
"No writer of the age was more beloved than Dickens. Just as people had once clamored for the next installment of his serialized novels, they now sought new details about his life and death at 58. For months, the newspaper brimmed with stories about Dickens’s final hours, his funeral, his will, the auction of his art collection, even his estate sale, where a set of old flowerpots went for a guinea.
"On June 12, The Times followed its report of Dickens’s death with a melancholy editorial tribute to the man 'whose works are more or less associated with the events of our lives,' pointing out that 'people of middle age cannot but feel that they have "grown up," as it were, with Charles Dickens. The appearance of each successive story from his pen is linked with a thousand domestic recollections, for he was eminently the novelist of the household.'"
Tina Jordan, "When Dickens Died, America Mourned. Our Archives Tell the Story," The New York Times, June 7, 2020
(Image: The Empty Chair, painting by Sir Samuel Luke Fildes, 1870)
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