Charles Dickens may never have lived in Wimbledon but he sent four of his seven sons to school here and a link remains to the present day.

Britain’s greatest novelist, whose birth bicentenary falls next month on 7th February, selected Wimbledon School for his sons Walter, Alfred, Edward and Henry.

When the first two arrived in the 1850s, the school was based at what was to become Eagle House in the Village but in 1860 it moved to specially built premises in Edge Hill which was where the younger two sons started.

It had a reputation for training future military entrants to Sandhurst and Walter went on to a brief but successful army career in India before dying suddenly aged just 22.

Neither Alfred nor Edward proved able to follow him into the military and both later sought new lives in Australia, but Henry was well regarded by the headmaster who recommended him for Cambridge. He went on to a long and highly distinguished career and is now buried beside the Common at Putney Vale Cemetery, along with his wife and one of his own sons.

Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, the writer’s last surviving child, was born exactly 163 years ago this week on 16th January 1849. Charles and Catherine Dickens had ten children in all and Henry Fielding – named after one of the writer’s own favourite novelists - was their sixth son (Edward was the seventh). He lived to the age of 84 and died on 21st December 1933, two weeks after being hit by a motorcycle on Chelsea Embankment.

He was brought up at Dickens’s home in Gad’s Hill, Kent, and was also educated at other schools in Rochester and Boulogne. At Wimbledon he did well and achieved the position of Head Censor.

However, in view of his brothers’ records on admission to the army, his father planned to enter him for the Indian Civil Service instead until the headmaster recommended him for Cambridge University. He duly went on to Trinity Hall. There he thrilled the great novelist by winning the college’s best scholarship for mathematics. But sadly he was still at the university when Charles Dickens died in 1870 and never saw his father alive again.

After graduating he switched to law, was called to the bar in 1873, appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1892, became a Bencher of the Inner Temple in 1899, and was a Recorder in Kent for some years before his appointment as Common Serjeant of the City of London in 1917. In that post until his retirement in 1932, he presided over many criminal cases at the Old Bailey. He was knighted in 1922.

Although he didn’t inherit his father’s genius as a writer, he was a great impressionist and started at a very young age, performing the role of Tom Thumb alongside his father and sisters at a school production when just four.

In later life at family gatherings he would imitate his father’s famous reading performances, wearing a geranium in his buttonhole and leaning on the same velvet-covered reading stand the novelist had used on his tours.

He celebrated his 80th birthday by reading the whole of “A Christmas Carol” perfectly. He also performed for charity, raising funds for the Red Cross and was Life President of the Dickens Fellowship.

Sir Henry Fielding Dickens and his French wife Marie were married for 57 years and she joined him at Putney Vale when she died in 1940. They had seven children and one of their sons, Philip Charles Dickens, is also buried there.

The Wimbledon Society is working with the Wimbledon Guardian to ensure that you, the readers, can share the fascinating discoveries that continue to emerge about our local heritage.

For more information, visit wimbledonsociety.org.uk and www.wimbledonmuseum.org.uk.

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