*This event was described in Collins’s first discovered journal that I as editor retitled for publication as The Detective and Mr. Dickens (St. Martin’s Press, 1990).
*This was quoted by James Boswell in his compendious life of Dr. Johnson, a staple of every reputable Victorian library.
A Night in Newgate
January 12–13, 1852
Dickens’s night in Newgate was not one of induced and dreamless sleep as was mine in the back of Sleepy Rob’s cab.
“They came to me in the night, these familiars, these devils sent from some other world. They danced around me like furies sent to plague my imagination. They were familiar familiars, indeed, yet changed and mixed, distorted and confused. They were grotesque, but not deformed. They were indeed frightening, yet in no way maimed or twisted or threatening. They were, perhaps, so unsettling because they seemed to follow no plots, move in no foreseen direction, exist for no reason but to plague me with past guilts, past sins, past omissions, and new spectres of threat. Perhaps they were a warning for the future.
“These phantasms swirled around me, sometimes flying in the air, sometimes dancing and jumping and howling around that tiny cell, striking sparks off the touching of their feet, flames bursting out in their hair, circling with grotesque grins and maniacal laughter, pointing crook’d forefingers at me as if I were the sacrificial victim at the centre of some strange satanic rite.
“That tall and ragged Jew, that twisted dwarf, that hanged man, that lecherous nobleman, those fiery rioters, the dying children, the starving workers, the drunken husbands, the shrewish wives, the cursing rich and the weeping poor, the murderers, the monsters, the lawyers.
“All were there to plague me, as if a magical casement had suddenly opened in that solid stone wall and they had all flooded in to drown me in their palpable presences. In a profane chorus they cursed me for creating them, and not heeding them, and killing them off at my whim. They screeched demands of me. As they danced and howled around me, they were ghastly devils, mythic monsters, real people begging for new life. As they swirled and jumped and flew around me, I had the power in but the blink of my eye to shift their shape, control their destinies even as they spun in the midst of this demonic dance. At once they were both daimons and demons, angels and devils, human beings and phantasms insubstantial as air. And yet they all were grey as death no matter how animated in their dance or fiery in their demeanor or gay in their finery. They were all dead, ghosts, and it was as if they held me solely accountable. I felt like Odysseus in the underworld facing the despair of his fellow comrades from the field of Troy.
“But this dance of my furies, my devilish familiars, was but a general phantasmagoria, a prelude to my real horror. Soon I was cast into a terrible dream. My real nightmare began.
“I was in a closed room, at first it was that cell in Newgate, but then it was this newspaper office, but then again it was my study in the Devonshire Terrace house. I was being held prisoner in that protean room which kept changing yet was always so familiar. I tried to leave the room. There was a polished brass knob on the door. I turned it, pulled at it, tried with both hands to open the door, but the knob simply froze and the door would not open. I braced my feet against the door and pulled on that mocking shiny knob, but the door would not open. And then the voices began.
“‘Play with me, Daddy dear. Do you have to go?’ a child’s voice, not sad, laughing but coaxing. My baby Dora?* ‘Charles, how nice of you to come, I haven’t seen you for awhile,’ my own dad’s voice, I think,* not censuring, only making conversation, filling dead air with meaningless babble as he always did. But the next was different. ‘Help me, someone help me!’ it screamed, terror quivering in all its registers. And I pulled harder at the knob and the door ’til my arms ached with the effort and a burning pain seared between my shoulder blades. It was her voice, Wilkie, not screaming for me, but screaming for help, for someone, anyone, to save her from that rapist, from those men.* And there was nothing I could do. I was helpless, Wilkie, locked in my room, trying to get out, but locked in behind that heavy immovable door, at the mercy of that cold, polished brass knob.
“I stepped back and stared at that brass knob, then fell to one knee to see if I was right. My face was staring back at me out of that polished piece of brasswork. I was my own gaoler. That brass knob mirrored my own restless unease with this locked-in life I lead. That is what that dream meant. Unable to open that door, imprisoned, whether in a gaol like Newgate as I was last night, or within my own mind, it makes no difference, a prison is a frightening place, Wilkie. The horror was in the realising that I was in that prison and that I was the gaoler as well; my whole life was a prison keeping me from the important things beckoning on the other side of the locked door.
“I tell you, Wilkie, when I awoke from that nightmare I thought for a moment that I actually was in the condemned cell; I was going mad myself as Fagin did before I executed his grim sentence. I felt as if I truly knew what it was like to have that dreadful scaffold looming over my whole existence.”
Dickens, tired and haggard, had a wild and troubled look in his eye as he related all of this strange dreaming to me. He had only two hours before been released from Newgate. Upon awaking from his menacing dreams in that cold dark cell, he had rushed to the door and, to his great relief, it had opened effortlessly to his touch. Stumbling in Tally Ho Thompson’s riding boots, he rushed to the lock and set up a clamour of protest that he was none other than Mister Charles Dickens, the famous author, and that he had been knocked on the head while visiting a prisoner the night before.
The turnkeys, indeed, had a great laugh at that. They thought Dickens more fun and entertainment than a one-man band in Piccadilly. In short, they did not believe his story at all at first. They sent him back to his cell to stew. He must have felt he was in a waking nightmare. But then Forster, who is, after all, Charles’s solicitor, had arrived at the prison, summoned no doubt by Inspector Field, with an order from the Queen’s Bench for Dickens’s release. At the same time, somehow, mysteriously, the Grub Street hacks, as well as reputable reporters of the Fleet Street persuasion, began to arrive at the Newgate lock.
Forster found Dickens with a small bump behind his ear (which Forster wisely insisted the turnkeys on duty examine carefully), but otherwise unhurt. Yet Forster remarked to me later that he had been concerned for Charles that gloomy winter morning as they rode in a hansom away from Newgate.
“He had a troubled look about him,” Forster confided, in a patronising way of course, as if I were some child allowed to sit at the table with the grown-ups. “He seemed shaken and scared.”
Forster, with Dickens in tow, had fought through the crowd of newspaper reporters outside Newgate and had, at Charles’s request, transported him to the Household Words offices in Wellington Street.
“As I walked out in the morning in the company of Forster and a constable, sent by Field no doubt, past that terrible scaffold of death,” Dickens pressed this frightening confidence upon me, “I felt utterly guilty, fit to be hanged. I felt, I swear Wilkie, as if I had just spent the night before my own execution upon that perverse tree.”
Once safe at Wellington Street, Charles, evidently, had assured Forster that all was well and had sent him away. Immediately thereafter, however, Charles must have sent for me because his messenger arrived at my lodgings a bit after eleven as I was yet nursing my headache. Dickens’s message was urgent. He must talk to me. Come quickly.
I, of course, wondered if some hitch had been thrown into Inspector Field’s plan. I hurried to dress and was relieved to find Sleepy Rob dozing on the box of his hansom at the kerbstone before my door. When we arrived at Wellington Street, the sharks had already gathered and were building toward their feeding frenzy. The Grub Streeters ringed the door to Number Sixteen and I had to push my way through them to enter. Wills, Dickens’s faithful office Cerberus, was guarding the door and let me in, though not without trouble in keeping the hungry reporter
s out. All the way there I had speculated upon the reason for the urgency of the summons, but upon arriving it soon became evident that Dickens simply wanted to talk, to narrate his strange dreams, to give voice to his troubling thoughts.
“It was as if the dream had come to me from somewhere else, some other world or time, perhaps the future, the twentieth century. Who knows?” He smiled and shrugged. But that smile was but a brief interlude in his morbid mood.
“It was a frustrating dream. A door one is unable to open, a prison one is unable to escape, voices one is unable to silence, a gaoler who is oneself. I’m telling you all of this because I think it is some sort of message from the future and is important, but I don’t know why, and I want to understand it. What do you think, Wilkie?”
I stared at him wide-eyed as if he had just asked me to murder his wife or empty his dustbins or polish his boots. I didn’t have the remotest idea of how to reply, and my inventive faculties were severely hindered by the throbbing headache with which I was still afflicted. “About the closed door and the brass doorknob?” I stuttered stupidly.
He nodded, waiting.
I could feel the beads of perspiration starting to push out of my forehead as if fleeing the pounding of my headache. I knew I was about to say something incredibly ridiculous and inappropriate, but I knew I had to say something—after all, Charles was depending upon me. I cast around for anything to fill the awkward silence beginning to gape between us.
I couldn’t control what I was saying, but my head hurt so badly that I was distracted. I said the first thing that came to mind. “It reminds me of Scrooge’s door knocker in A Christmas Carol,” I blurted out, and then immediately wanted to strangle myself for saying something so stupid. “The brass doorknob does, I mean. Sort of alike they are, don’t you think?” I waited for Dickens to strike me for being such a dolt or laugh at my moronic answer or hiss at me in anger for saying such an inconsequential thing. To my consternation, he did none of those.
“Good Lord, Wilkie, that’s brilliant!” he exclaimed. “You are right. It is like Scrooge’s dreams, fashioned from the material of my own mind.”
I stared at him, flabbergasted. He wasn’t mocking me. He was serious…or he was in a worse condition than I had imagined.
“Alone in that prison cell, Wilkie, I honestly felt utterly abandoned, a shipwrecked man washed up on some barren isle, a Robinson Crusoe, only worse, lost, no man Friday for company, no prospect for human contact. Imprisoned in that dream, it was as if there was a whole other world existing parallel to this one, within my mind. A world beneath the surface of this world that we know and write about, an inner world that we don’t write enough about.”
Dickens never ceased to amaze me. In the age of Victoria, introspection was not a proper investment. Self-knowledge was in no way redeemable as coin of the realm. The idea of a man attempting to understand some other, inner self would be received with the same hostility that Strauss encountered in his attempts to find a historical Jesus. Our age was simply neither inclined nor equipped to delve beneath the surface of its own closely regulated life. It felt comfortable with the surface appearance that it worked so hard to cultivate. It felt vastly uncomfortable with the ugly realities that lurked beneath that smug surface.
As Dickens talked, I remembered the terrible self-accusation and guilt he expressed that night ten months before as we kept vigil over little Dora Annie’s deathbed. The man was always very hard on himself, and tended to shoulder the blame for all sorts of things over which he had little control. That tendency toward self-doubt and self-blame was certainly one of Dickens’s self-made prisons, his “mind-forged manacles” as William Blake, that madman, might have called it. It was as if this fevered introspection brought about by his dream was an addiction that had locked him in its grip. “I have not been able to get it out of my mind all morning, Wilkie, but you have helped me to understand it.”
Those were Dickens’s own words as he confided them to me that gloomy morning after his night in Newgate. I have recorded them as best I can remember them. Strange, the images of his tormented Newgate dreams remain vivid to me today as if he had only confided them within the last few hours. In fact, since I began these commonplace books I have many times felt his presence upon my text, as though he were here in the room with me even as I write of these secret things lurking beneath the surface of our society, our official biographies. I have no ambition to be his Boswell, yet, perhaps, that is, indeed, the role that I now play. Good God, so often as I write I feel that he is feeding my memory from the vast store of his capacious imagination.
But more than anything else that gloomy morning after Tally Ho Thompson’s escape from Newgate, I remember the great satisfaction I felt in the fact that Dickens had sent that overbearing and petulant prig Forster away and had summoned me to be the receptacle of his secret confidences. Indeed, that alone made all of my feelings of inadequacy and confusion worthwhile.
Dickens had visibly calmed. That fevered, troubled look around his eyes had almost been exorcised. One pressing problem, however, yet remained. The Grub Streeters were still clamouring at his door. I feared that he was going to once again saddle me with the responsibility of dealing with them. Wills poked his timid head up out of the stairwell like a bald kitten peeking from a basket. “They show no signs of leaving, Charles,” he announced in despair as though he had failed in some dangerous mission.
“I’ll attend to them straightaway,” Dickens assured him in his old eager voice devoid of all the indecision and self-doubt of the previous half-hour. Wills gratefully retired as if being lowered out of sight on a dumbwaiter.
“What are you going to tell them, Charles?” I asked as he hitched up his braces and buttoned his vest and snapped on his collar and adjusted his foppish cravat like a knight preparing for a latter-day joust.
“I mean to do exactly what any good novelist ought”—Dickens grinned Tally Ho Thompson’s larcenous grin—“tell a good story, create a fiction.”
* * *
*His youngest child, Dora, had died of a strange seizure on April 14, 1851, some ten months earlier. The night of her death is described in Collins’s first secret journal.
*His father, William Dickens, had died in March, 1851, barely three weeks before the death of little Dora Annie. Dickens, after these two family deaths following one upon the other, had fallen temporarily into a morbid state and had remarked to Collins: “Death seems closing all around me.”
*Collins’s first secret journal also told of the rape, by an assailant subsequently murdered, and the abduction, by Lord Henry Ashbee, of a young actress named Ellen Ternan who, at the time of the events of this second secret journal, was residing in Urania Cottage, a Home for Fallen Women sponsored by Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, a close friend of Dickens, where she was recovering from her ordeal.
“In the Thick of It, Once Again”
January 14, 1852—late morning
After confiding the substance of his nightmares to me that morning after his night in Newgate, and after dealing labouriously with the clamouring press, we decided that our respective headaches deserved attention and that we ought to retire to our respective beds. But as we waited in the bay window overlooking the street for the loitering press to disperse, Charles honored me with one last morbid confidence.
“I fear, Wilkie,” his voice was tired and sad, “that the landscape of my imagination nowadays claims for its central landmark a bleak and abandoned house on a gloomy, haunted moor where the hunted flee the pursuit of the city. The city is always with us. We are imprisoned within it. Yet this deathly house lurks insistently in the landscape of my dreams. Shrouded in fog, it draws me to its dark secrets. I hate that bleak house, Wilkie. I hate it because I cannot capture it in words. One tries to write about both worlds, but it is nigh impossible. One world, our Victorian surface, the city, all of its ills, is too available to us, while that other world of our inner selves seems hardly available at all.”
On
that enigmatic note, I left him nursing his headache and foundering in the melancholy for which I had no ready antidote. If I were composing a novel rather than writing down the truth in this secret journal, there would be no meditative narrative upon Dickens’s dreams. But this is not a novel, and the rules of plotting and pacing do not here apply. Charles was visibly shaken by his dreams. The interior action of his soul was at that time every bit as important as were the stunts Inspector Field was putting us through. I happily accompanied Charles upon his ferocious night walks, and I always went reluctantly along with his adventuring in the company of Inspector Field, but I could think of no way whereby I could become a companion of his troubling interior journeys.
The next morning I awoke to a languid knocking upon my door. It was Sleepy Rob, evidently dispatched by a fully recovered Dickens, with an armload of newspapers and broadsides. The headlines all trumpeted the escape of a suspected murderer from Newgate Prison at the expense of England’s most revered novelist. One penny dreadful blared:
NOVEL ESCAPE!
Another cryptically dabbled in Miltonic allusion:
MURDERER UNBOUND; DICKENS FOUND
Doggerel from one broadside wagged its wit:
Murderer fled;
Knocked on head,
Dickens awakes in
Newgate bed.
One runninghead drew an immediate chuckle when it caught my attention:
ACTOR IMPERSONATES “THE INIMITABLE”
But I did not find myself laughing at what followed this headline:
Even Dickens’s rather dull visiting companion to Newgate, one Wilkie Collins, an aspiring writer and protégé of “the Inimitable,” did not recognise the impersonation which was, evidently, accomplished while said Collins’s back was turned. For his inattention, Collins also was rewarded with a knock on the head in a hansom cab after the escape was accomplished.
The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens Page 9
