Dickens Wills

By the spring of 1869, Dickens knew that he couldn't go on doing business as usual. He had said a very emotional farewell to his youngest, and sometimes favorite, son Plorn (Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens), before he sailed to Australia at the beginning of the previous October. There were no more boys living at home, and Kate was married and living in London with her husband, Wilkie Collins's younger brother Charles. W. H. Wills had not recovered completely from the concussion he suffered in a hunting accident the preceding year. All the Year Round needed more editorial assistance; returning from America in May of 1868, Dickens felt so overwhelmed with business that he could "scarcely get through it" (Letters 12: 116). However, none of Dickens's "young men" could be counted on for the long term. Henry Morley did take on Wills's tasks for a few months, but he could not continue because he held a chair in English Literature at University College, London (Slater Charles Dickens 587). Dickens had himself broken down on the 22^nd of April near the end of his final provincial Reading tour, and had to cancel the remaining engagements. His health, like Wills's, was fragile, both his feet frequently swelled, and while he looked ahead with some confidence, he knew his energy was compromised.¹ He still, however, had heavy responsibilities for his dependents.

As for family, his parents were both dead. So was his mother-in-law, with whom and her husband George, Dickens had severed relations as a result of the marital separation. His own brothers were deceased. Alfred died at 38 in 1860, leaving a widow Helen and five children. Augustus, who had deserted his blind wife and run off to the US with another woman, dropped dead in Chicago in 1866 at the age of 39, leaving his companion a widow with three children (Slater Charles Dickens 555). Dickens supported the abandoned wife, found her London housing, invited her to Gad's Hill, and served as a Trustee for her marriage settlement (Hawksley 222). And Fred – Dickens's general factotum for a number of years, and then an alcoholic separated from his wife and barely keeping his civil service job – died at 48 in 1868. Dickens's beloved two-years older sister, Fanny, had succumbed to tuberculosis at 38, and a younger sister, Harriet, born in 1819, lived about nine years. His only surviving sister, Letitia, was the widow of Henry Austin, a sanitary engineer whom Dickens had liked and respected, but whose early death on 9 October 1861 left his wife with an annual income of only around £40. Dickens, in addition to doing many things to help the widow on his own, joined with very distinguished others (among them, Earls Carlisle, Essex, and Shaftesbury) in petitioning the government, successfully, to provide her with a Civil List pension. It was granted nearly three years later, for £60 per annum. Surely Dickens reflected on this meager life-income for his only sister, as well as on the striking mortality rate of his siblings: he was older, at 57, by ten years than his longest-surviving brother. Letitia was the only one of his generation still alive.

While Dickens's own grandmother had a small estate to leave to her two sons, William (1783–1810) and John (1785–1851), Dickens and his brothers and sisters had had to make their way in the world without legacies. Fanny, had she lived, would have done credit to the family; and Letitia, by her choice of husband, should have secured a happy and comfortable life, were it not for his untimely demise. Dickens, the eldest son, was at an early age contributing to the upkeep of the family, and as he became famous and eventually wealthy, he continued to support his parents, his siblings, sometimes their families, and his children out of his own earnings.

Coming from this background, Dickens constructed not only the public narrative of his writing life (the keynote Michael Slater sounds in his canonical biography) but also the suppressed narrative of his childhood poverty and humiliating work...