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In the weeks following Dickens's death in June 1870, his relatives, friends, and the members of his public turned their eyes to his last will and testament. What they saw took many by surprise. In private letters and diaries, and in print, they recorded their uneasy feelings about Dickens's bequests, particularly three that acknowledged women in his life - his legacies to "Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan," to his "dear sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth," and to his wife, who went unnamed (Dickens, "Will" 857). ' As Annie Fields, Dickens's American friend, put it, his will left some "shocked at [its] publication"; its legacies and expressions seemed "to give colour to ... cruel accusations"2 against these survivors. His very first, unexplained bequest of £1,000 to Ellen was "an act of defiance," as Claire Tomalin writes, "the very smallness of the sum" designed to "shield her from scandal" but generating it nonetheless (Tomalin 1 88).3 Dickens's high praise of Georgina- "ever useful, self-denying," "the best and truest friend man ever had" (Dickens, "Will" 857, 859) -was provocative as well. It led diplomat John Bigelow, among others, to conclude that Dickens and his sister-in-law "were too intimate" (qtd Adrian 147). Meanwhile, Dickens's cutting reference to his wife Catherine, a beneficiary whom he declined to mention by name, "indelicately dragfged]" his marital quarrel "into the light," one reviewer protested, and "betrayfed] the same ungenerous desire to clear himself with the public" as had his statements of 1858 about the separation ("Review" 284). 4 Mrs. Dickens was "a quiet inoffensive person," Richard Bentley noted in response to the will, but her husband "could not have treated [her] worse" had she been "infamous" (qtd Slater, Charles Dickens 619). To be fair, Dickens could have treated Catherine worse, since he left her the interest on a trust of £8,000. Yet he used his will to wound her: by recording "the fact that [his] wife, since [their] separation by consent, ha[d] been in the receipt from [him] of an annual income of £600, while all the great charges of a numerous and expensive family ha[d] devolved wholly upon [him] self" (Dickens, "Will" 859).
By means of such "facts," Dickens constructs a family history in his will. That history is rendered suspect by its bitter criticism...