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Timaru Herald, Volume CXLII, Issue 20587, 28 November 1936, Page 12 (Supplement)

This being Pickwick Centenary year we have had much recollecting of the eagerness with which each part of the immortal “Papers” was awaited by a large public as it came from the publishers. In “The Recollections of Sophia Lonsdale,” compiled by her friend Miss Violet Martineau, further evidence is given of the popularity of the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Miss Lonsdale’s uncle was Edmund Beckett, First Baron Grimthorpe, Q.C., astronomer, and designer, with George Airey, the Astronomer Royal, of “Big Ben.” He was, too, a notable “character” of his century. Some years before his death he had a serious illness. He was, however, still able to read, and used to pick up alternately the Bible and "Pickwick Papers." At last he became much worse, and he saw his wife crying and the nurse and doctor evidently anxious:—So he said to one of his nurses, “I suppose you think I am dying?" “Well, my lord,” said the nurse, “you are very ill.” “I thought so,” said he. “Well! Give me ‘Pickwick,” and settled himself for what he thought might be his last read of that immortal work. And, as marrying a widow was Mr Weller’s sovereign cure for the gout, reading “Pickwick” was apparently in this case a sovereign cure for dying. On one occasion Lord Grimthorpe asked Miss Lonsdale, “Sophy, do you know that a fish feels no resistance as it swims through tire water?" She answered no, and how did he? “The only way one knows anything," he retorted; “by mathematics.” “Oh," said Sophia, "I thought you’d ask the fish.” “No," he said, “the fish might lie; mathematics can’t.”