Files had been pulled from cabinets. The charred remains of what had once been Wingate’s account ledgers lay on the floor in a corner of the room. The large painting of a naval engagement hanging opposite the window caught my eye. I looked at it more closely than I had before.
Burning hulls, bursting magazines; great guns exploding and tearing men to pieces; drowning sailors clinging to unseaworthy spars as others floated dead.
“The captain has deserted his ship,” Ellsworth said. “Come, let us look around.”
Room by room, I followed him through the house. The Wingates had taken whatever they could in direct proportion of monetary value to size. Jewel cases were empty and drawers flung open, as though thieves had entered in the middle of the night.
All of Amanda’s jewelry was gone. Her many gowns and the mirrors that had reflected her beauty when they adorned her had a desolate air. We passed the harp in the sitting room off the parlour where I had first seen her. In due course, Ellsworth brought the servant staff before me, and I transcribed what was said.
A chronology emerged. Wingate was extremely upset on Monday afternoon after the inspector and I sat with him. On Tuesday, his condition was the same. There was a flurry of activity on Wednesday and Thursday, with Wingate leaving the house several times, possibly to visit banks.
Amanda had come to my quarters late Wednesday afternoon. Had she known of their impending flight?
“We are parting now,” she had told me. “I shall not see you again.”
On Thursday night, they fled.
Amanda’s lady’s maid, Clarice, was the last of the servant staff to be questioned. She was clearly distraught. Clarice described how Amanda had shaken hands with each of the servants before departing and had turned for one last look at the house.
“She was dressed very plainly,” Clarice recalled. “And her hair was hidden under a shawl. All her fine clothes were left behind. That must have broke her heart.”
“What was Mrs. Wingate like?” I queried.
Ellsworth did not object to my question although, clearly, it overstepped my role.
“Very kind,” Clarice answered. “Mr. Wingate spoke harshly to us at times. Mrs. Wingate never said a word but was pleasant and right. She was a lady, and we were common people, but she talked with us as though we were of her own station in life.”
She stopped, as though wrestling with the propriety of what she was to say next.
“Go on,” I urged.
“Mrs. Wingate swore us to secrecy. But before she left—God bless her heart—she gave each of us fifty pounds. She warned us that Mr. Wingate would be angry with her if he knew. He spoke cruelly to her at times. She tried so hard to be a dutiful wife. How brave and strong her heart. She was crying when they left. And she said to me, ‘He is trampled down and ruined. I have an obligation as his wife. I cannot leave him now.’”
“A graceful woman,” Ellsworth noted. “Capable of doing honour to Wingate’s name and reflecting credit on his proprietorship. Quite ornamental, too, no doubt.”
When the interviews were done, I sat with the inspector in the parlour.
“Do you suppose he has much money with him?” I asked.
“I should think that he has pocketed a good amount in one way or another,” Ellsworth answered. “The total of what has been left behind for his investors will be expressed in arithmetic by a circle. But the money he has will soon be gone. And whatever object he pursues after that, he will do so crookedly.”
“Will you find him?”
“The world is a large place. To search for him would be hopeless. We will leave his discovery to time and chance and to Heaven’s pleasure.”
“Then he goes free.”
Ellsworth shook his head.
“We are well to be rid of him. I am a practical man, Mr. Dickens. His flight confirms his guilt. And he is being punished more than the law would have allowed. Despite what we know in our hearts, the proof to convict him in a court of law is not there. He has left behind most of what he owned. What the world thinks of him now and how it looks at him will be the haunting demon of his mind. He will imagine pursuers in every place. He will see them pointing at him in the street, seeking him out among the crowd, and whispering behind wherever he goes. He will hear their footsteps outside his window when he is shut up in his room in bed at night. He will be restless everywhere. Under the circumstances, that is the best punishment we could have hoped for.”
“And that is all?”
“I know his kind. He will not do well.”
Book 3
CHAPTER 10
On Saturday, the second of April, two days after Geoffrey and Amanda Wingate fled from London, I married Catherine Hogarth. The ceremony took place in Saint Luke’s Church. I understood more fully by then that my romance of Catherine was a love born of ambition more than the heart. But it was too late to turn back.
We lay together for the first time in the wedding bed that night. Catherine giggled. She squealed. I knew that I had erred horribly. I closed my eyes and imagined myself with another as the dungeon door of marriage slammed shut upon my life. I would never be free.
Toward the end of April, I returned to the Wingate home with Benjamin Ellsworth for one last look about. Well-muscled men were moving heavy furnishings, while two gentlemen with pens made out inventories in preparation for auction. Workers sat upon pieces of furniture never made to be sat upon and ate bread and cheese off other pieces of furniture never made to be eaten from. Chaotic combinations of belongings appeared. Mattresses and bedding in the dining room; glass and china in the conservatory; the great dinner service in heaps on the divan in the parlour.
Wingate’s flight had loosened tongues. The nature of his business was now clear. Investors had given him money to invest in various financial undertakings. By contract, he was allowed to retain a modest percentage of each investment as his commission. In practice, he had invested only a small portion of the money that was entrusted to him and appropriated the rest for his own personal use.
Men who should have known better—some honest, some not—deferred to his every word. They fawned and flattered and smiled as he showed them neatly kept balance sheets that detailed the manner in which he had turned their ten thousand pounds into twenty thousand.
The nature of the supposed investments allowed for the fraud. The entirety of the principle for an annuity comes in at the beginning and then dribbles back in small payments to the holder. The premiums for life assurance policies that Wingate purported to purchase were paid in advance. If the holder of a policy died, premiums paid to purchase fictitious policies for other holders covered the death benefits. Investors were told that their money was invested in the stock of various companies. They received dividends regularly and were assured that their principle was growing. In fact, there was no principle. It was imaginary wealth. Fraud concealed more fraud. Through it all, Wingate spent lavishly to maintain his luxurious way of life. By the time he fled, there was little for him to liquidate and take with him.
“It is remarkable,” Ellsworth told me. “People gave their money to Wingate to invest, and they knew no more about him than they might know about a man they met at the tailor shop. Men have such extraordinary powers of persuasion when exerted over themselves. The next criminal in delicate disguise who is comfortable living outside the law for the purpose of swindling will succeed as well.”
Two days later, the pulpit of the auctioneer was erected. Something within me compelled my return for the auction. Herds of vampires were overrunning rooms, sounding glasses with their knuckles, striking discordant notes on the harp, balancing the silver spoons and forks, punching the cushions of chairs and sofas with their dirty fists, opening and shutting all the drawers, examining the threads of the drapery and linen. A vile-looking woman with a screeching voice won the bid on the lavender silk gown that Amanda had worn on the evening that I went with her to the ballet. There was not a secret place in the whole house.
It would have been just if Florence Spriggs and Lenora Pearce had been allowed to claim a portion of the gain from the sale of the house and its contents. But wealthy investors who suffered losses in Wingate’s scheme had already staked their claim.
All day long, there was a retinue of moving carts in the street outside the residence. Then it was over. Nothing was left. As I rode home that night, I asked myself how much Amanda had known of her husband’s ways. I asked, as I would do a thousand times in later years, why she had taken me to bed. It was folly to think that I was the only man she had seduced in that manner. And yet . . .
The road she had chosen lay before her. She would follow it with her own self-willed step, and I would travel mine. I did not know where she was, only that there was an immeasurable distance between us and an empty place in my heart.
Catherine soon became pregnant, and we moved to a house at 48 Doughty Street. It was significantly larger than my previous rooms and reflected optimism with regard to my financial future.
There was a print run of one thousand copies of the first installment of The Pickwick Papers. Disappointing sales led to a smaller printing of the next three installments. Then the character of Sam Weller—Samuel Pickwick’s valet—was introduced, and sales soared. Forty thousand copies of the twentieth and final installment were printed.
The success of Pickwick gave me my first taste of renown. It had been publicly acknowledged in a publisher’s advertisement that “Boz” was in fact Charles Dickens. I was keenly alive to the praise that sounded in my ears. Then I took what was perhaps the most important step upon my journey to becoming an author.
It was a time in England when eighteenth-century customs with regard to labour, schools, orphanages, and democracy itself were being reevaluated. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 had replaced a system of parish-by-parish measures intended to deal with the problems of the poor. Or rather, the problems posed by the poor. It called for a centralised system of workhouses to be built, with no person receiving assistance from the state unless he or she lived in one. The poorhouses were kept in abominable and scandalous condition. Separate institutions were maintained for children, able-bodied men, able-bodied women, and the old. Families were torn apart. Mothers were separated from their children. Wages were less than those paid to the poorest free labourer.
I wanted to speak to the poor houses and to what it is like to live at the lowest levels of society. I did so through the eyes of a child: Oliver Twist.
Oliver stood for countless children born and bred in neglect. They have never known what childhood is, never been taught to love a parent’s smile or to dread a parent’s frown. The gaiety and innocence of childhood are unknown to them. Talk to them of parental solicitude and the merry games of infancy, and they will stare at you with unknowing eyes. Tell them of hunger and beggary and the streets, and they will understand.
They sleep at night packed close together, covered only by their ragged clothes. There are some who, lying on their backs with upturned faces, bear more the aspect of dead bodies than of living creatures. A few among the youngest of the children sleep peacefully with smiles upon their faces. As morning takes the place of night, their smiles fade away.
I wrote Oliver Twist with greater power than I had been able to summon up before. Friends told me that publishing in installments was a low form of commerce and that, by continuing in that form, I would encumber my future. I resisted their warnings and did as I would do with my writing throughout my life.
Oliver Twist spoke directly to the people. It portrayed the innate goodness and suffering of common men and women, the random nature of death, and the triumph of good over evil. Its serialisation made it accessible to all. Men and women gathered together with the publication of each installment, combined their resources for the one-shilling purchase price, and searched for one who could read aloud to the others.
The bond between my readers and myself was now a personal attachment. I was aware that my work was capable of stirring feeling among the downtrodden and also of influencing the debate among the powerful on matters of importance.
Whoever is devoted to an art must deliver himself wholly up to it. Ambition and hard work were the keys to my success. As a rule, I woke at seven o’clock each morning, took a cold shower, ate breakfast, and wrote from nine until three in the afternoon. On some days, I ate a modest lunch at my desk. I wrote with a goose quill pen and blue ink an average of two thousand words each day. After writing, I walked for several hours, dined at six, and retired by midnight.
When I wrote, my work had complete possession of my thoughts. My creations spoke to me. When I sat with pen and paper, reality and imagination were so blended that it was impossible to separate them in my mind. A voice kept whispering to me: greatness.
I wrote with speed. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge. I became a businessman as well as an author to ensure that I was fairly paid. When I was a child, the family had endured frequent moves as a matter of necessity as my father sought to evade his creditors. Now we moved by choice to an even larger house near Regent’s Park at 1 Devonshire Street.
It was rare for an author to live off the sale of his work without family funds or a benefactor to support him. By my thirtieth birthday, my earnings easily covered the expenses of what was becoming a rather large family. My clothes were more costly than before, and I was acquiring things of material value to have in the home.
It was during this time, when royalties from the sale of my work had become substantial, that I committed myself to one particular act of charity. I resolved to give a stipend to Florence Spriggs and pay for the schooling of her daughter Ruby. I found my way to the place where they had lived, but the hovel was no longer there. It had been torn down, or, more likely, it had fallen of its own state. No one could tell me where they had gone or whether they were alive or dead.
I sought out Benjamin Ellsworth, who by then had risen to the rank of district superintendent, and asked for his assistance.
“Leave it alone,” Ellsworth cautioned. “The probabilities are such that you do not want to know their fate.”
I did not pursue the truth. I feared what I might find.
On the fourth of January, 1842, I embarked upon a new adventure, a journey to America. I arrived in Boston after eighteen days at sea and was now in the Land of Liberty, although any land would have satisfied me after so much water.
My reputation had preceded me, and my presence was very much in demand. So many people of note sought to speak with me that the British Consulate arranged for a daily reception at Tremont House in Boston, where I was lodged.
I had come to America to meet a new people, see nature at its most beautiful, and gather insights for a book. After my stay in Boston, I journeyed to New York, where three thousand people attended The Great Boz Ball at the Park Theatre in my honour. Then I visited a dozen more cities and Niagara Falls, where I was moved by Nature’s splendour.
There were elegant parties, formal dinners, and meetings with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe. In the capital of America, I was introduced to John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John Tyler, President of the United States.
But America was not the republic that I had imagined. The factory system and treatment of labour were more enlightened than in England. However, there was a negative side to the ledger.
There was no respect for copyright in America. Pirate editions of my work were widely sold without any payment to me. Whenever protection of copyright was discussed, it was opposed on the ground that literature and knowledge should belong to The People.
Worse, I had no privacy in America. Crowds gathered whenever I appeared in public. If I walked down the street, I was followed by a multitude. If I went to the theatre, people stared at me as though I were a marble statue to be commented upon. If I dined out, I had to talk to everybody about everything. If I stayed at the hotel, it became like a fair wi
th callers. If I went to a party, I was so enclosed and hemmed about that I was exhausted for want of air. I could not drink a glass of water without a dozen people looking down my throat when I opened my mouth to swallow. There was no time for rest or peace. I wearied of giving myself up to spectacle as though I were public property.
I was handed newspaper accounts of discussions as to whether I was shorter than people had expected or taller or thinner or fatter or younger or older; whether my eyes were brown or blue or hazel or green; whether my attire was flashy or tasteful, gentlemanly or vulgar.
I will admit to being a bit vain in matters of appearance. For most of my life, I have been partial to theatrical dress. Dinner jackets with velvet and satin trim, brightly coloured waistcoats, noticeable jewelry. That said, it did my mood no good to pick up a newspaper and read that I was foppish, inclined toward dandyism, and very English in appearance although not the best English. And concern for my crude, vulgar, flamboyant behaviour did not keep the barber who cut my hair from sweeping up the locks and selling them to the public.
After six months, I returned home from America and docked in Liverpool. The writing of American Notes followed. In my previous writing, I had never shown any disposition to soften my commentary on what is ridiculous or wrong in England. I had assumed that the people who had honoured me so extravagantly in America would be indisposed to quarrel were I to apply the same standard to their own country. I was wrong. Nonetheless, my time in America endowed me with greater understanding of my fame and the power that my literary creations placed at my command.
With the publication of A Christmas Carol and The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, my career grew even more prosperous. I was caressed by the public and courted by the rich and powerful. Common men and women loved my work because it was about them. Members of the aristocracy welcomed me into their homes as the famous Charles Dickens. I had completed the journey from humble origins to recognition as a gentleman and was a guest of distinction at any gathering. People responded in haste to my requests, and my requests became demands.
The Final Recollections of Charles Dickens Page 10
