“Close under the bust of Thackeray lies Charles Dickens, not, it may be, his equal in humour, but more than his equal in his hold on the popular mind, as was shown in the intense and general enthusiasm shown at his grave. The funeral, according to Dickens’s urgent and express desire in his will, was strictly private. It took place at an early hour in the summer morning, the grave having been dug in secret the night before; and the vast solitary space of the Abbey was occupied only by the small band of mourners, and the Abbey clergy, who, without any music except the occasional peal of the organ, read the funeral service. For days the spot was visited by thousands; many were the flowers strewn upon it by unknown hands; many were the tears shed by the poorer visitors. He rests beside Sheridan, Garrick, and Henderson.”
The plain stone covering the tomb is inscribed
Born February 7th, 1812. Died June 9th, 1870.
Report of the Funeral, as published in the _Daily News_, June 15th, 1870:—“Charles Dickens lies, without one of his injunctions respecting his funeral having been violated, surrounded by poets and men of genius. Shakespeare’s marble effigy looked yesterday into his open grave; at his feet are Dr. Johnson and David Garrick; his head is by Addison and Handel; while Oliver Goldsmith, Rowe, Southey, Campbell, Thomson, Sheridan, Macaulay, and Thackeray, or their memorials, encircle him; and ‘Poets’ Corner,’ the most familiar spot in the whole Abbey, has thus received an illustrious addition to its peculiar glory. . . . Dickens’s obsequies were as simple as he desired. The news that a special train left Rochester at an early hour yesterday morning, and that it carried his remains, was soon telegraphed to London; but every arrangement had been completed beforehand, and there was no one in the Abbey; no one to follow the three simple mourning coaches and the hearse; no one to obtrude upon the mourners. The waiting-room at Charing Cross Station was set apart for the latter for the quarter of an hour they remained there; the Abbey doors were closed directly they reached it; and even the mourning coaches were not permitted to wait. A couple of street cabs and a single brougham took the funeral party away when the last solemn rites were over, so that passers-by were unaware that any ceremony was being conducted; and it was not until a good hour after that the south transept began to fill. There were no cloaks, no weepers, no bands, no scarfs, no feathers, none of the dismal frippery of the undertaker. We yesterday bade the reader turn to that portion of ‘Great Expectations,’ in which the funeral of Joe Gargery’s wife is described; he will there find full details of the miserable things omitted. In the same part of the same volume he will find reverent allusion to the time when ‘those noble passages are read which remind humanity how it brought nothing into the world and can take nothing out, and how it fleeth like a shadow, and never continueth long in one stay;’ and will think of the solemn scene in Westminster Abbey, with the Dean reading our solemn burial service, the organ chiming in, subdued and low, and the vast place empty, save for the little group of heart-stricken people by an open grave; a plain oak coffin, with a brass plate bearing the inscription:—