The Mystery of Charles Dickens Read online

  The Mystery

  of

  Charles Dickens

  Also by A. N. Wilson fiction

  FICTION

  The Sweets of Pimlico

  Unguarded Hours

  Kindly Light

  The Healing Art

  Who Was Oswald Fish?

  Wise Virgin

  Scandal: Or Priscilla’s Kindness

  Gentlemen in England

  Love Unknown

  Stray

  The Vicar of Sorrows

  Dream Children

  Incline Our Hearts

  A Bottle in the Smoke

  Daughters of Albion

  Hearing Voices

  A Watch in the Night

  My Name Is Legion

  A Jealous Ghost

  Winnie and Wolf

  The Potter’s Hand

  Resolution

  Aftershocks

  NON-FICTION

  The Laird of Abbotsford

  A Life of John Milton

  Hilaire Belloc

  Tolstoy

  Penfriends from Porlock

  Eminent Victorians

  C. S. Lewis

  Paul

  God’s Funeral

  The Victorians

  Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her

  London: A Short History

  After the Victorians

  Betjeman: A Life

  Our Times

  Dante in Love

  The Elizabethans

  Hitler

  Victoria

  Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker

  Prince Albert

  etc.

  First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2020 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © A. N. Wilson, 2020

  The moral right of A. N. Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Illustration credits: p.1, Ellen Ternan (Public Domain); p. 51, Dickens at the Blacking Warehouse, illustration from The Leisure Hour, 1904 (Wikimedia); p.97, Catherine Dickens, 1852 (GL Archive/Alamy Stock Photo); p. 143, ‘Charles Dickens relieving the sufferers at the fatal railway accident, near Staplehurst’, Penny Illustrated Paper, London, 1865 (© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images); p.193, Dickens’s last reading at St James’s Hall, 15 March 1870, from The Illustrated London News Record of the Glorious Reign of Queen Victoria 1837–1901, London, 1901 (The Print Collector via Getty Images); p. 241 The Mystery of Edwin Drood title page (Historic Images/Alamy Stock Photo); p. 289 Illustration by Hablot K. Browne, ‘Phiz’, from The Old Curiosity Shop, 1841 (Culture Club/Getty Images)

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 791 8

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 792 5

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  For Amicia and Richard

  CONTENTS

  1 The Mystery of fifteen pounds, thirteen shillings and ninepence

  2 The Mystery of his childhood

  3 The Mystery of the cruel marriage

  4 The Mystery of the charity of Charles Dickens

  5 The Mystery of the public readings

  6 The Mystery of Edwin Drood

  7 The Mystery of Charles Dickens

  Bibliography

  List of Abbreviations

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index

  ONE

  THE MYSTERY OF FIFTEEN POUNDS, THIRTEEN SHILLINGS AND NINEPENCE

  ‘I HAVE NO relief, but in action. I am become incapable of rest… Much better to die, doing,’1 the hyper-energetic, over-sexed, tormented, exultant, hilarious, despondent Charles Dickens had written to a friend, thirteen years before he actually died.

  Dickens was good at dying. If you want a good death, go to the novels of Dickens. Watch the dwarfish swindler Mr Quilp on the run from the police, slithering into the muddy Thames. Watch Mr Merdle, the financier who cuts his own throat with a penknife in a Turkish bath. Look upwards to the rooftops and see the murderer Bill Sikes trying to make his escape from arrest by clambering over the tiles, missing his footing and hanging himself by accident. See, too, his dog, Bull’s Eye, leap to his master’s shoulder and fall, dashing his brains out on the stones below. There had been the poignant deaths – little Jo the Crossing Sweeper trying to repeat the, to him unknown, Lord’s Prayer; and heroic deaths – none more so than Sydney Carton, voluntarily approaching the guillotine and doing a far, far better thing than he had ever done before.

  Sometimes Dickens may be said to have overdone the sob-stuff. Oscar Wilde quipped that it would take a heart of stone to read of the death of Little Nell without laughing. But the thing is, this isn’t true: for a start, in The Old Curiosity Shop the child is already dead when we find her lying in the schoolmaster’s house; her death happens offstage; and – as the thousands who gathered in New York harbour awaiting the latest instalment of the novel attested, with the anxious cry ‘Is Little Nell still alive?’2 – the scene where we find her dead body has astounding power, though sophisticated readers might be disturbed by the vulgarity of that power. Even if you question the story of the Americans shouting, agog on the quayside, for news of Little Nell, the fact remains that the novel was selling 100,000 copies per instalment as it appeared.3 The public reaction to Little Nell’s fate had revealed to Dickens that he possessed what no author in history had ever possessed to such a degree: a mesmeric power. Literature had never before, in the West, attracted the sort of crowds that had hitherto only been drawn to the revivalist meetings of John Wesley.

  The poignant deaths were not the only ones at which he was adept, of course. There were grotesque deaths, such as the tall lady eating sandwiches who was decapitated by an unnoticed archway in Rochester; improbable deaths, such as Krook’s – by spontaneous combustion; deaths by judicial execution and by mob violence; deaths by accident; deaths, like that of Edwin Drood, in his final novel, unexplained, mysterious. And there is what must be one of the most wonderful deaths in literature – rivalled only by that of Falstaff as described by Mistress Quickly – the death of Barkis: ‘and it being low water, he went out with the tide’. [DC 30]

  But now it was June 1870, and although he was only fifty-eight years old, Dickens was exhausted. His face was ravaged; it could have been the face of an octogenarian. He had been heavily dosing himself with laudanum (a mixture of opium and alcohol) for many months and was opium-dependent. The novel that he was in the middle of writing, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, begins with an opium-induced trance. It is the story of a man who drifts into different states of consciousness through the influence of the drug. It is the story of a divided self, a man who is a different person when leading his secret lives – lives hidden from the respectable cathedral town of Cloisterham, a fictionalized version of the same cathedral town, Rochester, that was a brisk hour’s walk from Dickens’s home at Gad’s Hill in Kent
. For, ill as he was, Dickens, who all his life was a restless and prodigiously energetic walker, still forced his body into vigorous exercise, on those days when he was capable of it. Now, his heart was weak, his breath was uncertain. He had crammed many lifetimes into one – the lifetime of the most celebrated novelist in the world; the lifetime of a full-time journalist; the lifetime of an actor, and of a public reader; the lifetime of a philanthropist; the lifetime of a family man and of a secret lover. Now, having described and enacted so many deaths, he was going to do it for real.

  Enacted, yes, for as well as his unrivalled presence in print, his fame as a writer, he never lost his desire to perform on the public stage. I want to write, in this chapter, about Dickens’s debt to the theatre, to burlesque, to pantomime, to the harlequinade, because it is central to his way of functioning as one of the greatest artistic geniuses of the nineteenth century. But although we know so little about the actress Nelly Ternan, she was part of this, obviously she was. So I also want to start with Nelly, and the theatre, before we go back and explore the other mysteries of Charles Dickens – the mystery of his childhood and his past; the mystery of his appalling cruelty to a harmless wife who bore him ten children; the mystery of his passionate, sincere and burning charity, his fury at injustice; the mystery of his relationship with the public, in the first era when there was a truly enormous public with whom to have such a relationship; and the mystery of his last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in which he changed direction as an artist and explored the human consciousness in a way that anticipated the developments of psychology and literary modernism. And I want to maintain that Charles Dickens was a writer like no other, a sui generis figure, unique in the nineteenth century. It was the glory age of the English novel.4 In his infancy, Jane Austen was still at work, and Sir Walter Scott. His contemporaries included the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray. Dickens was fundamentally different from any one of them, for reasons that we shall explore. Although we call all their works ‘novels’, he was actually writing books that were quite different in kind from theirs, and it was perhaps only when one of his greatest admirers abroad, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, began to write, partially in homage to Dickens, that the world started to see the kind of novelist he had been. His stories were prodigiously popular, and continue to be so. Unlike so much prose fiction, however, they work on many levels, and it would be as true to describe them as great visionary poems, as fairy tales, as pantomimes, as it would be to talk of them as novels in the prosaic tradition in which, say, Trollope excelled.

  This book is entitled The Mystery of Charles Dickens because, of all the great novelists, Dickens is the most mysterious. His way of going to work appears to be, on one level, so obvious, so basic: the comedy so crude, often – though, equally often, so hilarious; the pathos so heavily laid on with a trowel. But although he was a journalist, and one of the really great journalists, his novels were not journalistic, like those of Emile Zola. Zola was a camera. He depicted what was there. Dickens, like the illustrators chosen to adorn his early novels, created an alternative universe. He amused, or shamed, his readers into recognizing that this universe was uncommonly like their own, but his techniques were decidedly not those of a realist. He invented, rather, an alternative universe into which we are all drawn, persuaded that it is a real world, of a sort. Those who protest that the Dickensian world is unrealistic are so often forced to confront the pantomimic grotesquerie, the high comedy, the violence and the pathos of ‘real life’ and recognize that it is ‘just like Dickens’. This, however, is not to deny that, almost more than any great artist, he is the puppet-master who pulls the strings and writes the script.

  We are now going to his house in Kent, Gad’s Hill Place, near Rochester, in June 1870 to watch Charles Dickens die. Before we reach Gad’s Hill, however, following a road that was trodden by so many before us, fictitious and semi-fictitious, aware of Chaucer’s pilgrims going down to Canterbury, of Falstaff, Bardolph and Poins making their night-foray as highwaymen, and of Mr Pickwick making his more innocent sortie towards Rochester, we are going to return in our mind to a death enacted by Dickens on the stage of the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, thirteen years before. As well as writing up a good death, he loved to act one, and the more the audience sobbed, the better. Thirteen years earlier, then, during the summer of 1857, he was acting in The Frozen Deep, a play written by his friend Wilkie Collins, loosely based on the doomed expedition, led by Sir John Franklin, to find the North-West Passage. Dickens, performing on the stage of the Free Trade Hall, had the satisfaction of having ‘a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together, in the palm of one’s hand’. He took particular satisfaction in seeing ‘the hardened carpenters at the sides [of the stage] crying and trembling at it night after night’.5

  He took the part of Richard Wardour, and the actress in whose arms he died was Nelly’s sister, ‘Miss Maria Ternan – born on the stage, and inured to it from the days when she was the little child’.6 Dickens wrote Nicholas Nickleby before Maria Ternan was even born, but her mother, who had herself been on the stage since childhood, could have echoed the ham actor-manager Mr Vincent Crummles who engages Nicholas Nickleby in his troupe: ‘I am in the theatrical profession myself, my wife is in the theatrical profession, my children are in the theatrical profession. I had a dog that lived and died in it from a puppy, and my chaise-pony goes on in Timour the Tartar.’ [NN 22] Mrs Ternan, a widow, came from a family who had followed the theatrical profession since the eighteenth century.

  Continuing to describe Maria’s thespian gifts, on display in Manchester, Dickens explained, ‘She had to take my head up as I was dying, and to put it in her lap, and give me her face to hold between my two hands. All of which I showed her elaborately… that morning. When we came to that point at night, her tears fell down my face, down my beard (excuse my mentioning that hateful appendage), down my ragged dress – poured all over me like rain, so that it was as much as I could do to speak for them.’7

  Maria Ternan had been a true Infant Phenomenon. In fact she was twenty by now, but she looked much younger. Dickens always liked child-women, little fairies who were betwixt and between, like Little Dorrit or the Marchioness, neither children nor adults. When Mark Lemon, editor of Punch, took Maria backstage after the performance, her weeping set him off. Soon they were all crying, and she had to be comforted by her mother and sister, while Dickens gave her sherry. So much for little Maria. Her elder sister Fanny, who would one day marry the brother of the novelist Anthony Trollope and become a popular novelist herself (author of Aunt Margaret’s Trouble, That Unfortunate Marriage and others), really had been an infant prodigy, playing Mamilius in The Winter’s Tale when she was only three and a half in 1840.8 All three of the Ternan sisters, like their mother, pursued careers on the stage throughout their childhoods. The summer before they took on the roles in The Frozen Deep, Fanny had appeared as Oberon in Edmund Kean’s lavish production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (in which a ten-year-old Ellen Terry played Puck). Nelly, meanwhile, had been on the stage of the Haymarket Theatre, playing a ‘breeches’ role – in a show called Atalanta. Her part was that of Hippomenes, throwing golden apples in front of the speedy Atalanta to stop her running so fast. It had run every night from April to July 1857, and Nelly had not missed a single performance.

  Of the three Ternan girls, it was Nelly – eighteen, the youngest, slightly plump, blonde curls, large blue eyes and, again, the way he liked them, small – who arrested Dickens’s attention in that Manchester show some months later.

  Even by Dickens’s hyper-energetic standards, 1857 had been a phenomenal year. He was deeply involved in running a refuge for women and trying to rehabilitate them, after rocky starts, and prepare them for married life. He was finishing one of his very greatest novels, Little Dorrit. He was embarking on a series of public readings from his work. He had a seemingly ceaseless series of charitable dinners at which he was
required to make the speech. He was the editor of the weekly Household Words. At home, his unhappy marriage seemed to be causing him and his wife Catherine untold strain and misery, and there are few human experiences more exhausting than living with a partner to whom one is unhappily yoked. ‘There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose,’ [DC 45] a manifesto-mantra repeated four times by David Copperfield (twice midway through Chapter 45, once at the end of that chapter and again in Chapter 48).

  After The Frozen Deep in Manchester, however, he was a changed man. He wrote to Collins seven months later, in March 1858, ‘I have never known a moment’s peace or content since the last night of The Frozen Deep. I do suppose that there never was a Man so seized and rended by one Spirit.’9

  It was perhaps inevitable that the crisis of his life – the before-and-after experience – should have happened onstage, and that the woman in his life, for its last decade, should have been an actress. Equally inevitable, for Dickens was a divided self whose art depended upon the divisions in his personality, was the fact that Nelly Ternan should become, not his wife, but his secret. When they met he was forty-five and she was eighteen. She was with him to the end, and very nearly at the end, when, thirteen years later, he died in reality. Her relationship with him lasted thirteen creative, energetic, secret years; years in which she was better qualified than most to contemplate the Mystery of Charles Dickens. She did so offstage, away from the lights. As far as the world was concerned, Nelly did not exist. She was unknown to Dickens’s devoted public. She was largely unknown to posterity. And when, during the early decades of the twentieth century, rumours of her existence began to emerge, many of his dedicated readers refused to believe in her existence. Even one of the finest late-twentieth-century Dickensian biographers, Peter Ackroyd, claimed it was unthinkable that Dickens and Nelly could have been lovers, as they obviously were.