St. Clement's Day Many legends surround Saint Clement, some suggest he was the first man to refine iron from ore, and to shoe a horse. Clementine customs may be survivals of earlier pagan rituals, a confusion of Saint Clement with the early Saxon Wayland, or Wayland the smith, a mythical metalworker. He shares this feast day, which marks the beginning of winter, with the saint. In Charles Dickens’s "Great Expectations" Miss Havisham insists Pip sing for her and her ward Estella, and Pip responds with a ditty from Joe’s forge ‘that imitated the measure of beating upon iron’: ‘... hammer boys round -
Mary Dickens to have embarrassed or angered her family, who largely cut themselves off from her. Much of her life after her father's death in 1870 remains unknown, but after leaving her aunt's she lived for a period with a clergyman and his wife, Mr and Mrs Hargreaves, in Manchester, a "scandal" which was kept a secret by her family. Later she lived alone in the country. Mary Dickens went on to write "My Father as I Recall Him" (1886), and a novel, "Cross Currents" (1890). On Mary's death her aunt, Georgina Hogarth, wrote to Connie Dickens, the widow of Edward Dickens: