by A. N. Wilson
‘Simply this,’ I said, ‘the success of this tour is assured in every way, so far as human probability is concerned. It therefore does not make a bit of difference which of the works you read, for (from what I have seen) the money is safe any way. I am saying this in the interest of your health.’
Dolby went on to say that readings from David Copperfield, the Carol and the rest ‘will produce all the money we can take and you will be saved the pain of tearing yourself to pieces for three nights a week’.
But tearing himself to pieces was what Dickens needed to do.
‘Have you finished?’ he said angrily.
‘I have said all I feel on that matter’, was my reply.
Bounding up from his chair, and throwing his knife and fork on his plate (which he smashed to atoms), he exclaimed –
‘Dolby! Your infernal caution will be your ruin one of these days!’
‘Perhaps so, sir,’ I said. ‘In this case, I hope you will do me the justice to say it is exercised in your interest.’
I left the table, and proceeded to put my tour list in my writing-case. Turning round, I saw he was crying… and coming towards me, he embraced me affectionately, sobbing the while, ‘Forgive me, Dolby! I really didn’t mean it’…57
Clearly he had ‘meant it’, or, to put it another way, clearly his attachment to the murder of Nancy was coming from a deep part of himself which neither Dolby, nor we, can understand.
Dickens told Wills that his performance of the murder had a transformative, destructive physical effect. ‘My ordinary pulse is 72 and it runs up under this effort to 112. Besides which, it takes me ten or twelve minutes to get my mind back at all: I being in the meantime like the man who lost the fight.’58
Dolby describes the mania for hearing the murder that swept through the towns on nights when it was known it would be performed. It was especially popular in Edinburgh. After it was complete, there would be total silence in the hall. Dickens would then go backstage, often walking with difficulty, and would be forced to lie on a sofa for some minutes before he once more became capable of speech. Then he would recover and ‘after a glass of champagne he would go on the platform again for the final Reading’.59
The parallels do not require emphasis, they are too obvious: Dolby is describing a post-ecstatic pause, such as might occur to a witch doctor recovering from frenzy, a spiritual medium coming out of a trance or, in a more homely and obvious analogy, in the quietness of post-coitum.
William Macready, Old Rugbeian, Garrick Club member, the grand old man of British theatre who had been his friend since Dickens was in his young manhood, and who had played opposite Nelly’s mother as long ago as the 1820s, had thirty-five years as one of the greatest interpreters of Shakespeare known, since Garrick. His legendary farewell performance at Drury Lane on 26 February 1851 had been a performance of Macbeth. Macready was now living in frail retirement in Cheltenham. It was not one of the towns on Dolby’s list, but for the sake of old friendship, and in homage to the stature of the tragedian, they arranged a ‘command performance’ in Cheltenham.
After the show, Dickens sent Dolby to the stalls to bring Macready back to the dressing-room. The old actor was very frail, and seemed to be struck dumb by the performance, ‘as much excited… as if he had given it himself’. When he reached the retiring room, Macready stared speechlessly at Dickens, who urged Dolby to give Macready champagne. He refused, but pressed it on Dickens. ‘Turning to Dickens, who had by this time placed him on a sofa, he said, in the manner peculiar to himself and with great hesitation, “You remember my best days, my dear boy? No! That’s not it. Well, to make a long story short, all I have to say is – Two Macbeths!”’60
The great tragedies of Shakespeare all involve murder, but in Lear, Hamlet, Othello, the killings are incidental to the theme; whereas in Macbeth, yes, the witch-haunted would-be king is driven on by ambition, but the play itself, ‘steeped in so far’, is really about murder. Blood and violence are of its essence. Macready had seen something not merely about ‘Sikes and Nancy’, but about Charles Dickens himself. The veil had been lifted, and then it had fallen again before the proscenium. That was what reduced them to the little silence, broken – as so often in the novelist’s life and conversations – by him bursting out laughing. It ‘so tickled Dickens that he burst out laughing’.61
The inevitable happened at Chester in April 1869. Dickens had a minor stroke onstage. Nelly was in the audience. Frank Beard, his doctor, was summoned from London, and, although Dickens tried to make light of what happened, the medical advice was that the tour should be cancelled forthwith.
The connection between theatre and power, in particular between comic theatre and power, was probably not obvious until the twentieth century, when the mesmeric effects of the great dictators over mass audiences was put on display, and it was clear that such figures as Mussolini and Hitler had borrowed from Hollywood’s box of tricks. One reason that Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator does not completely work as a piece of satire is that he was evidently too benign to realize that, in the decade or so before he decided to impersonate Hitler, Hitler had been impersonating him; the little tramp in baggy trousers, reduced to eating his own bootlaces as if they were spaghetti in The Gold Rush, hero of the ‘Century of the Common Man’, had more than a little in common with the outcast bum, tramping the streets of post-First World War Vienna and exuding self-pity from every paragraph of Mein Kampf. Both drew on the burlesque traditions of Grimaldi and the Victorian clowns, the pantomime tradition that was so large a part of Dickens’s own inspiration and inheritance. One of the most intelligent analyses of the phenomenon is found in the character of Jerry Cobbold, the great comedian, in John Cowper Powys’s Jobber Skald/Weymouth Sands. Jerry is not only a great comedian, he is also a power maniac, who has discovered, by his ability to manipulate crowds, how mass hysteria, and the incitement to mass violence, can operate.
The public readings do not explain anything, but they show us the way that Dickens’s power was capable of working. You simply can’t envisage Thackeray or Trollope, popular as they were, having a comparable effect on audiences, still less – assuming that she had such hieratic skills – George Eliot. These popular novelists of the Victorian era were all working on a level different from that of Dickens. They were simply writers of various degrees of brilliance. The readings merely brought out what had been apparent from the first moment Pickwick moved from popularity to stratospheric bestsellerdom: onstage and on page, Dickens was not merely an artist. He was a mesmerist. It was his fascination with mesmeric power that would inspire his most ambitious novel, the one he left unfinished at his death, the one that killed him.
SIX
THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD
‘He was consumed with an enduring and almost angry thirst to excel’1
DICKENS RECOVERED FROM the stroke, in April 1869, and as the summer progressed, he began to think about another novel. Dickens’s American publisher, James T. Fields, and his wife Annie came over, together with Mr Childs, publisher of The Philadelphia Public Ledger, and his wife, in glorious June weather, and Dickens was determined to give them a real welcome. When the novel began to appear the following year, they realized that, during his kind tourist-guide views of London and Kent, he had been tracing the sites that would form the background to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. For example, as well as inviting the American friends to Gad’s Hill, Dickens came up to London and took apartments at the St James’s Hotel for himself and his daughters, so as to be able to guide his American friends around the capital. In addition to the obvious sights, he escorted them to the postal sorting office, to give them some idea of the sheer, stupendous scale of London, its monstrous sprawl. And there were nocturnal tours of ‘Horrible London’, to make their flesh creep. He took them to the opium dens of Ratcliffe Highway and ended up in ‘a place of resort for sailors of every nationality known as “Tiger Bay”’.2 Here they would be confronted by the sinister little den with whic
h his new novel, seen through the eyes of an opium dream, would open.
The relationship between Victorian England and opium was a close one, and one that demonstrated parabolically the Victorians’ capacity for double-think and double lives. They lived before antibiotics, before any pharmaceutical remedy against pain, bar a few simple drugs – and the greatest of these was opium. The ‘opium dens’ were low dives to be found in the region of the docks. The Ratcliffe Highway was a crime-ridden road cutting through the East End, connecting Limehouse to the City. The opium dens were really for the sailors coming off the ships, moored in Wapping and the other nearby docks. Middle-class people could purchase opiates, in those days before drug restrictions, at any pharmacy. There were no restrictions on the purchase of narcotics, and Dickens himself, in the last two or three years of his life, was heavily dosed with laudanum, the admixture of opium and alcohol that was, in those days before the invention of aspirin (by Bayer Pharmaceuticals in 1899), the commonest form of pain-relief. Dickens’s letters reveal that he was opium-dependent, and it would be fascinating to know, as he devised the character of John Jasper, the opium-fiend and almost-certainly murderer of Edwin Drood, the extent to which his own experience of the drug was used directly when composing the story. Alethea Hayter, in her book Opium and the Romantic Imagination, was dismissive of the opium dream with which The Mystery of Edwin Drood begins. But I have heard Will Self, who has taken opium, assert the faithfulness with which Dickens described the vision, the confused sight of the spiky old bedpost transmogrifying into the cathedral spire.
An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral Tower be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility.
Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around. [MED 1]
Jasper’s wheezing old ‘supplier’, Princess Puffer, says:
‘Poor me, poor me, my head is so bad. Them two come in after ye. Ah, poor me, the business is slack, is slack! Few Chinamen about the Docks, and fewer Lascars, and no ships coming in, these say! Here’s another ready for ye…
‘O me, O me, my lungs is weak, my lungs is bad! It’s nearly ready for ye, deary. Ah, poor me, poor me, my poor hand shakes like to drop off! I see ye coming-to, and I ses to my poor self, “I’ll have another ready for him, and he’ll bear in mind the market price of opium, and pay according.”’ [MED 1]
The price of opium did, indeed, fall slightly after 1850 – from around 8d. to 6d. an ounce in the last decades of the nineteenth century.3 The numbers of deaths from opium poisoning rose slightly, but, compared with drug-related deaths today, they were nugatory, between 100 and 200 a year. The first attempts, by the Liberal government, to limit opium supply had come in 1868, with the Pharmacy Act stipulating that anyone buying arsenic, prussic acid and other poisons and narcotics must do so from a registered chemist, but the Victorians were still miles away from the modern system of narcotics control. Profits from the sort of opiates that could be bought over the counter at a pharmacy – of which J. Collis Browne’s chlorodyne was the most popular – far exceeded anything that the proprietress of an ‘opium den’ could hope to make. (J. Collis Browne’s profits were between £25,000 and £28,000 in the last decades of the nineteenth century.4) It was decades after Dickens died that Bayer Pharmaceuticals, as well as perfecting the development of the aspirin, pioneered what it considered a purer synthetic opium derivative for medicinal use. It was so pleased with the result, a hero among cough remedies, that the firm gave it the name of Heroin.5
Dickens belonged to the innocent days before the only people making profits from the sale of such narcotics were the gangsters. The calming and analgesic properties of opium were regarded as virtues, even though the effects of overindulgence had been celebrated in the writings of the Romantics, most notably Thomas De Quincey. The fact that Coleridge and De Quincey showed how to destroy your life with narcotics did not stop a wily and long-lived politician such as W. E. Gladstone adding a dash of laudanum to his coffee before making one of his notoriously boring speeches to the House of Commons. Dickens, however, while making what use he could of the actual effects, upon his own consciousness, of slight overindulgence, preferred to make the wicked John Jasper – habitual user of opium at home – the frequenter of the opium dens of Ratcliffe Highway.
Among the other sights that Dickens laid on for the American tourists was a visit to Canterbury, a short enough distance from his house in Kent. Having put up at the Fountain Hotel, they arrived at the cathedral just as the afternoon service was beginning – exactly as John Jasper, still bleary from the opium, arrives at Cloisterham Cathedral to sing Evensong in the first chapter of Drood. The Americans, and Dickens himself, were appalled by how ‘mechanical and slipshod’ the clergy were in their manner of conducting the service.
Afterwards, when a verger offered to show them round the ancient building, Dickens dismissed the man and himself conducted the tour for his friends, ‘in the most genial and learned style in the world’.6 He also conducted them around the town, and showed them ‘Doctor Strong’s’ – the school attended by David Copperfield.
Directing his appreciative guests to the real-life sites of his fiction was something from which Dickens did not shy away. When in London, they had explored the Inn of Court where Pip is called upon by the old convict Magwitch, just as, when at Gad’s Hill, he had taken them to walk on the marshes, and seen the churchyard with the babies’ graves where Magwitch in chains first encounters Pip the child.
They could not have known at the time, but it must have dawned on them when they read the unfolding episodes of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, that the new novel was in many respects going to be a revisitation, not only of the geography, but also of the issues, of Great Expectations.
David Copperfield (1849–50), the benign version of his autobiography, was followed a decade later by the much more coherent, much more self-tormenting Great Expectations, in which, several layers of the carapace having been ripped off Dickens by falling in love with Nelly, the raw truth about his own ruthlessness, the impurity of his family hatreds, the psycho-bonds that drove his need for status and money, and the murky origins of his money – any money – had all been mythologized, projected, imaginatively realized. Of course, had Dickens fully known what he was doing, he could not have done it. A helpful course of cognitive therapy, such as our contemporaries might have urged upon a middle-aged man who had just visited such absolute mayhem on his wife and children, after Nelly and The Frozen Deep, would unquestionably have destroyed Great Expectations, made it, indeed, impossible for his imagination to operate at all. Perhaps that novel is the apogee of Dickens’s achievement. It is the only novel in which there is no wasted paragraph, no waffle, no padding, no dud or redundant characters and no illustrations. It did not need illustrations because it is the most devastating and the most inward of all his psychodramas. Every page hits you like a heart attack. But how could he possibly have written it if he had completely known, as we strongly suspect, that biography unlocks the key of the myth? Pip owes his
fortune to a violent criminal, not seen since childhood. The fact is unknown to himself, and the discovery is shattering. The author of this overpoweringly strong story, however, had to remain himself unaware that he owed the source of his wealth, the origin of his imaginative life and the capacity to translate it into gold, to a secret, violent criminal: not a ‘warmint’ who has turned his hand to sheep-farming in Australia, but a mysterious warmint called Charles Huffam Dickens. The other Dickens, the hairy bear in the forest, the secret twin he never knew and whom we glimpse only very occasionally, when, for example, he is practising the murder of a young prostitute as he walks around his shrubbery.
It is hard to think of any more powerful example of the truths explored in W. H. Auden’s poem ‘The Maze’ (in some collections entitled ‘The Labyrinth’):
His absolute pre-supposition
Is: – Man creates his own condition.
This maze was not divinely built
But is secreted by my guilt.
The centre that I cannot find
Is known to my unconscious mind;
I have no reason to despair
Because I am already there.
Dickens’s insightful daughter saw the same truth when she said that her father was a wicked man, while she recognized, and loved, the complexity of characteristics that cohered in and around this wickedness.
Before he left for that last tour of the United States and docked at Boston harbour in November 1867, Dickens was about to publish, in All the Year Round, an article by Sir James Emerson on the murder of Dr George Parkman. This crime had been committed in 1849, and had been followed by court procedures that have been called the O. J. Simpson trial of the nineteenth century. More than 60,000 spectators filed into the Boston court to hear the trial of Dr John Webster, head of chemistry at the Massachusetts Medical College. He was accused of murdering the wealthy businessman and hospital benefactor Dr George Parkman. To this day, there are those who believe in Webster’s innocence. One of the things that fascinated Dickens about the case was Webster’s demeanour after his arrest and during the trial. He was quietly composed, and appeared to be sincerely convinced of his own innocence.