In four years Charles Dickesn had written three commercially successful long novels (The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop) under the pressure of monthly installments; theatrical dramatizations were made of his work throughout England; “his success was unprecedented and thrilling”—but exhausting.
Though he had no savings and lived from month to month, he’d already acquired a substantial household with a wife, young children, and family dependents as well as servants; he was an indefatigable giver of parties, an amateur actor, and compulsive walker—his “expeditions” were often as many as twenty miles out of town.
Here was a man overcommitting himself to projects and responsibilities out of an insatiable interior restlessness that would leave him burned out and exhausted in his fifty-ninth year. Like Honoré de Balzac and Jack London, fellow obsessives and best-selling writers, Charles Dickens was a man of outsized energy, appetite, and ambition who, as Claire Tomalin writes, “worked furiously fast to give himself free time.”
Dickens’s end comes with startling abruptness, on June 8, 1870, in his home in Gad’s Hill:
Though he had no savings and lived from month to month, he’d already acquired a substantial household with a wife, young children, and family dependents as well as servants; he was an indefatigable giver of parties, an amateur actor, and compulsive walker—his “expeditions” were often as many as twenty miles out of town.
Here was a man overcommitting himself to projects and responsibilities out of an insatiable interior restlessness that would leave him burned out and exhausted in his fifty-ninth year. Like Honoré de Balzac and Jack London, fellow obsessives and best-selling writers, Charles Dickens was a man of outsized energy, appetite, and ambition who, as Claire Tomalin writes, “worked furiously fast to give himself free time.”
Dickens’s end comes with startling abruptness, on June 8, 1870, in his home in Gad’s Hill:
He sat down and [Georginia Hogarth] asked him if he felt ill and he replied, “Yes, very ill; I have been very ill for the last hour.” On her saying that she would send for a doctor, he said no, he would go on with the dinner, and go afterwards to London. He made an effort to struggle against the fit that was coming on him…. In every version she gave their final exchange, her “Come and lie down,” and his reply, “Yes, on the ground.”“He left a trail like a meteor,” Tomlin says
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