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Grace Greenwood was the pen name for Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott. Her home, which has a historical marker, is located between 12th and 13th Streets - 3rd Avenue, New Brighton.
On Thursday evening I dined with Mr. and Mrs. Dickens and a small party, at the pleasant house of the novelist, in Tavistock Square. Mr. Dickens is all I looked to see, in person, manner, and conversation. He is rather slight, with a fine symmetrical head, spirited borne, and eyes beaming alike with genius and humor. Yet, for all the power and beauty of those eyes, their changes seemed to me to be from light to light. I saw them in no profound, pathetic depths, and there was around them no tragic shadowing. But I was foolish to look for these on such an occasion, where they were very properly left in the author's study, with pens, ink, and blotting paper, the last written pages of Bleak House.
Mrs. Dickens is a very charming person - in character and manner truly a gentlewoman; and such of the children I saw seemed worthy to hand down to coming years the beauty of the mother and the name of the father. Mr. Dickens looks in admirable health and spirits, and good for at least twenty more charming serials. That, should he furnish to the world yet more than that number of his inimitable romances, they would be as fresh and attractive as those which had gone before, I have no doubt, from the confirmed impression I have of the exhaustlessness of his genius, and of the infiniteness of variety in English character, of phases in English life.
Mr. Dickens style of living is elegant and tasteful, but in no respect ostentatious, or out of character with his profession of principles. I was glad to see that his servants wore no livery.
Next me, at table sat Walter Savage Lanclor - a glorious old man, full of fine poetic thought and generous enthusiasm for liberty. Opposite sat Charles Kemble, and his daughter Adelaide, Madame Sartoris. At the other end of the table were Herr Devrient, the great German actor, Barry Cornwall and his wife, a daughter of Mrs. Basil Montague.
During the evening, Mr. Dickens spoke to me with much interest and admiration of Mrs. Stowe and Mr. Hawthorne. Wherever I go my national pride is gratified by hearing eloquent tributes to these authors, and to the past Longfellow. The memorials of Margaret Fuller have also created a sensation here. Carlyle says, "Margaret Fuller was a great creature-, but you have no full biography of her yet. We want to know what time she got up in the morning, and what sort of shoes and stockings she wore".
The sights and excitements of London in the fashionable season are too much for me, in my state of semi-invalidism (P.S. asthsma). The decorous quiet of cathedrals, theatres and university soirees and the multitudinous roar of the city alike appeal to me. The mighty beating of this great heart of the civilized world seems to shake and unnerve me.
After attending service, which surely did not lessen our reverential feeling, we walked directly to the Poet's Corner and in a brief moment were standing on the very slab which covers the grave of Charles Dickens. It is a most unobtrusive stone, bearing only his name and the date of his birth and death. I had come that morning from Tavistock Square, where I had gazed wistfully at the house in which on my first visit to London I had seen Mr. Dickens-young, happy, brilliant -surrounded by his loving family and troops of loyal friends, and it all seemed so recent that the bright scene almost effaced from my memory the later picture of Charles Dickens in America, so sadly changed - looking so worn and overstrained, yet so strangely restless - so resolutely and preternaturally active - alive in every nerve and fibre of his body and brain, to receive and give out - to enjoy and to suffer.
So it seemed to me as I stood there, that he had gone before his prime, in the morning splendor of his fame, and I could not be reconciled to his lying there in the sombre twilight which better befits the soberness of age, and the pomp and exclusiveness of what is called noble birth. It is a grand thing, doubtless, to be buried in Westminster Abbey, but it is a dreary sort of isolation in death for a social, kindly man like Dickens. No friend can come to keep him company, no child may be laid by his side. He loved light and warmth and color, all cheerful sights and sounds. Change was necessary to his alert spirit, and he should have been laid in some pleasant open burial ground in or near the great city with the sounds and the movements of everyday life about him. That was the life he loved to paint. He never was at home with Lords and Ladies. He has gone into magnificent banishment here, where the perpetual tramp of strange feet, coming and going, is like the ebb and flow of a sea across the granite which shuts him down amid unkindred dust, where no faintest influence of the sun, no intimations of the changing of the seasons can come. But they say his coffin was heaped with flowers. Midsummer went down with him into the grave, and was laid away with him in fragrant darkness there and on each anniversary of his death there are placed on that cold gray slab the sweetest and brightest flowers of this festal month -crosses of white lilies and roses, "pansies for thought" "rosemary for remembrance" and always a peculiar offering of some unknown hand -a wreath of scarlet geraniums, looking in that shadowy corner like flowering flame, the very expression of passionate love and sorrow.
In strong contrast with the simplicity of the inscription over Dickens is the pompous and elaborate epitaph of Bulwer. The very marble groans under the latters and pedigree of the dead patrician".