![dickens mug II](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/dickens-mug-II-1.png)
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…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins