line, and his great heart was so full, so responsive, so in tune with the tender emotions which belong to all men and women in common, that he never grew stale or dull. Master alike of pathos and of humour, he appealed direct to the hearts of his readers. "Nicholas Nickleby," "The Old Curiosity Shop," "Martin Chuzzlewit," "The Christmas Books," "Dombey & Son," "David Copperfield," "Bleak House," and "The Tale of Two Cities," in their turn won for him countless friends and admirers from every class of life in England and in America, for all his characters were living people, and though he never moralised or lectured, he always purified and uplifted.

"Do not harden your hearts," was his message to the world. "Sympathise, pity, help, understand, love. Laugh if you will, so long as you laugh not in scorn; but love always, love everywhere."

A gravestone in Westminster is his only monument there, but that was by his own desire. To a great crowd assembled in the Abbey on the Sunday after his funeral, Dean Stanley read aloud these words from his will, "sacred words," he said, "which come with a new meaning and a deeper force, because they come from the lips of a lost friend, because they are the most solemn utterance of lips now for ever closed in the grave":—

"'I direct that my name be inscribed in plain English letters on my tomb.... I conjure my friends on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever. I rest my claims to be remembered of my country upon my published works, and to be remembered of my friends upon their experience of me in addition thereto.... And I exhort my dear children humbly to try to guide themselves by the teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit, and to put no faith in any man's narrow construction of its letter here or there.'"