Will Something Turn up? Legacy and the Dickens Family

The very first published sketch by Dickens, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk," has the thread of a will running through it: could Augustus Minns, a bachelor, be persuaded to leave his property to the son of his cousin, Octavius Bagshaw, to whom he had been persuaded to become godfather by proxy? After an hilarious, but disastrous, dinner party Minns struggles to escape the entreaties of his cousin's family: "'Do stop, godpa' – I like you – Ma' says I am to coax you to leave me all your money!' Had Minns been stung by an electric eel, he could not have made a more hysteric spring through the door-way; nor did he relax his speed until" he arrived at the coach stop, only to see it drive off, full inside and out. "It was half-past three in the morning ere Mr. Augustus Minns" arrived home. "He had footed it every step of the way from Poplar Walk: – he had not a dry thread about him, and his boots were like pump-suckers." The next morning he made his will, ensuring the name of his godson, or the names of any of his cousin's family, did not appear therein.¹

As more sketches flowed from the pen of Boz over the next few years so did they show how the subject of wills appeared to have become lodged at the back of his brain. In "The Boarding House – No. 2" (August 1834), we learn how the "vulgar, ignorant, and selfish" Mrs. Bloss had inherited all her money when her "deceased better half," who had amassed a fortune as an eminent cork cutter, had cut his nephew out of his will in retaliation for requesting a modest loan, and left his entire estate to his wife. In "The Parish (The Beadle – The Parish Engine – The Schoolmaster)" (February 1835), we are told how "Our schoolmaster" is one of those "on whom misfortune seems to have set her mark […] A rich old relation who had brought him up, and openly announced his intention of providing for him, left him 10,000l. in his will, and revoked the bequest in a codicil." In "A Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle, Chapter the First" (January 1835), the timid bachelor of 50 with "uxorious intentions" imagines life with "a beautiful young lady, with a very little independence or will of her own, and a very large independence under a will of her father's." In "The Tuggs's at Ramsgate" (March 1836) Mr. Joseph Tuggs, a grocer, has his life transformed when a "long pending lawsuit respecting the validity of a will, had been unexpectedly decided; and Mr. Joseph Tuggs was the possessor of twenty thousand pounds." "Doctors' Commons," published on 11 October 1836, focuses, in part, on the work of the Prerogative Office, where wills were stored and made available for consultation by the public.

From these very first publications in the 1830s through to his last, The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 1870, wills featured, to a greater or lesser degree, in nearly all the writings of Dickens. A will was scavenged for in the dust-heaps of Our Mutual Friend, inheritance released William Dorrit from the Marshalsea Prison in Little Dorrit, and was fought over in the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce case in Bleak House. There's scarcely a Dickens novel that does not feature a will and the inheritance of property; and in his periodical Household Words he joint-authored a scathing piece about real-life access to, and the preservation of, wills.²

So why did Dickens, even as a young man in his early twenties, have a "thing" about wills? It might be said the British population as a whole had a fascination with wills throughout the nineteenth century. But there seems, to me, something quite personal about Dickens's attraction to the subject, and for an understanding of this we might look back at influences in his life up to the 1830s.

The Wills Office

The first impact of wills on Dickens as a child probably came in 1822 when his...