In the Rose Garden at Gad's Hill: Charles Dickens with his two daughters

In the Rose Garden at Gad's Hill: Charles Dickens with his two daughters

Source: Memories of my Father, facing 22

Dickens had three daughters: Kate Macready Dickens ("Katey"), 1839-1929; Mary ("Mamie") Dickens, 1838-1896; and the ill-fated Dora Annie Dickens, 1850-1851, who died a fragile infant of just eight months of age on 14 April 1851, named after the heroine of David Copperfield, running in monthly serialisation at her birth. The two girls with very similar faces (and showing a strong resemblance to Dickens himself) are the first two in the list. Katey married the sickly painter Charles Allston Collins in 1858, and, after her father's death as a widow married Carlo Perugini. Mamie, named after Dickens's much-loved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, did not marry, but chose to stay with her father as housekeeper and companion. in 1897, she published My Father as I Recall Him (Source of information: Davis, 103-104). [PVA]

Dedicated to Daphne Nisbett.

Philip V. Allingham explains how he acquired the volume from which he scanned this image: "Sir Henry F. Dickens's Memories of My Father . . . [was] given to me by my cousin, Daphne Nisbett of 1 Rock Road, Borough Green, Kent, prior to her death in 1998. She acquired both while she was working in London at the BBC (she retired from the music criticism department in 1949!). Her father, who built Brough Green House at the turn of the century, had in his youth been a copy-boy in a London publishing house, and in that capacity had to clean out the wastebaskets (which explains how an envelope addressed by Dickens came into his possession)."

References

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.

Dickens, Sir Henry F. Memories of my Father. London: Victor Gollancz, 1928.

Last Modified 2 May 2004