‘I beg to say,’ said Dickens, smiling, ‘that I have not the least belief in the noble savage.’
‘Of course, such things are not unknown, even to white men. After all, in Van Diemen’s Land there were cases of escaping convicts taking vile resort in eating each other. But they were men devoid of religion, a hundred times worse than the most barbarous heathens because they had turned away. You see, Mr Dickens, the distance between savagery and civilisation is—’
But had she not said such things before? Something seemed wrong—with her reasoning, or her memory, or how she had once behaved. Just when she felt uncharacteristically faint and lost, Dickens rescued her.
‘The distance, Ma’am, is the extent we advance from desire to reason.’ He would not tell her his whole life was an object lesson in control of one’s passions; that it was what had led him to sit there with her that very day.
‘I do not entirely agree with those that say it is a matter of science,’ said Lady Jane. ‘Rather it is an affair of the spirit.’
She stood up and went to a display cabinet, from which she took a wooden box. Sitting it on the mahogany guéridon between her and Dickens, she raised the lid. Inside, cushioned by red felt, were a few folded letters and a yellowing skull.
‘It is a king of the Van Diemonian savages, Mr Dickens. I have shown it to several professors and men learned in phrenology. To test them, I did not say who it once was. Some found irrefutable signs in the skull’s shape of degeneracy, others of nobility. It appears it is both.’
‘The convict, the Esquimau, the savage: all are enslaved not by the bone around their brain,’ said Dickens, reaching across and closing the lid, ‘but by their passions.’ He raised his hand with a flourish, as he did when performing. ‘A man like Sir John is liberated from such by his civilised and Christian spirit.’
‘Exactly,’ said Lady Jane.
‘As for the noble savage, I call him an enormous nuisance and I don’t care what he calls me. It is all one to me whether he boils his brother in a kettle or dresses as a seal. He can yield to whatever passion he wishes, but for that very reason, he is a savage—a bloodthirsty wild animal whose principal amusement comes from stories at best ridiculous and at worst lies.’
‘Lies, you say, Mr Dickens?’
‘I do say, Lady Jane. Terrible, wretched, disgusting, mirroring lies. Here we have a race of thieving, murdering cannibals asserting that England’s finest were transformed into thieving, murdering cannibals—what remarkable coincidence!’
‘They had evidence, Mr Dickens,’ said Lady Jane.
‘Murderous thieves produce damning evidence of murderous thievery—and what do we do?’ said Dickens, picking up The Illustrated London News. He waved it as a parliamentarian would a deficient bill, his triumphant smile perfectly judged. ‘Broadcast their story of innocence, that’s what!’
Later, when he came to kiss her liver-spotted hand in farewell, Lady Jane asked him if it was in his power to question such a story.
‘I only know I am in yours,’ replied Dickens brightly.
But as the door of Lady Jane’s home closed behind him and he faced the morning gloom, thick flakes of soot eddied around him like black snow, and nothing seemed bright. He made his way from Pall Mall in a hansom cab, through mud and shit so thick and deep that dogs and horses seemed formed from it. People dissolved in and out of the dirty fog like fen monsters, like wraiths, filthy rags wrapped around their faces to ward off the cholera miasma that had carried away six hundred souls only a month before. London seemed all stench and blackness: blackness in the air and blackness in his eyes, blackness in his very soul begging to be white once more as he made his way home to his family.
Family, of course, was everything by that morning in 1854—families alike and unlike, families happy and unhappy—for across classes and suburbs and counties, family had arrived like the steam train, unexpectedly but undeniably. Everybody had to be family and all had to celebrate family, whether it was the young queen and her consort or the poorest factory worker. Like any boom, there were opportunities to be had in family, and just as there were railway speculators, there were family speculators. Few had gambled so boldly and profited so handsomely as Lady Jane, the exemplary devoted wife, or Dickens, the very bard of family. But celebrating family was one thing. Practising it, Dickens had discovered, was something else again.
Because it had been raining too much and he had been gloomy too often, because he felt something too close to failure stalking him like a shadow, because he wanted light and needed to know he was still moving forward in all things, because he felt cold and the cold was growing, that evening he proposed to his wife, Catherine, that they go to Italy the following month. But she did not want to: the children had commitments of one type or another, and besides, her condition, after ten children, did not make travelling a welcome prospect.
Then, after what he felt was an innocent comment from him about her weight, which, as he said, was a simple truth, Catherine abruptly stood and walked out. According to their daughter, Katy, who rushed in soon after, angry at him, at her, at the whole miserable, wretched house they were doomed together to inhabit, along with all the other children, domestics and dogs and birds, her mother had now taken to her bed.
Her bed! thought Dickens, turning away from Katy. Again and again, over and over, back to her bed she would go after every argument, where she would once more become a heaving mound of feather quilt, rheumy eyes and stifled sobs. The last time, he had remonstrated, argued, apologised and, when daring, touched her on her forehead, her cheeks, her lips—but she had recoiled as if bitten by a mad dog. This time he did nothing. Weighing his options, he realised he had none, that somehow something was so broken that no word or action would fix it.
The situation, he knew, was felt painfully by all in the house, a house that seemed to breed only quarrels—between son and daughter, between elder and younger, between governess and servants—the whole house was wracked by a wretched spirit and even the furniture seemed to bear grudges against the walls. There seemed no end to the misery, and, impossibly, everything just went on and on. But that night, rather than fight with his wife, he was mortified to realise that he lacked even the passion to continue the argument.
Rather than go and see her, he put on his coat. A long time ago he had fled from himself into Catherine, but now he was fleeing from Catherine into himself. Then, he had needed her and tunnelled into her to protect himself from all that roamed inside his head, all that he now kept at bay with his ceaseless external activity. It was said he had chosen to marry above himself; but no cynic is ever truly cynical, and he had loved her. But her very presence now brought on in him a wordless anguish. Now he would rather walk to Lands End and back than stay the night in bed with his wife.
He could not bear her misery, nor her listlessness. He could not forgive the way she withdrew from her sacred duties as a wife and a mother into a lethargy that seemed to worsen with each new birth—surely a cause for jubilation, not melancholy?—and how she grew fatter and duller with each passing day. Why did she resort to the grapeshot of domestic life—the caustic aside, the peremptory embrace, the sudden, terrible glance of knowing contempt—and why did he respond with pettiness, with rage, with absence? The worse it got, the less he understood and the more she retreated, and the more she gave ground the greater grew his conviction it was all her fault. Could there be two souls less suited to living together?
His thoughts reformed as the Erebus and the Terror, thrown up on their sides by the ice, their masts casting diagonal lines across the frozen deep, the wind raising a dirge in their icicle-hatched rigging. And the ice and the cold and keening wind were all him and he was at the same time buried within it; for twenty years, had not his marriage been a Northwest Passage, mythical, unknowable, undiscoverable, an iced-up channel to love, always before him and yet through which no passageway was possible?
And so he decided to go out and, as he so often did now, walk the nig
ht away. Walking was his pressure valve, and he the steam engine fit to explode without it. Looking, thinking, improvising scenes, rehearsing monologues and dialogues and inventing plots, he walked miles and miles, ever deeper into the mysterious labyrinth of the greatest city in the world. As clatter, hovels, cries and stench filled his being, he would keep on walking, the filthy dross of the everyday stirring in his alchemist’s head and transforming into the pure gold of his fancy.
Once, he had loved to watch and mimic and recall, joining it all in one merge as glorious and muddy as the streets through which he wandered, knowing nothing was coincidence and everything happened for a reason. But now there was a dreariness about all things for him.
There were the ‘little periwinkles’—as Wilkie Collins called ladies of the night—to be opened when he went on a jaunt with his friend around the theatres and streets, and though this and all he had ought to have been enough, somehow, for some reason for which he could not find words, it no longer was. Much as he tried to suppress the dangerous, undisciplined thought, he wanted something more—but what he wanted, he could not say.
He felt a curtain lowering on some other world he had visited for a few brief years in his youth: a carnival world, with the brightest of swirling rings, a circus tent he was permitted to enter for a short time only, and for a shorter time yet to be the ringmaster, before being cast out once more into the bootblack night. He was panicked, fearful at the fading of some light he could not describe but which had once illuminated his world.
At some point, he knew, he would return to home and a snoring Catherine. He would fall into a strange slumber in rhythm with his walking: half-awake, half-asleep, possessed of the strangest dreaming. Was it the laudanum he took more frequently of a night to ease his sleep? Or was it just what life had become? Slowly he would feel better, as his characters talked to him, as he came to understand what it was, other than air, that they all wished to breathe.
After a few short hours’ sleep, he would awaken before dawn to the sound of carts heading to market laden with produce, and the noise of the streets below his bedroom would soothe him. By some miracle life had not stopped. As he slowly came to his senses, he would again feel an immense surge of relief that, even in the brief hours that he slept, the wondrous world had continued spinning, and he with it.
‘It’s not her fault,’ he heard Katy say behind him, as he went to open the front door.
Startled from his reverie, he turned and looked at her. She was fifteen, a dark beauty and, like him, forceful and quick. He loved all his children, but only with Katy did he share an understanding. She spoke to him in a way no one else dared.
‘That Dora died. She was a baby. Maman did all she could.’
‘Of course,’ he said, as gently as he was able. ‘Of course it’s not your mother’s fault.’
‘Sir, the immortal flame of genius burns in his bosom,’ Wilkie Collins was saying to John Forster at the Garrick when Dickens, unseen by both men, arrived. They were discussing a scandal involving a well-known painter and two women.
Wilkie Collins had a very large head that teetered on a particularly small body, and the oddity of his looks was accentuated by a bulging left temple and a depressed right temple, so that viewed from one side he seemed a rather different man than when viewed from the other. Outside of an anatomist’s bottle, he was one of the queerest things Forster had ever seen. Forster did not like the way Dickens had in recent times taken rather a shine to this odd young man who was, Forster felt, usurping his own position as Dickens’ intimate.
‘The genius,’ continued Wilkie, ‘of English—’
‘Never mind,’ said Forster, ‘about his genius, Mr Collins.’ He said the word as though it were a protracted illness. ‘We don’t have genius in this country unless it is accompanied by respectability. And then, not to put too fine a point upon it, in a word, so to speak, we are very glad to have it—very glad indeed.’
‘My dear Mammoth,’ said Dickens, coming up behind the two men, placing one hand on Forster’s great shoulder before sitting down on the green Moroccan divan next to Wilkie. ‘How splendid to see both my fine friends together. Shall we share a sherry negus?’
But Forster was having neither sherry negus nor any of it, and, making some excuses, stood up and left. Dickens seemed unperturbed by his friend’s abrupt departure; it was, as he put it after, ‘part of the Mammoth’s glacial patrimony’. He went on to tell Wilkie about his meeting with Lady Jane Franklin.
‘I am rather strong on voyages and cannibalism,’ he said, finishing his story.
‘And ice?’ asked Wilkie.
‘Very strong on the ice,’ said Dickens, raising a hand to signal a waiter. ‘Blue as gin. Sometimes feel I’m shipwrecked there myself.’
Wilkie Collins’ nerves were still good; he was yet to invent the detective novel, to be celebrated by his age as one of the great novelists and thereafter forgotten, to have his health fail, to take so much opium to ward off the pain that he would come to believe he had a doppelgänger, the Ghost Wilkie. The world for Wilkie was a promise yet to fracture into phantoms, his eyes were yet to turn into bags of blood, and the great Dickens was a friend and mentor. He holidayed with Dickens, he played with Dickens, and he even worked for Dickens on the novelist’s magazine, Household Words. Life had yet to shape him and he continued to believe he shaped his own life. He was young, quick-witted and, moreover, agreeable to whatever was Dickens’ fancy, and when that fancy was periwinkling, Wilkie knew some of the finest halls and houses to frequent. But in this case he was at a loss to know how to agree or what to agree with.
‘All those fricassees of the famous beneath mountains of ice, great men meeting noble deaths—do you think it’s exactly your sort of story?’
‘And the kettles,’ said Dickens. ‘Don’t forget the kettles.’
‘But only a week ago you said you were about to embark on a new novel and weren’t to be burdened with any writing jobs that came between you and it.’
‘Well,’ said Dickens, ‘I’ve never claimed to be consistent. Besides, I’m weary, my dear Wilkie. I was three parts mad and one part delirious rushing at Hard Times.’
‘It brought Household Words good times,’ said Wilkie.
‘It left me all done in.’
Wilkie knew that Dickens’ magazine, in which his novels would first appear as serials, was more than a major source of income for the novelist. It also mattered that it, as with everything Dickens touched, was not just a success, but an ever greater success.
‘I am beyond a novel just now,’ Dickens was saying, ‘but I need some tale to help sell our Christmas edition of the magazine.’ And then, on seeing a bowed, beetle-like figure in a far corner, he brightened. ‘Why, it’s Douglas Jerrold—he’ll give us something.’
On being waved over, Jerrold, his bright eyes bluer than ever beneath huge eyebrows that sat over his sharp little face like watchful moths, was delighted to see Dickens but declined a drink, saying he had been somewhat off-colour the last few months. Instead, he told a short and funny story about sherry negus and Jane Austen’s brother, with whom he had served in the navy.
‘I read one of Austen’s once, I think,’ Dickens ruminated. ‘Who these days would read more?’
‘Macaulay,’ said Jerrold.
‘Precisely,’ said Dickens. ‘Unlike you, Douglas, she didn’t understand that what pulses hard and fast through us must be there in every sentence. That is why, since her death, she has suffered ever greater obscurity rather than growing popularity—and that is why I really must have you write something for our Christmas edition.’
‘If I could, Charlie, I would. But I’m busy with a new play and I couldn’t see my way clear to do anything for you till next spring.’
After Jerrold left, Dickens played with his large wedding ring, sliding it off, rolling it around his fingernail. Though he did not say it, something in his meeting with Lady Jane Franklin had resonated in an unexpected and as yet intangible wa
y with him. He could not let it go. He slid the ring back on.
‘What do you think, Wilkie, if I did a little paper on Dr Rae’s report, taking the argument against its probabilities?’
At his home, Tavistock House, Dickens more closely studied The Illustrated London News. Outside, the London morning was almost as dark as night; inside, the hiss of his gas lights comforted him as he read Dr Rae’s account. So too, he concluded with relief, did the content. The man had no gift for story.
Dickens put the paper down, moved the bronze statuette of duelling frogs to the centre of his desk and set to work. He opened with some quick, telling jabs, and diverted for a moment to praise Dr Rae deftly, thereby eliminating the possibility of his article being construed as a personal attack.
Then, and only then, in the manner of the barristers he had reported on in his youth, Dickens began to sow doubt over every detail of Dr Rae’s account—from the utter impossibility of accurate translation from the Esquimau’s argot, to the very real possibility of multiple and even opposing interpretations arising from the savages’ vague gestures. He questioned the process of butchering and cooking up a fellow human. ‘Would the little flame of the spirit-lamp the travellers may have had with them have sufficed for such a purpose?’ he wrote.
Feeling better with the piece, with himself, with life, he halted, reread this last sentence, and then underlined the phrase may have had. The case was building, and he was now feeling words rushing his goose-quill along, leaving trails of ink, blue as ice, leading him and his readers to that strange and terrible world.
He turned to the inescapable matter of the mutilation of the bodies. ‘Had there been no bears thereabout, to mutilate the bodies; no wolves, no foxes?’ He didn’t answer his own rhetorical question—let the reader answer, he told himself, scurrying straight on to another telling blow.
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