by J C Briggs
‘Tell him everything. He’ll confide in Elizabeth — she’ll comfort him and perhaps he’ll tell her more about his mother.’
‘Good of yer,’ Scrap said.
‘Well, I had the squeeze box to make up for.’
Scrap grinned briefly and went back behind the counter to count the quill pens. Dickens left him alone while he browsed the inks and sealing wax. Green — a colour to which he had always been partial, now the colour that had haunted the case of Anthony Ferrars.
He took a sidelong look at Scrap. He didn’t look like Hugh Donnelly. He was still Scrap — it suited him. Small and wiry and quick, he could get in and out of all sorts of places. Scrap, of whom he was so fond, the boy he might have been had John Dickens remained in the Marshalsea, all his debts unpaid, and his eldest son in the factory pasting labels on blacking bottles.
Sam Jones — he could not imagine another name. It was a comforting name — solid and dependable as the man himself. Alf Rogers was an Alf — no question. Dolly Marchant, however, was not a “Dolly”. Her husband had meant something by that change from Doireanne — he had not loved his Irish wife.
He picked up a bottle of the green ink that his daughter, Katey, wanted. He put it down again and looked at the goose feather quills — the kind he liked.
‘Mr D.’
‘Scrap?’
‘I jest wanted ter know who I am.’
They walked together to Norfolk Street, Dickens and Scrap, in silent companionship.
As they neared Jones’s front door, Dickens spoke: ‘Going to tell Eleanor and Tom?’
‘Nah, I’m Scrap ter them … an’ it’s wot my ma called me. I shan’t forget ’er. Yer shouldn’t forget people.’
‘No, indeed — I’ll remember that.’
‘I’ll keep that name fer when I need it — yer might need a toff another day.’
Scrap, himself again, gave Dickens a wink and knocked at the door.
Finale: What’s in a Name?
Dickens signed his name to the letter he had just finished: Charles Dickens.
He thought about names: Ferrara, Ferrars, Polidori — poor, mad Anthony Ferrars who no longer knew who he was, nor did Mariana Fane. What would become of her child? Doctor Winslow had talked of hereditary insanity — dreadful thought. The sins of the father.
He looked at his own name. He saw it everywhere: on the spines of books, on the covers of Household Words, in the newspapers, on theatrical posters. Yet sometimes he did not know who he was.
There was Scrap; there had been Magpie, Jug and Watcher, Nolly Turner and Peely Peel, all names to fit the face and the man — or the boy.
Mr Dickens, Charles Dickens, Charley, the Inimitable, the Sparkler of Albion, Planet Dick, Young Gas — not so young now. Which of these was he really?
He looked at the portrait above the mantelpiece — a portrait with a face. The face of a handsome, young, curly-haired man, whose eyes looked upwards in dreamy contemplation — a poetical young blade.
Portrait of Charles Dickens, painted by Daniel Maclise in 1839. “Here we have the real identical Dickens”, so Thackeray had written.
There were only two styles of portrait painting, he had written once, the serious and the smirk. Mac had made him serious, that young man of twenty-seven. That young man who wouldn’t look him in the eye. Was that a smirk in the mouth or just the firelight? That young man knew something and he wasn’t telling. Laughing inwardly, he supposed.
He turned down the lamp. The young man’s face vanished. Portrait without a face. He went out into the hall. There was another face there — in the looking glass. An older man who looked careworn and troubled. He caught a glimpse of another figure behind him, but he was walking away — without a word. There would be one waiting to meet him at the top of the stairs — frowning at the chips in the paintwork made by so many boys’ boots. And another in the drawing room, smiling perhaps, at his wife.
And tomorrow morning there would be another, putting on his hat, making ready to go out of the door, to begin another day — to take on the world.
‘’Oo the dickens, indeed?’
*****
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A NOTE TO THE READER
Dear Reader,
The inspiration for this story came from Dickens’s letters about his time in Venice and Ferrara where he saw the girls looking down into the water. Of course, I had to research drowning and I turned to my old friend, Alfred Swaine Taylor, the ‘father’ of forensic medicine and his Manual of Jurisprudence (1844) where I found the grisly forensic detail: the eyelids livid, and the pupils dilated; the mouth closed or half-open, the tongue swollen and congested, frequently pushed forwards to the internal edges of the lips, sometimes indented or even lacerated by the teeth… The details about hanging and broken necks came from the same source.
I also turned to the British Newspaper Archives to find reports of drownings in the late 1840s and early 1850s — there was an astonishing number of cases of which I’ll give just a few to demonstrate how I arrived at the cases which Superintendent Jones discovers in the Police Gazette. The story of the men with the wooden legs is true — the inquests were held on April 8th, 1849 and a verdict of suicide recorded in both cases. Dickens told the story of the woman who jumped into a water tank in a letter to a friend.
The story of Emma Golightly who was presumed drowned and turned up again was a true one. It was never discovered who was in the grave thought to be hers.
I needed an unknown drowned girl, unclaimed, buried at the expense of the parish, and forgotten. The Morning Post in February 1842 explains: ‘In London the bodies are taken to any obscure vault, public house, or police office. The Coroner directs the parish to advertise the body, often in vain.’
I found several cases of unidentified females in the newspaper archive. In July 1841, according to The Morning Advertiser, a young woman was pulled from the London Dock. She was never identified. I was intrigued by the report’s dark observation that ‘No one could walk into that water by accident.’ Unknown, too, was the identity of the ‘fine-made’ young woman taken from the Serpentine in October 1845 and deposited at St George’s Workhouse. Yet she had a distinctive mole on her left cheek, dark hair and hazel eyes. And for which moustachioed seducer had she worn her white straw bonnet trimmed with pink and white ribbons and the lilac-coloured gown? Surely somebody noticed her. Seduced and abandoned, perhaps, like poor Eliza Luke found in the New River in April 1844.
However, this is a crime story, so, naturally, I needed a drowned, unknown, murdered girl. This was more difficult. Such was the damage done by the water, or the bridge, or the rocks of some lonely reach that it was often impossible to find enough evidence of murder. However, there was the case of Eliza Rayment — there’s a name for my notebook — found in the River Thames in October 1847. There was a deep cut under her chin. ‘Four inches in length, an inch in depth’, so reported Mr Bain, the surgeon, at the inquest, and there were ‘two arteries divided’. The wound might have been inflicted by the deceased, but ‘a person using the right hand would naturally make an incision on the left hand side.’ Eliza Rayment was right-handed. The incision was deeper on the right side suggesting a left-handed person. Mr Bain attributed death to the loss of blood from the wound.
Poor Emma Ashburnham who was formerly Emma Meyer had once lived ‘in some splendour’ in York Road under the protection of ‘a gentleman of fortune’, but it was not discovered how she came to be in the river at Waterloo Bridge with a deep and ugly stab wound in her side.
I found some very intriguing clues in some of the reports, for example the 1847 case of the unknown drowned young woman wearing a false plait at the back of her hair; the one in 1842 in which an umbrella is found nearby, bearing on its ivory handle the initials ‘F.H.’
Yes, I found unknown and murdered girls, but I still needed a strangled one. I dug deep into
the newspaper archives and I found it — just the one, and the indefatigable Mr Bain was on hand to assist. The body was found in October 1848 near Battersea Bridge, much decomposed, appearing to have been in the water some time. Nevertheless, Mr Bain’s post-mortem revealed evidence of a ligature encircling the neck, though what this might have been he could not say.
It was quite enough for me. Possible death by strangulation. Just what I wanted.
Oh, all right, I admit it: the body was that of a sailor. But it did happen. Evidence of a ligature was found. I put an ‘s’ before the ‘he’ — I didn’t think you’d mind.
Reviews are really important to authors, and if you enjoyed the novel, it would be great if you could spare a little time to post a review on Amazon and Goodreads. Readers can connect with me online, on Facebook (JCBriggsBooks), Twitter (@JeanCBriggs), and you can find out more about the books and Charles Dickens via my website: jcbriggsbooks.com, where you will also find Mr Dickens’s A-Z of murder — all cases of murder to which I found a Dickens connection.
Thank you!
Jean Briggs
ALSO BY J C BRIGGS
The Charles Dickens Investigations Series
The Murder of Patience Brooke
Death at Hungerford Stairs
Murder By Ghostlight
The Quickening and the Dead
HISTORICAL NOTE
In 1844, Dickens was living in Italy where he wrote his Christmas story ‘The Chimes’ and began Dombey and Son. He rented a house in Genoa but visited Ferrara and Venice in November. Accounts of his travels can be found in his book Pictures from Italy and in his letters to friends, including John Forster to whom the first letters in this novel are addressed.
The essay on Venice in Dickens’s book is entitled ‘An Italian Dream’, in which Dickens evokes a ghostly sense of unreality as his gondola takes him along the canal: ‘Before I knew by what or how, I found that we were gliding up a street — a phantom street; the houses rising on both sides, from the water, and the black boat gliding on beneath their windows. Lights were shining from some of these casements, plumbing the depth of the black stream with their reflected rays, but all was profoundly silent.’
The first letter which concerns the scenes he saw on approaching Ferrara is taken exactly from his letter as are his thoughts about Byron’s poem ‘Parisina’. The description of the peasant girls looking down into the water made me wonder what it was the girls had seen. Naturally, I thought it could have been a body! And Dickens’s words about being murdered there and his phrase ‘a more emphatic chilling of the blood’ set in motion the plot.
In Ferrara Dickens visited the house of the poet, Ariosto, whose poem, ‘Orlando Furioso’, links to the themes of madness and love in this novel and gave me the name of Rolando. From Venice he wrote to Forster about imagining the monk in the cell beneath the Doge’s palace and this was another inspiration for this story. He did not think that he saw a murder. I invented the second and third letters from Dickens to John Forster, but I have used some of Dickens’s own words about Italy and Venice.
In Dickens’s collection of ghost stories, To Be Read at Dusk, there is a story set in an old palace not far from Genoa, not unlike the Palazzo Mariano. The story concerns the haunting of a bride by a mysterious dark stranger, Signor Dellombra, whose name I borrowed and promoted to Count.
Dickens wanted to rent Byron’s old house in Albaro near Genoa, but the house was nearly a ruin and was let to a wine shop. Byron’s friend Doctor John Polidori wrote a treatise on sleep and trance-like states and the two did meet in Venice, so that allowed me to invent the visit to the fictional English family, the Ferrars. Polidori wrote The Vampyr, which was based on a fragment of a story written by Byron at the Villa Diodati in Geneva in 1816. Percy Shelley and his wife, Mary Shelley, were staying at the villa at the same time. Mary Shelley worked on a story which became her novel Frankenstein.
Polidori was uncle to Dante Gabriel Rossetti who does not appear in the novel, but is referred to by Cipriani Lloyd, my fictional sculptor. Polidori was thought to have committed suicide by prussic acid in 1821 — he had many debts. The verdict at the inquest was natural causes, or as Cipriani Lloyd quotes from the newspaper: ‘visitation by the hand of God’.
Luigi Mariotti or Antonio Gallenga (1810-1895) met Dickens on the boat to America in 1842 and he taught Italian to Dickens and his wife before they departed to Italy in 1844. He is mentioned in several of Dickens’s letters. In a letter to John Forster, Dickens writes, ‘A blessing on Mr Mariotti my Italian master.’ Mariotti was a frequent visitor to the home of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, though if he met Dickens again there I do not know. I invented his letter asking Dickens to meet him and the fictional Aurelio Paladino, but Mariotti’s reference to Dickens’s words in The Examiner is real. Mariotti wrote of Dickens ‘who dwelt with so much zest and humour on the horrors of our first voyage to Yankeeland.’
Mariotti became a distinguished scholar and writer under his real name Antonio Gallenga. He wrote a critical study of Ugo Foscolo, the Italian poet in exile, who fought a duel on Barrow Hill. Antonio Gallenga adopted the name Luigi Mariotti as he had fought in uprisings against Marie Louise, the Duchess of Parma, Napoleon’s widow, and in the revolution of 1831, which resulted in a provisional government put down by the Austrians who reinstated Marie Louise.
Antonio Gallenga was regarded as a dangerous agitator and he fled to France under the name of Mariotti which he kept until 1847. There is a biography, Antonio Gallenga: An Italian Writer in Victorian England by Toni Cerutti (Oxford University Press, 1974). Dickens knew Mazzini and supported the cause of Italian unification which is why he wrote so sympathetically about the Italian exiles in his letter to The Examiner.
Clarkson Stanfield (1793-1867), ‘Stanny’, was a great friend of Dickens and painted the scenery for some of the plays put on at Tavistock House, the home to which Dickens moved from Devonshire Terrace in 1851. Stanfield was a renowned marine painter as well as set designer at Drury Lane Theatre. A biography of Stanfield revealed the details of the painting room at Drury Lane.
I researched the Italian Renaissance artists of Ferrara and found Baldassare D’Este (1443-after 1504) who was believed to be the illegitimate son of the Marquis and painted portraits of the family, though most are lost, except the one I found which is possibly by Baldassaro and which I used as the model for Caterina Vecelli. Francisco da Cossa (1430-1477?) is thought to have worked on the frescoes at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara which depict the faces described by the fictional Aurelio Paladino.
James Anderson was actor-manager at Drury Lane in 1850 and Dickens knew him, as well as Mr Cuthbert who was one of the principal set designers and painters. Frederick Clarke was famed for his spinning globe act as I found out in the newspapers of the time where I found the details of the programme at Drury Lane for the winter season of 1850.
Anne Brown was Catherine Dickens’s maid and she did go to America and to Italy with the family. I invented her close friend, Amelia Pout, and, of course, Violet Pout, the governess.
Doctor Forbes Benignus Winslow (1810-1874) established two private asylums in Hammersmith, one of which was Sussex House, and his writings reveal his ideas about the humane treatment of the mentally ill. He is mentioned in the footnote to a letter by Dickens written in February, 1847, the year Winslow’s asylum opened. His books The Plea of Insanity in Criminal Cases and On the Preservation of the Health of Body and Mind gave me the material for the trial of Anthony Ferrars. Byron’s poem ‘Sleep’, Polidori’s paper on sleepwalking, and Dickens’s own comments on Robert MacNish’s book The Philosophy of Sleep gave me the material for the ideas about the mental state of Anthony Ferrars. Doctor John Elliotson was Dickens’s close friend. He advocated the use of hypnosis in therapy and the use of mesmerism by which Dickens was fascinated. Dickens successfully mesmerised his friend, the artist, John Leech when he was seriously ill. Dickens sent Elliotson to treat William Thackeray who recovered from a life-threatening
illness under Elliotson’s care.
Dickens’s children in this novel:
Mary, known always as Mamie (1838-96) was called ‘Mild Glo’ster’, a nickname that reflected her gentle nature. Her sister, Katey, (1839-1925) was a much fierier character, nicknamed, ‘Lucifer Box’, after the matches.
Walter (Wally, born 1841) was a weekly boarder at Mr Joseph King’s School. Dickens describes him as ‘a tougher subject than Charley (Dickens’s eldest son) … a hard-working, patient, capable child.’
Francis (Frank, born 1844) was the son who looked most like his father. He seems to have been a very sensitive child who had a stammer and suffered from sleepwalking.
Alfred (Alley, born 1845) was ‘a good steady fellow’, according to his father.
Dora, born August 1850, died at eight months in April, 1851. Dickens’s great friend, Mark Lemon, sat up all night with Dickens who did not break down until an evening or two after her death when some flowers were delivered, and, according to his daughter, Katey, it was then that Dickens ‘gave way completely.’
CHARACTERS IN THE SERIES
Charles Dickens
Catherine, his wife
Superintendent Sam Jones of Bow Street
Elizabeth Jones, his wife
Eleanor and Tom Brim, their adopted children
Sergeant Alf Rogers of Bow Street
Mollie, his wife, (formerly Spoon) who runs the stationery shop for Eleanor and Tom Brim, whose father is dead