The Last Dickens

by Matthew Pearl

  “I understand you have been seen with paper bags piled with greenbacks from your ticket sales, Mr. Dolby,” Pennock said in the same tone he might have chosen if the bags had been human bones. The tax collector's chair was in front of a anthracite coal fire, which outlined the man in a disturbing haze of dark blue that served to distress Dolby further.

  “Mr. Pennock, it is my understanding of your country's law that ‘occasional lectures’-that is the language in the act of Congress-by foreigners on your soil are exempt from taxation.”

  “You've misunderstood the law. Not that it's my duty to explain it. You should begin payments to me from your proceeds now, Dolby, five percent precisely, to avoid more unpleasant business than you've had.”

  “I assure you we haven't had any unpleasant business, sir.”

  Pennock stared hard. “You are having it right now, Mr. Dolby.”

  Dolby looked around the barroom as though he would find help. Instead, he saw a man who was in a sealskin cap and peacoat, the unbuttoned coat revealing the corner of another Treasury Department badge. Dolby did not like the idea that he had been watched by these men taking in his money from the ticket offices, and most of all he hated that he was outnumbered. He wished Tom were there with him, at least. Not that Dolby thought that government agents would attack him, yet with Tom, younger and sturdier, he thought he would have mustered more self-confidence.

  “Even if you are correct in your assessment of this claim, Mr. Pennock,” Dolby began to reply.

  “I am,” Pennock, interrupting, said flatly. “You will pay ten thousand, in gold or greenbacks, or you, each one of you-your beloved Boz included-will be locked away as a hostage before your steamer leaves the shore.”

  “Even if I were to agree to five percent as a just claim,” Dolby said, trying hard not to appear irate. “Even so, I have sent in the receipts from our sales to England already. The money is banked. I couldn't pay you if I had to.”

  “There are alternative solutions.” Pennock waved to the man in the sealskin cap, who moved toward the door. “Mr. Dolby, you are not the only theatrical manager with whom I have business. I understand Mr. Dickens is a man who likes things in good order. I suggest you de-liver your payments before the final readings in New York, or you shall bring Mr. Dickens into some hot water that he won't soon be out of, and shall make him regret stepping foot on American soil. Good night.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, while Dickens had enjoyed his usual breakfast at the Fieldses of a rasher of bacon and an egg with tea, Osgood had asked whether there was anything else the novelist had wanted to see in Boston that had been overlooked. When Osgood pressed the question rather insistently, Dickens had said he was curious about the site of the extraordinary murder of George Parkman at the Medical College. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who'd joined them for breakfast, and who had up until then been boring Dickens with his incessant talk, happened to be a professor there and immediately offered an expedition.

  “Careful now, careful, Mr. Dickens…” Dr. Holmes cautioned. They'd arrived at the site and were descending to an underground chamber beneath the Medical College. “Another two steps down.”

  The two men raised their lanterns. Around them in the grim chamber, shelves and medical jars glimmered with anatomical broth. Dickens picked up one to study by the light. “Pieces of sour mortality,” he commented. “Like the forty robbers in Ali Baba after being scalded to death!”

  “It is all terribly morbid!” Holmes said as Dickens returned the jar to the shelf with the others. “Our Mr. Fields would insist this is no subject for after breakfast. Quite terrible!”

  “Was it not my idea for you to take me here, Dr. Holmes? I could not leave Boston without seeing this.”

  “Perhaps it was your idea, Mr. Dickens,” admitted Holmes. “But you mustn't blame yourself. There's never use in that. My Wendy-Wendell Junior-he would sneer at me for spending time on ‘trivialities’ like this when every hour could be in hot pursuit of dollars.”

  Dickens laughed. “Count yourself lucky, my dear Dr. Holmes. Until Babbage's calculating machine shall be completed, the bills my boys acquire every day could never be added up! I think they have the curse of limpness upon them. I cannot get my hat on some days, I tell you, with how my hair stands up. You are blessed not to know what it is to look around the table and see reflected from every seat of it some expression of inadaptability, horribly remembered from your own father. Now, is this the spot-is this it?”

  Holmes nodded.

  “To be in such a grim place gives that sensation of cold and boiling water alternating down your back.”

  “Right here, unseen by any outside eyes, the unthinkable…” said Holmes.

  Dr. Holmes, poet and medical school professor, savored the chance to be the storyteller. It was in this underground laboratory, Holmes said, that the crime had been committed one chilly November day. That afternoon in 1849, George Parkman, a tall and gangling man, entered the grounds of the Medical College to visit John Webster, professor of chemistry and Holmes's colleague. That was the last time Parkman had been seen alive.

  The Medical College's janitor, Littlefield, had been present when Parkman came into the building. Littlefield had heard Parkman whisper sternly to Webster, “Something must be done,” as if there had been some argument between the two men. Littlefield climbed upstairs to Dr. Holmes's lab to help clean up after a lecture and did not give Parkman any further thought that afternoon.

  “After days without any word of him, Parkman's family was in a state, as you can imagine, my dear Dickens. When it became known that he was last seen here, the janitor Littlefield, a stranger to most men of our society, found himself the object of suspicious eyes, including my own!”

  It was a quiet Wednesday the week of Thanksgiving, when Little-field noticed Webster was in his lab, doors bolted. The janitor, determined to defend his good name, had his own suspicions and watched through the keyhole as the professor hurried around in urgent activity. When Littlefield brushed his hand on the brick wall, he almost cried out. It was scalding hot.

  The janitor waited for Webster to go out for the evening. He then bored a hole from the basement up into the same vault where Holmes and Dickens now stood. When Littlefield pulled himself through to the vault, he saw it. A human body, or part of one, on a hook. Hours later, the police would search more of the lab and find the charred bones of a chopped-up body in the furnace.

  “Nobody in the Medical School has ever used this laboratory again, even though we are sorely out of space and it has been fifteen years and more since the body smoked and burned. You see, superstitions run deep even in men of science-nay, especially in men of science.”

  Dickens listened to the doctor's story intently. “Yet if there is a single place in Boston that has innocent reason to be awash in bones, this Medical College is it,” he commented.

  “The defense attorney argued that! There are bones and bodies everywhere you step here. But it was the false teeth,” Holmes said. “That's what did in poor Webster. The dentist who had made them up for Parkman said he could recognize them anywhere. The broken jaw with the false teeth found by this furnace was the most unimpeachable witness ever seen in court.”

  “The most clever criminals are constantly detected through some small defect in their calculations,” noted Dickens.

  “Poor Webster. To see a man just before he is hanged is really to see a ghost!”

  “Surely, surely,” Dickens mused. “I have often thought how restricted one's conversation must become with a man to be hanged in half an hour. You could not say, if it rains, ‘We shall have fine weather tomorrow!’ for what would that be to him? For my part, I think I should confine my remarks to the times of Julius Caesar and King Alfred!”

  Dickens fell into a fit of coughing while the two men laughed and wrapped himself tighter in his mangy coat. After months of assault from the American worshippers acquiring souvenirs snatching at the fur covering, he looked like a poor shedding animal. />
  “Well enough now, Mr. Dickens?” Dr. Holmes said gently. Word had spread of Dickens's illnesses since the author landed in America and that weakness for Dickens was a private matter. Dickens had obviously become more exhausted every reading he performed, and his foot grew lamer every day.

  “Yes, no doubt of it!” exclaimed Holmes. “Fields will become warm at me if I don't return you to the comfort of his hearth to rest for your next reading.”

  “You can almost smell it,” muttered Dickens.

  “My dear Dickens?”

  “The burned flesh in the air. Let us stay just a few moments longer.”

  Chapter 24

  AS THE TOUR'S ORBIT PUSHED FARTHER FROM NEW YORK AND Boston, reaching Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Hartford, and Providence, George Dolby and his harried ticket agents frequently traveled ahead of the rest of the party to arrange sales and lay the way.

  Tom, in the meantime, never protested Dolby's restrictions on his duties. He was more preoccupied with the fact that Louisa Parr Barton had been allowed to walk free without questioning or a proper search of her carpetbag. At least Dickens's traveling to small, outlying towns would make it hard for the phantom incubus to follow, for she seemed a creature of the city. During Tom's duties, carrying baggage between train stations and hotels, he would keep his eyes open, which was more than anyone else was doing. He had been taught by his father in Ross that it was not the duties one was given but how one performed them that mattered.

  At Syracuse, the inn was a grim place that looked like it had been built the day before, as did the whole town, and they were served what seemed like an old pig for breakfast. Henry Scott sat down in the public room and wept while George attempted to recruit an emergency militia to clean the hallway on their floor.

  Between Rochester and Albany, the whole country seemed to be underwater from a furious storm that had displaced the ice and snow overnight. They had to stay all night in a desolate region that went by the name Utica. Even the telegraph poles had been knocked over and were floating like the masts from shipwrecks, so no communication was possible with the next reading hall.

  Once they were near enough to Albany, they took paddleboats through the flooded expanse to get to their next hotel. Broken bridges and fences drifted across their paths alongside blocks of floating ice.

  Tom was worried about Dickens as the boat struggled through. As they had crossed the United States, Tom had seen on many occasions a repetition of Dickens's sudden fits of dread while in a railway car or a ferry, or anything that the novelist had no power to stop in case of emergency. In their familiarity the fits were no longer startling but still created a distressing picture of internal terror. It was not unusual for Dickens to call out “Slower, please” to a coach driver several times until they were proceeding at the pace of a walk.

  As they floated along the seemingly endless expanse of water, Dickens took out his chronometer watch to see whether they would be able to keep to their schedule. It was possible that the audience of ticket holders would not be able to reach the theater, but to Dickens that was not what was important: punctuality to him was a matter of principle and self-mastery. He shook his watch.

  “It is remarkable, men,” he said. “My watch always kept perfect time and could be entirely depended upon, but since the moment of my railway calamity three years ago it has not gone quite correctly. The Staplehurst experience tells more and more, instead of less and less. There is a vague sense of dread that I have no power to check that comes and passes, but I cannot prevent its coming. Hold, what is that?” Dickens asked their guide, a superintendent of works. There was an entire train floating in the water ahead of them.

  “Freight train, caught in the flood. Cattle and sheep. Men got out of it, but the livestock will have to perish, s'pose. Start eating each other in a couple of days, s'pose.”

  Dickens turned to him with a hard glare.

  “That's what dumb animals do, Mr. Dickens, when starved,” the superintendent continued nervously.

  Dickens stared over at the abandoned train bobbing up and down in the filthy rainwater. As they passed, they could hear cries and moans from inside; it sounded like human misery. “They won't perish,” he said quietly, then moved to the head of the tiny boat. “Not a single one of them. Paddle back. That way.”

  “But, sir, my instructions are strictly to get you to Albany in time for…” the guide started to protest.

  “You didn't say something, did you?” Dickens asked with fire in his eyes.

  “S'pose I didn't, sir,” he replied after taking a hint from the expressions of the staff in their boat.

  “The Albanians can wait for us,” Dickens said. “Everyone paddle to that freight train, and no half measures! We're going to emulate Noah today!” After the work of several hours, they released the sheep and cows to swim across to land, and pulled the weaker ones up the shore high enough for them to rest until they brought food. All along, though it began to snow and hail, Dickens cheered and spurred on the men and animals with such enthusiasm that even the guide added a bounce to his step in the rescue of an emaciated calf.

  Their misadventures brought them to Albany. Dickens sat before the fire at the hotel holding his hat out at the heat. It was almost a solid cake of ice, as was his beard. He tried to loosen his necktie but it was frozen into his collar.

  As the new year began, most of their staff fell terribly ill. Tom was one of the few who had remained in good health, with Dickens increasingly dependent on him as the writer's own health continued to waver between hearty and weak. At one reading, ticket holders there to hear Nickleby and Mr. Bob Sawyer's Party were given notices: Mr. Charles Dickens begs indulgence for a severe cold but hopes its effects may not be perceptible after a few minutes’ reading. The first clause was composed by Dolby and a doctor; the second was the Chief's. Besides his small breakfasts, Dickens had begun limiting himself to an egg beaten up in sherry before a reading and another at intermission, which Henry would have mixed and ready in the dressing rooms.

  By this time, Osgood had finished implementing his shop boy Daniel's idea of “special” condensed versions of the readings, thin volumes that Fields, Osgood & Co. sold for twenty-five cents at the front of the theaters.

  “We need not worry about chasing away the Bookaneers from our readings, Mr. Branagan,” Osgood had told him when he and Fields came to see the group off at the railway station. “Mr. Sand's idea has worked exactly as we planned.”

  “That lad will be on his way to clerk in no time!” Fields had said, congratulating Osgood on the innovation. “He's like another shop boy I can recall.”

  On the way to Philadelphia, Tom was obliged to play cards with the Chief while Henry Scott dozed, keeping his legs locked together so that his boot would not be out at the moment some rude American spit his tobacco. Dickens, as usual when on a train, had his flask open beside him. Every few minutes, Henry's head would drop to one side and he would straighten up with great propriety as though he had been wide awake.

  “No one ever likes to sleep in public like that,” Dickens said to Tom. “As a practice, I never do it myself. A contest of cribbage is good to keep you active and awake. It brings out the mettle.”

  Dickens, perhaps finding Tom too quiet, seemed content to speak for both of them as they played. “How much has changed in this country it is impossible to say. The last trip I had to Philadelphia, twenty-five years ago, I remember nearly the whole city showed up at my hotel for interviews. Every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Edgar-Edgar Poe, that is. Never was a king or emperor on earth so followed by crowds as I was in Philadelphia.”

  “Edgar Poe, you say, Chief?” Henry asked, his dropped head having suddenly jolted him into consciousness. The dresser was sufficiently impressed whenever he heard any person's name that he recognized as famous, especially one who had died. “Poe wrote morbid and weird tales,” Henry said as a didactic aside to Tom. “Then he died.”

  “He was also a poet,” said Dickens,
“as he reminded me many times. I spoke with him some about my poor raven Grip, who died eating part of our wooden stairs. We also talked about the tragic copyright situation for authors who did not reap a farthing while scoundrel publishers grew rich with spurious editions. Poe was writing tales of ‘ratiocination’ then-of mystery-as was I. Then I spoke to Poe of-yes, I can recall exactly, as if it were yesterday-of William Godwin's Caleb Williams, a work we both admired.”

  “That novel I read in a single day,” Henry said happily.

  Dickens continued. “I told Poe what I knew about its strange construction-that Godwin had written the hunting down of Caleb first. Only later did he decide how to account for it, and he wrote the first half of the book afterward. Poe said that he himself wrote his stories of ratiocination backward. He wanted more than anything for me to see him as a common spirit so that I might find him an English publisher, which I later tried but failed to do with Fred Chapman. Nobody knew much of Poe then and to print American writers was a risky venture. He was certain Europeans could appreciate him better than the Americans. Poor Poe took fire at me after that, a miserable creature.” Dickens seemed immediately sorry to have said that. “He was a disappointed man, you know, in great poverty. It may be my mood, or my anxiety, or I know not what else that makes me think of him now.”

  Two readings in Philadelphia were followed by four in Washington and then two in Baltimore. At the first Washington stop, congressmen and the ambassadors of almost every country attended, as did a stray dog that passed by the police guards and began howling during the reading. President Johnson attended all of the Washington readings and invited Dickens and Dolby to the White House on the novelist's birthday, although Dickens's illnesses had grown worse. Dickens was certain, after the visit, that Andrew Johnson would manage well despite talk of his undoing for trying to push reconciliation with the Southern states through an unfriendly Congress. “That is a man who must be killed to be got out of the way,” Dickens commented to Dolby afterward.