Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  In the autumn of 1869, Dickens began writing his fifteenth novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

  He began reluctantly. Since finishing Our Mutual Friend four years earlier, he had spent almost all his creative energies on his public readings. “While so engaged,” he wrote early in 1868, “I cannot write,” and at that point he had no plans for a novel: “What I may do next in the way of fiction, or when I may do it, are questions, therefore, on which I cannot bind myself in anyway.” He was then on his American tour; within six months of his return he would embark on a tour of a hundred more readings in the British Isles, and according to Dolby he again entertained the idea of reading in Australia, where two of his sons had emigrated. So long as his health held out, he was eager to continue public readings, content to defer novel-writing. Only when compelled to abandon his reading desk in April 1869 did he resign himself to his writing desk. The four years since he had finished Our Mutual Friend was already the longest interval between novels since his first novel more than thirty years earlier. Uncertain that he was equal to another twenty-number serial like Our Mutual Friend, he planned its successor for only twelve monthly numbers. As it turned out, even that was too hopeful.

  The ever-rolling stream to which Dickens liked to consign his fictional characters was bearing him along rapidly. Sending his youngest son Plorn off to Australia in September 1868, he wrote him in farewell: “I need not tell you that I love you dearly, and am very, very sorry in my heart to part with you. But this life is half made up of partings, and these pains must be borne.” Putting Plorn on a train in London, he knew he was unlikely to see him again (nor did he). “It was a hard parting at the last,” he told his friend Fechter. “He seemed to me to become once more my youngest and favourite little child as the day drew near, and I did not think I could have been so shaken.” To Dolby, who had young children, he wrote: “When you come (if you ever do) to send your youngest child thousands of miles away for an indefinite time, and have a rush into your soul of all the many fascinations of the last little child you can ever dearly love, you will have a hard experience of this wrenching life.”

  When his younger brother Fred died the following month, Dickens’s grief was more temperate: “a wasted life,” he remarked candidly. Yet like Plorn’s departure, Fred’s death took away a once fondly loved child: “I am truly grateful to you, in remembrance of him,” he thanked Fred’s physician for his deathbed care. “How tenderly I write these words you can scarcely imagine, unless you know that he was my favorite when he was a child, and that I was his tutor when he was a boy.”

  To the end, Ellen remained his consolation and his passion. His love for her, he had written, “belongs to my life and probably will only die out of the same with the proprietor”—and this proved the case.

  She remains only intermittently visible during the last year of his life. That almost all his letters are dated from either Gad’s Hill or his office, and almost none from Peckham, conceals how much time he spent with her there. In August 1869, for instance, he assured one correspondent that “any communication from you will find me with little delay. I may not be here at the moment, but in that case shall be merely cruising about the country within a short circuit, and shall be in town every week.” Woven into this disingenuous comment are the three loci of Dickens’s last years: “here” was Gad’s Hill; “town” was London, to attend to All the Year Round and other business; while “cruising about the country” took him straight to Ellen in Peckham.

  His inner circle—Georgina, his two daughters, Forster, and Ellen herself—maintained their conspiracy of silence until his death and beyond, excising virtually all references to her in the letters they did not destroy. Two fellow conspirators, however, his subeditor Wills and readings manager Dolby, left behind a few letters which escaped Georgina’s scissors. Though often fragmentary and coded, Dickens’s occasional allusions to Ellen in these letters show how thoroughly she was woven into the fabric of his life during his last years, and how she permeated his imagination.

  In the summer of 1869, for example, after much deliberation, he arrived at a title for his new novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and to celebrate “he gave a little dinner of three,” Dolby recalled, “a sort of christening party, at which we drank but one toast, ‘Success to the Mystery of Edwin Drood.’” Dolby’s coy mention of a third, unnamed member of this cozy dinner party guarantees that it was Ellen.

  At the end of September, Dickens traveled to Birmingham to give an address at the annual banquet of the Birmingham and Midland Institute. Several weeks before, he had written to the Institute’s founder, Arthur Ryland, that “I shall not be able to profit by your kind offer of hospitality when I come to Birmingham.… I must come down in time for a quiet dinner at the Hotel with my ‘Readings’ Secretary Mr. Dolby—and must away next morning. Besides having a great deal in hand just now (the trifle of a new book among other things), I shall have visitors from abroad here at that time,” and so on. Did Ryland wonder about this elaborate excuse-making? Well he might, for rather than hurrying back to London the morning after his speech, Dickens instead enjoyed a day of sightseeing with Ellen: “I have a notion, if it will suit you,” he had informed Dolby, “of supplementing the speechmaking with a small N excursion next Day to Stratford, or Kenilworth, or both, or somewhere else, in a jovial way.” Dolby need not plan on keeping them company, he added. As Dickens scarcely needed his readings manager to manage a single banquet speech, it seems likely that the obliging Dolby was brought to Birmingham principally to escort Ellen while Dickens himself was in public view. Did any of the Birmingham worthies assembled to hear his wisdom on the subject of “Education for the People” suspect that the attractive young woman sitting with Dolby was the great writer’s mistress?

  Perhaps even stronger evidence of Ellen’s regular presence in Dickens’s life emerges from casual allusions to her in his letters, all the more suggestive just because they are so casual. Late in 1869, for example, he wrote to Dolby from his office: “In answer to your enquiry to N—I do not think I shall be here until Wednesday in the ordinary course.” Evidently Ellen had seen Dolby recently, and Dickens himself even more recently—both encounters being routine enough to require no comment; Dolby, moreover, expected that Ellen would be familiar with Dickens’s plans for the week, or at least knew that she would see Dickens soon enough to relay his inquiry. On the Wednesday in question, he attended a play in London, probably with Ellen, then he disappeared for two days—again, probably to Peckham with Ellen.

  Early in the new year, 1870, he briefly resumed his public readings, giving a dozen final performances, all in London to avoid the stress and wear of railway travel. Two of the readings were special matinées for actors and actresses unable to attend evening readings. “The patient was in attendance and missed you,” he wrote to Wills after the second of these afternoon performances. “I was charged with all manner of good and kind remembrance.” The following week, he reported that “I have just come back (as you may possibly have heard from Dolby) after 2 days in the country”—“the country” being code for somewhat rural Peckham. The following month, he invited Wills to “a certain small dinner of four, next Thursday the 3rd. March at Blanchard’s in Regent Street at 6 sharp”—to celebrate Ellen’s thirty-first birthday; Dolby probably made the fourth.

  Early in May, just a month before his death, he employed one of the hoariest of his Ellen alibis: “In addition to my usual engagements, I have been (and still am), in attendance on a sick friend at some distance,” and he nursed the sick friend for several more days. The following Thursday he was again at Windsor Lodge. The following week, two weeks before his death, he was “away” for three days. And just the week before his death, he apologized for his tardiness in replying to a letter by explaining that he had just returned to Gad’s Hill the night before, “having come here from town circuitously, to get a little change of air on the road”—the last of his evasive alibis for visits to Ellen.

  Such
scattered glimpses of her, each one inconclusive by itself, together assume a distinct pattern. While her inconspicuous footprint in the documentary record may make her seem an interesting but peripheral figure in the background of Dickens’s last years, she was in fact center stage—as much as he, enacting Bill Sikes bludgeoning Nancy in the glare of gaslight, was the focus of the rapt audiences at his readings. Except during his months in America, he saw her frequently and intimately, at a great cost of time, trouble, secrecy, and deception. Regularly scheming to be with her, he eagerly took time from his busy and demanding life to vanish in her company. He maintained her in comfort, and set aside generous sums in trust for her. If not a notably faithful husband, he proved a loyal and ardent lover, never swerving from his devotion to his beloved Nelly, or from his desire and determination to be with her. Near or far, she was on his mind constantly.

  In action and in imagination, he doted on her. Despite the frequency of their meetings and the many days they spent together—despite their ménage in Slough and then Peckham—he never took her for granted. She remained the magic circle of one. Until his death, she was his “Nelly”—“my dear,” “my dear girl,” “my dear Patient,” “my Darling.” Georgina Hogarth might be “the best and truest friend man ever had,” but “friend” reveals the limits of her influence. Ellen reigned over regions of his imagination that Georgina never visited.

  Writing to the Fieldses early in 1870, Dickens hoped that they had heard about “the little touch of Radicalism I gave them at Birmingham” in a speech the week before. There is something slightly absurd about a wealthy and cosseted celebrity boasting of his Radicalism (in the same letter, he announced that “The Conservatory [at Gad’s Hill] is completed, and is a brilliant success:—but an expensive one!”). A legacy of the 1830s, Dickens’s Radicalism was by 1870 as dated as Mr. Pickwick’s breeches, and his “radical” Birmingham speech amounted to little more than commonplace populist sentiment. Far more revolutionary than anything in his political views was his intrigue with the young woman who had accompanied him to Birmingham, clandestinely, a year earlier. Under the influence of that twelve-year fascination and devotion, Dickens had gone back to school.

  His gave his last public reading in March 1870. “For some fifteen years,” he said in his concluding remarks, “I have had the honour of presenting my own cherished ideas before you for your recognition; and, in closely observing your reception of them, have enjoyed an amount of artistic delight and instruction which, perhaps, is given to few men to know.” In the future, to his regret, he would have to forgo the immediacy of his audiences’ tears, laughter, and applause, and confine his performances to his study. During those years of readings,

  I have been uniformly cheered by the readiest response, the most generous sympathy, and the most stimulating support. Nevertheless, I have thought it well, at the full flood-tide of your favour, to retire upon those older associations between us, which date from much further back than these, and henceforth to devote myself exclusively to that art which first brought us together.

  In short, as David Copperfield’s Mr. Micawber would have said, it was back to writing. The end of his readings, forced upon him by poor health, could only have heightened his awareness of ebbing strength, of time’s irresistible current moving him along, of the final act beginning.

  And as he gave his last public reading in March 1870, the first installment of his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was about to appear.

  It is tempting to compare The Mystery of Edwin Drood with The Tempest, traditionally considered Shakespeare’s valedictory, though Dickens could not have known that Drood would be his final work and scarcely intended to leave it only half-finished. But it was written with a heightened awareness of mortality and of endings. “In this brief life of ours, it is sad to do almost anything for the last time,” he had said after his final public reading in Boston two years earlier; and at his last public reading ever, he concluded: “… from these garish lights I vanish now forever, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and affectionate farewell.”

  There is a flavor of nostalgia in The Mystery of Edwin Drood: to begin, its principal setting, the cathedral town of Cloisterham, reproduces the cathedral town of Dickens’s childhood, Rochester. When people who grew up in Cloisterham “come back from the outer world at long intervals … the striking of the Cathedral clock, and the cawing of the rooks from the Cathedral tower, are like the voices of their nursery time.” Yet the chief issues in Drood are not memory and youth, but love and death. Death is a brooding, ominous presence, lurking in the menace of the villain John Jasper and in uncertainty about his nephew Edwin’s fate. (“Dead? Or Alive?” was one title Dickens considered.) The tower of Cloisterham cathedral offers a vista of life and death juxtaposed, and of life flowing toward death, naturally and inevitably:

  … they look down on Cloisterham, fair to see in the moonlight: its ruined habitations and sanctuaries of the dead, at the tower’s base: its moss-softened red-tiled roofs and red-brick houses of the living, clustered beyond: its river winding down from the mist on the horizon, as though that were its source, and already heaving with a restless knowledge of its approach towards the sea.

  To those who grew up in Cloisterham, “it has happened in their dying hours afar off, that they have imagined their chamber floor to be strewn with the autumnal leaves fallen from the elm trees in the Close: so have the rustling sounds and fresh scents of their earliest impressions, revived, when the circle of their lives was very nearly traced, and the beginning and end were drawing close together”—an image drawn from Dickens’s memory of his sister Fanny on her deathbed twenty years earlier. His recollection shortly before his own death of Fanny’s dying illusions seems curiously premonitory. Perhaps Drood is tinged with a presentiment that “the mouth of Old Time” was soon to swallow Dickens himself. Whether or no, he wrote the final words of Drood only an hour or two before his fatal collapse. Whatever he had to say at the end of his life we must find in Drood or not at all.

  Most of the commentary on the fragment has focused on the unsolved crime. The mystery plot is baffling: a sinister villain with an opium addiction, murderous opium fantasies, and a suspiciously long scarf; the unaccountable disappearance of the nephew he professes to love; the witch-like proprietress of an opium den who stalks the villain; a moonlit cathedral crypt; quicklime; a telltale ring; an incognito detective; genuine and false clues on every page—all invite the reader into a blind labyrinth. Even alive, Dickens kept the secret to himself—concealing it even in his working notes—and now it lies entombed forever (perhaps like Edwin Drood himself). As an insoluble riddle, The Mystery of Edwin Drood rather resembles life itself.

  Nonetheless, there are clear indications of where the novel was going.

  Its dark elements portend violence, treachery, murder—or at least a murderous attempt. The villain Jasper is always associated with darkness: “… a dark man of some six-and-twenty, with thick, lustrous, well-arranged black hair and whisker,” his rooms “mostly in shadow”; he is a “shadow on the sun-dial,” “setting, as it were, his black mark upon the very face of day”; he is nocturnal, and his nephew Drood disappears on a stormy night. Jasper’s violence is barely suppressed. In a deleted manuscript passage, Jasper in an opium fit directs his nephew Edwin to “Put those knives out at the door—both of them!”—because, he declares, they may attract lightning—though there is no sign of a storm. The two knives allude to Macbeth; but scarcely able to restrain himself from murdering his nephew on the spot, Jasper, unlike Macbeth, seems no half-hearted murderer.

  Whether Jasper in fact murders Drood, and if so how and where, remain open questions, but one certainty is that for two pairs of characters the novel will end in marriage. In this respect, The Mystery of Edwin Drood more closely resembles Shakespearean comedy than it does Macbeth. Like Twelfth Night, for example, Drood features orphaned look-alike twins, a brother and sister of obscure origin cast up on a foreign shore, the siste
r much the stronger character in both play and novel. Shakespeare’s comedies are usually animated by spirited, resourceful heroines, and while the next-to-last chapter of Drood would probably have been harrowing, the final chapter would have seen the novel’s two heroines, Helena and Rosa, prevail.

  As usual in Dickens’s novels, it is the heroines who matter most.

  The dark figure of the murderous Jasper glooms so ominously over the Drood fragment that it is surprising to discover that in searching for an illustrator, Dickens was apparently indifferent about the portrayal of Jasper and worried instead about that of his two heroines. His son-in-law, Katie’s husband Charles Collins, was initially commissioned to illustrate The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and got as far as designing the wrapper cover for the monthly installments. But Collins was a sick man and could go no farther, and Dickens had to seek a replacement. At the recommendation of John Everett Millais, Dickens wrote to the young painter Luke Fildes: “I see … that you are an adept at drawing scamps,” adding “send me some specimens of pretty ladies.” Complying with this demand, Fildes submitted, in addition, a sketch he had drawn of a scene in David Copperfield. These samples were all very well, Dickens judged, but he still worried about Fildes’s knack for drawing handsome heroines. Writing to his publisher Frederic Chapman, he complained that “there are many points of merit in the Copperfield design, but it is wanting in a sense of beauty.” Lest Chapman should wonder why Fildes’s sense of beauty was so critical, Dickens explained: “In the new book I have two beautiful and young women, strikingly contrasted in appearance, who will both be very prominent in the story.” This declaration of the heroines’ prominence is one of his few explicit statements about the novel.