Life and Death of Dickens

Dickens’ last years were stressful ones.  He was extremely busy with his readings which were immensely popular.  He lived in the country house he had bought -Gads Hill, Kent… with Georgina Hogarth still presiding as housekeeper.  Catherine lived in London.  He had constant stress with his boys, trying to place them in good situations and hoping that they would not turn out like his father… improvident and thoughtless.  His daughters married parlty to get away from the house, because  of the strain of their fathers separation from their mother.

Georgina seems to have been rather callous about her sister, who had been cast off and unkindly treated by Dickens, and it seemed as if her affection and loyalty were to him rather than to her own flesh and blood.  She clearly enjoyed the position of keeping house for such a famous man, and being his friend and confidante.   He was one of the most popular novelists of his time and even now his works have never been out of print…

His readings were well attended and he threw himself into them, particularly in acting out such high drama scenes as the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes.  His health was getting worse.  He had gout which made it difficult for him to take the long walks that he had loved and which he felt were necessary “stress busters”-which helped him to keep fit and happy.

In 1869, he began to suffer more and more with his health, but kept on with his punishing schedule of tours with his readings, and in April, that year he suffered a stroke.  He had to cancel his tour, and his doctors were increasingly concerned about his health.  He started to write his final Novel, Edwin Drood, and later on decided (with medical approval) to do some more readings to make up to his fans and sponsors.  But he was getting more worn out. In June 1870 at the age of 58, he had another stroke, and never recovered, dying within a few days. 

Although he had wanted to be buried privately and quietly in Rochester, he was too famous a person for this.  He was given a funeral at Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Morse and Colin Dexter

My partner was a big fan of Morse and when we married, he got me watching the TV show and he loved all the books.  I never really got to like Morse as a character but I enjoyed the show.  My sympathies were with the unfortunate and hardworking Lewis, who carried the can for all of his boss’s bad temper.  My husband liked crosswords and beer, so he shared some of Dexter’s and Morse’s enthusiasms.

The middle aged, lonely agnostic minded Inspector was the brainchild of Colin Dexter.  Dexter was born in 1930 to a middle class family and went to a public school and then to Cambridge.  He went into teaching, and became a classics master…  His brother John was also a classics master at a school, but Colin found himself going gradually deaf in the 1960s.  This meant he had to give up teaching and he got a job in examination administration.   He worked at the University of Oxford Delegacy of Local Examinations (UODLE) for many years, till he retired in 1988.

During the early 1970s, out of boredom on a family holiday, he began to write a mystery story and created Morse and his sidekick Robbie Lewis.  In the early books, Lewis is Welsh and close to retirement age.  However when TV took up the books in the later 1980s, Dexter made Lewis younger and closer to the TV character portrayed by Kevin Whately, a Geordie family man.

Lewis is a deliberate contrast to Morse, who is a grumpy bad tempered bachelor who never has any great success with women and has no family.  Lewis is kindly, good tempered and a loving father and husband.  He puts up with his Inspector’s snarling and expecting him to drive and to pay for his beer, and the constant put downs that he makes, because he thinks of Lewis as being less intelligent.  So Morse is a very flawed hero, who is a borderline alcoholic, with some of his creator’s hobbies of loving Wagner, crosswords, and real ale. John Thaw brought Morse to life, and made his grumpiness more lovable… and the beauty of the Oxford setting and well-acted well plotted episodes made the show extremely popular.   Dexter like Hitchcock, had a brief appearance in every episode, usually a silent part.

Some years into the series, Dexter killed off Morse, in both the TV and book versions.  The actor John Thaw died and Later on Keven Whatley played Lewis, in a post Morse world.   He is back at Oxford, after a stint in the Virgin Islands.  He has become a DI and lost his beloved wife, and now works with a young Sergeant James Hathaway.  

Dexter continued to write Morse novels, and occasionally appeared in episodes of Lewis.  In recent years, he became a consultant on “Endeavour” a series set in Morse’s earlier career.  He always said that he didn’t want anyone but John Thaw to play the mature Morse.

Dexter died at the age of 86.. after a long and successful career as a writer and a long and happy marriage. 

Dickens Part V

After his separation from Catherine, Dickens’ life took a new turn.  He seems to have spent a lot of time with Ellen Ternan abroad.  He visited Paris frequently and it is possible that she had gone to live there, so that they could spend time together discreetly.  There have been rumours, that they had a child who died in infancy. 

Georgina Hogarth looked after his family home and children, as she had been doing for some time and the Hogarths felt that she was betraying her sister by staying with Charles, after the separation.  Charley, Dicken’s eldest son, seems to have taken his mother’s side most.  But the younger children were a trial to Dickens.  He found that most of his sons were not very clever or hard working – rather like his own father.  He seems to have been irritable and resentful of the need to help them get started in careers and very cross when he found that he had to bail them out financially or that they did badly in the jobs he had put them into.   He began to seem like a selfish and harsh father, complaining that he had so many children, when he had been the one who produced such a large family… It was as if he blamed Catherine for saddling him with them.

In 1865 Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash.  He was coming back from France with Ellen and her mother, when the train plunged off a bridge and hung there.  
Dickens’ carriage was still on the rail and he was saved, but he had almost been “caught” with his mistress and she and Mrs. Ternan were discreetly gotten away.  He must have been concerned about the possibility of scandal, because he had tried so hard to blame Catherine for their separation, even to the point of saying that she didn’t get on well with her own children.

In the last 12 years of his life, Dickens did less direct charity work, and wrote less.  
He now took to giving reading tours, travelling around reading shortened versions of the exciting scenes in his most popular novels.  It was lucrative and he enjoyed it because he had always wanted to act and this gave him a chance to do so.  He threw himself into the work, but it was hard work and he “gave his all” during his performances. It also meant that he had less time for writing his novels and he only wrote 2 more books.  

Dickens Part IV

Dickens and his wife separated in 1858.  Divorce at the time was very rare. 

In spite of the separation being due to his affair with Ellen Ternan, he tried to put the blame on his wife to the point where he alienated some of his friends.  They felt that he had been very selfish, quite unlike the “supporter of families and virtue” that he claimed to be. 

Catherine had been his wife for many years, and borne several children to him, yet Dickens just cast her off.  He claimed that they were separating because she was an inefficient housekeeper, not a great mother and that she and he had nothing  in common.  Most of the children remained with Dickens, all except their eldest son Charley, who lived with his mother. 

Dickens turned angrily on friends whom he regarded as “not supporting him” or sympathising too much with his wife. He fell out with Thackeray who was an old friend, because the other novelist had said at his club that “Dickens was having an affair with an actress”.  Rumours had gone around that Dickens had split up with his wife because of an affair with her sister Georgina, who remained with the family as housekeeper and aunt to the children.  She took her brother in law’s side and many people thought badly of her, or that she might have been the cause of the break up.

 She lived with the family for the rest of her life and showed more loyalty to Dickens than to her sister. Dickens was angrily self-justifying in his behaviour and he was very anxious, as the novelist of “family life” and a campaigner for various social reforms, to conceal his affair, which made him the “guilty party”.

Dickens Part III

Dickens became increasingly successful as a writer, and his work became more complex than the simpler stories like Pickwick.   He was a hard worker, and edited journals as well as writing.  He worked well within the Victorian style of publishing, of instalments of a story in a magazine.  His books were long, full of thrilling incident and cliff hangers.  When Elizabeth Gaskell became a professional writer, she was a lot less comfortable with the demands of writing for magazines, of dragging out the story, and of inserting thrills and cliff hangers- like a modern TV soap opera.  Mrs. Gaskell found this difficult, and she and Dickens clashed at times over how she wrote her novels.

He and Catherine produced a large family of children, which meant that he was under pressure to provide for them. His wife was not a very clever woman and as time went by, she and Dickens grew apart.   In 1842, he and Catherine had visited America, where Dickens found that the new republic was not to his taste -In spite of his usually radical views.   He condemned slavery, but was in many ways conservative, as he grew older, and more “pro-British”.  For example in the 1860s’ (unlike other progressive writers) he did not condemn the Governor of Jamaica, Eyre, in his harsh crackdown on Jamaicans during the Morant Bay Rebellion.

He also annoyed Americans by complaining that his works were being sold in pirated editions in America, thus robbing him of income.

His sister in law Georgina Hogarth, moved into the Dickens house after the American visit, to help Catherine with running the household and managing her large family. 

Dickens was always working very hard, involved in charities and urging reform of laws that bore heavily on the poor.  With the philanthropist millionairess, Angela Burdett Coutts, he set up a reformatory for “fallen women”, which was meant to be less harsh than the ones in existence and which was to help penitent girls who had been seduced or been prostitutes, to a new way of life.  As well as involvement in charities, Dickens was an ardent amateur actor.  He loved plays and had wanted to act as a boy.   He was putting on a performance of the play “The Frozen Deep” a play he had co-written with Willkie Collins, in 1857.  One of the actresses he hired was Ellen Ternan…She was only 18 and he was 45, but he fell deeply in love with her, and his wife found out about the relationship.