The Last Dickens

by Matthew Pearl

  Rebecca, who was bringing a box of cigars for them to the Authors’ Room, had paused at the door and glowed at Osgood's praise for her brother.

  ON THE WAY OUT of the office building on that day, pleased at the resolution, Dolby purchased several papers from a newsboy. “That Osgood is a genial man, Branagan, though with an almost grim smile,” he was saying. “Don't you notice? He smiles as if he does not believe anything he beholds. Oh, God! That I were but dead!” Dolby exclaimed upon opening one of the papers.

  The article called “Dickensiana” described a floral offering left for Dickens at his second Boston reading by a young woman. Dickens does not live with his wife, it is said. This fact adds spice to this little story. The nice parties he gives are usually to several people largely of the female persuasion, all of whom were captivated by the Bozzian soup and sentences. Oh, Charles, at your age and with that bald head and that gray goatee!

  In a different paper, a cartoon showed a haughty Dickens on the streets of Boston with a young boy running up to him. The boy held a large letter H-the letter dropped from most words by the cockney accent-and was shouting, “Hello mister, look-a-here, you've dropped suthin’.” It was not the first paper to mock his modest cockney origins.

  “‘At your age,’ dear heavens! That would put him in a red hot fury for three days. On penalty of your life, don't let the Chief see them, Branagan!” Dolby stopped the next newsboy he could find and bought up every copy of the papers in his possession.

  AFTER A SERIES of successful readings in Boston, the entire party took a nine-hour express train to New York, where it had been snowing heavily. Within a few days of their arrival, eighteen inches covered the ground, walls of white lining the sides of the streets. Dolby hired a sleigh for the Dickens party to use since the carriages could no longer get around. Dickens, whenever he left the Westminster Hotel, would resemble some kind of Old World emperor as he was pulled on the red sleigh, his lap piled high with buffalo robes to keep out the cold.

  The New York World, in an article about how Dickens desired privacy, included his room number at the hotel. The article also noted rather disapprovingly Dickens did not use the mustard on the table once during his first dinner there. The Herald suggested that the scum of New York surround this visiting Homer of the slums and back alleys so that he could not slip out unnoticed as he had tried to do in Boston.

  Tom arrived at the hotel with some of the late baggage and found Dickens and Dolby comforting an old woman who was sobbing tears of humiliation. The hotel detective stood over them.

  Tom joined Richard Kelly, their ticket agent. “What happened?” Tom whispered.

  Kelly explained that she was a widow who was very dear to the hotel landlord and had brought flowers to Dickens's room. As she was exiting Dickens's room, another woman appeared in the hall and started pummeling the widow with her fists. By the time the victim's shouts brought Dickens and a hotel waiter running, the other woman was gone.

  “Imagine a poor little white-haired widow-one of the Majesty's admirers-attacked!”

  “Why would that other woman have done that?”

  “Because she was a little off her head!” concluded Kelly.

  Tom, preoccupied with what had happened, left Kelly's side and went back to the hall.

  “I don't know,” he could hear the crying widow saying. “She said I had awful daring to go into the rooms of Charles Dickens without escort like I was your wife. She just kept hitting me, first with her carpetbag and then her fists. Oh, Mr. Dickens!”

  Dickens replied, “I am sorry for this. Queer it is that I should be perpetually having things happen that nobody else in the world would be made to believe.”

  FOR THE NEXT SERIES of sales, Dolby had a plan to combat the speculators. Each ticket would be stamped with a unique number before it was sold, defeating reported counterfeiting attempts. With ten thousand tickets for the next New York sale, and then eight thousand for Baltimore and six thousand for Washington, this required many days’ work for Tom, Richard, and Marshall Wild, an unassuming American ticket agent hired to help them. The labor of the stamping kept waking Dickens, so Dolby moved the group into the hallway where they had to sit on the floor. Next, Dolby instructed his staff that the first fifty men on line for the tickets-who were always mostly speculators or their agents-should be sold tickets only for the back rows of the theater so that the speculators could not grab the best seats.

  The papers, of course, printed reports of Dolby bullying the innocent New York citizens in his search for speculators and gleefully remarked that no “Dolby ex machina” would solve the problem. “Surely it is time that the Pudding-Headed Dolby”-preached the World- “retired into the native gloom from which he has emerged!”

  This time the sale was to be held in Brooklyn and on a bitter day, colder than any they experienced in Boston. At eight o'clock in the morning, their sleigh arrived after being conveyed by ferry across the river. Dolby stepped down to the street with his case of tickets, followed by Tom, Kelly, and Wild.

  “Good Lord,” Dolby swore to himself in a low whisper looking over the spectacle.

  The line was three quarters of a mile long. Later it would be reported by the newspapers, in the aftermath of the incident about to transpire, as three thousand people. They had chosen the Plymouth Church for the reading as the only building suitable for the expected size of the audience. The pulpit had to be taken down to make room for the gas lighting and the screen.

  The ticket staff was hassled by the crowd as they went.

  “We'll buy you right up, Dolby, sleigh and all!”

  “So Charley has let you have the sleigh, has he, Dolby? How's he feeling this morning? Writing a new book for us?”

  “Let me carry the ticket portmanteau for you, Pudding-Head! Tell Dickens to take my wife back with him to the mother island if he don't want his no more!”

  There were policemen and detectives already present trying to hold back the crowd. One of the police officers made his way to Dolby and whispered to him. Dolby nodded and headed to the ticket office to prepare for the onslaught.

  During the night the Réaumur thermometer had dropped below zero. The men who had lined up stretched out on straw mattresses, drank cheap whisky, sang rowdy songs, built fires. Pocket pistols had been displayed to ward off latecomers hoping to steal spots.

  The policemen had identified a large number of known speculators not only from New York but from Philadelphia, New Haven, and Jersey City as well. The speculators’ aides toasted to Dickens's health with bourbon whiskey and ate bread and meat they had been supplied in little bags by their employers. Included in the group was the speculator seen before, old in appearance yet quite energetic, in the outfit of George Washington. He was babbling about how Charles Dickens's visit was the most important affair in all American history. Coming from George Washington, this seemed rare praise.

  “For we won't go home till morning, till daylight does appear!” The song started somewhere in the middle of the line and spread through the motley crowd. One fellow proposed a toast to the two men who had put their stamps on the civilization of the nineteenth century, “William Dickens and Charles Shakespeare. Let anyone deny it who dares!” he boomed.

  Another man stepped out of the line and tapped Tom on the arm with his bamboo walking stick. “You! What do you mean by this?”

  “I beg your pardon,” Tom replied.

  “You mean to fix me next to two God darned niggers?”

  Tom looked at the line behind the man and saw two young men with the slightest tinge of brown in their faces.

  “You will sit in the church, sir, exactly where your ticket indicates,” said Tom.

  “You'd better promise to move me, boy, if I'm next to one of these two!”

  “I am certain Mr. Dickens would not recognize that objection,” Tom said evenly, his muscles tensing in preparation to restrain the man if he had to. “You may leave now if you'd like.”

  The man, fuming and loo
king ready to pull out his hair, turned and walked away shouting epithets directed at Charles Dickens for holding open readings and Abraham Lincoln for freeing blacks to attend them. The two men in line both touched their hats in thanks to Tom.

  Meanwhile, the police were extinguishing bonfires too close to the wooden houses along either side of the narrow street, eliciting a bluster of threats from the mob. Tom continued inspecting the line, struck by the endless representation of humanity. As had happened in Boston, the higher classes had employees or servants to hold their places through the night; as a result, around nine o'clock in the morning the composition of the line metamorphosed from caps to hats, from mittens to kid gloves and walking sticks.

  Tom shifted attention to a woman who was staring inquisitively in his direction. Eyes cold and clear but dim, she stood outside the queue of people, almost as though she were undertaking the same sort of inspection as Tom's. She had a notebook and was writing pensively with a pencil stump, frowning in a way that seemed to indicate the permanent expression of her face. Was she another shorthand writer sent by the pirate publishers? The gazer flipped some pages to find a fresh one. One of her pages had a splotch of mud, or some sort of muddy footprint pasted on top.

  “Do you wish to wait for tickets, ma'am?” Tom asked, approaching her and lifting his hat. “We do permit women in the line, or you may ask someone to wait on your behalf.” Just then some rowdy men in the queue burst back into song.

  We'll sing, we'll dance, and be merry,

  And kiss the lasses dear

  For we won't go home till morning,

  Till daylight does appear…

  “Those horrid, vulgar, vulgar knaves,” the woman observed loudly of the ragged choir. She had removed a pearl-handled switchblade to sharpen the lead of her pencil. Tom noticed that for a small knife it had a smart blade. “Not the sort that would ever appreciate, truly, a Charles Dickens. I heard some of those knaves and fools quoting pas-sages to each other-quite wrongly. One said he was quoting Nickelby, but it was most obviously Oliver Twist! ‘Surprises, like misfortunes, seldom come alone.’

  Something about her tugged at Tom's memory as he looked upon her. “Have you attended a reading by Mr. Dickens before?” Tom asked.

  “Have I? Come closer. What's your name, dear boy?”

  Tom hesitated, then leaned in to the woman and told her. She had a manly demeanor but pretty features covered up by the wide black feathered hat that was in fashion. He guessed she was around her fortieth year but she had the self-assurance of a sixteen-year-old belle or a seventy-year-old matron.

  “Indeed I have been to his readings!” she suddenly said in an even bigger shout. “He adapts them for me, you know!” She paused, pursing her lips. “He changes the books as he reads, doing all manner of wild improvising for me. Dickens, I mean,” she said after testing the length of Tom's silence. “I daresay you think me very odd.”

  “Ma'am?”

  “You do!” she shouted. “There's one of those horrid, vulgar Americans, you say to yourself. Well, yes, it's true, I'm not a nice girl. I am an incubus, really. I'm part English, too, you know. But you're-you're from the potato lands, aren't you? You dream of want and woe, with buttermilk in your blood.” Suddenly she jumped as if it startled by thunder. She pulled a watch from her carpetbag. “I'm horrid late! I've just missed two appointments in the time we've spoken. Good-bye, au revoir.”

  Tom moved on, suddenly realizing what had struck him about her. It wasn't the woman exactly, though he had seen her before among the crowds that always formed around Dickens. It was the notebook he had noticed: the paper of which was the same peach color and size-just the same, Tom was certain-as the letter left in Dickens's hotel room that he still kept. He retrieved that letter from his coat. The writer had claimed to be Dickens's favorite reader in all of these vulgar American states, words similar to the ones the woman had spoken. Tom turned back and saw she was heading away from the line.

  “Ma'am,” Tom called out, and she began to walk more quickly. “Hold there. Ma'am!”

  Then Tom heard his own name being called from a distance. He tried to ignore it-if this woman was who he thought she was, this might be his chance to put to rest his questions about the incident at the hotel. Tom waded through the throng, keeping sight of the feathers of her hat swaying above the landscape of people.

  “Branagan!” It was another shout, louder, and there was no ignoring it. “B-B-Branagan!”

  Tom looked over his shoulder and found that the previously small bursts of commotion in the line had erupted into a brawl. Combatants were thrashing one another hard with sticks from the bonfire and trampling over the fallen. In the middle of it all was a party of Brooklyn police and speculators. The police were swinging their batons against the sticks. Mr. George Washington staggered, his nose dripping blood and yanked-out strands of his white wig hanging from his ear. As the combat spread, several enterprising ticket seekers, faces bloodied, dragged their mattresses behind them and rushed to the front of the line for better spots.

  Tom leaped into the heart of the fight, tackling one of the offenders, and liberated a policeman. A man screaming wildly swung a burning stick at Tom's head-Tom caught the stick in the middle, breaking it with his hand and then shoved the attacker into the snowbank. By this point, more police charged by with batons drawn, dragging rowdies away. Many wanted more than anything else just to keep their places in line by gripping the iron railing of the church fence as if their lives depended on it. To his astonishment, Tom noticed that several plainclothes detectives, instead of helping, used the disturbance to take their own prime positions in line.

  The George Washington speculator was crying out in an outraged scream as he was being pulled away by his belt, “Hand out honors to a Cockney foreigner for his trashy literary pamphlets that were never given to our own homegrown heroes-our own democrats like Washington himself! The literary war between the Old World and the New World has begun!”

  “Branagan, all r-r-right over here?” Dolby rushed to his side, breathless, eyes wide at all the men knocked down around his porter. He studied Tom with a new respect.

  Tom was inspecting his palm, which had been burned by the flaming stick and would need to be wrapped right away. “What happened?” he asked Dolby.

  “Disaster!” Dolby cried. With his stutter heavy from the fright, he explained they had begun the ticket sales by enforcing their new policy against the speculators. When it was understood that the first portion of the line were to receive tickets in the rear galleries, the hotheaded speculators protested and cursed vociferously, while the levelheaded ones bribed the men behind them to trade places. Those who were not speculators protested, as well. The various disruptions escalated into general mayhem up and down the line.

  “Where were you?” Dolby said to Tom accusingly. “They wanted to tear me to p-p-pieces!”

  Tom looked over his shoulder but knew that the woman with the notebook would be gone. There would be no point now in getting his employer's dander up. “I apologize, Mr. Dolby. I was inspecting the bonfires.”

  “You should have been at the ready.”

  “I am sorry, sir.”

  Dolby straightened out his suit and neckcloth, though he remained the model of dishevelment. “Well, let's get on with it. There's at least two thousand dollars to be taken from this crowd, if there's a dollar! Isn't that the American way?”

  AFTER A SET of readings in New York, the schedule required Dickens, Dolby, and staff in Boston. Because the snow had closed the railroad, they waited around until Saturday in New York, where they were subjected to the papers’ columns condemning the events at the Brooklyn ticket sales and blaming a “hotheaded Irishman” employed by Dickens for starting the near riot. This fact was confirmed by an unimpeachable “bewigged, buckled, three corner hatted witness,” the George Washington speculator who urged the police to arrest Tom at once. Meanwhile, Dickens had entered the depths of a worsening cold-“English colds are nothing c
ompared to those of this country,” he proclaimed gravely-but Dolby privately worried it was worse, perhaps influenza. Another long train ride now would not help. Dickens signaled Henry Scott to remove a flask from the traveling case as soon as they took their seats.

  Henry, meanwhile, prayed for Dickens before each journey by rail.

  “Is anything wrong, Henry?” Tom asked him once when he had first noticed this display.

  “Staplehurst!” Henry replied gloomily.

  “Staplehurst?”

  “Yes, only that. If there were but no Staplehurst at all-no June the ninth-perhaps the Chief should not be such a sad man.”

  “He still seems rather gay to me,” Tom noted, “for what you call a sad man.”

  “Don't you read the papers? Don't you know anything at all, Tom Branagan?”

  He described how approximately two years earlier, on June 9, 1865, Dickens had nearly been killed. A terrible train accident near the village of Staplehurst in Kent. The railway tracks covering a bridge had been removed for repair without alerting the oncoming trains. Dickens and his party were aboard the “tidal train” from France, which, reaching the portion of missing track, careened off the bridge.

  Dickens had lifted Nelly Ternan and her mother from their dangling first-class car to safety, and then the novelist climbed to the ravine below where he pulled out as many victims as he could. Despite his brave efforts, ten people died that day as the novelist watched helplessly. Dickens climbed back into the dangling train compartment twice during the ordeal. First to retrieve brandy for the suffering patients below. Then he realized however dangerous it was he had to climb back in again. Inside his coat was a new installment of the novel he was writing, Our Mutual Friend, the pages of which were dirty but unharmed. Forever after, whenever the novelist stepped foot in a railway car, a steamer, even a hackney cab, he could not help but be reminded that here could be our final passage on this earth. Brandy helped nerve him on these occasions.