This episode of The Conversation’s In Depth Out Loud podcast, features the work of Leon Litvack at Queen’s University Belfast, a world authority on Charles Dickens, on what happened after the death of the author.
His new research has uncovered the never-before-explored areas of the great author’s sudden death on June 9 1870, and his subsequent burial.
Dickens’s death created an early predicament for his family. Where was he to be buried? Near his home (as he would have wished) or in that great public pantheon, Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey (which was clearly against his wishes)? But two ambitious men put their own interests ahead of the great writer and his family in an act of institutionally-sanctioned bodysnatching.
You can read the text version of this in depth article here. The audio version is read by Michael Parker and edited by Gemma Ware.
This story came out of a project at The Conversation called Insights. Sponsored by Research England, our Insights team generate in depth articles derived from interdisciplinary research. You can read their stories here, or subscribe to In Depth Out Loud to listen to more of their articles in the coming months.
The music in In Depth Out Loud is Night Caves, by Lee Rosevere.
Leon Litvack is Principal Editor of the Charles Dickens Letters Project (Dickensletters.com) and a Board member of the Charles Dickens Museum, London. This article, published to mark the 150th anniversary of Dickens's death in 2020, is based on new research carried out for 'Dickens's Burial in Westminster Abbey: The Untold Story', the lead chapter in Reading Dickens Differently, edited by Leon Litvack and Nathalie Vanfasse (Wiley, 2020), and 'Charles Dickens and Westminster Abbey: The Elusive Times Leader of 13 June 1870', in the Dickensian 116.1 (2020).
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
