If you had picked up a copy of The Times on Friday 10 June 1870 you would have been able to read the news of the death of Charles Dickens, one of the country’s favourite authors. The article was very low key by today’s standards, slotted in among the other pieces of ‘Latest Intelligence’ and well into the edition of the paper. Surrounded by column inches dedicated to details of cotton bales landed at New York, Reuters reports on the French legislature and a horse show taking place at Islington, the announcement seems out of place to modern eyes. The lack of images is another striking difference between The Times then and now. The report is, nonetheless, respectful and recognises that readers would have felt ‘sorrow’ as well as ‘surprise’ at Dickens’ sudden death. There was a second piece, a precis of the author’s life, further into the paper.

Even if your ancestors were not as famous as Dickens, The Times is a name-rich resource which can be used to good effect if your ancestor is mentioned in its pages. TheGenealogist has begun releasing searchable editions of this newspaper of record. The Times carried a number of birth, marriage and death announcements on the front page, but inclusion in its pages could be because a person had been the victim or a witness to a crime. Alternatively, police officers, lawyers and members of the court, taking part in a legal case, may be part of a report.

Having found an ancestor in the news, the next step would be to see what other records can be found to flesh out their story. In Dickens’ case, a glance at the parish record books on TheGenealogist allows us to find that he was given a burial at Westminster Abbey. The actual interment took place in the part of the abbey known as Poets’ Corner, a section of the south transept with a high number of poets, playwrights and writers buried or commemorated there. Dickens received this honour after public opinion, led by The Times, had made the argument for it to happen.

The Times informs us that the author had in mind a quiet inexpensive burial. In a piece published on 22 July 1870 entitled ‘Mr Charles Dickens’s Will’, his wishes are reproduced as follows: ‘I emphatically direct that I be buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner, that no public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial, that at the utmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be employed…’

Dickens even had instructions about what those who would attend his funeral should refrain from wearing, stipulating that they ‘…wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hatband, or other such revolting absurdity.’ He also had something to say about his tombstone in his will: ‘I direct that my name be inscribed in plain English letter on my tomb without the addition of Mr. or Esquire.’

To comply with the competing desires of the deceased and the public, his funeral was carried out in private at Westminster Abbey by the Dean on 14 June with just 12 mourners from the family present. Naturally the press were not made aware of the service and so by mid-morning reporters were trying to find out what time the burial might take place. The private funeral over the grave was left open, by agreement, until the 16th so that the public could file past and toss in flowers.

It was the worst of times
Charles Dickens had been born in 1812 to parents John and Elizabeth Dickens in Portsmouth. One of eight children, at the age of three he moved with his family from Portsmouth to London and then on to Chatham in Kent. His father, John Dickens, a clerk in the Royal Navy’s pay office, sent Charles to be educated at the William Giles School in the town. But Dickens senior had a habit of spending beyond his means, which saw him end up in debtor’s prison in 1824. This had a profound effect as it meant that the destitute Dickens family were without the means to pay for the 12-year-old’s education and he was forced to go and work at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse. Earning six shillings a week for his family, it was a ten-hour day pasting labels onto shoe polish in harsh, rat-infested conditions.

Dickens, we can find, has an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography easily searched in the Occupational records on TheGenealogist. This tells us not only about the author’s traumatic experience as a child when his father was sent to Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison, it also gives us other useful information about his life and works.

Working in the blacking warehouse clearly influenced many of Dickens’ later writings such as Great Expectations and David Copperfield as well as forming his interest in social reform. The blacking warehouse also provided him with the name of a character that he would use in the future. A boy with whom he worked alongside and who, on his first day in the job, had helped show him what to do was named Bob Fagin. Dickens would use that name in Oliver Twist, one of his most famous novels.

Debt to the baker
Difficult as it is today to comprehend that a person could be locked up for being in debt, in the 18th and 19th centuries 10,000 people a year were being imprisoned for debts. Many were trapped indefinitely in jail until they had paid their debts in full. There are a number of records that can be explored on TheGenealogist that record the unfortunate people that were in these circumstances. Children could be born to inmates, while some marriages were carried out by clergy who themselves were held in the prisons. The Fleet prison is a well-known example of this where marriages took place allowing inmates and also others to marry without the normal charges or the need for banns to be read. These records are available to search on TheGenealogist as part of the Nonconformist record collection.

TheGenealogist’s Court and Criminal records allow us to find Dickens’ father as well as the name of the man to whom he was in debt and who sent him to the Marshalsea. Searching the records for the Marshalsea (PRIS 11) we discover the record for 20 February 1824. John Dickens owed the baker James Karr £40 and 10 shillings (approximately £3,700 today). By April of that year John’s wife Elizabeth had also joined him in the Marshalsea, along with their four youngest children.

John Dickens and his family were eventually released after a few months when John’s mother died and the inheritance that came his way was able to clear his debts. Their son, Charles, was still working in the blacking factory at this time as his mother was reluctant to allow him to leave immediately, but with his father’s backing Charles managed to quit Warren’s and go back to school to continue his education.

The best of times
In May 1827, now aged 15 years old, Dickens returned to the world of employment – but now to a more respectable occupation. He began working as a junior clerk in the office of attorneys Ellis and Blackmore at Gray’s Inn. While employed in this lawyers’ office he began to learn shorthand in his spare time until he was proficient enough to be able to leave and become a freelance reporter. Soon he was able to branch out when he published his first story in a London periodical in 1833 and within a few years he had met and married Catherine Hogarth, the eldest daughter of the Evening Chronicle newspaper’s editor. The couple settled down to family life in London and finding them in the 1841 census we can see that by then they had four children.

In 1843 Dickens published the book A Christmas Carol and with other famous works that he had written, such as David Copperfield, Bleak House and Little Dorrit, his rising income meant that in 1856 he was in the position of being able to purchase Gad’s Hill Place in Higham, near Rochester, Kent. It was a house that he had often walked past as a child and had dreamt of living in. His father had told the young Charles that if he worked hard enough then maybe one day he could afford such a place, a childhood dream that came true in the author’s forties.

A picture of the porch of this house appears in a book by Dickens’ close friend John Forster who published the first volume of The Life of Charles Dickens in 1872. This is available to read in a digital copy on TheGenealogist.co.uk along with Dickens’ early work Sketches by Boz. In Book Eight of Forster’s books on the author’s life he describes the negotiations for the purchase of Gad’s Hill and how Dickens embarked on significant expenditure on his property, thinking of it primarily as an investment and not as a residence for himself. As time went by Dickens abandoned the idea of renting the property out to others, deciding to live in it himself. It was where he was when he died as we see by looking back at the Parish Transcript of Burials on TheGenealogist.

The last chapters
Luck had been with Dickens when on 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris, he was involved in a train crash, but was in the only carriage which had not been derailed. While waiting for rescuers to arrive he helped the wounded and dying fellow passengers. A search in the Newspapers and Magazines collection on TheGenealogist finds him mentioned in the full page report of the disaster in the Illustrated London News for 17 June of that year.

Saved from death in the accident, he was nonetheless approaching the last chapters of his own life story. Charles Dickens, having begun his public readings 15 years earlier, undertook his farewell event on 15 March 1870. It was advertised in The Times as we can read in TheGenealogist’s Newspapers & Magazine Collection and also mentioned in a supplement of the Illustrated London News. The ILN piece included a great drawing of the author giving his last performance at St James’s Hall where he had read from The Christmas Carol and the trial from The Pickwick Papers .

Dickens suffered a stroke on 8 June and he died the next day, exactly five years to the day of the Staplehurst rail crash. Her Majesty Queen Victoria, on being informed at Balmoral, commanded her staff to send her ‘deepest regrets’ to the family, an action that warranted a mention of it in The Times of 11 June.

Using the extensive resources provided by a Diamond subscription to TheGenealogist we have delved into the records for Charles Dickens that add to the telling of his story. The Times allowed us to discover the details of his will and the wishes for his funeral and burial. The Illustrated London News provided fantastic line drawings of the rail accident that he had been a survivor of and a picture of his last reading engagement. The Court and Criminal records found us the author’s father at the time of his incarceration as a debtor in Marshalsea Prison and we saw the name of the man to whom the debt had been owed. TheGenealogist can also be an invaluable companion in your own ancestor research. {