This post is contributed by our new blog co-editor, Michelle Crowther. Michelle is a Learning and Research Librarian at Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent and also a PhD candidate. She can be found on Twitter at @HumLib_cccu.

My research is in writing groups and connectedness. I am three years into a part-time PhD about a Canterbury-based mixed-gender writing group called the Persistent Scribbler’s Society. They are a lovely bunch – 1870s privileged women who write beautiful, funny (and occasionally preachy) stories and poems, which reflect their everyday lives – difficult servants, playing Sphairistike, going to the ball and meeting knights in the wood (okay, so that one isn’t an everyday occurrence). However, researching obscure lives does mean that you end up living one, so I have decided to improve my connectedness with Victorianists by joining the Dickens Society.

What I have noticed in my research into the lives of the Scribblers is how obscure writers in the Victorian period often seek validation by name-dropping. At least four of the Scribblers mention knowing Lewis Carroll. This got me thinking about obituaries and I began to wonder about who knew whom and who gets mentioned most. One of the Scribblers, Bertha Porter, a writer for the Dictionary of National Biography, was acquainted with Dickens as a child. She was 18 when he died, so the fact that the person who wrote her obituary felt the need to tell the world about this connection implies that it was very important to Bertha and her family, and clearly was a story that had been retold enough times for it to become part of the fabric of her life. Bertha (or probably more accurately her parents) also knew Thomas and Jane Carlyle, and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. As a biographer herself, Bertha had a reverence for the stories we tell about ourselves and the legacy we leave.

I have started searching obituaries in newspaper archives to find out who else knew Dickens. What constitutes “knowing” is also a question that I am trying to address. When I read in Wilkie Collins’s obituary that he “was perhaps the most intimate friend of Charles Dickens to whom he was deeply attached,” there are plenty of sources that can help me verify this. But when I read that the Cornish poet H.S. Stokes, who was four years older than Dickens and was at school in Chatham with him (a school that Dickens attended for only about a year), I fear the relationship is not that strong and is being used to “beef up” Stokes’s literary legacy and sense of worth.

When I am not researching the Scribblers, I volunteer for the Kent Maps Online. We have a heap of essays about Dickens and because the website seeks to make connections between people, places and generations, I do spend a lot of time chasing literary lives in newspapers and thinking about how each essay can link to another. As the pieces use a visual essay tool developed by JSTOR Labs, there are lots of images to source, so I have been known to snap a few literary sites around Kent with my husband and also to buy up old postcards.

The Old Buttermarket Canterbury

Finding new information about Dickens for the Kent Maps Online site can feel like chasing rainbows. I recently discovered that American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, and playwright William Wells Brown attended a reception at the Whittington Club, London, “an institution numbering nearly 2000 members” of whom Dickens was one. I spent some time trying to find out if the two men could have met on Kentish soil, but as Brown describes zipping through the county on his way to the continent, it is highly unlikely. The mention of Dickens in relation to the club in Brown’s memoir is clearly a device used by Brown to indicate his own importance (after all his book is subtitled Three Years in Europe: Or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met).

Michelle Crowther holding Sarah Grand’s cigarette case

In my day job as the Learning and Research Librarian for Humanities at Canterbury Christ Church University, I am very fortunate to work with our archives which include material belonging to M.E. Braddon and Sarah Grand. It’s fantastic to be able to work with this material, which includes original manuscripts and letters. I discovered a tiny manuscript written by George Augustus Sala a few weeks ago in Braddon’s possessions, and so was able to discover more about the man whose obituary describes Dickens and “Household Words” as the person “whom he looked upon as his master, and for some years lived in the clover of the £5 a week he made out of the paper.” Today I created an inventory for the Sarah Grand archive and discovered that Grand received a letter from her close friend Gladys Singers-Bigger in 1941 which begins with the words “I am writing so that this may reach you by the 7^th, it being the Heavenly Twins day and Dickens’[s] birthday when we used to have such exciting times at the Fellowship Dinner.” Now that’s the sort of fact that makes me tingle.