Great Expectations by Robert Gottlieb

Author:Robert Gottlieb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

PART TWO

1870–1933

After Dickens’s death

AFTER DICKENS’S DEATH

WHEN DICKENS DIED at the age of fifty-eight, in June 1870, only four of his children were in England. Dora and Walter had died; Sydney was away at sea; Frank was in India; Alfred and Plorn were in Australia. The night he suffered his fatal stroke, as we have seen, he was alone at Gad’s Hill with Georgina, who immediately summoned Mamie and Katey from London, followed the next morning by Charley. These three—the oldest of the children—waited together for his final moments, soon joined by Henry and by Ellen Ternan. When the body was brought to London and transported to Westminster Abbey for burial—without any ceremony, as Dickens had insisted—the first of the three carriages that followed the hearse from the train station held the four children; in the second were Georgina, Bessie (Charley’s wife), and Laetitia, Dickens’s sister. The news of his death reached the other children irregularly in those days before instant communication.

From their earliest childhoods, he had dominated their lives, both practically and emotionally; even when they were at the other ends of the earth, his approval and disapproval weighed heavily on them. The most immediately affected were, of course, those on hand, since it was up to them—and Georgina, the co-executor (with John Forster) of his will and a leading beneficiary of it—to oversee carrying out its erratic and semi-scandalous provisions, including a bequest to Ellen, provocatively set forth first and therefore highly public, and a deliberately cold and grudging reference to Catherine. The children were left equal shares of the residual funds after all obligations were discharged and all property—copyrights, real estate, etc.—turned into ready money. (By the roughest estimate, each share amounted to something like $500,000 in today’s money.) Alas for the heirs, particularly Charley’s eight needy offspring, copyright law was not then what it is today, or the Dickens family would have been benefiting (hugely) from his writings until well into the twentieth century.

Catherine would live on for nine more years, on easier terms with her children—making a home for Sydney when he was in England on leave, staying often and happily with Charley and his family at Gad’s Hill, enjoying Henry’s constant attentions to her, closer to Katey and Mamie. She had never stopped loving Dickens, and although she was devastated by his death, she emerged from her grief into a happier situation than what she would refer to as her “12 years of widowhood.” And when he died she had the immediate satisfaction of a telegram of condolence from the Queen. She was still—after all, and despite all—“Mrs. Charles Dickens.”

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