The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  38

  As we were approaching the crossroads at the town of Nevertire, one of the troopers came to the carriage window and told us there was a line of barrels blocking the road. He and his colleague were riding ahead to see what it meant. We watched them ride on, our discussion of the guvnor suspended.

  We were relieved to see a New South Wales policeman and a number of men with firearms over their shoulders emerge from the barricade and begin to spin the barricading barrels on their side so we could pass. The troopers returned and one of them explained, ‘Gilbert’s gang were heard to say they would take the town of Nevertire prisoner, so the people have barricaded the town against them. It’s up to you, gentlemen, whether we go on.’

  ‘I vote to go on,’ said Alfred. ‘My little brother can deal with the bushrangers.’

  So we passed through town and into the bush beyond. Gilbert’s mob, like Starlight’s, had a reputation for bush urbanity, and if they saw the black crepe of mourning on the coach they might just let us go, surmising we were those Dickens boys and – as Dr Pearson had discovered – more trouble than we were worth.

  Alfred returned to the guvnor, though, saying, ‘So, listen to the argument, Plorn. Now you haven’t gone to the novels yet, but you’ll have to. The convict Magwitch is transported to Australia after Pip shelters him. And in Australia he makes his sheep fortune, but he has to creep back into England because he’s forbidden by law to return. The guvnor’s saying that a condemned person in England may be a great man in Australia!’

  ‘That’s stretching it,’ I protested, ‘and in any case, he’s not talking about us.’

  ‘Hold hard. Then there are all the people he sends to Australia in David Copperfield.’

  This reminded me of how, before we parted, Mrs Wivenhoe had said, ‘You must read David Copperfield if you want to know anything. Go and read David Copperfield.’ Her command made it possible I might.

  ‘So who does he send to Australia?’ Alfred continued. ‘He sends the Peggottys, whose simple goodness is pretty close to stupidity, of course, and their fallen niece Little Em’ly – another tart to be saved by Australia. And he sends the hopeless Mr Micawber and his family, and turns Micawber into a colonial gent.’

  ‘This merely shows –’ I began, but he cut me off again.

  ‘So who does he send to Australia in his mind, Plorn? In the most important part of his mind? The criminals – the Artful Dodger to start, and that pageboy in Copperfield – and the reformed prostitutes and the stupid. And who does he send in his paternal imagination, long before he sent us, in fact? He sends his two sons. What does it tell you about what he thinks of those two sons?’

  I thrashed about for something to say. Even though all had changed with the guvnor dead, it was clear that would not stop Alfred pursuing the same old arguments.

  ‘Now you can answer me,’ he said.

  I watched a line of eucalyptus trees along a billabong which were close enough to the road to harbour bushrangers.

  I was stumped, until inspiration revived, and I asked, ‘What about the Staplehurst crash, then?’

  ‘No,’ murmured Alfred. ‘It’s too cruel.’

  ‘Too cruel? The guvnor was a hero at Staplehurst!’

  ‘Maybe we can talk about Staplehurst another time. When there aren’t bushrangers around.’

  But no bushrangers presented themselves, and we got to Cobar without incident. Alfred seemed dispirited at dinner but in a way that did not favour conversation.

  In the evenings I read and reread Charles Dickens’ Proposal, which confirmed and consoled my belief in the guvnor’s essential virtue. Of course I already knew that in the late 1840s he and Miss Coutts had set up Urania Cottage for young homeless women found in the slums or coming from workhouses and prisons. Father had got advice on how to run the place from the governor of Tothill Bridewell in Westminster, which housed women, and visited the crowded dormitories of Coldbath Fields Prison in Clerkenwell. I forget the name of the poet who wrote ‘As he went through Coldbath Fields/He saw a solitary cell;/And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint/For improving his prisons in hell.’

  I could see the guvnor was fascinated by gaols and visited them to understand both how and how not to manage them. According to the Reverend Cooper he did not like the idea of the treadmill he’d seen at Coldbath. And I remembered on a rowing trip on the Medway one day he’d muttered to us boys something about the treadmill not teaching the rewards of labour, but making the criminal resolve never to do honest work again.

  His ‘An Appeal to Fallen Women’ opened in a most humane way.

  You will see, on beginning to read this letter, that it is not addressed to you by name. But I address it to a woman – a very young woman still – who was born to be happy and has lived miserably; who has no prospect before her but sorrow, or behind her a wasted youth; who, if she has ever been a mother, has felt shame instead of pride in her own unhappy child.

  A girl, that is, who deserved to live in a cottage and not a penitentiary. The guvnor must have been referring to Miss Coutts and her grand house in Piccadilly when he wrote that same appeal.

  There is a lady in this town who from the windows of her house has seen such as you going past at night, and has felt her heart bleed at the sight. She is what is called a great lady, but she has looked after you with compassion as being of her own sex and nature, and the thought of such fallen women has troubled her in her bed.

  He said that the house this lady had provided stood not in Piccadilly but on a pleasant country lane, and each girl could have her own little flower garden if she pleased. And after they had been there for a time and their conduct was good, they would be enabled ‘to go abroad, where in a distant country they may become faithful wives of honest men, and live and die in peace’.

  But the guvnor and Miss Coutts’ net was broader than the fallen. The guvnor wrote in Household Words that he and Miss Coutts and other unspecified ladies of eminent generosity and sense recruited starving needlewomen of good character, as well as needlewomen who had robbed their furnished lodgings; they also sought violent girls committed to prison for disturbances in ill-conducted workhouses, poor girls from ragged schools, destitute girls who had applied to police officers for relief, young women of the same class taken from the prisons after undergoing punishment there as disorderly characters, or for shoplifting or for theft, young women held to bail for attempting suicide, and domestic servants who had been seduced.

  Cooper wrote so clearly the arguments I could not marshal against Alfred to dent his sense of grievance. Despite his busy life, the guvnor had taken time to choose the furniture and select the materials for the young inmates’ clothing. They should not wear uniforms, he said. They should have bright colours, like his waistcoats. He went to buy a piano for the place, said the Reverend Cooper, and the word got out, and virtuous people of the kind the guvnor never liked disapproved so much of a piano that my father spread a rumour that the young women would get one each, which Cooper said outraged the falsely pious even more.

  As I read this history, celebrating the benign energy of my father, the assumption that he was still alive became irresistible, and I grasped at and wept more pathetically for that possibility than I had when Dr Pearson told me he had died. My face was never dry through this rather exceptional spate of reading, and I acclaimed my brother Frankie’s opinion that Father had been at that point of his life selfless and Christ-like, and I wanted to be able to tell him and applaud him on that, whatever his crimes in Alfred’s eyes.

  I read the entire pamphlet in two nights.

  I had barely been to school myself when the guvnor took me out to London Fields’ ragged school. The Right Reverend Dr Cooper had been very taken with a description of that school in Oliver Twist, and there was something about learned men quoting my father that had the normal effect on me of abasement. I recognised the school as it was a landscape of my childhood and his campaigning, since he donated to the ragged schools. Places
and days exalted and made eternal in his novels. Astounding that the guvnor could do that!

  And then Dr Cooper introduced me to the cases of some of the individual girls, and somehow, despite the scale of the Australian colonies, and of Momba for that matter, it all seemed curiously intimate to me. These tales showed the girls were not in colonial brothels but had an angelic and redeemed shine to them.

  Case number forty-one, for example, was a pretty and quiet woman of nineteen years who was cast off after her mother’s remarriage, both mother and stepfather considering her an encumbrance. A clergyman found her sick on the streets and in a state ‘too deplorable to be even suggested to the reader’s imagination’. After a year and a half at the cottage, she was sent away, and found happiness in Australia. And so it went, with case number fifty, number fifty-eight, number fifty-one, number fifty-four, number fourteen, the latter ‘an extremely pretty girl of twenty’ who was sentenced for disorderly behaviour, a crime which the guvnor saw as mere protest at the cruelty of life.

  Dr Cooper quoted from a letter sent from New South Wales to Miss Coutts and her committee of ladies, thanking them for writing to her:

  Honoured, Ladies, I have seen Jane and I showed my letter and she is going to write Home, she is living about 36 miles from where I live and her and her husband are very happy together – she has been down to our Town this week and it is the first we have seen of her since a week after they were married – my Husband is very kind to me and we live very happy and comfortable together we have a nice garden where we grow all that we want we have sown some peas and turnips, we have three such nice pigs and we kill one last week . . . My Husband has built a shed at the side of the house to do anything for hisself when he come home from work of a night. He tells me that we shall every nine years come Home.

  I wished I had the names and places of these women so that I could ride round one day and tie my horse to their gate and drink tea with them and both say, as colonials are required to say, how lucky they were to have been sent here. What a talking-to the woman of the letter would give to Alfred with his resentment and sniping at the high regard in which the guvnor was kept.

  A conclusive letter arrived from Aunt Georgie soon after I got back to Momba. In it she wrote:

  It was our grief when it happened that we could not instantly transmit the news to you by any means. That first night after his death, as he lay on the sofa the doctor had brought into the dining room for him, we were all conscious that you and Alfred would have been about your duties so far away with no suspicion of the light that had vanished from the world. There was a story here, copied from Australian papers, that you had the news broken to you by an outlaw they call a bushranger. I cannot imagine your grief and bewilderment, but according to newspaper reports you routed the desperado. How delighted would your father have been by that! It would have determined him to put it in a novel.

  Your father died in familiar rooms, specifically in the dining room here. Your sisters were here before he expired, along with Mr Beard for escort, and they were attentive and helpful all through the last long day. Your oldest brother Charley attended too. I know no one would have been of more service than you, Plorn, had you been here. He spoke of you with great affection the time before last he was here at Gad’s. You can rest assured of his abiding love.

  I wondered if Aunt Georgie had written the same thing to Alfred, and put him in his place thereby.

  I attach a copy of your father’s will . . . It was my belief and John Forster’s that you should all have a copy, so that you would see you were equally provided for. You can look forward to considerable benefit from it on achieving your majority. If in the meantime you need an advance, Mr Forster and I would be happy to make one of a relatively modest nature in terms of the scale of your inheritance, perhaps up to £150 according to need. However, I would make the point that you should not too closely examine the order in which the ‘Ts’ and other parties are mentioned, or unfairly construe the emphasis that is put on this person and that. You will see that I have the great honour of being an executrix of the will, and I hope that you know how strenuously I will carry out that duty on your mother’s behalf and on yours.

  I had little appetite for reading a will and set it aside at first, but then suffered from a growing curiosity, not all of it of the highest order, to see how the guvnor had reconciled all his duties within this document.

  I, Charles Dickens, of Gad’s Hill Place, Higham in the county of Kent, hereby revoke all my former Wills and Codicils and declare this to be my Last Will and Testament.

  And there, first off in the next line, before the call of blood, came, ‘I give the sum of £1000 free of legacy duty to Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan, late of Houghton Place, Ampthill Square, in the county of Middlesex.’

  Hence the warning about ‘Ts’ in Aunt Georgie’s letter. I did not like to see this blatant item in the will, both for my own sake and because I knew what its effect on Alfred and others would be. I knew, too, how it would be for my mother, reading it. ‘Was I on his mind at all?’ she would have asked after seeing page 1. I was pleased that Aunt Georgie had warned me not to put too much weight on the order in which things were addressed, or praise for parties, Aunt Georgie being justifiably esteemed above all others.

  There were more legacies to servants, and then £1000 for my sister Mamie, together with a legacy she would receive up to the time of her marriage. And then, not Mother, but Mother’s sister was mentioned:

  I give my dear sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth the sum of £8000 . . . I also give to the said Georgina Hogarth all my personal jewellery not hereinafter mentioned, and all the little familiar objects from my writing table and my room, and she will know what to do with those things. I also give to the said Georgina Hogarth all my private papers whatsoever and wheresoever, and I leave her my grateful blessing as the best and truest friend man ever had.

  I felt unworthy in the resentment that now rose in me. Not to underestimate Aunt Georgie in the least, but I wanted to protest that there is a wife, and a mother. Finally Mrs Catherine Dickens was mentioned, but only after Charley was left the guvnor’s library, a silver salver presented at Birmingham and a silver cup presented at Edinburgh. Charles and my clever older brother Henry were to be given the sum of £8000 to invest and pay ‘the annual income thereof to my wife during her life, and after her decease the said sum and the investments thereof shall be in trust for my children . . .’

  John Forster was left the gold repeater watch presented at Coventry with its chains and seals and appendages, along with any manuscripts. For he and Forster had been friends so long, and Forster of the knotted brow was so often with us all during our childhoods.

  He left Aunt Georgie with the decision concerning the sale of real estate. And the annual income from the sums realised would come to the children once ‘they shall have attained or shall attain the age of twenty-one’.

  Aunt Georgina and John Forster were to be the executors of the will.

  And so I reached the end of the legal language with the sentence that began:

  And lastly, as I have now set down the form of words which my legal advisers assure me are necessary to the plain objects of this my Will, I solemnly enjoin my dear children always to remember how much they owe to the said Georgina Hogarth, and never to be wanting in a grateful and affectionate attachment to her, for they know well that she has been, through all the stages of their growth and progress, their ever-useful, self-denying and devoted friend. And I desire here simply to record the fact that my wife, since our separation by consent, has been in receipt from an annual income of £600, while all the great charges over a numerous and expensive family have devolved upon myself.

  I saw at once that one could consider the will would have been a more gracious document without this. Mother had, after all, borne ten children. Could that have been mentioned with a similar stress as he placed on the £600 pounds, indeed, as the justification for the £600.

  He directed th
at he be buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious and strictly private manner; and that no public announcement be made of the time or place of his burial, saying:

  that at the upmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be employed; and that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band, or other such revolting absurdity . . . I conjure my friends on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever. I rest my claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works, and to the remembrance of my friends upon their experience of me in addition thereto. I commit my soul to the mercy of God through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and I exhort my dear children humbly to try to guide themselves by the teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit, and to put no faith in any man’s narrow construction of its letter here or there.

  39

  Alfred sent me a copy of a letter he’d written to Mr Rusden, to whom I would be forever grateful for finding me my place at Momba. Alfred’s letter was pitiful to read, because in some elements it was in contrast to his private thoughts, although it is possible that he believed utterly in what he sent me as a copy:

  I do not think I probably realised the full extent of my loss till yesterday when my home letters came, and then all hope of some mistake or contradictions vanished. It is very hard to think that I shall never see him again, and that he who was so good, so gentle with us all, has passed away. There is but one unfortunate incident in our dear father’s life, and that was his separation from our mother. As people will doubtless talk about this, may I ask you to state the facts properly for myself and Plorn, should you hear them be misrepresented. When the separation took place, it made no difference in our feelings towards them: we children always loved them equally, having free intercourse with both, as of old: while no word on the subject ever passed from the lips of either father or mother. Of the causes which led to this unfortunate event, we know no more than the rest of the world. Our dear mother has suffered so much, my eldest sister, Katie, in a letter said to me, ‘Poor dear she is better than I dared to hope she would be, and I’m sure that in a little time she will be more settled, and even happier than she has been for years, for she says what is true that she has already lived twelve years of widowhood, and now she feels that there is nobody nearer to him than she is.’ My heart is too full to write of any other subject than this today.