Some Observations on Dickens's Will and Codicil

This article will address three points related to Charles Dickens's last will and testament and its codicil, all of which have a connection to my ongoing research into All the Year Round. The first point concerns the identity of the two witnesses to these legal documents, the second relates to the whereabouts of the physical will drafted by Dickens and the third concerns the sole beneficiary of the codicil, Charles Dickens the younger.

Let's begin at the end. Both the will of 1869 and the codicil of 1870 were witnessed by the same two individuals, who each give as their address 26, Wellington Street, London – the office address of Dickens's weekly magazine All the Year Round. One of the signatories was G. Holsworth, whilst the other signed himself variously as H. or Henry Walker. My reason for taking an interest in these individuals was that their active involvement with Dickens and the conduct of the magazine towards the end of the 1860s made them the most likely candidates as the scribe or scribes who annotated the marked set of All the Year Round which I discovered in 2014. Having already eliminated on the basis of their handwriting the most obvious suspects: Dickens himself, Wilkie Collins, Henry Morley, Harry Wills and Charley Dickens – I was left casting around for other members of the office staff who would have had access to either the ledger or another working set of the magazine (both of which are now presumed lost) from which the data given in the marked "Parrott" set must have been extracted. Since Holsworth and Walker were both employed by Dickens and trusted by him as witnesses to the extremely sensitive information contained in his will, it seemed (and still seems) highly plausible that he may also have entrusted them with annotating a luxuriously bound 20-volume set of the magazine, naming all the contributors over a 10-year run, for his own, personal use.

I published my preliminary findings on Holsworth and Walker in an article for the Dickensian in 2016,¹ outlining the life of George Holsworth and suggesting two bearers of the very common name Henry Walker, either of whom could have been, on the basis of the evidence then available to me, the signatory to Dickens's will. As the identikit picture of Holsworth that I constructed has not altered significantly in the past three years, I would refer the reader to that Dickensian article for details and will merely summarize my findings here. George Vincent Holsworth was born in 1830 and baptized on 12 October in the St. Pancras area of London. The 1851 census shows him as living with his widowed mother, two brothers and a female domestic servant at 44 Morton Villas, St. Pancras and gives his profession as "clerk." In the same year his name was first associated with Charles Dickens (who consistently misspelt his surname), appearing in a letter to Wills of 14 May 1851: "I sent word through Mr. Holdsworth that you would be at Devonshire House after 7" (Letters 6: 390). The letter was sent from the office of Household Words and we can infer that Holsworth was by then working for Dickens at the magazine. Occasional references to him by Dickens in letters to Wills in the mid 1850s clearly establish Holsworth as a clerical assistant, answerable to both Dickens and Wills. Towards the end of the decade Dickens started to endow Holsworth with traits of character (or caricature), suggesting that he was the object of an in-joke shared by Dickens and Wills: "Holdsworth smiles on me with a limp and sickly benevolence," he wrote on 3 April 1858 (Letters 8: 541). Whatever Dickens's private feelings were about Holsworth, he was retained when Household Words ceased publication and All the Year Round took its place just a few doors away in the same street. Once again in correspondence with Wills in August 1861, this time discussing sales of the journal, Dickens alludes to Holsworth with heavy irony as –"Holdsworth the Brilliant" (Letters 9: 450). For George Holsworth himself, the position...