Charles Dickens’ connection with Southwark wasn’t always a happy affair. When he was just twelve years old his father was sent to debtors’ prison on Borough High Street, plunging him and his family into poverty.
Young Dickens managed to stay out of jail and, to stay afloat, worked at a boot polish factory while renting an attic room in Lant Street, next to where Borough station now is.
By 1837, aged just 25, Dickens was already gaining huge popularity thanks to the serial publication of The Pickwick Papers. That year, he started publishing Oliver Twist in which Southwark featured heavily.
In that serial, which was later turned into a novel, he wrote: “Near to that part of the Thames on which the church at Rotherhithe abuts… there exists the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London, wholly unknown, even by name, to the great mass of its inhabitants.”
But according to one theory, Dickens’ Southwark connection stretched not only across his life, but into death.
According to official records, Dickens died following a stroke at his home in Higham, Kent, on June 9, 1870, aged 58. This was regarded as fact until the publication of The Invisible Woman (1990) by Claire Tomalin, a biography of the Victorian actress Ellen Ternan – Dickens’ secret mistress.
It was already well-known that Dickens had courted Ternan – 27 years his junior – under his wife’s nose. But in the biography, Tomalin raised the titillating possibility that Dickens actually died at a house he rented for Ternan in Linden Grove, Nunhead.
The theory goes that Dickens was a frequent visitor to the home and actually collapsed there in 1870 – not in Kent. His body was then allegedly moved to his home in Kent to avoid the scandal that would follow if the press found out the truth.
This was based on a letter Tomalin received from J. C. Leeson, telling her a story passed down by his great-grandfather, a Nonconformist minister in Nunhead. The story went that Charles Dickens did not collapse in Higham but at another house “in compromising circumstances”.
People would later rush to dismantle the idea. Biographer Lucinda Hawksley questioned whether Georgina Hogarth, Dickens’ housekeeper in Kent, would have had “the presence of mind” to fib about her master’s doings “at such short notice and suffering from shock and grief”.
Hawksley also made the point that it would have made more sense to take Dickens’ body to his central London offices, far closer than to his home. Professor David Parker, writing for the Dickens Quarterly, described elements of the theory as “plainly absurd”.
For all the jostling and arguing, we will probably never know, for certain, where Dickens drew his last breath.