IV.

Final Years

The Mystery of Edwin Drood was unfinished when Dickens died. In 1864 his health was beginning to show signs of severe strain and he collapsed while giving a public reading of his work. He was advised by doctors that he must rest but, in defiance of this advice, he embarked on a gruelling schedule of readings, including a tour of America in 1867-1868, which made him £19,000, but probably hastened his death. He was also feeling the increasing strain of keeping his liaison with Ellen Ternan secret. He seems to have established her in a series of houses on the outskirts of London and to have fitted frequent trips to see her around his other many and pressing engagements. He finally exhausted himself to the point of death, and died of a stroke in 1870, apparently in the dining room of his house in Gad's Hill, although it has been suggested that he in fact died at Ellen Ternan's house and was taken back to Gad's Hill already dead. He was buried at Westminster Abbey.

Dickens was undoubtedly one of the most important literary figures of the 19th-century. He revived and transformed the serialized, illustrated novel, and captured the public imagination with his emotive and exciting fiction. As a novelist, he can perhaps be accused of sentimentality, sensationalism, and an inability to portray female characters as other than angels or monsters, but nevertheless, he was an unashamedly popular writer who gave a new plausibility to the profession of authorship. His espousal of campaigns for social reform has also been criticized as capricious and unsystematic, but through his fiction he did much to highlight the worst abuses of 19th-century society and to prick the public conscience.