6
BUT WHAT OF DICKENS? For those who had followed the greatest mystery of the age, the prospect of the most popular writer of the day putting forth his view on the sensation of the rumours of cannibalism was irresistible. ‘The Lost Arctic Voyagers’ was published in
Thus did Dickens ally his name with the salving of an empire’s anguish, and no one was ungrateful. On this basis, Lady Jane donned black mourning. Her life’s work of turning her dull husband into a great man, finally relieved of his ongoing and colossal ineptitude, began to bear fruit. Dickens spoke at fundraising dinners she organised for yet more rescue expeditions, the goal—with the favourable absence of evidence—now to proclaim Sir John’s undoubted success in finding the elusive Northwest Passage.
Less successful were Wilkie Collins’ attempts to raise his companion’s spirits through drinking and periwinkling. A taint was upon Dickens. For, having dispensed with Dr Rae and the cannibals, he could not himself escape the growing sense that some greater authority seemed to have turned the whole world into a gaol yard. No matter what accolade or geegaw of success or standing came his way, whatever compliment, congratulation, ovation or award was granted him, all iron was rusty and all stone slimy, all air stank and all light was fading. Still, there was for him only one way, and that way was forward, ever forward, never stopping.
By autumn he had begun a new novel raging against government men and government absurdity, the heart- killing world of government regulations and government offices, and at the end of it he was even angrier and sadder and more lost in the thickening ice floes of his own life. For once, words had not rescued him, great as the success of
He continued with his marriage. He continued to believe that, like everything else in his life, it would be righted by the sheer force of his will. He had trouble staying in the same room as his wife, but he stayed nevertheless. He continued to argue in his writing for domesticity, and tried not to think that perhaps this was the very thing in life that had escaped him, that perhaps it did not really exist, or, if it did, it was just one more prison bar.
He kept seeing the cold whiteness of the Northwest Passage, and he kept feeling himself trapped in it with Sir John’s corpse. He kept dreaming he was one of a party of lost sailors, making their wretched way through a polar world both terrible and extraordinary, who finally stumble on Sir John’s iced ship. Here, they know, is salvation, for here there will be warmth and food; here there will be those who know how to find their way home. But a search of the silent, chill cabins reveals only frozen corpse after frozen corpse.
Something was guttering within him, no matter how he fed the flame. He chose to embody merriment in company; he preferred solitude. He spoke here, he spoke there, he spoke everywhere; he felt less and less connection with any of it. He walked more than ever, he travelled overseas ever more; yet on the inside he felt as still as a seized cog. Nothing moved.
He resolved to live a year in solitude in the Swiss Alps with monks and St Bernards. He resolved to move to Australia. He resolved to escape from himself, yet there was no escape. He felt such pity for the beggars and the downfallen he saw everywhere, the ragged people to whom he often spoke, but he could not understand why his wife, to whom he now almost never spoke, seemed fearful and sullen, why she spoke little to him, and why, when she did, it was so often sharp. He suspected he hated himself. He felt he might burst if he did not press on.
On the train to Dover, he read a whaling captain’s description of how, at a certain point in winter in the polar regions, the drifting pack ice joins together into one frozen mass, and any ship so unfortunate to be trapped is unable to move and is squeezed tighter, ever tighter, and everyone waits as the turpentine drips out of the boards slowly being crushed, everyone listens to the ache of the tormented timbers, everyone can do nothing but wait, not knowing if the boat will break and they will then die. It could have been a description of his own life.
‘I believe no two people were ever created with less in common!’ he cried out to Wilkie on the Montmartre one evening, as with a noisy crowd they watched two Turks wrestling: one large and covered in filthy scabs, the other small and oddly tenacious. ‘It is impossible…’ For a moment he seemed lost for words. ‘There is no interest, empathy, confidence, sentiment, tender union of any kind,’ he said dully, as if he were reporting on the effluvium of a cesspit.
Wilkie did not know what to do—to express sympathy would be to encourage what perhaps should not be encouraged, rash words that might later be regretted; not to react was to look callously indifferent to what was clearly consuming the man. Fortunately, before he had decided how he would respond, Dickens was again talking.
‘It is an immense misfortune to her,’ he said, shaking his head, seeming to be uncharacteristically bewildered. ‘It is an immense misfortune to me. She is the only person I have ever known with whom I cannot get on somehow or other. I know I have many…faults…’ He shook his head again, as if he were working on a jigsaw puzzle in which pieces cannot be made to fit. ‘
Again Wilkie was faced with the impossibility of knowing how to respond, and for a second time Dickens recovered and went on, but in a darker, more bitter, more determined strain, saying Catherine had never overly cared for her children and showed little affection. In front of them, the scabby Turk finally pinned his opponent to the ground. Around them, the crowd roared its approval, then laughed when the Turk spat on the face of his compatriot.
After the evening of the Turkish wrestlers, Wilkie did not hear Dickens speak of his marriage again—or not at least until things had reached such a sorry pass that he could speak of little else. In the meantime, Dickens’ activity grew even more frantic: he walked more and more, slept less and less; he attended ever more events and took on ever more burdens. He found himself, one evening, sitting with Wilkie in a Covent Garden theatre watching
To delay that fall a few moments more, he tried to lift himself back up by talking of his next amateur theatrical, which he staged every new year at Tavistock House. Family and servants and friends stood in for actors. Money from the tickets was given to one worthy cause or another, and Dickens’ productions had become quite an event in the London calendar.
‘The problem is that the year is creeping by,’ said Dickens to Wilkie, ‘and I still have no idea what our next play might be.’
As the two headed down a dingy street toward a house recommended by Wilkie as ‘particularly excelling in sybarite pleasure’, the confusion of splendid deaths at the end of the play they had just watched and Dickens’ keen interest in Franklin’s expedition came together in Wilkie’s mind to suggest a solution.
‘Wild ideas are on me again, Wilkie,’ Dickens was telling his companion. ‘Wilder than ever, of going to Paris —Rouen, Switzerland, anywhere—somewhere I can write aloft in some queer inn room. I’m restless, Wilkie.’
‘Imagine,’ began his companion, ‘if your next Twelfth Night play had as its setting that chill, white world.’
‘I need a change, Wilkie, but I am obliged to live in a home with a wife. They say Christ was a good man, but did he ever live with a woman?’
Wilkie coughed.
Wilkie liked women. He found Dickens’ railing against women difficult. Unlike his older friend, he was neither sentimental nor conventional about them, and he would come to manage living with two women, without marrying either. Wilkie also had unusual opinions on mesmerism, the spontaneous combustion of human beings, and scrofula, and his opinions on all such matters interested Dickens.
‘That world,’ continued Wilkie, flurrying his fingers as, in the flaring gaslight, he for a moment beheld not a great man of letters in his prime, but a poor creature preternaturally old, ‘where Parry conquered…’ Briefly he was
