The Death of Mary Hogarth - May 7th 1837.

London walks are a great way to discover little known nuggets of information about people and places from London’s past. Unlike coach tours, where you just whiz past a location and the guide has just enough time to tell you what it is before you’re off to the next site, a London walk allows time to stop by the location and take in every feature of it. It also gives your guide enough time to tell you about that location. About the people who lived there, what they did, who they were and, of course, the gossipy snippets of information that really bring that location to life.

Our Charles Dickens London walks are all about this type of secret history and many of our tours feature the write who, more than any other, is indelibly linked with the streets and places of the metropolis.

Like many writers Charles Dickens was much influenced by his own personal experiences. On our Dickens London walks we look at various aspects of Dickens private life that either influenced or else found their way into his fiction.

One of those experiences that profoundly affected Dickens for the rest of his life was the death of his beloved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, on 7th May  1837. We cover the tragic events of that day on several of our Dickens and Literary London walks, most notably, the Dickens in Doughty Street and the Kensal Green Cemetery walking tour.

By 1837 Charles Dickens life had changed dramatically. Pickwick Papers had set him on the road to literary fame and fortune and Oliver Twist was beginning to appear in installments cementing his reputation.

To reflect this change in his fortunes he had moved to handsome house in Doughty Street and his wife had borne him the first of their children. His pretty 17- year-old sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, had moved into the house with them and she and Charles Dickens developed an intense platonic relationship. He found her, witty, charming and more than a match for his burning intellect.

Everything was looking up for “Boz,” the pseudonym under which his works were appearing. As his primary biographer and great friend, John Forster, wrote in his Life of Dickens, Mary “by sweetness of nature even more than by graces of person had made herself the ideal of his life…”

But then on 7th May, 1837 this idyllic life was shattered in a way that would affect him personally and professionally for the rest of his days.

His sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, collapsed in the early hours of the morning – doctors later diagnosed heart failure – and died that afternoon in Dickens’s arms. As he cradled his dead sister-in-law,  Dickens removed a ring from her finger and wore it for the rest of his life.

Dickens grief at the loss of the young girl was extreme. ‘Thank God she died in my arms,’ he said shortly after her death, ‘and the very last words she whispered were of me.’

Such was his sense of loss that his own feelings became all that mattered and he never seemed to strike him that others might have felt the tragedy just as keenly.

Every night for months after her death she appeared to him in his dreams, ‘sometimes as a spirit, sometimes as a living creature, never with any of the bitterness of my real sorrow, but always with a kind of quiet happiness’.

Dickens paid for her grave in Kensal Green Cemetery - which is featured on one of our London walks that takes in the graves of many of the Victorian authors and artists who are also buried there. It was he who composed her epitaph which, albeit now somewhat weathered, can still be read on her tombstone: ‘Young, beautiful, and good. God in His mercy numbered her with his angels at the early age of seventeen.’

Dickens also reserved a spot for himself to be buried with her in the same grave. It was with great reluctance that,when Mary and Catherine’s brother, George, died in 1841, that Dickens gave up on his desire to share his grave with her. ‘It is a great trial for me to give up Mary’s grave,’ he wrote to Forster, ‘the desire to be buried next to her is as strong upon me now, as it was five years ago… and I know… that it will never diminish… I cannot bear the thought of being excluded from her dust…’

Professionally, the immediate effect of her death on him was that he was unable to write the next installments of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. Instead Dickens and Catherine went to the rural surrounds of Hampstead to recover. The little white weather-board cottage where they sought refuge still exists on the wilder reaches of Hampstead Heath and is featured on several of our London walks around Hampstead.

But, in the years ahead, Mary Hogarth would be reincarnated time and again in his novels, becoming the all too perfect heroines such as Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist, Florence Dombey in Dombey and Son, Agnes Wickfield in David Copperfield, Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities and, most famously Little Nell the unbelievably saccharine heroine of The Old Curiosity Shop.

As an article in The Dickensian Magazine put it in 1937, on the centenary of her death, ‘[Mary Hogarth] is part of the world’s literature’.

Personally, her death may even have stunted his emotional growth leaving him with an idealized image of womanhood, which must have affected his relationship with Catherine.

As time and years of child bearing took their toll on Catherine Dickens, she was more and more unable to live up to his ideal. For the rest of his life, Dickens would search for a new Mary Hogarth, and it could be said that the seeds of the later collapse of his marriage were sown in the room in Doughty Street where she died.

The house where her death occurred is now the Dickens House Museum in Doughty street and a visit here is a must for all fans of Dickens. We cover it on several of our Charles Dickens London walks, but even if you don’t choose to join our tour I would urge you to make the pilgrimage to the house where Dickens was living when his reputation as a great author was first sealed.