No ‘Christmas Carol’ for Dickens’ son buried in Kolkata

Shubhadeep Choudhury

Tribune News Service

Kolkata, December 25

The nondescript tombstone in Kolkata’s South Park Street Cemetery will certainly go unnoticed unless someone has information in advance about its existence. Those with prior information may be able to locate the tombstone but reading the epitaph will still pose a challenge.

One has to bend down and have a real close look to be able to read the name, “Lieut. Walter Landor Dickens”. “Second son of Charles Dickens…,” the inscription goes on. The word “Charles” has got nearly obliterated from the slab but “second son” and “Dickens” can be read relatively easily.

Charles Dickens, the 19th century English writer who has produced masterpieces such as ‘Great Expectations’ and ‘Oliver Twist’, is religiously remembered in English-speaking countries during Christmas. ‘The Man Who Invented Christmas’, written by Florida University Creative Writing Department Director Les Standiford, is one of the many books that deal with the subject of how ‘A Christmas Carol’, written by Dickens, has shaped the way Christmas is celebrated.

The writer’s great-great grandson Gerald Charles Dickens, an actor, has recently produced a CD of ‘A Christmas Carol’ to tap the popularity of the book around Christmas time. Gerald also gives performances. His overseas tours inevitably wind up after a final performance on the day of Christmas.

But no such luck for poor Walter Landor Dickens, whose desolate tombstone remains desolate even on a Christmas day. No caring hand places flower on it. People who man the graveyard say that graves at the South Park Street Cemetery are so old that a visit by any relative to pay respect to a departed soul is a rare phenomenon.

Walter became a cadet in the East India Company and had come to India in 1857 at 16 years of age. He was only 22 when he died of an arterial ailment in the Officer’s Hospital in Kolkata on the New Year’s Eve. His father had seen him off at Southampton from where Walter had sailed for India. The father and the son were never to see each other again. The young officer was originally buried in the Bhowanipore Military Cemetery at Calcutta. In April 1987, Jadavpur University students collected funds and moved the tombstone to the South Park Street Cemetery. The original grave is still in Bhowanipore Cemetery but it can no longer be located.