Wanting

taking on some other dimension.

‘I always felt,’ ventured Wilkie, ‘that Wardour was so much more than a simple villain.’

Dickens nodded.

‘Driven low by cruel Nature,’ suggested Wilkie.

Dickens nodded more vigorously.

‘Bowed by Fate, undoubtedly,’ continued Wilkie, encouraged. ‘But a savage, never…’

‘A savage, my dear Wilkie, be he Esquimau or an Otaheitian, is someone who succumbs to his passions. An Englishman understands his passions in order to master them and turn them to powerful effect. Was and is that not Franklin? And here we have a man poisoned by his passions,’ Dickens continued, unfurling another roll of paper across which was scrawled ACT III, ‘but who, at the end, with both ships trapped in the Arctic ice, and horror all around—’ Dickens paused. The unrolled sketch showed a ship’s deck. Dickens shook his head. ‘No, this won’t do. Not now. Not with such a dramatic denouement. We need towering cliffs of ice. The terror of the sublime. Because Wardour finally chooses something far better than allowing his rival to die: he sacrifices himself in order that Frank Aldersley can have Clara—a rather splendid redemption, I think.’

And with that, he picked up a pencil stub and ran a line through the sketch.

So Dickens continued over the final eight weeks, altering lines here, adding monologues there, changing plot everywhere. As the story drifted like pack ice then froze into a fixed shape, he was also attending to the invention of the world of the play—the sets, the costumes, the casting, the props—to such an extent that when the play’s programme was published, Wilkie, whose name still appeared as its author, thought it prudent to have added on the title page ‘Under the Management of Charles Dickens’.

For Dickens was stage director, very often stage carpenter, scene arranger, light setter, property man, prompter and bandmaster. He had authentic Arctic costumes made for the explorers, employed and trained ‘snowboys’, whose job it was to scatter paper snow onto the stage from above, and substituted hammocks for the beds to impart the necessary veracity. On his nocturnal walks, he devoted himself more and more to the frozen deep rather than little Dorrit, falling into the part of Wardour, shouting out his lines as he went, walking himself into new lines, venturing farther and deeper into the treacherous shoals of ice that entrapped his own lost soul.

One final matter irritated him, though. Why would Wardour sacrifice himself? Somehow, something was lacking in their invention, which insufficiently explained why a bad man would do such a good thing. Then, while out walking one night, he realised Richard Wardour was not bad at all; rather he was good, a good man who might rescue himself—and with what?—with love! Lack of love had iced Wardour’s soul, and love rescues his soul from the ice, such a love that he would lay down his life for another!

‘Young and loving and merciful,’ he cried out to Clerkenwell, Wardour’s voice now filling his throat. ‘I keep her face in my mind, though I can keep nothing else. I must wander, wander, wander—restless, sleepless, homeless— till I find her!’

And then Dickens halted, puzzled, lost. Who was this woman? She didn’t exist. It was all delusion.

In the new year of 1857, after four weeks of full dress rehearsals, a hundred people crammed into the refurbished schoolroom at Tavistock House—among their number members of parliament, judges, ministers and several journalists—to watch Dickens, his family and friends perform The Frozen Deep.

The cast was all the old crew—or nearly all, Douglas Jerrold still being unwell—the children, of course, Wilkie, Freddie Evans, Augustus Egg, John Forster, Catherine’s sister Georgina Hogarth, who played a Scottish nurse with second sight, and a Scottish servant getting some laughs as an Esquimau. But Dickens stole the show.

He had gone so far as to invite theatre reviewers, and they, along with the rest of the audience, were stunned by the intensity of Dickens’ performance, particularly in the closing scenes when, clad in rags, he transformed from a man about to murder his rival in love, to one who, as music specially composed for his death scene swelled and rose, sacrifices himself for that same love.

‘He has won the greatest of all conquests,’ said Wilkie as Frank Aldersley, standing over his friend’s prostrate form. ‘The conquest of himself.’

Strangely, as he uttered these, the play’s closing words, in that moment preceding the curtain’s fall and the rapturous applause that followed, Wilkie felt a growing irony that he thought best to keep to himself.

He soon came to see that success is deaf to irony. Dickens was lauded in The Times and The Illustrated London News as having the powers of the best of professional actors, while The Athenaeum went even further: his performance, it declared, ‘might open a new era for acting’.

Shaking her head, Mrs Ternan closed The Athenaeum and put it down on the train seat next to her. A new era for acting! Opposite, a young man looked askance, for Mrs Ternan was dressed in black mourning, and was—improbably, impossibly and clearly disrespectfully—laughing. The train lurched around a bend and braked at the same time, its whistle screeching, with the effect of throwing everyone in the third-class carriage back and forth. When the train resumed a more settled ride and the passengers their original seating, she contained herself and apologised.

‘My sister,’ she said. ‘We buried her this morning in Salford.’ And then she would have burst into tears, if she were someone other than Mrs Ternan. But tears were what she wept on stage; tears were what she worked so hard to elicit from audiences; tears were art and art’s reward. This, though, was life. Mrs Ternan’s vicissitudes had trained her to laugh at life rather than be broken by it. ‘Never,’ she said to herself. Though she was a thoughtful woman, she lived by this unthinking mantra. Never ever give in. Never ever complain. Never ever admit to failure.

She crossed her hands in her lap so that he might not see the darned holes in her gloves, inwardly cursed herself for not having warmer clothing to wear in the unheated carriage, and looked out of the misty window as though she could see something of the iced landscape beyond as the train steamed northwards.

Still, the matter of the review amused her, and if it were not for her determination to remain respectable, she would have laughed again. A gentleman and his untrained children in front of a paper house! It may have been some new form of mesmerism, but it most certainly wasn’t theatre. And Mrs Ternan most certainly knew what theatre was; after all, she had been treading the boards—damp, rotten, creaking, splintered—since she was three. And though she believed in the theatre of Shakespeare and Moliere, it had not repaid her passion. Here she was, she thought, fifty, alone, with three daughters, renting a very small house on the outskirts of London, with little income and, it would seem, diminishing prospects.

It wasn’t the life she had expected when, as a young woman, she’d looked to become another Mrs Siddons; when she had made more money than Fanny Kemble in Boston; when she played opposite Charles Kean; when she was celebrated for her acting in both the Old World and the New, and adored for her looks; when she had married a young Irishman of great ambitions—but he had died insane in Bedlam, and she had aged, and the good roles became fewer and the need to take whatever was offered grew stronger. She had journeyed through the provinces, lived on beer and bread and slimy old meat, trudged back and forth between damp lodgings and distant theatres, laid her dead young son out in a cot and then worked three nights in a row, coming home to his cold body each night, until she had enough to pay for his funeral.

She was determined for something better for her three daughters, but it was hard to know what that might be. There was the one-time Infant Prodigy—as she had been billed—her eldest daughter, Fanny, who had so enchanted audiences with her performances as a child but had not been able to carry that magic into her young adult life; there was Maria, ever able, but without overwhelming beauty or talent, equally destined for neither greatness nor fortune. Then there was her youngest, Ellen, who had also been on stage since she was three, who had danced polkas, played boys in tights, performed with acrobats, sang solos and duets and choruses, but who now, at eighteen, had the looks but not the vivacity on stage that might bring fortune.

Times were not good. Fanny and Maria had boldly attempted to set up a school for young ladies the previous summer, another form of fancy; it began with hope and an empty house and ended with neither. Though her friends in theatre helped in finding parts, Mrs Ternan could no longer rely on the Cordelias and Desdemonas that had once brought her a good living. Maria had a fortnight of bit parts at the Regency but nothing beyond it, while Fanny had found steady, if not starring, work as Oberon in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.