Boz and Oz: The Australia Charles Dickens Created

On June 9, 1870, Charles Dickens died at his beloved Gad’s Hill Place in Kent (above). He was fifty-eight.

He had first seen the house when he was nine years old when his father told him that if he worked hard enough, one day he would own it or one like it. As a boy, he would often walk from Chatham to Gad’s Hill Place, as he wanted to see it again and again as an image of his future. He later wrote, “I used to look at it as a wonderful Mansion (which God knows it is not) when I was a very odd little child with the first faint shadows of all my books in my head—I suppose.” Thirty-five years later, rich and famous, he bought it for £1790 and moved in during the summer of 1857. And it was here on the sofa in his dining room that he died of a stroke.

One of his biographers, Claire Tomalin, has suggested Dickens was actually at the home of his mistress, Ellen Ternan, in Peckham when he suffered the stroke, and she and her maids had him taken back to Gad’s Hill so the…