At 11.15 on Tuesday there will be a celebratory wreath-laying at the resting place of the most famous novelist our country can boast. And when better to boast than the 200th anniversary of his birth, in the year which will also see a Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympic Games? Our spirits will soar. Let there be no mourning garb in Westminster Abbey next Tuesday – but the fancy waistcoats that Boz loved.
In a way, 2012 will be the year of London, and of the novelist who set 15 of his 16 novels in the city whose laureate he is. What is the most Dickensian sentence he penned? The verbless, one-word sentence that opens Bleak House: “London.” (No young person should imitate Dickens’s grammar, grumbled Anthony Trollope. He was right of course – Dickens called himself “the Great Inimitable”.)
Dickens is dead, long live Dickens. But does he rest in peace? If there is one word that sums up Boz it is “restless”. A fanatic walker, he thought nothing of legging it – by night preferably (he was incurably insomniac) – from his home in Tavistock Square to his other home at Gad’s Hill, 26 miles, at four-and-a-half miles an hour. He could, Boz boasted (in The Uncommercial Traveller), walk for England.
There are other reasons Boz’s repose in Poets’ Corner might be less than peaceful. He would have preferred “Novelists’ Nook”. Charles Dickens had little time for poets. There is just one featured in his fiction: the obnoxious “child of nature”, Skimpole, in Bleak House. Other great novelists of the time (George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Meredith, Emily Brontë, Thomas Hardy) all have at least one volume of verse in their collected works. Not Dickens. Strictly prose – apart from a handful of ditties few would recognise.
There are further thorns which might prick Boz’s eternal slumber. He was, as has been said, a light sleeper. In the Macbeth class, practically. He always carried a compass with him, when away from home. He could not nod off unless his head was pointing due north. If necessary, beds were shifted. I shall check on Tuesday (thanks to the Dickens Museum people for my invitation). But, as I recall, I don’t think the stone is pointing quite the right way. Not, of course, that Dickens ever wanted to be
buried in Westminster Abbey. He designated Rochester Cathedral as where his remains should lie. The nation decreed otherwise. Rochester has, over the years, made applications for exhumation and relocation. All rejected. That body is Westminster’s and they’re not giving it up. Some “resurrection man”, like the grave-robber Jerry Cruncher in A Tale of Two Cities, should perhaps be recruited by the Chapter of Deans at Rochester. This would be the year to do it.
At least Dickens is better off than Hardy. He wanted to be buried in his local Wessex churchyard. The nation demanded Poets’ Corner. So friends took his heart out, buried it where he wanted and sent the body off to London. Scrag end for Poets’ Corner.
My guess is that Dickens might find the company of the author of Tess congenial in their long journey into eternity. With another companion lying beside him under the Abbey flagstones he might have a bone (ahem) to pick. It was Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-lytton, Bart, who persuaded Dickens to tamper, disastrously, with the ending of Great Expectations. As originally written, Pip and Estella meet, by accident, years later, in Piccadilly. After some mild pleasantries, they part again forever. It’s a perfect ending. But Lytton persuaded Dickens to concoct a happy-ever-after, and that wholly unconvincing last line: “I saw the shadow of no parting from her.”
The rose-tinted ending of Great Expectations, with its forecast of marital bliss, is ironic verging on grotesque. Dickens and Lytton were husbands in the Bluebeard class. Dickens evicted the mother of his 10 children from their house to take up with his young actress, Ellen Ternan. As Claire Tomalin implies, in her recent life, it’s unforgiveable. Lytton was worse, though. When his cast-off wife pestered him he followed the example of Mr Rochester and had her locked up in an asylum.
Graves feature centrally in the two novels that have been dramatised for TV in this bicentennial year. Great Expectations opens on Christmas Eve, with a solitary Pip regarding the tombstones of his parents and five siblings. Suddenly, from behind his father’s stone, there leaps a monstrous man who grabs him and threatens to eat his liver (“I’m your second father,” Magwitch will later say). Dickens’s last novel, Edwin Drood, is set in Rochester Cathedral, where, as the stonemason Durdles points out, the really interesting bodies lie rotting in quicklime, the substance in which hanged murderers are traditionally buried.
“Recalled to Life”: the titular phrase from A Tale of Two Cities rings solemnly over all the pages of that novel. Do the dead die? When Magwitch blunders off into the marshes, hands seem to reach out from the graves to grab his ankles. Will the dead live again? Did Dickens believe in resurrection? He was certainly obsessed with the idea and its symbolic potential. Characters are forever coming back from the dead in his fiction, like John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend.
Whether or not he will rise from the grave, Dickens the Novelist lives. Triumphantly. More books with his name on their title page will be sold in 2012 than ever before. So, observe a second or two’s silence at 11.15 on Tuesday and keep that resolution you made to read the ones you never quite got round to. John Sutherland’s ‘The Dickens Dictionary’ is published by Icon Books