Dickens's funeral is a topic which would seem to be of slight interest to his fiction, and with respect to his life more generally, just a footnote. Most of his biographers have, accordingly, paid only perfunctory attention to his funeral. John Forster, one of the witnesses of the service, devotes only three sentences to it, and offers only one specific detail--the date (Life, bk. 12, ch. 2). He was more interested in the decision to bury Dickens in Westminster Abbey: a decision in which, as one of Dickens's executors, he was closely involved. Most subsequent biographers follow Forster in devoting a paragraph or two to the Westminster Abbey issue, while giving the funeral itself only a nod--if that. Edgar Johnson's 1160-page life of Dickens gives a scant two paragraphs to the funeral (1156-57), while Peter Ackroyd's 1100-page biography ignores it altogether. Who can blame these two most indefatigable of Dickens biographers if, after tracking him through his 58 years of hyperactivity, even they were too exhausted by the end to bother themselves about his funeral?
