The Final Recollections of Charles Dickens

by Thomas Hauser

  “Mr. Dickens, a package for you.”

  I accepted a box wrapped in paper the colour of gold.

  “When did this come?”

  “Early in the evening.”

  “By whose hand?”

  “A woman, sir. She did not leave her name.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Not a young woman, sir. But extremely attractive and nicely dressed. There was an elegance about her.”

  I took the package hurriedly to my room, tore off the paper . . . and held a book in my hands. Exquisitely and freshly bound in soft brown leather with marbled end boards and gold letters on the cover: Sketches by Boz, Volume I.

  I turned to the title page and, beneath the title, read:

  For Amanda Wingate,

  a woman of uncommon beauty and grace.

  My fondest good wishes,

  Charles Dickens

  She had kept it. All these years, down every road she had travelled, I had travelled with her.

  A letter sealed with red wax lay nestled between the pages. The stationery was the colour of cream, edged in cobalt blue:

  Dear Mr. Dickens,

  For many years, I have read your books with happiness for your success. It is an extraordinary world, and I have followed your passage through it with great joy. I know of your life through the newspapers and reading your books. Let me tell you of my own years.

  Long ago when we knew each other, I was in chains. I loathed my life but had gone too far to turn back. I was obligated under the law and in the eyes of God to fulfill my marriage vows. Geoffrey was a broken man when we left England. The fear of punishment that was instilled in him caused the wounds of which he died. His life ended by his own hand.

  I am happy now. I have been married for many years to a good man. He knows of my past and accepts it. We met after the death of his wife and, together, raised his son and daughter. We have grandchildren now. I have held them in my arms since they were born. I am at peace with myself and who I am.

  I have thought often of you. I remember our time together with great fondness. You were a better friend to me than I was accustomed to having at that time in my life. You have been a better companion to me these many years than you could possibly have known. We will continue to be friends though we are apart.

  I hope that your happiness has rivaled your fame and continues to do so.

  Warmest regards,

  Amanda

  I wept.

  Uncontrollably.

  Loss and grief swept over me.

  Amanda had found in the arms of another man what I have never known. I had longed for her, and only her, for more than thirty years. I was infinitely sad and broken.

  I slept not at all that night. I am Dickens, renowned throughout England as the greatest wordsmith since Shakespeare. Yet my words had failed me. I had been constricted in the lecture hall by the throng that surrounded us. She had appeared when I could not speak my heart. Yet I should have fallen to my knees and paid the crowd no mind. And if I had . . . it would have been to no avail.

  There was no way to find her. Her letter was signed simply “Amanda.”

  I looked at myself in the mirror. A haggard face confronted me. I examined the lines and hollows. I felt useless and older than my fifty-six years.

  Life is made up of partings. This one caused me to suffer the most. I returned home to England, safe but not sound. The last remnants of my heart were shattered.

  Two years have passed since that time. I have conducted public readings when my health allows. The last was at Saint James Hall in London on 15 March of this year. Except for this writing, I believe that my most important work is done.

  I think often of Amanda. I cannot help it. I live with what might have been and what was not. For four and thirty years, I have been haunted by the memory of her. And I have treasured it. Had that late afternoon between us not happened, would my life be emptier or more serene? Are there strings in the human heart that are best not vibrated? Did she perhaps feel some love for me? There are so many unanswered questions.

  I do not know. I do not know.

  I know only that I loved her and heaped upon her the wealth of my imagination. It is no better or worse because I write of it. Nothing can make it other than as it was. My dreams of Amanda live now only at night and melt away in the first beam of sunlight, leaving me sadder than when I lay down the night before. I would forsake everything in my life for her. But the ocean is between us, and I am resigned to think of her as if she were beneath another sun and sky.

  The future is a bright thought for some, wreathed with cheerful hopes. The time for me, when the thought of love would have been filled with optimism, is gone. The Creator bestows youth but once and never grants it again. I have outlived the dreams that I once cherished. My course is nearly run.

  There is a large grandfather clock in the dining room of my home. Its face is brass and silver with just a touch of gold. The steady pendulum throbs and beats in the bottom of the old dark case. The pulse of the craftsman who made it was stilled long ago.

  How often in the tranquility of night, when the clock and I are the only things in the house that are awake, have its chimes broken the silence and given me assurance that it watches faithfully over me. How often have I marvelled at its constancy, its freedom from human strife and desire, its steadiness of purpose, and its ceaseless going on. It is the voice of time, reminding me that my brief sojourn on earth will soon be lost in a vast eternity as a drop of water is lost in the sea.

  My health is poor. Words come slowly to me now, in speech and as I write. My eyesight is weak. I am dizzy from time to time. My left leg does not always do what my mind commands it to do. My left hand some times misses the mark when performing a simple chore.

  As I write these words, the blaze is departing from the fireplace in my study. The afterglow will soon subside. The ashes will turn gray and drop to dust. I am about to pass through change of a similar kind. More often now, my thoughts of London wander to the river which flows through the city and rolls steadily away to meet the sea. I am on the brink of that great gulf that no one can see beyond. Some day soon, my bed will be a coffin in which I lie in calm and lasting sleep, with tall grass waving gently above my head and the sound of church bells to soothe me.

  I believe that I am a good man. I ask forgiveness from all whom I have wronged. Whatever I have done in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well. I have never put my hand to anything on which I could not throw my whole self thoroughly and in earnest. I have devoted myself completely to aims great and small.

  My greatest happiness has been in my written words. There have been few times when I was truly happy except in my books. My purpose in life is writing. I measure myself by my art. My books will speak for me when my faults and virtues, my fortunes and misfortunes, are all long forgotten.

  My great ambition has been to live in the hearts and homes of the English people through the truthful telling of English life. In my writing, future generations will find London and the English people as they have been in my time. I have tried without cessation to give common men and women a voice so that they may be heard and to use my fame and talent to combat the sordid oppression of their daily lives.

  Every effort of my pen has been intended to elevate the poor and downtrodden to the station they deserve. I have always endeavoured to present them in as favourable a light as the rich and to advocate their being made as happy as the circumstances of their condition in its utmost improvement will allow. I will fight to my last breath the dreadful engines of a society which makes young children old before they know what childhood is and gives them the exhaustion and infirmities of old age without the privilege of old age to die. I have tried to make a difference. My God, I have tried.

  To leave one’s hand lastingly upon time in a way that time itself cannot obliterate is to lift oneself above the dust of Kings in their graves. I hope that, centuries from now, people will read my books and,
through them, know me and the age in which I lived. A hundred years from now, which will be more real? The lives of David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, or the lives of the millions upon millions of people who are alive today but will be gone and forgotten soon after their last breath?

  My mind wanders often now to the eternal tread of feet upon the streets of London. The hand that traces these words falters as it approaches the completion of its task. This baring of private emotions has been difficult for me. But I have fulfilled the vow that I made to myself to reflect my mind honestly and fully and to bring my secrets to light.

  When I think of Amanda, the past comes out of its grave. Decades vanish, and I am in a time of my life when the qualities that have done me the most good were growing in my heart. The whole world lay before me, bathed in the light of hope and youth. By this writing, my passion for Amanda shall outlive me. Our names will be forever joined.

  Amanda was born into a world where generation upon generation of good men and women rise each day, lie down each night, live and die, with no certain roof over their head but the lid of a coffin to shelter them some day. They awake each morning not knowing where their head will rest that night. They seek not a luxurious life, but the bare means of subsistence to continue their struggle for another day. Many among them die in spirit when they are young. They know only injustice and misery. Knowledge is never taught. Yet the world rolls on, careless and indifferent to their plight.

  Amanda did more than survive that world. She overcame the squalor of her origins. She found happiness. She triumphed!

  Now, as I close this writing, many faces fade away. But one face shines before me like a radiant Heavenly light. It is the face of a lady. She is very beautiful. And I love her.

  Charles Dickens

  Gad’s Hill Place

  30 May 1870

  NOTE TO THE READER

  On the night of 8 June 1870, while dining at home, Charles Dickens suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He lapsed into unconsciousness and never moved or spoke again. Death came the following afternoon several hours before sunset. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. For two days, tens of thousands of people, most of them common men and women, passed by his open grave to pay their respects and drop flowers onto his coffin.

  Shortly after Dickens’s death, a locked box was found among his belongings with a letter directing that the box be transferred to the British Museum and kept unopened in a library vault until the two hundredth anniversary of his birth.

  The box was opened in private on 7 February 2012. In it, those present at the opening found a leather-bound copy of Sketches by Boz, Volume I, the foregoing manuscript, and a silk handkerchief with two violets embroidered into the cloth.

  In accord with what are believed to have been Mr. Dickens’s wishes, the manuscript is published herewith.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  New York Times bestselling author Thomas Hauser was born in New York and attended both college and law school at Columbia University. After graduating from law school, he clerked for a federal judge. Then he started work as a litigator for the Wall Street law firm of Cravath Swaine & Moore.

  In 1977, Hauser began to write. Since then, he has authored forty-seven books, on subjects ranging from professional boxing to Beethoven. He has been published by many of the major imprints in the US and UK publishing industries, including Simon & Schuster, Viking Penguin, Collins, Touchstone, Warner Books, Pan Macmillan, and Hamish Hamilton.

  His first book, Missing, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the National Book Award and was the basis for the Academy Award–winning film starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. The Beethoven Conspiracy, Hauser’s thriller about the search for a lost Beethoven symphony, won the prestigious Prix Lafayette, awarded biannually in France to the outstanding book by an American. Subsequently, Hauser co-authored Final Warning: The Legacy of Chernobyl, again demonstrating his ability to bring to life and explain events of complexity and importance, an ability that has secured his reputation as a responsible and reliable social critic. The film version of Final Warning starred Jon Voight and Jason Robards.

  Hauser’s most celebrated work to date is Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times—the definitive biography of the man who was once the most famous person on earth. Like Missing, the Ali book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The British edition was honored with the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award in England. Subsequently, Ali and Hauser coauthored Healing: A Journal of Tolerance and Understanding, and they crisscrossed the country, meeting with student audiences on their subject. For their efforts to combat bigotry and prejudice, they were named as co-recipients of the 1998 Haviva Reik Peace Award.

  In recent years, Hauser has written extensively about the sport and business of professional boxing. His award-winning investigative articles and his testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation were hailed within the boxing industry as a significant force for change. In 2004, he was honored by the Boxing Writers Association of America, which bestowed on him the Nat Fleischer Award for Career Excellence in Boxing Journalism.

  Hauser’s books are read worldwide in eighteen languages. He has published articles in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and numerous other publications, and he was retained by the Encyclopedia Britannica to write its entries on Muhammad Ali and Arnold Palmer. He is currently a consultant to HBO Sports and has appeared in several HBO documentaries in addition to being featured in the Academy Award–winning documentary When We Were Kings and being interviewed on numerous television programs such as NBC’s The Today Show.

  He lives in Manhattan.