Commemoration

Who gets a voice in poetic commemoration of a public figure? While often associated with the elite tradition of canonical elegy, poetic commemoration can encompass a more varied selection of poetry and poets, both ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’. This was certainly true in Dickens’s case, with the author’s death in June 1870 inspiring a wide range of verse, both in the immediate aftermath and the decades that followed. Many of these poems were reprinted as part of the long-running ‘Poetical Tributes to Charles Dickens’ series, published in the Dickensian between January 1905 and December 1918, alongside new verses by members of the Dickens Fellowship. Many-voiced and eclectic in form, origin, and coverage, this corpus demonstrates how poetic commemoration works differently when criteria other than artistry and originality are privileged. Considering both the ways in which individual tributes commemorate Dickens and the cumulative work of the collection, I argue that ‘Poetical Tributes’ affectively stages Dickens’s loss, renewal, and endurance, broadly consolidating a sanctioned version of the author while allowing different facets of his life and work to be celebrated.