The Last Dickens

by Matthew Pearl

  Osgood nodded away the last aside. “Your idea is simply not in our authors’ interests, Major. We shall always see our books as wiser and better than objects, and I think I speak for Mr. Fields in saying we would rather continue in that light even if it means we do not last. I'm afraid you cannot ever de-Bostonize this house.”

  Osgood decided to swiftly end the meeting using one of Fields's techniques. He passed his foot down on a pedal hidden under the desk and Daniel Sand came to alert Osgood of an “emergency” that would forestall any further conversation. But Harper stood and signed his understanding.

  “You needn't bother with the performance,” Harper called out before the clerk had the chance to speak.

  Daniel, acting out his urgent entrance, looked to Osgood with sad eyes. Osgood nodded permission to go.

  Harper continued, a dark cloud passing over his face. “I know every trick, every plan, every purpose in this trade, Mr. Osgood, and I know it ten times better than my dear brother the mayor did, God bless the proud man. Come! The old methods will not save you from the truth I have delivered to you today.”

  They eyed each other, taking stock.

  Harper suddenly laughed, but a laugh that said the joke was his and his alone. “Well, it is true what they say, I suppose. Courtesy is courtesy but business is business.”

  “Who says that, Major?”

  “Me. And you shouldn't believe Mr. Fields and yourself are so different from us, Mr. Osgood, shielded from the world by sunshiny talk and your high ambitions. We've watched you. Remember, the angel may write, but “tis the devil that must print. You should have gone into the ministry if you wanted to remain a believer.”

  “Major, I wish you good afternoon.” Osgood waited silently until Harper had no choice but to gather his belongings.

  “Oh! By the by, the new mystery that Dickens is writing, I hear, shall be enthralling,” Harper said offhandedly to Osgood as he brushed the rainwater from his hat. “Chapman in London, they say, is paying a fortune to publish it. The Murder of Edward Drory?” “The Mystery of Edwin Drood, I believe he has decided to call it.” “Yes, yes, that is it! I am on the very tiptoe of expectation to see where Dickens, the Great Enchanter, will take us this time.”

  DICKENS!-THAT STRANGE WORD, that name of names, the man-meant the world to the firm of Fields, Osgood & Co. The Major knew it, which is why his mention of the new novel was also a threat.

  Fields had a few years earlier made two big propositions to the world's most popular novelist, Charles Dickens: first, that Dickens come to America on a grand reading tour, and second, that their firm be the author's exclusive publisher in America. From his estate in the English countryside, Dickens agreed to both terms, which prompted the loud grousing of all the other American publishers-especially the Harper brothers.

  There was no international copyright agreement between the United States and England. This meant that any American publisher could publish any British book without permission of the author. There did exist what was known as trade courtesy, however: when an American publisher made an agreement to be the publisher of a foreign book, other American publishers would respect it. The Harper brothers were notorious, though, for printing cheap, unauthorized editions (making their own changes to the text, sometimes carelessly and sometimes to suit an English topic better to an American audience). They'd leave the Harper torch off the title page and sell the spurious edition in railway cars or on the street or by subscription.

  Thus, Major Harper's alluding to The Mystery of Edwin Drood was a reminder that Harper could undermine the enormous investment by Fields, Osgood & Co. in Drood by flooding their own cheap editions into the marketplace. The demand would be high for Dickens's new book, and what would the typical hardworking American reader choose? Spend two dollars for the book from Fields, Osgood & Co.- or seventy-five cents from one of Harper's hawkers or peddlers?

  The Boston publisher would be powerless to stop it.

  Charles Dickens's five-month-long reading tour of the United States arranged by Fields and Osgood in the winter of 1867-68 had proven an enormous success. It felt historic even as it was happening. Thousands heard him perform. Osgood worked industriously during the tour, charged with the duties of a treasurer and with meeting Dickens's sometimes fickle demands, in addition to smoothing over conflicts and troubles. At the end of the tour, there were a hundred thousand dollars in profits in the pockets of the “Chief”-as he was called by Dickens's manager, Dolby.

  Fields, Osgood & Co. made money on the readings-5 percent of gross receipts-but their real reward for the faith they had shown in Charles Dickens was yet to come. That would come with the publication of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

  The whole world awaited it, as had been true of each Dickens novel since The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist placed the former court reporter's name before the public thirty-five years before. Dickens alone, among all the writers of popular fiction of the day, could employ wit and discernment, excitement and sympathy, in equal parts in each one of his books. The characters were no mere paper dolls, nor were they thinly veiled extensions of Charles Dickens's own persona. No, the characters were utterly themselves. In a Dickens story, readers were not asked to aspire to a higher class or to hate other classes than their own but to find the humanity and the humane in all. That is what had made him the world's most famous author.

  This time the wait for a new book had been nearly five years, longer than any other interval between books in the past. “The public is ripe for it!” Fields had said. Drood would tell the story of a young gentleman-Edwin Drood-an honest though ambling character who vanishes after provoking the jealousy of a devious uncle named John Jasper, a respectable citizen with a double life as a drug fiend. Dickens promised in his letters to Fields that the book would be “very curious and new” for his readers.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson had been sitting in Fields's office when Fields and Osgood had read Dickens's letter about the novel.

  “I am afraid Dickens has too much talent for his genius,” Emerson announced in his way of an old oracle bored by his own pronouncements.

  “How do you mean, my dear Waldo?” asked Fields. A publisher in the trade as long as Fields would never be roused by one writer kicking another.

  “His face daunts me!” Emerson exclaimed at the Dickens photograph on the wall showing a strong but weather-beaten profile, the far-off look in the strict military eye. “You and Mr. Osgood would persuade me that he is a genial creature. You would persuade me that he is a sympathetic man superior to his talents, but I believe he is harnessed to them. He is too consummate an artist to have a thread of nature left.”

  Emerson did not realize how much his publishers needed Dickens and could no longer depend only on the likes of Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes-nor even their Concord Sage, Mr. Emerson-to keep them afloat. Years earlier, the mutual admiration society of Boston brought floods of readers to the publishing house for their novels and poems. Effortlessly, Longfellow's sensation, The Song of Hiawatha, had flowed from the presses and out the doors of bookshops in Os-good's first months of working at the firm! Now the best Osgood seemed able to do was to persuade Dr. Holmes to write a pale sequel of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table; smile at Mrs. Stowe over a well-intended morality novel half as courageous as Uncle Tom; or encourage Longfellow's slow labor on his long, somber poem about Jesus Christ, The Divine Tragedy, though republishing Longfellow's controversial Divine Comedy translation, yet again, would be more lucrative.

  Osgood felt the Furies chasing him: each day, having to meet irritated authors’ demands for free copies or for solace when books passed into the dreaded land of the “out of print.” Drowning themselves in the Frog Pond in disappointment. Montague Midges, from two offices down the hall, would report the higher author payments needed to fill the pages of their magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. Osgood would look over his shoulder at sluggish, heavy literary productions always reported as “almost half finished!” like Bryant's translati
on of Homer and Taylor's Faust, neither of which could realistically sell enough, even once completed, to make up for their costs. Osgood was overseeing a ship rocking at sea, with the storms worsening.

  Dickens's new book could change that.

  Harper had a point, Osgood had thought the day of their meeting, though he would never admit it. Maybe a publisher had become little different from the toy maker, and maybe an author's name couldn't survive twenty years. “Except for Charles Dickens,” Osgood said to himself. “He transcends the rest. He makes literature into books, and books literature. Harper's toys be damned.”

  Then, early that summer, the news arrived.

  “JAMES!” FIELDS HAD rushed into Osgood's office breathlessly. “We received it over the cable wires! God grant it as some mistake!”

  Osgood panicked before he knew what to panic about. It was so rare that Fields would address his young partner informally, or that he'd exhibit such a show of emotion in proximity to the female bookkeepers-who all looked up from their copying and probably blotted a dozen words in one instant-or that he would be running at all. Then Osgood noticed one of their employees crying into her bare hands before she could find a handkerchief. And Rebecca was looking over at Osgood as though she had a thousand words waiting on her lips. He had the sickening feeling of everyone else knowing something terrible had transpired.

  The sympathetic look of her green eyes made Osgood want to take Rebecca's counsel-to have the news, whatever it was and however bad- delivered by her.

  But Fields had already flown through his office door, gesticulating wildly as he pushed it shut. “Charles Dickens… dead!” he finally managed to blurt out.

  The Boston newspapers had received the obituaries from that morning's London papers and had sent a wire on to their office. Fields read from it aloud, emphasizing the details as though the subject might still be saved by quick thinking: “The pupil of the right eye was much dilated, that of the left contracted, the breathing stertorous, the limbs flaccid until half an hour before death, when some convulsion occurred…”

  Further details included that Dickens had spent his final day working on The Mystery of Edwin Drood when, pen in hand, he had begun to feel sick. He had just finished the final words of the sixth installment of the story-the halfway mark through the book, which was to be composed of twelve serialized parts. Soon after, he fell down and never recovered.

  “Dickens dead!” Fields exclaimed, shaking bodily. “How is it…! I cannot believe it! A world without Dickens!”

  Men and women wept or sat bewildered and silent in the offices as word spread. “Charles Dickens is dead,” was repeated by all who heard it, to whomever they saw next. Nearly everyone in the publishing house had met Mr. Dickens when he had come for his tour two years before. Though it was difficult to feel Charles Dickens to be your friend, it was instantaneous to feel oneself his. How much life was in him-not just his own but each of his characters whose lives he had performed in front of so many thrilled audiences during his visit! No one who had ever met Dickens could imagine him gone. A man who had-Osgood remembered someone saying-a man who had exclamation points for eyes. How could such a man die?

  “Charles… Dickens… Forty miles…” Fields was mumbling still in a crestfallen fog after they had sat in silence almost an hour. “I must remain on watch at the wires in case it was a mistake.” Dickens had only been a few years older than Fields-whose own sick headaches and hand aches had grown worse. Fields turned back to Osgood on his way out, “Forty miles, you said so!”

  “I did indeed,” Osgood replied with a patient kindness.

  It had been March 1868, near the end of Dickens's visit to Boston, at dinner at the Fieldses on Charles Street. The talk had somehow turned, in the way such things happened at the Fields dinner table, to calculating how far all of Charles Dickens's manuscripts would extend in a single line if the pages were laid end to end.

  “Forty miles,” Osgood had said after careful mental calculation of the number of novels and stories and a quick census of their average length.

  “No, Osgood,” Fields had called out. “A hundred thousand miles!”

  “Thank you, my dear Fields,” Charles Dickens had said, as though conferring knighthood on him, then turned to Osgood with a stern countenance, his large blue-gray eyes seeming to burrow deep into the young publisher's soul, and his eyebrows darting far up. “Mr. Fields, I am inclined to be down on your young associate here until he rather changes his calculation of how many words I have surrendered in my day. More than forty miles, surely!”

  There were Fields and Osgood in a nutshell: the younger man sought the correct answer, the older gave the answer one wanted to hear.

  “Does it not give you a weird sensation, Mr. Dickens?” said beautiful Annie Fields, laughing at her husband and his partner. “How could words with so much value cover so light a portion of the earth?”

  The writer put up his large hands in an expressive gesture that pulled all attention to him. He had an ever-changing face that could not really be seen properly unless he was caught sleeping. “Mrs. Fields, you do understand my odd lot. Once I publish, my words are mangled, pounded, and robbed on both sides of the ocean. I have many readers and booksellers in league with me: and yet I stand alone. I suppose I am fated to be a Quixote without a Sancho. That is how my fellow authors fall as this life fight of ours progresses. There is nothing to do but close up the ranks, march on, and fight it out.”

  Osgood felt a confusion and diminishment come over him at the memory now as he followed Fields into the corridor and his office. The senior officer sat and slumped over on his manuscript-filled window seat, pressing his forehead against the cool glass of the window until it fogged over from his breath.

  Osgood felt if he could make a strategy for business instead of sinking into depression, Fields would be grateful. He would earn the faith placed in him with this partnership. He could hear Major Harper's voice in his ear from three months earlier speaking of junior partner, yes, and then Drood. I cannot wait to see for myself.

  “Mr. Fields,” Osgood said, “I am concerned now more than ever about the Harpers.”

  “Yes, yes,” Fields replied languidly. He was lost to grief. “What? I cannot understand it, Osgood. How could you think of Harper?”

  “When the Major hears the new novel was only half finished-and Dickens dead-well, Mr. Fields, Harper will claim no trade courtesy even applies for anything unfinished. He will try to rush out and publish Drood right under our noses without hindrance or disguise.”

  Fields snapped to attention. “Harpy Brothers, Lord! A deadly stab. Osgood, our house cannot survive it!” He moaned in a voice of surrender and rolled himself across the room in his desk chair. “No man can see the end of this. The business world now is depressed and wavering. Major Harper was right about what he told you of New York, you know. It will be over for us.”

  “Do not say that, my friend,” said Osgood.

  Fields's energy had seemed to expire as he sat with his limbs hanging flaccidly from the chair. “New England has been a brilliant school of literature. But it has the feature of a single generation, not destined to be succeeded by another. Edinburgh gave away its publishing over to London, and so we will be bought and swallowed by New York. Dash it all! We might as well just hawk books of quotations and law textbooks, like poor Little and Brown, God rest their souls. Why undergo the pain of literature?” Fields's mind suddenly wandered. “Say, you have a taste for salt at the moment, as I do, Osgood? I would run a mile for it. I want you to go to the stand on the corner and get a quart of peanuts. Yes, something salty.”

  Osgood sighed, feeling suddenly like a junior clerk again-and feeling the solid forms around him were ready to disappear. Then he tossed his hat on the chair and turned back to his senior partner. “We must not sit by,” Osgood said. “Perhaps nothing can be done, but we must try. We will publish it and publish it well. Before Major Harper does. Half a Dickens novel is half more than any ot
her novel on the shelves!”

  “Bah! What good is a mystery novel without the ending? We become invested in the story of young Edwin Drood and then… nothing!” Fields cried out. But he started to pace up and down the room, with a reassuring clarity kindling in his eye. He blew out a long sigh as if expelling the old despair. Suddenly he was Osgood's Fields again, the invincible businessman. “You are in part right, Osgood. Half right, I should say. Yet we mustn't be content with half of the thing at all, Osgood!”

  “What choice do we have? That is all he left.”

  “The man just died-all is in disarray and grief in England, I am sure. We need to discover everything we can about how Dickens intended to finish the book. If we can reveal exclusively in our edition alone how it was meant to conclude, we shall defeat all the stealthy literary pirates.”

  “How shall we do it, Mr. Fields?” asked Osgood, increasingly excited.

  “Courage. I shall go to London and use my knowledge of its literary circles to investigate what was in Dickens's mind. Perhaps he even wrote more before his death that he did not have the chance to hand over to his publisher-it may be sitting in some locked drawer while his family is crying out their eyes and putting on mourning clothes. I must go about coolly until I find at least a hint of what he intended. Yes, yes. Take it quietly, tell no one outside these walls our plan.”

  “Our plan,” Osgood echoed.

  “Yes. I will find the end to Dickens's mystery!”

  ON THAT DAY in June, Osgood went from quietly mourning the death of Charles Dickens to plunging neck and heels into spinning out their practical plans. He asked Rebecca to cable John Forster, Dickens's executor, with an important message: Urgent. Send on all there is of Drood to Boston at once. They had the first three installments and needed to receive the fourth, fifth, and that sixth installment that the news papers had reported he'd been finishing when he died. Osgood ordered the printer to begin setting the existing copy of The Mystery of Edwin Drood immediately from the advance sheets they already had. In this way they'd be ready to add in whatever could be gleaned of the end and go to press immediately.