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ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT EVENTS in the life of charles Dickens was the tragic death, at the age of seventeen, of his sister-in-law Mary hogarth. its huge emotional impact and ramifications in his writings have been explored in depth by his biographers, but to my mind what has never been satisfactorily explained is the actual cause of her death. her doctors' diagnosis was heart disease, but does this really fit the facts?
The sequence of events is well known. on 7 May 1837, Dickens, catherine and Mary returned home about 1 a.m. after an evening at the theatre where they saw a performance of his farce Is She His Wife? Mary went to her room, but before undressing she cried out and collapsed. Dickens wrote: 'she was taken ill without an instant's warning [...] although every effort was made to save her, and no danger apprehended until nearly the very last, she sank under the attack and died - died in such a calm and gentle sleep that although i had held her in my arms for some time before, when she was certainly living (for she swallowed a little brandy from my hand) i continued to support her lifeless form, long after her soul had fled to heaven'.1 although we cannot be sure of her time of death (given as around 3 p.m. in Dickens's letters), it is clear that Mary's illness was dramatically sudden in onset, that it was followed by a period of relative stability which lasted many hours, and then a decline into unconsciousness and death.
in the days and weeks that followed Dickens wrote a number of letters referring to the tragedy, in three of which he mentioned what the doctors had told him. on 8 May he stated: 'the medical men are of opinion that her heart had been diseased for...