by A. N. Wilson
Dickens wrote home to Wilkie Collins on 12 January 1868:
Being in Boston last Sunday, I took it into my head to go over the medical school, and survey the holes and corners in which that extraordinary murder was done by Webster. There was the furnace – stinking horribly, as if the dismembered pieces were still inside it – and there are all the grim spouts and sinks, and chemical appliances, and what not. At dinner, afterwards, Longfellow told me a terrific story. He dined with Webster within a year of the murder, one of a party of ten or twelve. As they sat at their wine, Webster suddenly ordered the lights to be turned out, and a bowl of some burning mineral to be placed on the table, that the guests might see how ghostly it made them look. As each man stared at all the rest in the weird light, all were horrified to see Webster with a rope round his neck, holding it up, over the bowl, with his head, jerked on one side, and his tongue lolled out representing a man being hanged!
Poking into his life and character, I find (what I would have staked my head upon) that he was always a cruel man.7
There were many things about Webster that would have caught Dickens’s imagination. One was that he was a Micawber, a Dorrit, a man like Dickens’s own father through whose fingers money simply leaked. Parkman had lent Webster money and wanted to be repaid. He discovered that Webster had run up debts elsewhere. Some valuable minerals that Webster had offered Parkman as a guarantee of his substantial loan had, it transpired, been mortgaged to another lender. The motive for killing the cold-hearted Scrooge-like Parkman was fairly clear, though it is less clear whether Webster would still have been obliged to repay the debt to Parkman’s estate.
The central mystery of the trial, and one reason for the enthusiasm of the 60,000 ghouls who trooped into the courtroom to stare at Webster’s impassive features, was that there was no body. Some body parts had been found in a laboratory in Dr Webster’s department, and he appeared to have dismembered Parkman and burned some of him. In those relatively primitive days, when forensic medicine was in its infancy, it was not possible, initially, to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the body parts in the Massachusetts Medical College were indeed those of Dr Parkman. Nor could it be proved that Dr Webster had put them there, or dismembered the body. However, some gold in the cadaver’s dentures, which were discovered among the charred remains, matched that of the Boston Brahmin’s own false teeth; and his widow identified various body parts. The crucial evidence was given by the janitor, a dubious character who had made a nice little living supplying the Medical College with cadavers at $25 a time, but who was now rewarded with a staggering $3,000 for his evidence against Webster.
It was a case in which the judge created a precedent in US law. Hitherto, an American jury could not convict a suspected murderer in the absence of the victim’s body. In this case the judge, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, ruled that the jury could convict, if they believed ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that the body parts were those of Dr Parkman.
Webster was found guilty and he was publicly hanged. It was a story very much up Dickens’s street, but what appeared to fascinate him most deeply was the murderer’s state of mind. Webster had appeared to be not so much a hypocrite, when he professed his innocence, as a divided self. The mild-mannered professor of chemistry had perhaps been unaware, or scarcely aware, of the murderous capabilities of his darker self. The extent to which this case inspired Dickens’s last novel has been questioned. The parallels are not so very close. That the Webster/Parkman case was one of the ingredients that fed into The Mystery of Edwin Drood, however, could not really be denied. We do not know, of course, for a certainty, how Dickens’s book would have ended, but we know that he planned to write the story of a man who had committed a murder, while professing his own innocence. Like Dr John Webster, John Jasper, whose name is not so dissimilar, was ardent in his expressions of a wish to pursue the murderer. Like the body of Dr Parkman, the body of Edwin Drood is, in the surviving pages of the novel, never discovered. Like John Webster, John Jasper was, Dickens said, destined in the last section of the completed novel to have confessed to the crime he had committed, and the final part of the book was to have been an exploration of the divided self of a killer. One obvious influence upon the way Dickens came to the story of the Parkman murder, as the gestation of his own last novel developed, was The Moonstone, the 1868 novel written by his friend Wilkie Collins. In that story, Franklin Blake removes the moonstone from its hiding place while he is under the influence of opium. Once the effects of the drug wear off, he has no recollection of having stolen the jewel.
Dickens all but alluded to this story in The Mystery of Edwin Drood when describing the headmistress of the girls’ academy in Cloisterham: ‘As, in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal magnetism, there are two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of which pursues its separate course as though it were continuous instead of broken (thus if I hide my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk again before I can remember where) so Miss Twinkleton has two distinct and separate phases of being.’ [MED 3]
Double-selves, divided personalities, and the psychological theories of those who believed in animal magnetism, all these preoccupations weighed on that divided self, Charles Dickens, as he undertook his final novel.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood would seem to suggest that there are more sick souls, more false selves, in the world – or, anyway, in the imagined cathedral town of Cloisterham – than healthy ones, and that wholeness, an integrated personality that is happy in its own skin, not at war with itself, is the exception rather than the rule. The disrupted torn self inflicts terrible damage, on its other self or selves and on other people. But the divided self is also a source of creativity. Dickens could see that the gallery of characters who had been buzzing out of his head ever since ‘Boz’ first ventured into print had not come from a calm, happy place, but from a cauldron of self-contradiction and self-reproach, a bubbling confusion of moral centres. The capacity to create fiction was an artistic way of describing the capacity to self-deceive. The creative urge was the artistic way of describing the urge that used, battered and, if necessary, destroyed the loves of those closest to him. It has been rightly said that the murderer in Dickens’s last novel is himself a kind of novelist. He is shaping his own story.
Just as Mr Quilp[en], in the early days of Dickens’s marriage, derived his pantomimic strength from the demonic, cruel side of Dickens’s own nature, and from Dickens’s personal hatred of his wife, so the psychopathic villainy of John Jasper, in the unfinished novel, stems from Dickens’s own possessive sexual fantasies about his much younger mistress, Nelly. Any lover with a much younger partner is tormented by the possibility that the young one will eventually find a mate of a similar age. The fear that he was approaching death did not diminish this torture for Dickens: on the contrary. The knowledge that Nelly, an attractive young woman, would undoubtedly find a mate after his own departure from the scene fed into the imaginative maelstrom that led to The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
The key to the plot of this last novel, however, which unravelled a good while before he died – indeed, as we shall see, the unravelling of the novel was one of the things that killed Dickens – is Mesmer’s idea of animal magnetism. Jasper, obsessed by desire for the schoolgirl Rosa Bud, attempts to mesmerize her during their music lessons together, and she, overpowered by the sexually predatory nature of his feelings, is forced to run away and seek hiding in London.
We began with the Mystery of Fifteen Pounds Thirteen Shillings and Ninepence, and we followed a perhaps too-sensational version of events, which took Dickens from Gad’s Hill to Peckham, where he spent his last fully cognizant hours with Nelly Ternan. But let’s have second thoughts. Let’s tell a different story. Let’s accept the version given out by Georgy Hogarth. We cannot prove that Dickens went to Peckham on that June day, had a seizure and needed to be brought home to die a respectable death in Gad’s Hill. We might not wish to gather behind the cloak of respectability tha
t his family drew around Dickens’s last days; but we will accept the verdict of the housemaid who was sent to fetch the doctor, that, at the very end, Dickens certainly was at home. This, though, is simply to quibble about the kind of death that doctors write about when they sign death certificates; the bodily death that Dickens clearly felt creeping over him as he planned The Mystery of Edwin Drood. (The contract drawn up with his publishers makes provision for the book being unfinished at the hour of his death.)
There are, in any event, versions of the story of his bodily death, other than the version that took him to Peckham and had him suffering from a stroke in poor Nelly’s house; and there are other keys to his Mystery. In the story that became the official version, and which could well be the true one, Dickens, on Wednesday 8 June, did something he never normally did. He wrote all day, rather than finishing work at lunchtime. After his luncheon at Gad’s Hill that day, he returned to the Swiss chalet. If this was the case, we must conclude that he was writing the last pages he would ever compose. Either way, whether Dickens was at Peckham in the arms of Nelly or sitting in the chalet at Gad’s Hill fervently and frantically writing against the clock, the overpowering importance of sex, in his life and in his fiction, was inescapable. The story of ‘Fifteen Pounds, Thirteen Shillings and Ninepence’ would take us some way to recognizing the centrality to his life, in that last decade, of Nelly Ternan. More than that, the existence of Nelly reminds us of the centrality of sex, of women, of the sexual passions he could never openly write about. The Mystery of Edwin Drood, more than any of Dickens’s books, concerns itself with clumsily, scarcely buried sexuality.
At the little female academy run in the cathedral town of Cloisterham by Miss Twinkleton there is an annual ceremony in which she takes leave of her boarders before they go home for their holidays. As the girls gathered round, Miss Twinkleton said, ‘“Ladies, another revolving year had brought us round to that festive period at which the first feelings of our nature bounded in our” – Miss Twinkleton was annually going to add “bosoms”, but annually stopped on the brink of that expression and substituted “hearts”.’ [MED 13]
Dickens had been stopping on the brink of ‘bosoms’ all his professional career, and substituting ‘hearts’: in his writing, that is to say, if not in his life. He had been teetering on the edge of writing about sex – for example, in the story of Little Em’ly’s seduction by Steerforth – and then stepping back again. The fact that he did not write overtly, very often, about sexual passion should not make us suppose that the books allow us to forget sex. On the contrary. Quilp’s desire to seduce the pure child-woman Nell Trent, having fathered another child-woman, ‘the Marchioness’, on Sally Brass (though in the final published version he expunged any such suggestion); Sikes’s brutal relationship with Nancy the prostitute, ending in her being clubbed to death; Mr Carker’s wish to seduce the wife of his employer, and Edith Dombey’s willingness to elope with Carker to punish her husband; Lady Dedlock’s aching, depressive yearning for the dead copywriter, as she sits trapped in a sexless marriage; Pip’s masochistic adoration of Estella – these and dozens more examples shout to us about sex, sexlessness, desire and the inability to live without sex and be happy; or to live with it and find satisfaction.
Rather than inventing figures such as Balzac’s Valérie Marneffe (who in La Comédie humaine overtly uses sex as a form of self-promotion, but is in fact as sexually frustrated as the Dickensian figures just named, as are all the characters in the sex-soaked Cousine Bette), Dickens gave to his readers sentimental, sexless heroines like Dora and Agnes in David Copperfield. As his writing career drew to a close, however, he seemed to approach the subject that so concerned him with such subliminal violence – sex – more nearly. The scene he repeated again and again on the stage, during the public readings, was the savage murder of Nancy the prostitute in Oliver Twist. Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit enjoys a repetition, with the eponymous heroine, of Dick Swiveller’s cosy relationship with the dwarfish ‘Marchioness’, while the actual sexual passions occur in the margins of the story – with Miss Wade’s elopement with Tattycoram, or in the unmentionable life of the prostitute encountered on the Iron Bridge in the middle of the night. In the penultimate novel, however – Our Mutual Friend – the sexual impulse is much nearer the surface of the story. Bella Wilfer is the closest we ever get to a woman describing and embracing her sexual feeling and achieving satisfaction: her awareness of her father’s sexual frustration in his own marriage, and her pity for him, and her quasi-incestuous secret ‘dates’ with her father before she finds an evidently satisfactory mate in Our Mutual Friend are all recognizably messages from the real world of sexual life, as opposed to the fantasy world of toy doll-women like Dora Copperfield. Bradley Headstone, in the same novel, is driven to attempting a murder because of his frenzied sexual jealousy of Eugene Wrayburn and Lizzie Hexam.
In the unfinished novel Dickens returned to this very theme, with his story of John Jasper, the choirmaster who, violently jealous of his nephew Edwin Drood, and of Drood’s rival Neville Landless, contrives a cunning and dastardly scheme whereby he will kill Drood, and Landless will hang for the murder. Jasper longs to possess Rosa Bud, and believes that Drood will have her – not even for the asking, but as the result of an absurd pact, made by their respective fathers when Edwin and Rosa were young children. In this story, of a young woman who is envied by all her fellow teenagers because she is engaged to be married, but who secretly does not love her young man and yearns to be free; of a young woman who excites the darker, possibly violent passions of her music master, the saturnine John Jasper, and who is instantaneously loved, on their first encounter, by the Asiatic Neville Landless, there is a fourth man who is preoccupied with her to the point of obsession – and an almost blatantly obscene obsession at that. This figure is, of course, her creator.
Not content to give her the suggestive name of Rosa Bud, Dickens allows her fiancé to call her by the synonymous nickname of Pussy. When Edwin Drood playfully tries to kiss the verger’s wife, Mrs Tope, who acts as his uncle’s housekeeper, he exclaims, ‘“Give me a kiss, because it is Pussy’s birthday”’ and she replies, ‘“I’d Pussy you, young man, if I was Pussy as you call her… Your uncle’s too much wrapt up in you, that’s where it is. He makes so much of you, that it’s my opinion you think only to call your Pussys by the dozen, to make ’em come.”’ [MED 2]
The double-entendre here is not between Edwin Drood and his uncle’s housekeeper; it is between Dickens and his more sophisticated readers. The old Podsnappian convention persists that there is going to be nothing in his novels, as they are read aloud in the cosy family circle, which could bring a blush to the cheek of a young person. (And, of course, even this famous Podsnappery is itself a subversive piece of flagellant filth; one remembers that one of Dickens’s most fervent admirers was the poet Swinburne.)
Even without conjuring up the image of Charles Dickens very nearly dying of sexual excess in Peckham, therefore, we can follow, in the last book he wrote and never finished, a comparable journey in his imagination as he plotted, and wrote, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
We have also observed that at the heart of Dickens’s last novel is the idea of animal magnetism, as espoused by Franz Anton Mesmer, and, by extension, the possibility of ‘Mesmerism’ – that is, of one human being exercising hypnotic power for good or ill over another: in practice, such power nearly always being exercised by a man over a woman. Fred Kaplan, who wrote so well about Dickens and Mesmerism, reminded readers that ‘in late Dickens, to love another is to have power over that other, and to give that other power over you. It is to enter into a special kind of subject–operator relationship.’8 If Mesmerism is a metaphor (while also being an actual practice followed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), then it speaks volumes that Dickens was able to practise Mesmerism on his wife when they were still a sexually active couple. When she accepted, at least to some degree, the ‘subject–operator’ nature of the rel
ationship; when she grew out of this, and questioned it, she could be discarded as an obviously ‘difficult customer’, especially since he had found, in the much younger Nelly, the perfect submissive.
Not only did Dickens practise Mesmerism, but he also read widely in related subjects. Only months after his death, when his library was put up for sale, purchasers could have found such titles as Count de Gablis’s A Diverting History of the Rosicrucian Doctrine of Spirits: Sylphs, Salamanders, Gnomes and Daemons (1714), John Abercrombie’s Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investigation of Truth (1840) and, above all, John Elliotson’s Human Physiology (1835–40). Elliotson was the key pioneer of Mesmerism in Victorian England, and his On Numerous Cases of Surgical Operations without Pain in the Mesmeric State (1843) bears on the flyleaf – as the auctioneer and the punters would have noted, when it went under the hammer – the inscription ‘To Charles Dickens, from his sincere friend, John Elliotson’.9
Like many ideas originating on the European land-mass, especially with the French-speaking parts of Europe – most notably the emergent theories of evolution – Mesmerism had failed to take hold in England during the long period of the Revolution (1789) and the subsequent wars. It had been in 1779 that Franz Anton Mesmer, having fled Vienna, had published, in French, and in Paris, Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal. Though it sounds to us like mumbo-jumbo, as nearly all science does fifty years after it has been accepted as truth, Mesmer’s theory has been seen by historians of Ideas as being deeply in tune with the Enlightenment and with revolutionary times. This was chiefly because Mesmer was an out-and-out materialist. Having ‘discovered’ the ‘fluid’ in the universe, he could discard the spiritual influence of God, or the Absolute Good, on the soul. He was, therefore, a progressive, and those who embraced his theories in Britain were nearly all, likewise, seen as political radicals. (Most enthusiasts for Mesmerism in Britain were, for example, vociferous abolitionists in the slavery question.10)
