Père Lachaise without the visitors; Zadie Smith on Kensal Green Cemetery and the search for Eliza Touchet

With nothing to do and nowhere to go, I took my regulation walk through the streets like my fellow-Britons, but with the small difference that my eyes always remained above shop level: trained upward to the eaves and the cornices and the chimneys. Toward the nineteenth century, in other words, which is everywhere in North West London, once you start looking. I began haunting the local graveyards. I found William Ainsworth’s grave and Eliza Touchet’s grave, and could point on a map to the unmarked pauper’s grave of the Tichborne Claimant, as well as the corner of King’s Cross where Bogle breathed his last. It was 2020 outside but 1870 in my head.

Zadie Smith: On Killing Charles Dickens  (The New Yorker, July 2023) 

In a writer so tied imaginatively to the area of London she grew up in, and where she still lives, it is inevitable that Kensal Green Cemetery finds its way into Zadie Smith’s fiction. In ‘On Beauty’ the Belsey family attend Carlene Kipps’ funeral at the cemetery but daughter Zora is more interested in carrying out a literary tour of the graves of dead writers (though she is under the misapprehension that she will find Iris Murdoch here) than she is in the interment of a family friend. Kensal Green “is what La Cimetière du Père Lachaise would look like if nobody knew it was there or went to visit it,” Smith says. Her latest book, ‘The Fraud’ features the cemetery even more heavily; based around the Tichbourne Claimant case, of the four principal protagonists two are buried in Kensal Green, the books narrator Eliza Touchet, and her cousin William Harrison Ainsworth, the third, Andrew Bogle, is buried next door in St Marys Catholic Cemetery and the fourth, Arthur Orten, the notorious Tichbourne Claimant himself, is buried in an unmarked grave in Paddington Cemetery, a 15-minute walk away. Other characters are, or were, buried here including W.M. Thackeray and George Cruikshank. During the course of the novel Eliza, who was housekeeper to her cousin and lived with him at the now demolished Kensal Lodge on Harrow Road, takes a walk in the cemetery where she is eventually to be buried herself, and reflects on some of the memorials to past acquaintances.  

I’m spending the morning with Zadie Smith, and she’s taking me to a cemetery. It’s Kensal Green Cemetery, to be exact, the largest one in London. (The interred include Thackeray and a few minor royals which, Smith informs me, is the sign of a “respectable” graveyard.) “Ready to get our legs stung?” she asks, as we veer off the gravel path and plunge into thick undergrowth. I’m more concerned about Smith, who is dressed in denim dungaree shorts, a black tank top – “Walmart,” she says apologetically – and Palmaira sandals that look pretty time-worn. Will the literary establishment forgive me if I let one of its finest living novelists trip over an overgrown tombstone and sprain her ankle?

Zing Tseng in Vogue 23 August 2023

The Fraud is a fascinating book and I was intrigued by Eliza Touchet, who was very real but is now completely forgotten.  Only a biography of Dickens as extensive as Edgar Johnson’s finds space to mention her in passing when discussing Dicken’s friendship with Harrison Ainsworth; “Ainsworth, who was separated from his wife, had taken a pleasant dwelling named Kensal Lodge, on the Harrow Road near the village of Willesden. Here the widow of a cousin, Mrs. Eliza Touchet, a clever, sarcastic, fascinating talker, who was twelve years Ainsworth's senior, acted as his hostess…” Although fantastically successful at the time (his novel ‘Jack Shepherd’ outsold ‘Oliver Twist’) Harrison Ainsworth was a once famous author whose 39 novels are now all out of print and whose reputation is that of a talentless hack. If Ainsworth was a better writer, then Eliza Touchet could be as famous as say, Ellen Ternan. Smith rescues Eliza from anonymity, building her whole fictional edifice around her. Closet taphophile that she is, Smith first attempted to connect with Eliza by seeking out her grave in Kensal Green, where her modest memorial lies just a hundred yards or so away from Ainsworth. In an article written for the New Yorker in July this year Smith says she found Eliza’s grave but when she was interviewed for Vogue by Zing Tseng in August she takes Tseng to Kensal Green where the journalist says “we are valiantly attempting to find the graves of Eliza Touchet and William Harrison Ainsworth.” They don’t find them it seems; close to the end of the article, as an aside, Tsing says “we’ve given up on our cemetery quest and retired to a nearby bench to recover from the heat.” In the postscript to the novel itself Smith says;

Mrs Touchet – a woman always partly phantasmagoric – extends herself far beyond her earthly span here: in reality, she died before her cousin, on the 4th of February 1869… She too is buried in All Souls. Kensal Green, although her grave is entirely obscured by a huge, impassable, spiky thicket of bramble.

The plan for Square 156 showing the position of Eliza's grave

Enthused by the book I was keen to find Eliza Touchet’s grave. The General Cemetery Company’s records say she is buried in grave 10481. Henry Vivian Neal, once head guide at the cemetery and author of several books on it, told me that she was in Square 156 and provided me with a detailed map of the burials to help me locate it. Whilst he was out and about he even checked the plot for me “Went to the cemetery this pm – the Eliza Touchet plot is marked by a substantial dog rose – so, Zadie Smith was right - not much to see,” he told me. Would anyone mind if I pruned the dog rose? I asked. Not at all he told me. And so I lugged a weighty pair of heavy duty loppers to the cemetery, all the way from East London, determined to rescue Eliza, like the prince in Sleeping Beauty hacking his way through the forest of thorns to rescue the somnolent princess. Once I was in front of the dog rose it was immediately obvious that there was no headstone hidden amongst the tangle of thorns and whipcord branches. I was disappointed and rather surprised. Would Ainsworth, a hugely successful novelist, have let is cousin be buried without a memorial? Despite Eliza’s unflattering portrait in the book, I just could not believe that he would be such a miserable bastard. I checked and rechecked the site on the grave plan and eventually realised that Eliza’s grave should be to the right of the dog rose. But that plot carried a memorial for a married couple called Salmon.  On the plan Eliza is to the right of the Salmon’s, not the left – was the plan wrong. I puzzled over this for some time, walking around the grave, checking and rechecking the names on adjacent graves. Eventually the penny dropped; if I pulled away the grass at the side of the Salmon memorial, there was another grave beneath, a ledger stone. Someone has put the Salmon's kerbed headstone on top of Eliza’s grave, completely hiding it. 

Eliza's grave covered by the salmon's headstone and kerb, Eliza's ledger stone just visible at the bottom

The Salmon headstone was inscribed to Albert Charles Salmon ‘who passed away 27th Dec 1939 aged 48 years’ and ‘In loving memory’ of his wife Florence May Salmon ‘who passed away 28th July 1988, aged 92’. To allow Florence to rejoin the husband from whom she had been separated for almost 50 years cemetery staff would have had to lift the kerb and headstone from the grave so that they could dig a new shaft down to just above Albert’s coffin.  The memorial would have been winched out of the way; handily Eliza’s grave had a flat ledger stone and as she had been buried a hundred years earlier there were unlikely to be relatives to object to the cemetery workers putting the Salmon’s memorial on top of it. No doubt after Florence’s funeral the intention would have been to put the headstone and kerb back onto the Salmon’s grave. But for reasons unknown, perhaps they just forgot, it never happened and for the last 35 years the Salmon’s have been smothering Eliza while their own grave was being colonised by the dog rose. Poor Eliza, doubly forgotten in death, even her grave obscured. Cousin William’s much grander memorial, a little further down the path, is unlikely to find itself so easily eclipsed. 

Eliza takes a walk in the cemetery – her she is at the Soyer monument;

On a melancholy whim, she turned back and retraced her steps, passing through the gates of All Souls. The dead stay where they are, at least. More join them, but that is the only change. She took a seat on the first bench that presented itself, and, looking up, grimaced at the twenty-foot monument before her, unchanged, except for a growth of ivy around its preposterous foot-long dedication: TO HER. When she had lived beside this graveyard, and taken her morning constitutionals here, she had liked to pretend that the her in question was Frances. ….. they had known the lady, not well, but they had met her. Emma Soyer the painting prodigy….  Later she had married the head chef at the Reform club – he was the Soyer; before that she was plain Emma Jones – and so, like Mrs Touchet, had found herself in possession of a dubious French name… another one of Samuel Johnson’s dogs, paintbrush in paw… 

And here, her thoughts on the headstone for Dicken’s sister-in-law Mary Hogarth;

She stood up and looked about for a sadder story than her own to cheer her. She did not have to go very far. Only a few hundred yards to the left lay the tragic Hogarth girl. Dead without issue. Dead without making art or books or any kind of name for herself. Dead before womanhood had even come to claim her:

Mary Scott Hogarth
Young beautiful and good
God in His mercy numbered her among
His angels at the early age of seventeen 

Only Dickens, though Mrs Touchet sourly. Only he could imagine those first two adjectives as having any possible relation to the third. Sentimentalist, And never more so than on this subject of his dead sister-in-law. The heaving tears he’d shed at this young woman’s graveside! The animal moan as they lowered the coffin! An inconvenient, revealing grief, unnatural and unmanly. He’d cried more than his wife.

“Thackeray! That pig-nosed moralist!” Eliza rants. When she isn’t reminding us of his porcine snout, she calls him “the worm Thackeray.”    His offense? The sentence “It seems to us that Mr Cruikshank’s illustrations really created the tale, and that Mr Ainsworth, as it were, only put words to it.” Thackeray published ‘An Essay on the Genius of George Cruikshank’ in the Westminster Review in 1840. As well as the one sentence Eliza takes objection to, Thackeray spent 5 pages extolling Cruickshank at Ainsworth’s expense. 

Thackeray's monogram on his grave

The rift between George Cruikshank and Ainsworth was even deeper than that between him and Thackeray. Cruickshank came to genuinely believe that he was not only suggested the plots of Ainsworth’s most successful works but that the reason for the success in the first place was his own illustrations. In 1872 Cruikshank published a pamphlet entitled ‘The Artist and the Author’ in which he claimed to be the true author of not only work by Ainsworth but also by Dickens! Eliza also dislikes Cruickshank for being one of the men who regard her as one of Samuel Johnson’s dogs; “the antipathy was mutual,” she admits. She tells Ainsworth’s daughters that “he drinks too much, and for another, he has a jaundiced view of the world. You should pray for him.”  Cruikshank’s memorial in the cemetery declares that he was ‘for 30 years a total abstainer and ardent pioneer and champion by pencil, word and pen of TOTAL abstinence from INTOXICATING DRINKS.’ But to Eliza “Cruikshank was always a terrible drunk”.