Writing the Death of Dickens

Abstract

Through discussion of the author's final hours, final words, and final moments, this article enacts a metabiographical reading of the ways in which the death of Dickens has been written. It shows how major biographies from the 1870s to the present, including John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens (1872–4), reinforce a particular narrative, and how more radical representations such as Claire Tomalin's The Invisible Woman (1991) seek to disrupt it. These accounts are discussed alongside lesser-known life writing and representations, from obituaries and the earliest posthumous biographies to family reminiscences and biofiction. The few existing metabiographical approaches to Dickens's life primarily explore his childhood; by analysing the significance of the public readings and interrogating the argument that Dickens caused his own early demise, the article refines the meta-narrative of his death. In doing so, it argues for greater recognition of the role played by friends and family as the earliest biographers, and of later biographers as mediators of Dickens's cultural legacy. The article also explores the broader narrative purpose of the attribution of his death to overwork, and concludes with an examination of the ways in which it has been used as a springboard to evaluate the author's afterlife.