UK - Cooling - Childrens' graves featured in Dickens Great Expectations novel

Visitors inspect the row of childrens' graves in the churchyard of St James, Cooling, Kent. Charles Dickens wrote about these graves in the opening of his famous novel Great Expectations (1860). Dickens lived nearby in Higham and referred to this row of children's tombstones now inevitably referred to as Pip's graves. Dickens pictures them as '....five little stone lozenges each about a foot and a half long which were arranged in a neat row ... and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine....' In fact the Cooling graves belong to the children of two families, aged between 1 month and about a year and a half, who died in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

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Copyright: Richard Baker
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Visitors inspect the row of childrens' graves in the churchyard of St James, Cooling, Kent. Charles Dickens wrote about these graves in the opening of his famous novel Great Expectations (1860). Dickens lived nearby in Higham and referred to this row of children's tombstones now inevitably referred to as Pip's graves. Dickens pictures them as '....five little stone lozenges each about a foot and a half long which were arranged in a neat row ... and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine....' In fact the Cooling graves belong to the children of two families, aged between 1 month and about a year and a half, who died in the late 18th and 19th centuries.