Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 -- Homes and haunts -- England -- London; Literary landmarks -- England -- London
Report of the Funeral, as published in the _Daily News_, June 15th,
1870:—“Charles Dickens lies, without one of his injunctions respecting
his funeral having been violated, surrounded by poets and men of genius.
Shakespeare’s marble effigy looked yesterday into his open grave; at his
feet are Dr. Johnson and David Garrick; his head is by Addison and
Handel; while Oliver Goldsmith, Rowe, Southey, Campbell, Thomson,
Sheridan, Macaulay, and Thackeray, or their memorials, encircle him; and
‘Poets’ Corner,’ the most familiar spot in the whole Abbey, has thus
received an illustrious addition to its peculiar glory. . . . Dickens’s
obsequies were as simple as he desired. The news that a special train
left Rochester at an early hour yesterday morning, and that it carried
his remains, was soon telegraphed to London; but every arrangement had
been completed beforehand, and there was no one in the Abbey; no one to
follow the three simple mourning coaches and the hearse; no one to
obtrude upon the mourners. The waiting-room at Charing Cross Station was
set apart for the latter for the quarter of an hour they remained there;
the Abbey doors were closed directly they reached it; and even the
mourning coaches were not permitted to wait. A couple of street cabs and
a single brougham took the funeral party away when the last solemn rites
were over, so that passers-by were unaware that any ceremony was being
conducted; and it was not until a good hour after that the south transept
began to fill. There were no cloaks, no weepers, no bands, no scarfs, no
feathers, none of the dismal frippery of the undertaker. We yesterday
bade the reader turn to that portion of ‘Great Expectations,’ in which
the funeral of Joe Gargery’s wife is described; he will there find full
details of the miserable things omitted. In the same part of the same
volume he will find reverent allusion to the time when ‘those noble
passages are read which remind humanity how it brought nothing into the
world and can take nothing out, and how it fleeth like a shadow, and
never continueth long in one stay;’ and will think of the solemn scene in
Westminster Abbey, with the Dean reading our solemn burial service, the
organ chiming in, subdued and low, and the vast place empty, save for the
little group of heart-stricken people by an open grave; a plain oak
coffin, with a brass plate bearing the inscription:—
‘CHARLES DICKENS,
Born February 7th, 1812,
Died June 9th, 1870’;
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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