The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

  The Strange Affair of the Feminist Phantom

  A Secret Victorian Journal

  Attributed to Wilkie Collins

  Discovered and Edited by

  William J. Palmer

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

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  Copyright © 1997 by William J. Palmer

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition April 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-734-0

  Also by William J. Palmer

  The Detective and Mr. Dickens

  The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens

  The Dons and Mr. Dickens

  This book is dedicated to Jill

  Editor’s Note

  This manuscript is the third of six unpublished commonplace books of Wilkie Collins discovered by Mr. Allerdyce Clive, the special collections curator of the library of the University of North Anglia. These manuscripts were bequeathed to the college in the estate of Mr. George Warrington, which contained the papers of his great-grandfather Sir William Warrington, who was Collins’s lifelong solicitor.

  Third in date of composition, this manuscript is also the third which I have had the privilege and profit of shepherding to commercial publication. The first manuscript I titled The Detective and Mr. Dickens. To the second, I affixed the title The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens. It is with sincere appreciation that I thank Mr. Clive and the University of North Anglia library for the unlimited access they have granted me in aid of the editing and publication of these manuscripts.

  Because this is the third of the private Collins journals to take up the Charles Dickens/Inspector William Field friendship and collaboration, its principal characters—Dickens, Field, Collins himself, Irish Meg, Ellen Ternan, Tally Ho Thompson—have gone through much together prior to the composition of this manuscript. A brief outline of their previous adventures might be of interest to present readers of this third manuscript.

  At the time—June 1852—when the events chronicled in this commonplace book begin, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens had already participated in two of Inspector William Field’s most notorious cases, that of “the Macbeth Murders” and that of “the Medusa Murders,” as sensationalized in the true-crime tabloids of their day. Those two cases were described in Collins’s first two secret journals.

  The Detective and Mr. Dickens dealt with the beginning of the unusual relationship between Dickens and Inspector Field of the newly formed detective rank of the Metropolitan Protectives. Dickens’s curiosity about criminals originally led him to Bow Street and Field, and entangled him in the solving of two theatre-district murders. But, in the course of those violent events, Dickens’s entanglement became much more personal. He met and fell in love with a young actress twenty-five years his junior, Miss Ellen Ternan. When Miss Ternan was subsequently kidnapped and sexually exploited by Lord Henry Ashbee, the most notorious rake and secret pornographer of his time, it was Dickens, Collins, and Field, aided by a reformed highwayman-turned-actor, Tally Ho Thompson, who came to her rescue. Suffering from the psychological trauma of these violent events, Miss Ternan was placed in Urania Cottage, the Home for Fallen Women established by Dickens’s close friend and confidante, Angela Burdett-Coutts, heiress to the largest banking fortune in Victorian England.

  The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens brought Dickens and Inspector Field together once again when their friend Tally Ho Thompson was taken up and thrown into Newgate for the poisoning murder of a wealthy London society doctor’s wife. Though Thompson was cleared in this case, the suspected murderer, the wealthy Dr. William Palmer, as had Lord Henry Ashbee in Dickens’s and Field’s first collaboration, went free owing both to a lack of evidence and to the notorious leniency of the English Criminal Court toward wealthy gentlemen of high connection.*

  Both of these previous commonplace books are, of course, narrated by Wilkie Collins, Dickens’s protégé and closest friend and confidant during these turbulent years in Dickens’s life. At the center of both of Collins’s previous memoirs lies the development of Collins’s own relationship with Irish Meg Sheehey, whom Collins rescued from a life as a street prostitute and police informer in The Detective and Mr. Dickens to make his secretary and live-in mistress in The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens.

  I have similarly titled this third Collins manuscript The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens. I use this unusual word “hoyden” in my title because Collins uses it in his prefatory comments, and also because it is such a distinctly Victorian word. I have other motives, however, in choosing such an archaic title. I did not want to title this book The Women and Mr. Dickens or The Feminists and Mr. Dickens (though that term was already in use at the time of the events which Collins narrates) because I did not want this book mistaken for some dry-as-dust work of academic literary criticism.

  By dictionary definition, a “hoyden” is a “high-spirited girl or woman.” But in Victorian usage that word carried a more complex sociopolitical meaning. For the Victorians, “hoyden” was a gender-specific word that referred to a woman with a political or social agenda involved with issues such as female emancipation, suffrage, or the English divorce laws. In the oppressively patriarchal Victorian age, equally often the word “hoyden” carried a slightly derogatory connotation of unconventionality, or even sexual looseness. Suffice to say that the ideal Victorian woman, the “angel of the house,” would not be referred to as a “hoyden.” This more sinister connotation perhaps arose from the fact that “free love” was one of the most actively discussed issues in the feminist circles of that time.

  Nonetheless, for the Victorians, the word “hoyden” was most often used to denote an animation and intelligence of personality rather than a looseness of morals. However, even if Collins and Dickens use that term “hoyden” in its slightly derogatory tone, we of the late twentieth century in our political correctness must not judge them too harshly. The Victorian was a very chauvinistic age. Even Victoria was uncomfortable with the gender revolution. In a letter to one of her ministers she wrote: “The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad wicked folly of Women’s Rights with all its attendant horror.”

  Finally, because this particular Collins memoir involves so much material set in the midst of the Victorian feminist movement, some of the events are narrated secondhand through the descriptions of Irish Meg. Her lively narrations are particularly helpful for Collins’s reporting of those events at which he was not present and those conversations to which he was not privy. Thus, Irish Meg sometimes serves as a conarrator speaking through Wilkie’s pen.

  But Collins also does something else in this third commonplace book which distinctly sets it off from the two previous and from almost every other novel written in the nineteenth century with the possible exception of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. In the early stages of this manuscript, Collins actually experiments with a primitive form of narrative flashback which goes beyond the pure exercise of memory which has served as the frame for the narratives of all of his commonplace books.

  —William J. Palmer

  * * *

&nbs
p; *Dr. William Palmer, England’s most notorious poisoner, was finally brought to justice and hanged for his crimes in 1856. His effigy now graces the Hall of Murderers at Madame Tussaud’s. It is mere coincidence that he bears the same name as the editor of the Collins journals.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Prefatories

  January 4, 1871

  That word “Prefatories” is especially appropriate for this new putting of pen to paper. Another year has fled. It was the year of Dickens’s death, the year that pressed me to begin filling up these little leather books with my memories of our adventures on duty with Inspector Field. Now it is a new year, yet it seems strange to have gone through the ordeal of the holidays without Dickens to buoy me up.

  He always loved Christmas so, made such a production of it that the holiday season came to resemble one of his amateur theatricals. I didn’t realize how much I missed Charles until the Christmas season blazed up and he wasn’t there to prompt me—“Come now, Wilkie, try but a taste of this fine plum pudding”—or taunt me—“Oh, Wilkie, you’re acting just like old Scrooge”—or tease me about my discomfort in the presence of children—“If you weren’t such a relentless old bachelor, Wilkie, the little pugs wouldn’t terrify you so.” He went to such excess over Christmas!

  I missed him terribly this Christmas, his energy, his good humor, his festive enthusiasm. I have never done well at Christmastide, probably because I have become somewhat of a cynic in my middle age, an attitude that Charles utterly abhorred. Maybe that is why he loved Christmas so. Perhaps he saw it as the yearly rebirth of hope for this fallen world.

  Yes, I missed him this holiday season. I missed being ushered as an honored guest into his warm, bright manse so festooned with greens that one expected monkeys to come swinging across the bedecked chandeliers. But I also missed being the only one to accompany him to his other household, more modestly decorated but equally cheery, where he bestowed lavish gifts upon his beloved Ellen. I was the only one of his friends he entrusted with access into his secret life with her. I think Dickens trusted me with his secret Ellen because I had been there at the very beginning, and had remained at their side through all the perils of their—I almost wrote “courtship”—struggle…against the criminal powers that she seemed to attract, against the prejudices of an age that could not sanction their love.

  Knowing that she would be and feel even more alone than I, I visited Ellen this Christmas season. I was surprised. She seemed at peace, almost relieved that the intensity of their love had burnt out and left her at rest. I guess I was happy for her, that she was taking his death so well, thinking about moving on.

  But I was disappointed, too. Perhaps she didn’t hold him in the sort of awe that I did. He had been my mentor, the source of what little fame I have managed to grasp. He was, for me, the consummate artist, and the source of all the adventure in my life.

  For her, he was just a man that she took into her bed whenever he was free. Perhaps she was relieved to no longer be the invisible woman in his life. When I left her, with a peck on the cheek and a “Merry Christmas,” I felt his loss even more intensely. Was I the only one in mourning for “the Inimitable” this Christmas season? It was then that I knew what my Christmas present to myself would be.

  I gave myself this new little leather book, and I intend to fill it with more of my private memories of Field and Ellen and Irish Meg and all the rest of the journeyers through Charles’s and my shared life.

  I never intend to expose to public light what I write here, and I intend this for no reading audience save some far-off posterity which I am sure will have little use for it except as a small curio amidst the larger treasures of Dickens’s life and work.

  There is some fittingness in my use of the word “Prefatories.” So much had happened “prefatory” to the events of this memoir that some space must be allotted for introducing the various and unusual cast of characters before proceeding to the curious and shocking events which drew Field and Dickens back together in their favorite game of detection and pursuit.

  This new memoir is set in the rather closed and political world of those embattled hoydens who at the time were intent upon turning Victorian society upon its head. The world of these women was not one which we, Dickens and myself, as gentlemen, had either a great deal of interest in or were even capable of understanding. However, both of us were devoted to our own particular hoydens and actually, in private, encouraged their freedom and unconventionality. Ironically, Victorian gentlemen though we were, we were bound in fealty to our demanding hoydens in ways which mimicked neither the chivalry of the Arthurian epoch nor the domesticity of our own Victorian age. We served them, I my Irish Meg, he his beloved Ellen, as addicts to opium serve the keeper of the pipe.

  Finally, I am going to narrate some of the events in this third little leather book in a manner upon which I have not previously relied. In my earlier narratives, I described only those events in which I participated. In this narrative, however, I foresee the necessity of abdicating my voice in favor of another, that of Irish Meg, who was present at events which I would not even have been welcome to attend.

  And so, let us begin in a familiar place, with Dickens, closed into a careening coach galloping toward our destiny.

  Saint George or the Dragon?

  June 3, 1852—Noon

  It began in a coach, as his A Tale of Two Cities would years later. But this coach collected me on a glistening spring day and galloped out into the country toward Urania Cottage.*

  ’Tis difficult to penetrate the world of women, yet the narrative of this newest commonplace book must, for it was those relentless hoydens who turned the cards in what would be, perhaps, the most dangerous game of chance that Dickens, Field, and your most humble servant would ever be drawn into. It was the women who forced us back on duty with Inspector Field.

  “What a brick you are, Wilkie!” Charles broke the silence which had gathered around us inside that speeding coach. “You are always ready at my summons, a willing accomplice.”

  If the truth of the matter be told, his choice of words, “willing accomplice,” somewhat put me off. He made it sound as if we were two criminals setting off on a “crack,” as Tally Ho Thompson might have said in his colorful highwayman’s argot. But that day Dickens was skittish, and I didn’t fully understand why he was so nervous until that ill-considered phrase, “willing accomplice,” gave away his guilt.

  “You know, Wilkie, success is relative.” Charles grinned expansively as the lush green countryside rushed by. “The more successful you are, the more relatives you find you’ve got.” It was a feckless little joke. I smiled at it, but we both knew that it was counterfeit joviality. He went back to contemplating the countryside.

  I realized how many reasons there were for him to be nervous. Certainly he was nervous about his Ellen. But why? He had visited her many times in the fourteen months since she had entered Miss Burdett-Coutts’s establishment. All seemed quite proper there. Perhaps he was nervous because this was the first time anyone had accompanied him upon one of his visits. As I look back upon it now, I am sure he asked me for propriety’s sake. I would not venture to comment upon the dark intent of his interest in this sixteen-year-old actress because I had already preceded him in the execution of such dark intent. My own Meggy was even more deeply sunken into the depravities of the night streets. Meggy, unashamedly, had been a street whore, where Ellen Ternan had been a stage actress, though in the lexicon of many Victorian gentlemen one was no different from the other.

  For whatever reason, Charles was exceedingly nervous as we entered the tree-lined drive that led to the front veranda of the sprawling three-storey villa which Miss Burdett-Coutts had purchased for their little experiment in social redemption. That fresh spring day we were come to set his mysterious Ellen free like some princess in a fairy tale. Perhaps that was it. Dickens was a nervous Saint George, fearful of loving this enchanting young woman so many years younger than himself, fearful t
hat he was not the rescuing knight but the ravening beast.

  As we stepped out of that coach and entered Urania Cottage, Dickens’s agitation, I am now sure, was that of a hitherto good and moral man suddenly forced to question his deepest intentions. Etched deeply into the tension of his face and the hesitance of his step was the clear fact that Dickens didn’t know what he was doing, yet was powerless not to do it. He wanted the girl, and he couldn’t yet envision, amidst the disparities in their ages and the strict proprieties of the age, how he could possibly have her.

  Urania Cottage was a quite pleasant place, and as we disembarked that spring morn all seemed, as Mr. Browning put it, “right with the world.”* The porch was festooned with potted flowers and the lacy white curtains billowed out of the open windows like Mr. Pope’s mischievous sylphs floating on the air.* Urania Cottage was the brainchild of Angela Burdett-Coutts and Dickens, and that noble lady met us at the threshold.

  “Charles, so good to see you, it has been weeks.” She took him in tow. “And Mr. Collins. This is the first time you have visited Urania Cottage, is it not?”

  “Why yes, uh, no reason, uh, quite pleasant here, I say,” I stammered in the face of her knowledge. Miss Burdett-Coutts was a tall, hovering woman with a long neck and a face too small and fair and gentle for her angular presence. She was not unattractive; her dark brown eyes seemed especially lively, quite fervent in their focusing upon one as she spoke. She wore one of the conventional heavy silk dresses of the day, shiny grey with white lace rising high up around her neck as if intent upon twisting off her small head. Her hair was pinned up in the shapeless bread-loaf style (which is still, regrettably, in vogue). “Must be quite exciting, uh, I mean different, uh no, pleasant for those young ladies chosen to reside here.” My doddering inanity elicited a bubble of mirth from Miss Burdett-Coutts.