Drood, Page 7

  Dickens refused. His reasons were clear enough: his daughters, who appeared in the play, had never been introduced at Court and he did not want their first appearance before the Queen at the palace to be as actresses. He proposed that Her Majesty should come to a private performance at the Gallery of Illustration a week before subscription night and that she should bring her own gallery of guests. Faced with the iron will of the Indomitable, the Queen agreed.

  We performed before her on 4 July, 1857. Her Majesty’s guests included Prince Albert, the king of Belgium, and the prince of Prussia. It was especially in honour of Prince Albert that Dickens had directed the entrance and stairs to be decked with flowers. Some of us, I confess, were apprehensive that such a royal audience might not react with the passions of those who had been our audience at Tavistock House the previous winter, but Dickens assured us that the Queen and her guests would laugh at the funny parts, weep at the sad parts, blow their noses exactly when our more common audiences had, and that—during the farce called Uncle John presented after The Frozen Deep— some of the royalty would bray like donkeys. He was, as usual, correct on all counts.

  After our performance, the delighted Queen invited Dickens to come forth to accept her thanks.

  He refused.

  The reason he sent this time—“I could not appear before Her Majesty tired and hot, with the paint still upon my face.”

  Actually, of course, it was more than the actors’ paint that kept Dickens from allowing himself to be presented to Her Majesty and her guests. You see, our romantic farce of Uncle John had left Dickens in his Uncle John costume of a floppy dressing gown, a silly wig, and a red nose. There was no way on earth that Charles Dickens, one of the proudest and most self-conscious men who ever lived, was going to allow himself to be introduced to Queen Victoria in that regalia.

  Once again, the Queen politely gave way.

  We offered two more performances of The Frozen Deep at the Gallery of Illustration, but though the play once again met with wild enthusiasm and ecstatic reviews from everyone who attended and its receipts accounted for the vast majority of the money raised for the Jerrold family fund, we still fell short of the £2,000 goal.

  John Dean, manager of the Great Manchester Art Exhibition, had been pressing Dickens to perform The Frozen Deep at that city’s New Free Trade Hall, and—unwilling to end up with anything less than the full £2,000 he had promised the Jerrolds—Dickens immediately went up to Manchester to do a reading of A Christmas Carol there and to inspect the hall, which could easily hold two thousand people.

  He decided at once that it would be a perfect venue for the play but that it was simply too large for the meagre acting skills of his daughters and sister-in-law Georgina, all of whom had central roles. (It never occurred to Charles Dickens that he might not be up to the professional requirements of such a huge hall and such large audiences. Dickens knew from experience that he could master crowds of three thousand and more with his magnetic influence.)

  He would need to hire and rehearse some professional actresses. (Mark Lemon, Dickens’s son Charley, and I were allowed to stay in the troupe, but the Inimitable began rehearsing us all as if we had never performed the play before.)

  Alfred Wigan, manager of the Olympic Theatre, suggested to Dickens two promising young actresses whom he had recently hired for his theatre—Fanny and Maria Ternan—and with Dickens’s rapid approval (he and I had already seen both of these Ternan girls, their younger sister, and veteran-actress mother perform in other plays), Wigan approached them to see if they would be interested in appearing in The Frozen Deep. They were eager to do so.

  Wigan then suggested to Dickens that he might also consider the young women’s mother, Frances Eleanor Ternan, as well as the youngest and least impressive member of the acting family—just eighteen—a certain Ellen Lawless Ternan.

  And thus Charles Dickens’s life changed forever.

  AFTER LEAVING THE CHARING CROSS HOTEL I took a hackney cab part of the way home and decided to walk the rest of the way, stopping for supper at a club to which I did not then belong but at which I had guest privileges.

  I was angry. That impertinent young Dickenson whelp with his “You are so fortunate to have someone like Mr Dickens as your mentor and editor…” had put me in a foul mood.

  When, five years earlier in late summer of 1860, my novel The Woman in White had begun appearing in All the Year Round the week that Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities concluded (and I should note to you, Dear Reader, that Dickens’s character of Sydney Carton had been taken most liberally from my selfless and self-sacrificing character of Richard Wardour in The Frozen Deep—why, Dickens even said as much, allowing that the Carton character and idea of Tale of Two Cities had come to him during the last performance of The Frozen Deep while he lay on the floorboards with Maria Ternan’s—the new Clara Burnham—real tears soaking his face and beard and ragged clothes, to the point that he had to whisper to her—“My dear child, it will be over in two minutes. Pray compose yourself!”)…

  Where was I?

  Oh, yes, when The Woman in White appeared in eight-months’ serialisation in Dickens’s new weekly magazine—and appearing to tremendous interest and acclaim, I might modestly add—there was much idle chatter and some small written comment to the effect that I, Wilkie Collins, had learned my craft from Charles Dickens and honed my skills under the tutelage of Charles Dickens and had even borrowed my narrative styles from Charles Dickens. It was said that I lacked Dickens’s depths and whispered in certain quarters that I was “incapable of character-painting.”

  This, of course, was pure nonsense.

  Dickens himself had written me a note after first reading my manuscript in which he said that it was “a great advance on all your former writing, and most especially in respect of tenderness… in character it is excellent.… No one else could have done it half so well. I have stopped in every chapter to notice some instance of ingenuity, or some happy turn of writing.”

  But then, of course, Dickens… being Dickens… ruined the effect by adding that he must “always contest your disposition to give an audience credit for nothing, which necessarily involves the forcing of points on their attention.”

  One might have responded that Charles Dickens invariably gave his audiences credit for too much and, through his self-indulgent flights of impenetrable fantasy and unnecessary subtlety, left far too many ordinary readers lost in the thick forest of Dickensian prose.

  To be honest with you, Dear Reader who lives and breathes in such a remote branch of my future that no hint of my candour could possibly get back to anyone who loved Charles Dickens, I am… was… almost certainly always shall be… ten times the architect of plot that Charles Dickens ever was. For Dickens, plot was something that might incidentally grow from his marionette-machinations of bizarre characters; should his weekly sales begin slipping in one of his innumerable serialised tales, he would just march in more silly characters and have them strut and perform for the gullible reader, as easily as he banished poor Martin Chuzzlewit to the United States to pump up his (Dickens’s) readership.

  My plots are subtle in ways that Charles Dickens could never fully perceive, much less manage in his own obvious (to any discerning reader) meandering machinations of haphazard plotting and self-indulgent asides.

  Impudent and ignorant people, such as this orphan-whelp Edmond Dickenson, were always saying that I was constantly “learning from Charles Dickens,” but the truth is quite the opposite. Dickens himself admitted, as I have mentioned earlier, that his idea for self-sacrificing Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities had come from my character of Richard Wardour in The Frozen Deep. And what was his “old woman in white” in Great Expectations, the much-ballyhooed Miss Haversham, if not a direct steal from my central character in The Woman in White?

  I SETTLED DOWN to my solitary meal. I enjoyed coming to this club because of how the chef here prepared lark pudding, which I considered one of the four great works
produced by my present age. Tonight I decided to dine relatively lightly and ordered two types of pâté, soup, some sweet lobsters, a bottle of dry champagne, a leg of mutton stuffed with oysters and minced onions, two orders of asparagus, some braised beef, a bit of dressed crab, and a side of eggs.

  While enjoying this modest repast at my leisure, I recalled that one of the few things I had ever liked about Dickens’s wife was her cooking—or at least the cooking she oversaw at Tavistock House, since I had never seen the woman actually don an apron or lift a ladle. Years ago Catherine Dickens had (under the name Lady Maria Clutterbuck) brought out a volume of recipes, based on what she served regularly at their home at Devonshire Terrace, in a book called What Shall We Have for Dinner? Most of her choices were to my liking—and many were visible on my table here this evening, although not in such plentitude or with an equal glory of gravies (I consider most cooking as simply a prelude to gravies)—as her tastes had also run towards lobsters, large legs of mutton, heavy beefs, and elaborate desserts. There were so many variations of toasted cheese in Catherine’s volume of recipes that one reviewer commented—“No man could possibly survive the consumption of such frequent toasted cheese.”

  But Dickens had. And had never put on a pound over the years. Of course, it is possible that his habit of briskly walking twelve to twenty miles a day might have something to do with that. I am, myself, of a more sedentary nature. My inclinations, as well as my chronic illness, keep me close to my desk and couch and bed. I walk when I must but recline when I can. (It was a ritual of mine, when spending time at Tavistock House or Gad’s Hill Place, to hide in the library or some empty guest room until two PM or three PM—whenever Dickens finished his writing labours and came hunting for someone to go on one of his confounded forced marches with him. Of course, it was a ritual of Dickens’s to seek me out—often tracking me by the smell of my cigar smoke, I realise now—so I was often good for a mile or two of Dickens’s long walks, which would be less than twenty minutes or so at his impossible pace.)

  This night, I could not decide between two desserts, so—Solomon-like—I chose both the lark pudding and the well-cooked apple pudding. And a bottle of port. And coffees.

  While finishing my pudding I noticed a tall, aristocratic, but very old man rising from a chair across the room and for an instant thought it was Thackeray. Then I remembered that Thackeray had died on Christmas Eve of 1863, almost a year and a half ago.

  I had been in this very club, a guest of Dickens, when the older writer and the Inimitable had reconciled after several years of cold silence. That breach had begun during the height of the madness surrounding Dickens’s separation from Catherine, when he was most vulnerable. Someone at the Garrick Club had mentioned that Dickens was having an affair with his sister-in-law, and Thackeray, evidently without thinking, had said something to the effect—“No, it is with an actress.”

  Word got back to Dickens, of course. It always did. Then a young journalist friend of Dickens’s, part of his “squad” as it was said then, a certain Edmund Yates (who, like Iago, always had a lean and hungry look, I thought), had written a truly unpleasant and dismissive profile of Thackeray in Town Talk. Deeply stung, the old gentleman-writer noted that both he and Yates were members of the Garrick and asked the club to expel the younger man on the grounds that his conduct in writing such a piece had been “intolerable in the society of gentlemen.”

  In an astounding act of insensitivity towards his old friend Thackeray, Dickens had taken the young man’s part in the dispute and then resigned from the Garrick himself when the membership committee had agreed with Thackeray and expelled the journalist.

  So it was here in the Athenaeum Club, years later, that the breach was finally healed. I had heard Dickens describe the reconciliation to Wills. “There I was hanging up my hat in the Athenaeum,” he said, “when I looked up and saw Thackeray’s haggard face. The man looked like a ghost, Wills. He looked as dead as Marley and lacked only the chains. So I said to him, ‘Thackeray, have you been ill?’ And we struck up a conversation after the years of silence and shook hands and all now is as it was before.”

  This is very touching. It is also very false.

  I happened to have been in the Athenaeum that night, and both Dickens and I saw Thackeray trying to struggle into his coat. The old gentleman was speaking to two other members. Dickens, coming in, passed close by the old writer without giving him a glance. I was putting away my stick and hat and Dickens had already passed Thackeray and had his foot on the stair when the older author chased after Dickens, catching him on the stairway. I heard Thackeray speak first and then hold out his hand to Dickens. They shook hands. Then Dickens went into the dining room and I watched Thackeray return to his interlocutor—I believe it was Sir Theodore Martin—and I heard him say, “I am glad I have done this.”

  Charles Dickens was a kind and frequently sentimental man, but he was never the first to mend a quarrel. A fact that I would be reminded of soon enough.

  AS I TOOK A CAB HOME, I thought about Dickens’s queer plan to seek out this phantom named Drood.

  As I was listening to Dickens tell his story of the Staplehurst disaster that morning, I had gone through shifting opinions on the veracity of the “Mr Drood” commentary. Charles Dickens was not a liar. But Charles Dickens was also always convinced of the veracity and truth of whatever position he took on any subject and—through his telling, but especially through his own writing—he would always convince himself that something was true, simply because he said it was, even when it was not. His various public letters blaming his wife, Catherine, for the separation eight years earlier, a separation that was obviously his idea, his need, and his instigation, is a perfect example of this phenomenon.

  But why invent this Drood character?

  Then again, why tell everyone that he, Dickens, had taken the initiative to settle his long breach with Thackeray when it had been the older writer’s move to do so?

  The difference is that Charles Dickens’s lies and exaggerations, while perhaps not told deliberately—speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call “the real world”—were almost always promulgated in order to make Charles Dickens look better.

  By all objective accounts, including that of the pudgy little homunculus Edmond Dickenson—may his bruises fester and rot and turn to cankers—Dickens had been the hero of the Staplehurst railway disaster. Adding a phantasm such as Drood to the telling did nothing to increase the Inimitable’s heroism in the telling. Indeed, Dickens’s obvious anxiety in describing the odd, almost inhuman man detracted from the Dickensian aura of heroism.

  So what was all this about?

  I had to assume that there had been a very strange personage named Drood at the wreck site and that something very close to their brief conversation and bizarre interactions as Dickens had described them had occurred.

  But why try to find the man? Agreed, there was a certain mystery in such an odd figure, but London and England and even our railways were full of odd figures. (Even that impertinent mayfly young Mr Dickenson seemed a character out of a Dickens novel—orphaned, with his rich Guardian and Chancery-endowed fortune, listless, aimless, given only to reading and lazing about. What extra stretch was there to believe in a “Mr Drood” with his leprous appearance, missing fingers and eyelids, and lisping utterances?)

  But again, I wondered as I approached my street, why try to find this Drood?

  Charles Dickens was a man given to much planning and careful premeditation, but he was also a creature of impulses. During his first tour of the United States, he had alienated the majority of his audiences and almost all of the American newspapers and journals with his insistence on the creation of an International Copyright. The fact that Dickens’s fiction—and most English authors’ fiction—was being blatantly stolen and published in America with no recompense whatsoever to its author evidently seemed only right
and fair to the upstart Americans, so Dickens’s anger was justified. But, shortly after the tour—after the damage was done between Dickens and his original adoring audiences there—Dickens simply lost interest in the Copyright. He was, in other words, a careful man with careless impulses.

  At Gad’s Hill Place or his earlier homes, or on any voyage or outing, it was invariably Charles Dickens who decided on the destinations for outings, who decided on the location of picnics, and who decided on the games to be played, who decided who the captains would be, and—most frequently—it was Dickens who kept score, announced the winners, and awarded the prizes. The occupants of the village nearest to Gad’s Hill Place even treated him rather like a squire, obviously honoured to have the famous author hand out awards at fairs and competitions.

  Dickens had always been the boy who led the other boys in play. He never doubted that this was his role in life and he never relinquished that role as an adult.

  But what game would we be pursuing if Dickens and I actually sought out this Mr Drood figure? What purpose would it serve other than to gratify yet another boyish impulse of Charles Dickens’s? And what dangers would be involved? The neighbourhoods that Drood had allegedly mentioned to Dickens as they descended the railway grade to the carnage below were anything but safe areas of London. They were indeed, as Dickens called them— the Great Oven.

  I WAS IN great PAIN from the rheumatical gout as I arrived home.

  The light from the street gas lamps hurt my eyes. My own footfalls struck my brain like chisel blows. The rumble of a passing waggon made my entire body twitch with pain. I was trembling. A sudden, bitter taste of coffee filled my mouth—not an echo of the coffee I had enjoyed with dessert, but something far more vile. There was a confusion in my mind and a nauseating sickness permeating my body.