The Mystery of Charles Dickens

by A. N. Wilson

  It was not, however, quite like that. Despite his initial depression in America, and his unwillingness to throw himself at first into the social life of Boston, and in spite of his perpetual catarrh and exhaustion, the readings transformed Dickens. They were a mind-altering, transformative narcotic.

  During that evening’s performance, while Dolby had been standing at the foot of the stairs, a member of the audience was seen lurching down them. Dolby offered him a hand, thinking he might be ill. The man burst out, ‘“Say, who’s that man on the platform reading?” “Mr Charles Dickens,” I replied. “But that ain’t the real Charles Dickens, the man as wrote all them books I’ve been reading all these years.”’38

  Even though we did not hear the readings, and – despite, or because of, the many descriptions of them – if we find it slightly hard to imagine them, we sense that this man had seen something that the bluff Dolby had not. Dolby represents the man on the stairs, who shoved his hat on his head and stormed out into the night, as a comic character, the one man in the house who is not enjoying the show – like the figure in the Charles Addams cartoon who is laughing when everyone else is convulsed with fear by a horror movie. We know that the man had seen the disjunction. Whatever they were hearing from the stage, it was different from the experience of reading Dickens quietly, while turning the pages.

  So on they went – Rhode Island, Rochester, the Falls of Tennessee, Buffalo, Niagara, New Bedford, Portland – in freezing weather, with Dickens often suffering from the catarrh, the sleepless nights, the fevers that were with him for most of the trip. Eventually they returned to Boston, took their affectionate farewell of the Bostonians before returning to New York, to address the Press Association dinner, with protestations that ‘equally by my winter fireside and in the green English summer weather’ Dickens would remember his American friends with ‘the greatest gratitude, tenderness and consideration… God bless you and God bless the land in which I leave you.’39 It was an uncynical version of W. H. Auden’s poem ‘On the Circuit’, about being on a lecture tour, moving from city to city, and turning from home with the sentiment ‘God bless the USA, so large,/So friendly, and so rich’.

  The quantity of loot being trousered both by Dickens and by Messrs Chappell of New Bond Street, London, was not lost on the US Customs, and the tax collectors demanded that Dickens and Dolby appear before a judge. Dolby argued that ‘having the authority of head of the Internal Revenue Department… to the effect that neither Mr Dickens nor myself (as foreigners), added to which they were liable, added to which the Act of Congress distinctly stated that persons travelling for the purposes of giving “occasional lectures” were not liable for income tax’.40 The taxmen demanded 5 per cent of all Dickens’s receipts for the lectures, which would have amounted to $12,000. Even while the porters were staggering aboard the Russia with the little reading desk and the rest of their enormous consignment of luggage, the taxmen were threatening Dickens and his agent with arrest, though in Charles Dickens As I Knew Him one senses Dolby exaggerating the danger of imminent arrest to improve his story. Regardless of who had right on their side, Dickens escaped the American tax authorities and, by the time he returned to England, he had clocked up personal earnings of more than £19,000, nearly twice the ‘£10,000 in a heap’ that he had hoped to net.41

  There is a very good vignette in Dolby’s account of the homecoming. He has already described the shock of the American man who did not feel that the Dickens on the stage was the ‘real’ Dickens. And he has depicted Dickens on the podium, Dickens on the railroads, Dickens being convivial with strangers, and Dickens among his literary cronies in Boston. They docked at Liverpool and ‘After so long and rough a voyage, we deemed it inexpedient to travel the same night by the mail train, and so, remaining quietly in Liverpool’, they stayed at one of Dickens’s favourite hotels, the Adelphi.

  we continued our journey the following day. Reaching the Euston Square Station at about three in the afternoon, we parted from one another as if we had arrived there from one of our ordinary journeys. By arrangement, there were no friends to meet us at the station to give us welcome after our travels, and it was something almost ludicrous to see Mr Dickens walk out of the station, bag in hand, on his way to the Charing Cross Station and Gad’s Hill, where of course his arrival had been made known by telegraph to his family.42

  Pause for a moment and watch the spruce, tired little man walking through Euston Station towards the stand where the hackney carriages stood waiting and the horses sniffed the afternoon air. Londoners who only know the hideous modern railway terminus can scarcely imagine how beautiful the Greek Revival Euston Station, completed in 1849, was. Dickens and the other passengers passed through a huge hall, flanked with pillars, towards the entrance arch, designed by Philip Hardwick and surmounted with two lodges (which is all that survives of the original design). Pevsner wrote that it was pride in the achievement of the railway line that led Hardwick to ‘go all out for the sublime in his Doric display… Here was something as grandiose of its kind as anything the Greeks had ever accomplished. So it deserved the highest rhetoric available.’43 Betjeman added, ‘To compare with Euston, there is nothing.’44

  Dickens, one of the most famous of the Victorians, was walking through one of the most sublime expressions of their aesthetic self-confidence. The Euston Road, which thronged with horse traffic, omnibuses, cabriolets, victorias, broughams, was a row of railway stations – with huge St Pancras, a red-brick cathedral, being erected 500 yards to the east even as he stood there beside the snorting Euston cab horses, and beyond St Pancras the twenty-year-old King’s Cross with its huge stock-brick façade facing the road. It was modern London. Drummond Street, where the schoolboy Dickens had amused his chums from Wellington House Academy pretending to be a penniless beggar and cheeking the old ladies, was just behind the cab-stand where he stood. By now they had built all over the fields that he used to cross each morning in his walk from Camden Town. A few hundred yards to the north was the foetid terraced house in Bayham Street from whose narrow front hall the child had left each morning for his forty-minute walk southwards to Warren’s Blacking, 30, Strand, during the year his father was in prison. The man whose performances on the stages of halls and theatres on two sides of the Atlantic held audiences enraptured, and whose books sold in the tens of thousands, had used experiences garnered in this neck of the woods half a century ago! No one seemed to notice him as he caught his cab. And if they had done so, which Dickens would it have been that they saw? The public performer? The secret, inexplicable imagination of the novelist? The tiny child in his ‘poor white hat, little jacket, and corduroy trowsers’45 staring hungrily through the windows of pie-shops and making his equally anonymous journey through the pitiless streets of London?

  The readings formed a part of Dickens’s life from now onwards until a few months before his death. The readings. Nelly. And, eventually, the new novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. But that would not take form until the late summer of 1869. For fifteen months, against the familiar background of editing All the Year Round and writing shorter pieces for it, and attending to Gad’s and trying to ‘place’ his children in their grown-up life, it was – the readings and Nelly.

  We know that he had confided in the Fieldses, back in Boston, since Annie Fields, imagining his homecoming to England, wrote, ‘I cannot help rehearsing in my mind the intense joy of his beloved – it is too much to face, even in one’s imagination and too sacred. Yet I know today to be the day and these hours his hours – Surely the most painfully and joyfully intense of his whole life. And believe he is well once more. Tomorrow Gad’s Hill!!46 Clearly, Dickens had not gone straight home to Gad’s Hill. The valet Henry Scott was sent to Gad’s with the luggage. If you had followed the novelist’s cab from Euston, however, and seen him alight at King’s Cross, that small, much-aged figure whom Dolby had watched disappearing into the crowds, you would know that he had taken the train straight to Peckham; for the next week, it was
from Windsor Lodge that he commuted to the office in Wellington Street. The faithful Wills was keeping the periodical running smoothly. The separation from ‘N’ had indeed been painful, and it was clear that, whenever possible, during the next fifteen months, he would take her with him on the reading tours.

  There is a nice conjunction, demonstrating his love for Nelly and the popularity of the readings, which resumed in the autumn, left behind in the memory of a shop assistant. The young man’s name was Edward Young, and he worked at Dixon’s, an emporium in Whitefriargate, Hull. Dickens entered the shop and, in the course of making a purchase – six pairs of ladies’ black silk stockings – he asked Edward Young what he liked to do in the evenings. Young replied that he liked going to the theatre, and he liked dramatic readings, but that, unfortunately, the tickets for this evening’s performance were sold out. As the two conversed, it was clear that Edward knew Dickens’s works well. He was astonished when the customer wrote on a card and put it into his hand. The card was inscribed with the three words, ‘Please Admit Bearer’, and Edward realized only then who was writing the words. Dickens left the shop.

  Such stories – of Dickens in shops, Dickens speaking to strangers – almost have something in them of the Resurrection narratives in the Gospels: the failure to recognize, followed by recognition on the part of the ‘believer’. Fred Roe, in his day a relatively well-known artist, saw a watercolour drawing in the window of a junk shop in Seven Dials. He entered the shop and asked the proprietress, a stout party, how much she wanted for it. She replied, ‘O, five shillin’s.’ After this exchange, Roe heard a voice from the back of the shop asking, ‘May I look at the drawing?’ He saw that it was Dickens, sitting in the rear of the shop with a notebook in his hand. He scanned the drawing for a moment, and then handed it back to Roe. ‘T,’ was all he said, meaning Turner. ‘Yes,’ said Roe. ‘I congratulate you,’ Dickens replied.

  Seven Dials was a district that had obsessed Dickens all his life. It had been a nest of vice and crime at least since the eighteenth century, when Henry Fielding’s brother tried to clear it up. Forster says that he had ‘a profound attraction of repulsion to St Giles’s’ – the parish in which Seven Dials was found.

  Fred Roe did not make the connection, but surely the junk shop in Seven Dials, where he found Dickens making notes in the 1860s, was in the neighbourhood of – or perhaps the very model for – Mr Venus’s taxidermy shop in Our Mutual Friend. While writing the last, great, finished novel, Dickens told his illustrator, his young protégé Marcus Stone, that he was looking round for someone with a peculiar avocation, something ‘very striking and unusual’. Stone had lately felt the need to find a taxidermist to stuff either a small dog or some pigeons (his accounts varied). He told Dickens about the taxidermist’s shop in St Andrew’s Street, Seven Dials, which he had lately visited. Dickens immediately accompanied Stone to the shop and ‘with his unusually keen power of observation, was enabled during a very brief space to take mental notes of every detail that presented itself’.47 We see Dickens lurking in the junk shop with a notebook, accompanied by the young Stone. He was mentally sketching the shop for magnificent reuse as Mr Venus’s shop – surely one of his most brilliant creations. Here we have the phenomenon of witnesses being themselves observed. They were not seeing him, it was the other way round, and Dickens was, moreover, in the case of the taxidermy shop, applying the transformative vision. The Shakespeare who gave us the description of the apothecary’s shop in Romeo and Juliet must have been, in rather a comparable way, the unrecognized camera in the corner of the business, noticing and unnoticed.

  The initial 1858 repertoire, when Dickens went professional and took the readings on the road, had been drawn solely from the Christmas Books. Little by little he had added the favourite set-pieces – Boots and Marigold, the death of Paul Dombey, the Trial of Bardell v. Pickwick. It was in 1863 that he had first tried ‘alone, by myself, the Oliver Twist murder, but I have got something so horrible out of it that I am afraid to try it in public’. It is almost as if, in his private enactment of the murder of Nancy by Sikes, Dickens had summoned spirits from the vasty deep, and released a djinn from the bottle of whose sexually violent existence he had been scarcely aware; as if, in the words of T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney:

  Any man has to, needs to, wants to

  Once in a lifetime, do a girl in.48

  (If this were a crime story, rather than a book about Charles Dickens, would we discover that a young woman in Hull had been found strangled with a pair of black silk stockings?) Dickens liked to joke about his ‘murderous instincts’. ‘I have a vague sensation,’ he said, ‘of being “wanted” as I walk about the streets.’49 The divided self who imagined he was a detective also imagined himself as the hunted criminal.

  Five years after trying the Oliver Twist murder alone, he was planning his Farewell Tour of the British Isles, and decided that a ‘powerful novelty’ was essential to keep up ticket sales. It was then that he told Dolby he was going to include the murder of Nancy in the programme. Dolby was fiercely against it, and did all in his power to dissuade him – ‘My reasons for this had reference not so much to the inappropriateness of the subject for Reading purposes – because I knew well that the sensational character of it would be a great attraction – as to the effect which the extra exertion might have on his constitution and the state of his health.’50

  Likewise, Dickens’s family were against the inclusion of ‘Sikes and Nancy’ in a show meant to be amusing, and to be suitable for both sexes and all ages. Charley was working in the library at Gad’s one warm afternoon in the summer of 1868 when he heard the sound of violence taking place outside in the garden. It sounded as if a tramp was beating his wife. The noise swelled, an alternation of brutal shouts and female screaming. Charley realized it was his duty to intervene and stepped outside the house, to find his father, at the other end of the meadow, murdering an imaginary Nancy with ferocious gestures.

  Dickens asked his son what he thought.

  ‘The finest thing I ever heard,’ Charley replied, ‘but don’t do it.’51 You can imagine how Hitchcock would enjoy this scene. Norman Bates, dressed as his mother and ‘doing’ the voices, as ‘she’ instructs ‘him’ to murder the flighty young woman in the shower of their motel, is not the same story as ‘Sikes and Nancy’, but it is cognate.

  Dickens decided to put it to the test by undertaking a reading before a select audience of 100 friends and acquaintances in St James’s Hall, where he enacted ‘Sikes and Nancy’, which he by then had more or less by heart. All the guests were ‘unmistakably pale and had horror-stricken faces’,52 he was delighted to observe.

  William Harness, who had been at Harrow with Byron and grew up to be a Shakespearean scholar, had been a receptive member of Dickens’s private circle, and part of his audiences for years. Forster’s Life carries an illustration of a group of them at 58 Lincoln’s Inn Fields – Maclise the actor, Forster himself, Carlyle and others – listening to Dickens read aloud from The Chimes on 2 December 1844. Harness, upstage right, is so overcome with emotion that he has covered his face with both hands.53

  Twenty-four years on, and the old man, now nearly eighty, was still as satisfyingly suggestible. Harness told Dickens, ‘I am bound to tell you that I had an almost irresistible impulse upon me to scream, and if anyone had cried out, I am certain I should have followed.’54

  Sir William Overend Priestley, ‘the great ladies’ doctor’, had warned Dickens before the performance, ‘My dear Dickens, you may rely upon it that if one woman cries out when you murder the girl, there will be a contagion of hysteria all over this place.’55 Better and better!

  Another person present during that experimental reading was Mrs Keeley, a famous actress. Dickens asked her: should he include ‘Sikes and Nancy’ in the repertoire or no?

  ‘Why, of course do it,’ she replied. ‘Having got at such an effect as that, it must be done. But,’ rolling her large black eyes very slowly, and speaking very
distinctly, ‘the public have been looking for a sensation these last fifty years or so, and by Heaven they have got it!’56

  Between January 1869 and March 1870 Dickens would do no fewer than twenty-eight renditions of the murder of Nancy. It became an obsession. The only time Dickens lost his temper with Dolby was when the agent suggested that he maybe reduced the number of times he did his routine of publicly beating a young woman to death. Over a working supper one evening, they were drawing up a list of prospective readings to be performed over the next month in a variety of towns. When they had finished, Dolby noticed that the ‘Murder’ was taking precedence over everything else. He said:

  ‘Look carefully through the towns you have given me and see if you note anything peculiar about them.’

  ‘No’, he replied, ‘what is it?’