He was the best of brothers, he was the worst of brothers.
But to Mehaffey and Kasper the rift between the Dickens brothers is water under the bridge, which is why they are aiding an effort to put a headstone on the unmarked grave of Augustus Dickens, his common-law wife, Bertha Phillips, and three of their children who died as infants. The five share a plot on the western rim of Graceland Cemetery, in what Chicago cemetery historian Helen Sclair calls “the low-rent district” of a graveyard best known for high-class residents like Daniel Burnham, Bertha Palmer, Marshall Field, and George Pullman.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Before their estrangement the Dickens boys were close. Charles was 15 when his youngest sibling was born in 1827. According to Sidney and Carolyn Moss’s Charles Dickens and His Chicago Relatives, Charles nicknamed Augustus “Mose,” which mutated to “Boz” because of the way Charles pronounced it through a stuffy nose. Later Charles took the pet name back, using it as his pen name for the 1836 work that launched his literary career, Sketches by Boz.
Perhaps Charles’s repudiation of Augustus was fueled by guilt over his own failings as a husband; perhaps he envied the relative anonymity that allowed his brother to run away and start anew. In any case, the brothers hadn’t communicated for ten years when Augustus died of tuberculosis in 1866, leaving Bertha alone to care for their three surviving children: nine-year-old Bertram, six-year-old Adrian Charles, and four-year-old Amy Bertha. No sooner had Augustus joined the triplets in the family plot in Graceland than American newspapers began taunting Charles with tales of the poverty endured by his fatherless niece and nephews in Chicago. In fact, according to the Mosses, Augustus seems to have left his family solvent, but the press was seemingly unable to resist putting a Dickensian spin on the situation.
Five generations after the rift between the brothers, Mehaffey is amused by his forebears’ enduring grudge against his great-great-great-great-great-uncle. “I don’t mind being related to the black sheep,” he says. And he thinks it’s fitting that Augustus should be identified in relation to Charles on the monument. “All his life Augustus never escaped his brother’s shadow,” he says. “And he can’t escape it even in death.”
