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AT THE OUTSET OF HIS BIOGRAPHY OF CHARLES DicKEns, John Forster recorded that two of John and Elizabeth Dickens's children did not survive into adulthood. Running through the names of Dickens's siblings, he noted:
The eldest, Fanny (born 1810), was followed by Charles [...] by another son, named Alfred, who died in childhood; by Letitia (born 1816); by another daughter, Harriet, who died also in childhood; by Frederick (born 1820); by Alfred Lamert (born 1822); and by Augustus (born 1827)1
Forster's haziness about these two dead children has since been clarified: it has been shown that Alfred Allen Dickens was born at the family's home at Southsea on Portsea Island on 28 March 1814,2 and Harriet Ellen Dickens at Chatham in Kent on 15 September 1818.3 Their christenings, conventionally, and like those of all the other Dickens children, occurred at the most convenient location: the church of the parish in which the family was living at the time. For Alfred, this was St Mary's at Kingston in Portsea on 22 April 1814;4 for Harriet, it was St Mary's at Chatham on 3 September 1819.5
Dickens himself was two-and-a-half when his six-months-old brother Alfred died of 'water on the brain' at Southsea on 6 September 1814;6 he was buried four days later.7 When Harriet died, aged nearly nine, on 19 August 1827,8 possibly of smallpox,9 Dickens was fifteen. She was buried on 24 August 1827.10 At the time the family was living in Somers Town in London.11
Neither Alfred nor Harriet Dickens was buried in the family's home parish graveyard. Alfred's grave was in the churchyard of the small inland rural parish of Widley, some distance from the family's home in Southsea.12 Harriet was buried in the graveyard of St George Hanover Square, a west London parish some distance from the family's home parish of St Pancras in north London.13
In this paper we consider why John and Elizabeth Dickens chose to bury their children in these less obvious places, and we suggest that a common factor may have influenced their decisions.
The reason for Harriet's extra-parochial burial may well lie in the family's history on her father's side. John Dickens's parents - Harriet's grandparents - William and Elizabeth Dickens, had been butler and housekeeper to...