The dubious links between Dickens, Shakespeare and landmark West Midlands church
It is a grandiose, historic and haunting structure strangely out of character with the fumes and fast roars of traffic that passes through its shadow.
Commuters travelling the busy highway that bleeds from Shropshire to the nearby Staffordshire border are oblivious, as they soak in the verbal candyfloss of breakfast radio DJs, to the literary significance of St Bartholomew’s Church.
Let’s be bold and make that “alleged literary significance”.
Cleanse your senses of the automobile aromas and driver’s din and savour a mesmerising, 15th century building dubbed “the West Midlands’ Westminster Abbey” which dominates the 12 square mile parish of Tong.
Honeycombed with tombs that provide the last resting places for truly powerful families, St Bartholomew’s has links to this country’s two most powerful literary figures, Dickens and Shakespeare.
The former described the church as “a very aged, ghostly place”. Architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner wrote: “The interior can scarcely be taken in.”
It is a “treasure house of alabaster tombs, medieval carving, history and scandal”, states The National Churches Trust
It is also the setting for Britain’s longest-running “wind-up”, a practical joke that simply keeps giving.
Long before fake news came the fake grave – and St Bartholomew’s led the way in bogus burial sites.
Close to the south door can be found a plot – it’s been moved a number of times – that is the Loch Ness Monster of memorials, an RIP myth that still attracts tourists.
I spent a childhood believing Little Nell – Nell Trent, the persecuted waif in Charles Dickens’ classic The Old Curiosity Shop – lay beneath St Bart’s soil. The plaque’s ambiguous wording, “The reputed grave of Little Nell”, didn’t shake that resolve.
It was a belief that long outlived my hopes in Santa and the Tooth Fairy, but died before my dreams of seeing Wolves lift the FA Cup before qualifying for free slippers.
I now know the unassuming spot is a glorious folly, the setting for an elaborate practical joke that would’ve drawn a belly-laugh from Dickens himself.
Of course, it was a nonsense. Little Nell, who died fleeing from her cruel pursuers, is entirely fictitious.
