The Quickening and the Dead

by J C Briggs

  In any case, he hadn’t felt well himself — some sort of bilious attack which had made his eyes feel like yellow bullets. It came on after the inquests on Sefton and Plume. Sam had looked at him anxiously, thinking that two appearances as the star witness had been too much for him. And it had, in a way. They both felt the waste of all those young lives. But, it was over. That strange, eventful history ended.

  Dickens looked down at his letters. It had begun with a letter — the letter from Lady Pirie. But, no — in truth, it had begun on a foggy day when he had found himself in Weymouth Street giving a sixpence to a boy with a birthmark like a teardrop and he had seen a man in a low-crowned hat bend over the child.

  He hadn’t known either of them, but they had been there, already part of his life without his even knowing it. In his letter, Sefton had referred to fate — fate weaving its net about his feet. Well, Dickens had thought often that we were all connected by fate without knowing it. Perhaps fate had brought them together on a foggy evening: perhaps he had been Sefton’s nemesis. Sefton wasn’t the shadow — he was. Shadow of his shadow.

  He closed his eyes. His mind ran on — inconsequential scraps, as if he were dreaming. A man dying in a police cell; two figures under the moon, digging; a baby’s cry; a girl with a stove-in face; a devil’s face lit by scarlet flames; a knife swishing through the dark; a boy with an angel’s face; a woman with a parcel in a midnight graveyard; a bloody lump in a bucket; a beetle-browed boy with his fists curled; a girl with a gaunt white face on a mortuary slab; a wretched boy sweeping a crossing — odd, how that boy had got in; a portrait in a tarnished frame; a flower in the mud; a speechless girl with a waxen face.

  Miranda. He had done his best for her. She had gone, speechless again, with the Reverend Hugh Woodhouse and his wife, Dorothea. Dickens had hopes of them. Hugh Woodhouse was a mild-faced, gentle man, but with far-seeing eyes, Dickens had thought. He had looked at Miranda Deverall with such compassion. Dorothea Woodhouse was tall like her husband. She looked intelligent and wise. It would take time, she had told Dickens, but they had plenty of that. Miranda had looked at him, but she had not spoken. Yet, he had seen something — a tiny light. Perhaps it was hope. It wanted Time, he thought — all wounds want time — wounds of the heart and mind most of all

  And for him? We are here to work, he had told someone once. Our business is to use life well. Time for action — that refuge from gloomy thoughts. Take your own advice.

  Answer your letters; deal with Fred; write to Henry Austin about the Sanitary Board — light and air, that’s what was needed for places like Bones Alley — go to see Doctor Fuller about Mary Brady and May — do something for that child; go to the stationery shop, see Mog Chips and ask him to take a letter to Captain Pierce in Devon; go down to Wellington Street; set about the Christmas number of Household Words; finish the article on the Christmas tree. Brighten it, brighten it.

  He walked — that quick, light walk — down to his office, caught up in the surging, wheeling, roaring life of the city, swept along, observing it all with his bright glance, hardly stopping until he came to the junction of Hanover Street and Long Acre.

  There was a band playing — an unmusical affair of a couple of cornets, a piccolo and a trombone. No one was listening, but Dickens stopped to put a penny in the hat. However, he wasn’t alone. The boy was there. The crossing-sweeper — that very muddy, very ragged, very slouching boy who had popped into his dream. Dickens watched him sweep the pavement for him. Two pairs of eyes met, one muddy brown, one a bright searching blue. Something understood. Dickens gave the boy a coin. The boy watched him walk swiftly across the road. ‘Where’s ’e agoin’ in such a tearin’?’

  ‘To meet the future,’ murmured Dickens to himself, ‘if I have one.’ He stepped smartly out of the way of an oncoming cab.

  *****

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  A NOTE TO THE READER

  Dear Reader,

  The inspiration for this story came from a letter that Mrs Gaskell wrote to Dickens in January 1850. Dickens had asked her for a contribution to his new magazine Household Words. Mrs Gaskell knew that Dickens had established a home for fallen women with Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts so she wrote asking his advice about a young girl whom she had visited in the New Bayley Prison. The girl, aged sixteen, had been imprisoned for theft. Mrs Gaskell told Dickens the tragic story of her abandonment by her mother and her apprenticeship with an Irish dressmaker who placed her with another woman who connived at the girls’s secuction by a surgeon in the neighbourhood. Dickens helped Mrs Gaskell to contact the right people and the girl was sent out tp the Cape with an emigrant family.

  Another research tool, I use frequently is the British Newspaper Archive. I found a similar story there. In February 1851, a seemingly respectable surgeon was charged with assaulting a thirteen year old girl. The evidence showed that he used prostitutes to bring him young girls whom he plied with drink inorder to seduce them. The newspaper article referred to seven or eight girls whom the surgeon had ‘succeeded to ruin.’

  These two stories created Doctor Lancelot Plume. I also found the case of a homeopathic doctor who was prosecuted for manslaughter. Doctors were a mixed lot in the mid nineteenth century – some were quacks and took up fashionable cures like homeothapy. The coroner at the inquest on the dead patient observed that ‘such was the state of the law, as regarded medical practice, a man might write himself a sugeon, practice as one … without having passed any examination.’

  There were plenty of stories about doctors procuring illegal abortions, and stories about baby farming – the practice of farming out children to minders in whose care they often died, disappeared, or were sold.

  All grim tales, but of interest to Dickens who cared about children and the poor and wrote about them in his novels and articles in Household Words, and who set up his home for fallen women with Miss Coutts in 1847.

  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

  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

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  By 1850, Dickens had nine children, three girls and six boys. Dora, his third daughter, was born in August 1850, but died in April 1851. He gave them the most extraordinary nicknames – Sydney’s nickname actually was the Ocean Spectre which was abbreviated to Hoshen Speck. Henry Fielding Dickens was born in on January 15th, 1849. The birth of Sydney Dickens in 1846 had been a difficult one. Dickens had learned about the use of chloroform in childbirth, and promised his wife that she should have it. He wrote that ‘the doctors were dead against it, but I stood my ground… It spared her all pain … and saved the child all mutilation.’ According to Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor’s Manual of Medical Jurisprudence (first published in 1844), ether and chloroform were used criminally in cases of rape. He cites the cases of a dentist in France and a doctor in America who were convicted of the crime. Professor Taylor also quotes ‘an eminent judicial authority’ whose opinion was that a victim might be unable to defend herself from attack ‘from terror, or from an overpowering feeling of helplessness as well as horror.’ Taylor also refers to ‘magnetic sleep’ and a case in which the seducer was accused of hypnotising or mesmerising his victim into a sleep then carrying out his attack. Moreover, he states that it was perfectly possible for a young woman to be entirely ignorant of ‘the nature of the act’. I drew on these ideas when creating Miranda Deverall’s circumstances.

 
; William Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, met Dickens in 1836 when he offered Dickens some sketches for Pickwick Papers which Dickens turned down. They became friends, but not always easy ones, though their daughters played together. The friendship of Thackeray’s daughter, Annie, and Dickens’s daughter, Katey, lasted until Annie’s death in 1918. Katey Dickens died in 1929 at the age of ninety.

  Dickens’s article A December Vision appeared in his magazine Household Words on December 14th, 1850, and is a powerful expression of his concern for the poor and his anger at the way in which their suffering is ignored by those who have the power to do something about it.

  In 1847, Dickens set up a home for fallen women with Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, the banking heiress. He wrote the letter to the young women to be read to them by prison governors in the hope that some would take the opportunity of applying for refuge when they came out of prison. Some young women were recommended by clergymen or others concerned for the welfare of girls who had drifted into crime through poverty or being orphaned or simply abandoned by their families like Mrs Gaskell’s poor Miss Pasley.

  The poem An Old Haunting did appear in Household Words, but I couldn’t find who had written it. Contributions to the magazine were always anonymous, but research has been carried out attribute many of the essays, stories or poems. However, the poet I found remains unknown so I borrowed it for poor Edward Lawson – it seemed to fit his circumstances and, of course, gave Dickens the excuse for visiting him about the murder of Doctor Plume.

  Published by Sapere Books.

  11 Bank Chambers, Hornsey, London, N8 7NN,

  United Kingdom

  saperebooks.com

  Copyright © J C Briggs, 2019

  J C Briggs has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events, other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales are purely coincidental.

  eBook ISBN: 9781912786886