by A. N. Wilson
We do not know whether Dickens, who told his son Charley that John Jasper had, quite definitely, committed the murder, would have changed the plot, had he lived; or whether Edwin Drood, who appears to be dead in the surviving pages of the novel, might not have returned, like John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend, either disguised or openly. We do not know whether Dickens was intending to borrow from his friend Wilkie Collins’s plot in The Moonstone and have the crime committed while under the influence, in this case, of opium, which induces amnesia until the narcotic repossesses the perpetrator’s brain.
None of these things can be known. And in some senses, they are beside the point. What we have are the surviving six monthly parts (out of the projected twelve). Dickens had seen Numbers 1–3 through publication and corrected the proofs of Number 4, and Numbers 5 and 6 were altered after his death, restoring cuts, in book form, that had been deemed necessary for serial use. And what these surviving pages reveal is that for the first four episodes or so, Dickens was writing at the very height of his powers. He had never created more tense ‘atmospherics’. He had returned to the Rochester of his childhood. The old hag whom we met in the wonderful opening pages – in the opium den – Her Royal Highness the Princess Puffer – has now come down to Cloisterham from London in pursuit of John Jasper. Dickens does not tell us how she got there, or whether he had forgotten that the railways have not yet reached Cloisterham. Rochester, and the marshes, and the glittering Medway, had always been the scene of the lost Eden, the time of innocent walks with his father John Dickens, of relative prosperity working in Chatham dockyards, of a certain degree of schooling, and of the family being of containable size before his poor parents found themselves, like the old woman who lived in a shoe, the mother and father of more children than it was possible to cope with. The railways in Dickens had always been symbols of the cruel, modern world intruding into Pickwickian innocence, thundering its man-made earthquake through Staggs’s Gardens, where ‘a bran-new Tavern, redolent of fresh mortar and size, and fronting nothing at all, had taken for its sign The Railway Arms… the old-established Ham and Beef Shop had become the Railway Eating House’. [DS 6] The railway brought loss of innocence, and since the Staplehurst crash it brought fear, and the possibility of destruction. It was an emblem of unhappy death, and the possible instrument of Dickens’s – and Nelly’s – exposure to the public. In an essay in All the Year Round of a decade since, 30 June 1860, Rochester had been ‘Dullborough’, ‘my boyhood’s home… Most of us come from Dullborough.’ Cloisterham had seemed more picturesque than Dullborough, but it had first come before our eyes in an opium trance. At the beginning of the Cloisterham myth it was still out of reach of the corrupting railroad, but by the time it had run into difficulties, it had become possible for the serpent to enter Eden and the old purveyor of wickedness from the Ratcliffe Highway to present at the innocent place. Old Puffer is the Angel of Death. ‘Died of what, lovey?’ ‘Probably, Death.’ [MED 23]
So now the novel was never going to be finished.
The eyelid drooped, but flickered. There was still life in the body as they lifted it from the floor to the sofa. ‘At death’, Larkin averred, ‘you break up: the bits that were you/Start speeding away from each other for ever.’30
In Dickens’s view of things, this process could begin long before the moment of death. The ‘bits that were you’ could, indeed, coexist with bits that were not ‘you’ at all, or were a different ‘you’ who was able to lead a separate life from the conscious ‘you’. In his final novel, he chose to write about the phenomenon of the divided self, in the context of a gruesome murder story. The phenomenon, however, was not external to himself. He had always been a divided self – the victim-child and the Infant Phenomenon who exacted a cruel revenge on his hapless parents; a lovelorn romantic and a domestic tyrant; a worshipper of feminine purity who had probably somehow managed to contract venereal disease and who certainly liked to pace the streets of Paris and London, eyeing up the trade. His oeuvre abounds in divided selves of one sort or another, or of doubles – such as Edward Carson and Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities or the many paired siblings or twins, from the Cheerybles in Nicholas Nickleby to the Flintwinches in Little Dorrit. Now the complicated juggling act, of keeping his divided selves from ever coming to know one another, had ended, and he was drifting towards the peaceful Garden of Proserpine.
By the time Katey returned from London to Gad’s Hill, having told her mother the news that Charles Dickens was dying, the death-scene was finally assembled in the dining room. She brought with her Frank Beard and her sister Mamie. Nelly was already there, having been summoned back from Peckham, presumably by Georgina.
‘Directly we entered the house,’ Katey remembered, ‘I could hear my father’s deep breathing. All through the night we watched him, taking it in turns to place hot bricks at his feet, which were so cold. But he did not stir.’31
The next day, 9 June, was the fifth anniversary of the Staplehurst train smash. Charley arrived in the morning, with Dr Russell Reynolds who, upon examining the unconscious patient, told them all what they knew already. No hope. All day the door was open, leading into the conservatory where bright-red geraniums, Dickens’s favourite flower, could be glimpsed, together with vivid blue lobelia. Light flooded into the room. His eyes could no longer be dazzled. Just before six in the evening he gave a deep sigh, and a single tear rose to his right eye and trickled down his cheek. Dickens was dead.
SEVEN
THE MYSTERY OF CHARLES DICKENS
DICKENS WAS DEAD: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever, about that… Old Dickens was as dead as a doornail.
With death, the oyster shell stayed firmly closed, and the pearl that, in this book, we have tried to prise out was, for the time being at any rate, left hidden. There he lay, ceasing at once to be the lover of Nelly, or the creative divided self who had made the novels, the wicked-virtuous monster recalled later by his children, the Enchanter who could mesmerize crowds of thousands by his readings, leaving behind for ever the sickly factory boy who had stared with bewildered and potentially vengeful eye upon a cruel, bloody England, and now Charles Dickens was ready to change into an Eminent Victorian. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Sir John Everett Millais, the establishment painter par excellence, arrived on the very day to sketch his corpse.
Much to ponder here! Millais, whose painting Christ in the House of His Parents had been so furiously (and rather unaccountably) denounced by Dickens as a work of blasphemy, was now, twenty years on, stepping over the threshold of Gad’s Hill. No longer a young firebrand, but the essence of respectability; frock-coated, pomaded, an adornment of the Royal Academy, and well on his way to the baronetcy that he had conformed so ardently to achieve: a Podsnap among painters. Those who kept alive in their hearts the flame of rebellion against Victorian England, such as William Morris and John Ruskin, deplored Millais, who had left them for a riband to stick in his coat. He had diluted art with commerce, and his sentimental painting Bubbles would be used as a commercial advertisement for soft soap. Highly appropriate. He understood the whole duty of man in a commercial country. Dickens, in his last novel, had mocked the vain pomposities of cathedral monuments: the tax inspector ‘“Departed Assessed Taxes;” introducing a vase and towel, standing on what might represent the cake of soap. “Former pastrycook and Muffin-maker, much respected.”’ [MED 5] Now they were going to sarcophagize and memorialize Dickens. Katey regretted that Sir John, the Royal Academician, had not asked for the bandage to be removed from Dickens’s chin, for, ‘it marred the calm appearance of my father’s countenance’. But since when had his face ever been calm? Mrs Storey, in reconstructing the scene, said that the face in death ‘was observed by more than one to resemble Tennyson’.1
Of course. Between one whiskery great man and another, who would presume to distinguish? Whether it had been Darwin or Gladstone or Herbert Spencer lying there, who would have m
inded, for what was about to happen was that, in taking him as their own, they would neuter him and use him as a vehicle for collective self-congratulation.
Dickens had let it be known that he wished to be buried in the little churchyard at Shorne, on the edge of the marshes immortalized in Great Expectations, and the family accordingly began to make the arrangements. Given the picture of cathedral life in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, there was a certain dusty, mouldy and unconscious graveyard humour in the fact that the Dean and Chapter of Rochester quickly muscled in on the act and wished to reclaim their local son for their own vaults, among the nuns, abbots, distinguished muffin-makers and undistinguished bishops of Rochester. ‘“There’s a old ’un under the seventh pillar on the left as you go down the broken steps of the little underground chapel as formerly was; I make him out (so fur as I’ve made him out yet) to be one of them old ’uns with a crook. To judge from the size of the passages in the walls, and of the steps and doors, by which they come and went, them crooks must have been a good deal in the way of the old ’uns!”’ [MED 5]: thus Stony Durdles.
Millais brought with him the sculptor Thomas Woolner, who took a death-mask, later to be fashioned into a sculpture, an unlikeness that did in marble what Millais had achieved with a pencil, an eminence who could have been the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster or the Bishop of Sodor and Man.
But while plans were afoot to bury the Great Victorian in his nearest cathedral, and the Victorian pieties were being trotted out, something had happened that was quite unlike the death of most other writers. ‘It is an event world-wide,’ Carlyle said, ‘a unique of talents suddenly extinct.’2
Carlo Dickens e morto, an Italian newspaper eloquently telegraphed, and Mary Cowden Clarke (Mistress Quickly in his production of The Merry Wives of Windsor), reading the words in Genoa, felt that ‘the sun seemed suddenly blotted out’.3
The Times, huffing and puffing with full-throated portentousness, and entirely forgetful of the number of occasions on which it had denounced him, pontificated that ‘Westminster Abbey is the peculiar resting place of English literary genius; and among those whose sacred dust lies there, or whose names are recorded on the walls, very few are more worthy than Charles Dickens of such a home.’
The Dean of Westminster, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, had met Dickens with the poet Frederick Locker-Lampson, best known for his anthology-piece ‘Mabel’. Dean Stanley sent a message via Locker-Lampson to the Dickens family, conveying the gracious sentiment that he was ‘prepared to receive any communication from the family respecting the burial’.4
Back at Rochester, Stony Durdles had been at work with his hammer, to find an area beneath the ancient stone floors that could accommodate another coffin.
‘I take my hammer, and I tap.’ (Here he strikes the pavement, and the attentive Deputy skirmishes at a rather wider range, as supposing that his head may be in requisition.) ‘I tap, tap, tap. Solid! I go on tapping. Solid still! Tap again. Holloa! Hollow! Tap again, persevering. Solid in hollow! Tap, tap, tap, to try it better. Solid in hollow; and inside solid, hollow again! There you are! Old ’un crumbled away in stone coffin, in vault!’
‘Astonishing!’
‘I have even done this,’ says Durdles, drawing out his two-foot rule (Deputy meanwhile skirmishing nearer, as suspecting that Treasure may be about to be discovered, which may somehow lead to his own enrichment, and the delicious treat of the discoverers being hanged by the neck, on his evidence, until they are dead). ‘Say that hammer of mine’s a wall – my work. Two; four; and two is six,’ measuring on the pavement. ‘Six foot inside that wall is Mrs Sapsea.’
‘Not really Mrs Sapsea?’
‘Say Mrs Sapsea. Her wall’s thicker, but say Mrs Sapsea. Durdles taps, that wall represented by that hammer, and says, after good sounding: “Something betwixt us!” Sure enough, some rubbish has been left in that same six-foot space by Durdles’s men!’
Jasper opines that such accuracy ‘is a gift.’
‘I wouldn’t have it at a gift,’ returns Durdles, by no means receiving the observation in good part. ‘I worked it out for myself. Durdles comes by his knowledge through grubbing deep for it, and having it up by the roots when it don’t want to come.’ [MED 5]
But now the Dickens children had a better offer. Durdles had the grave already dug and open in St Mary’s Chapel, in Rochester Cathedral, when the plan changed once more. Neither the small country churchyard that their father had actually wanted, nor the cathedral that he had depicted with such gruesome comedy in his final book, was to receive all that had been mortal of the Great English Worthy. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, cousin of ‘The King of Lancashire’, Lord Derby, and son-in-law of that Lord Elgin who had brought back the Parthenon Marbles to the British Museum, also husband of Queen Victoria’s beloved friend and lady-inwaiting Lady Augusta, had signalled that he was prepared to receive a communication. So a communication was sent, and the family,5 via John Forster, conveyed that they would like to bury Dickens in the Abbey, on condition that there were only two coaches full of mourners, that there should be no plumes, trappings of funereal pomp of any kind, and that the time of the interment should be kept secret. The dean agreed to these conditions, perhaps thinking of Oliver Twist’s unhappy time as an undertaker’s mute, sleeping under the counter at Mr Sowerberry’s establishment and staring with terror at the shadowy coffins as he tried to sleep. ‘An unfinished coffin on black tressels, which stood in the middle of the shop, looked so gloomy and death-like that a cold tremble came over him, every time his eyes wandered in the direction of the dismal object.’ [OT 5]
Somewhere in the vicinity of Gad’s, perhaps in Rochester, perhaps nearer at hand, ‘Coffin-plates, elm-chips, bright-headed nails, and shreds of black cloth, lay scattered on the floor’ [OT 5] as someone or another made the coffin. And at six o’clock in the morning on 14 June, that receptacle, now filled up, left Gad’s for the station at Higham. How often, when living, Dickens had taken this trip, as often as not alighting at Peckham Rye to see Nelly, or whizzing on to Charing Cross Station, a short walk from the offices of Household Words in Wellington Street.
Now he rattled along to Charing Cross in his coffin. When it arrived at the terminus, it was carried into a hearse and three carriages followed, not the two the family had originally specified as a maximum. In the first were the four children who were still alive and still in England – Charley, Old Etonian and failed businessman, at present making a mess of editing Household Words; Harry the barrister; Mamie; and Katey Collins, who would one day be the person who revealed Dickens’s Secret Life to the world. In the next carriage was the purveyor of the official version, biographer John Forster, who had known Dickens since the Doughty Street days, the early triumphant Pickwickian days; he shared the carriage with Charley’s wife; with Georgy, who had also been with Dickens ever since the days of Doughty Street and had been his companion to the very last; and with his sister Letitia, four years Charles’s junior, who had been a little child when their father was taken into the Marshalsea, but whose eyes had seen it all: the hilarity of the aunts and the parents clapping and laughing as the infant Charles entertained them with songs and imitations; the ignominy of her twelve-year-old brother setting out to Warren’s Blacking warehouse; the success of Boz; the holidays in Broadstairs when she and her husband stayed with Charles as he laboured on Barnaby Rudge; and later holidays on the Isle of Wight, when, at Lady Swinburne’s house at Bonchurch, the company had screamed with excitement at Dickens’s skill as a conjuror, and Lady Swinburne’s strange flame-headed little boy, with an enormous head, Algernon Charles, had clapped and cheered. In the third carriage were Frank Beard, Wilkie Collins with his brother Charles (Katey’s gay painter-husband) and the family solicitor, Frederic Ouvry, in whose house at Walham Green there had been an amateur performance of The Frozen Deep, followed by a glorious afternoon, ‘quaffing great goblets of champagne’.6 Twelve years later, Ouvry had penned Dickens’s will, leaving £1,000 to Nelly.
Twelve mourners, that was all. They reached the Abbey, to which the public had not been admitted, at nine o’clock, and the coffin was carried through the west door, up the nave and into Poets’ Corner in the South Transept. Claire Tomalin, in her book The Invisible Woman, wondered if, behind a pillar, and standing apart from the others, Nelly stood to watch the burial. I so hope that was the case.
The dean noted:
It was a beautiful summer morning, and the effect of the almost silent and solitary funeral, in the vast space of the Abbey, of this famous writer, whose interment, had it been known, would have drawn thousands to the Abbey, was very striking. As the small procession quitted the Church I asked Mr Forster, as it would be a great disappointment to the public, whether he would allow the grave to be open for the remainder of that day. He said, ‘Yes; now my work is over, and you may do what you like.’ The usual service was at ten o’clock. At eleven o’clock there arrived reporters from every newspaper in London, requesting to know when the funeral would take place. I told them it was over. Meantime the rumour had spread, and during that day there were thousands of people who came to see the grave. Every class of the community was present, dropping in flowers, verses and memorials of every kind, and some of them quite poor people, shedding tears.7
Dean Stanley, imaginative, clever man, got it right. The National Valhalla was indeed the place in which to enshrine the mortal remains. A pompous public funeral, however, and the musical rites of a church in which Dickens did not really believe, would have been entirely inappropriate. Stanley respected the family’s wish for a quiet burial, and acknowledged the public’s need to pay tribute to the novelist.