Wanting

She picked up The Athenaeum again, and took out the letter she had used as a bookmark, the letter that bore the news of Louisa’s death. She had been just fifty-three, with four children. Mrs Ternan did not know how much longer she might go on before she might suffer similarly—perhaps dying on stage like poor old John Pritt Harley, who had dropped like a stone a few nights before while playing Bottom, with poor Fanny standing right there next to him. And if she died, thought Mrs Ternan, what then would happen to her girls?

For the time being, she was able to continue to trade on the memory of her beauty and past triumphs, on her friendships and the acumen she had accrued over the course of a life of beds shared with children and bedbugs, of cheating theatre managers, threadbare clothes and the illusion of merriment. If she had often to make clear her respectability and virtue in face of a world that viewed her profession as little better than public prostitution, it was also a life not without its compensations: if you could through talent gain the public’s favour, you were able, in some measure, to live independent of men, of whom she had a diminishing opinion. It was a better world than that of governesses and seamstresses. But it was still harsh and terrifying, and all that sustained her was the friendship of other actors.

On the night she had received the news of Louisa’s death, leaving her the only surviving member of her family, Mrs Ternan had stifled her weeping with a pillow so her daughters would not hear her heart breaking and would never suspect what she now knew: that every death of those you love is the death also of so many shared memories and understanding, of a now irretrievable part of your own life; that every death is another irrevocable step in your own dying, and it ends not with the ovation of a full house, but the creak and crack and dust of the empty theatre. Mrs Ternan felt an infinite darkness beckoning; she resolved only that she would face it bravely. What could a gentleman and his children playing at theatrics know of any of it?

The young man was now looking at Ellen, who had travelled with Mrs Ternan to the funeral and who was sitting at the other end of the bench seat, engrossed, as always, in another novel. With great care, Mrs Ternan had mended Fanny’s old out-of-doors dress for Ellen to wear to the funeral; it did not look shabby, nor was its fawn colour—now faded to a dull grey—lurid, but, she felt, entirely respectable. To make it clear that the young attractive woman was not some fallen girl, but a chaperoned young lady, Mrs Ternan held out The Athenaeum to her.

‘Read this, my darling, and kindly tell me if you think you can ever trust a glowing review.’ She passed the magazine over; she was insistent. ‘For my money, I think never,’ she smiled, thinking how, until the final curtain swept her forever away, she would keep the show going. ‘Never ever.’

With the play that had buoyed him for so many months now over, Dickens lapsed into melancholy. He returned to writing Little Dorrit. In an ever-growing frenzy, he did not realise he was writing himself. London seemed damper, darker and dingier than ever, and everything and everybody on the streets and on the page felt entombed and dying. As he lived his crowded life, he wondered how it was possible to feel so alone. His solitude terrified him.

He dosed himself more frequently with laudanum. Those who objected that Little Dorrit was his gloomiest novel got no argument from him. It was also his most successful, its sales in serial form exceeding all his previous works. He was so alone. He resolved to endure. He would sacrifice all. He could not bear to talk to his wife. He was forty-five. He and Catherine no longer recognised each other, no longer could apprehend in the other pain, sorrow, regret. He could feel something breaking.

Was it the world? Was it him? He had been drawing on something within to keep writing his books, to play Dickens, and it was some reserve he no longer had. His soul was corroding. Certain blows rained down on him, all the more incomprehensible and unsayable because of his external success. It was a slow loss of life, or vitality, or somesuch, some force that joined him with others, and it was that joining with others that he found harder and harder. It was as if the more of him there were in his books, the less of him in life. He might have spoken about it if he knew anyone who might have understood, but, not understanding it himself, that was impossible. He was falling and falling and he did not know how to stop.

Winter gave way to spring. He finally bought Gad’s Hill, the home in Kent he had dreamt of owning since, as a child, he walked past it with his father. He remembered himself as a queer small boy listening intently as his father told him that, if he were very persevering and worked very hard, he might some day come to own it. He had persevered. He had worked hard. He had talent—some said genius. He had Gad’s Hill as proof. It should have felt an affirmation. It didn’t.

Genius—what was it? Increasingly it felt an agony. Yet only in his work did Dickens truly feel that he became himself, only as he took on the mask of this and that character did he discover the very truth of who he was. His novels were true in a way life was not. Why, even Katy had accused him that his characters in his novels were more real and dear to him than his children. He denied it, he laughed it off, he resented it. He moved his family to Gad’s Hill, but he remained most nights in London, sleeping in a small suite he kept above the Household Words office. He feared his work was eating up his soul. Talent, genius—were these just names for his determination to continue excavating himself until only a corpse remained to offer death?

He looked in the large mirror he had hung opposite his desk to observe his own face as it played out the part of this character or that. But all he saw was a face that could have been any man and no man, somebody who in his relentless mimicry of everybody had become nobody. He had met most of the great men of his age and been invariably disappointed. I have no peer, he thought. How he missed Richard Wardour!

The rain pattered down erratically, as if troubled by some guilty secret; the city through which he was once more nightwalking was a hundred heavy shades of pewter. Yet it was the only real home he had, wandering those foul rookeries and casual wards, mazes of misery with their half-naked inhabitants and oilskin doors and broken windows, the wretched courtyard where a wraith-like woman drooled as she sucked opium from a rude pipe contrived from a penny ink bottle. Above, he saw the wild moon and clouds rolling restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed. Finally light staggered down into the streets of the Great Oven. He made it back to his rooms an hour after dawn.

He went straight to his desk. He felt his thoughts start stuttering and then words spat and fizzed, and one word led to another and then that in turn led more along. In this way, he knew, wars, revolutions, conspiracies, love affairs and novels were made, but nothing could empty Dickens’ head of something beyond words: it was fit to burst with everything that could never be said.

‘The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the wholly wild night is in pursuit of us,’ he found himself writing in his notebook; ‘but so far we are pursued by nothing else.’

It made no sense. Why was the night in pursuit? And who was us and we? Who would walk with him?

The strange journey to where Dickens would find us and we began a week later when he travelled by railway from Gad’s Hill up to London. A man with a collapsing Stilton for a head entered Dickens’ carriage. He sat down, opened a newspaper, then almost as soon as it was fanned out, folded it back up and turned to the passenger next to him. He spoke as though reporting an advertisement for chamber pots.

‘Douglas Jerrold is dead.’

Dickens was stunned. Why, he had seen his good friend only the week before, and though Jerrold had said he had been sick, he had put it down to the inhaling of fresh paint from his study window.

It had been a wretched enough morning already. Katy had bought a bonnet and Catherine had felt it perfectly fine. He liked seeing his daughters look as splendid as she did in the bonnet, but the cost! the cost! His children had no idea about money—they were as spendthrift as his own father had been, and, he feared, perhaps as doomed.

He had shouted at Katy, who had shouted back, and then Catherine shouted, then it seemed that there could be nothing said unless it was by shouting. Then he had stopped and in a whisper begged for them all to stop, to stop such madness as this, to stop falling apart, to come together once more as a family. But it was a speech, words, and no one cared a fig for it, and Catherine was weeping again and Katy was standing at her side, glowering at him.

All he could do was try to steady himself by returning to work, to some new project in which he might once