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He was only fifty-eight when he died. His horse had been shot, as he had wanted; his body lay in a casket in his home at Gad's Hill, festooned with scarlet geraniums. Tributes poured in from all over his native England and from around the world. Statesmen, commoners, and fellow writers all grieved his passing. As quoted in Peter Ackroyd's monumental study, Dickens, the news of Charles Dickens death on June 9, 1870, reverberated across the Atlantic, eliciting the poet Longfellow to say that he had never known "an author's death to cause such general mourning." England's Thomas Carlyle wrote: "It is an event world-wide, a unique of talents suddenly extinct." And the day after his death, the newspaper Dickens once edited, the London Daily News, reported that Dickens had been "emphatically the novelist of his age. In his pictures of contemporary life posterity will read, more clearly than in contemporary records, the character of nineteenth century life."
It was a judgment that has been proven more than perceptive.
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