Mary Dickens

Mary Angela Dickens (31 October 1862 – 7 February 1948)       In the Dickens family she was known as 'Mekitty', and as a child she called her grandfather, Charles, 'Venerables'. Mary and Charles were very close, and when she scalded her leg and foot with boiling water while staying at his country home he sat beside her bed and held her hand, reassuring her that he would make her well. She earnt a living by writing for much of her life. She remembered being taken to see her grandfather give one of his famous performances and wrote about it… 'The "Venerables" on the platform was quite a stranger to me, and his proceedings were so eccentric as to be most alarming. He took no notice of me, or of my mother; and yet it seemed to me that he never took his eyes off me. And to Tiny Tim himself I owe my one intensely painful and distressing memory of my grandfather, for the climax of my discomfort was reached at last when it dawned upon my poor little faculties that "Venerables" was "crying." I never read the little scene in the carol where Bob Cratchit breaks down – the moment, I suppose, of this tragedy – without remembering the horror and dismay which seized upon me then. I knew nothing whatever about acting; any ideas I had about "pretending" were associated with the Christmas pantomime, and did not assimilate at all with the solitary appearance of my grandfather on a dull-looking platform. To me his distress was absolutely real. I had never before seen a grown-up person cry. I had not known that they ever did or ever could do so. And that "Venerables", of all people in the world, should cry with all those people looking on, and that no one should dare – as it seemed to me – to express sympathy, or offer consolation, was nothing short of an upheaval in my universe.' Grave location is close to the cemetery gates on St John’s Rd