Wanting

Wilkie knew that Dickens’ magazine, in which his novels would first appear as serials, was more than a major source of income for the novelist. It also mattered that it, as with everything Dickens touched, was not just a success, but an ever greater success.

‘I am beyond a novel just now,’ Dickens was saying, ‘but I need some tale to help sell our Christmas edition of the magazine.’ And then, on seeing a bowed, beetle-like figure in a far corner, he brightened. ‘Why, it’s Douglas Jerrold—he’ll give us something.’

On being waved over, Jerrold, his bright eyes bluer than ever beneath huge eyebrows that sat over his sharp little face like watchful moths, was delighted to see Dickens but declined a drink, saying he had been somewhat off-colour the last few months. Instead, he told a short and funny story about sherry negus and Jane Austen’s brother, with whom he had served in the navy.

‘I read one of Austen’s once, I think,’ Dickens ruminated. ‘Who these days would read more?’

‘Macaulay,’ said Jerrold.

‘Precisely,’ said Dickens. ‘Unlike you, Douglas, she didn’t understand that what pulses hard and fast through us must be there in every sentence. That is why, since her death, she has suffered ever greater obscurity rather than growing popularity—and that is why I really must have you write something for our Christmas edition.’

‘If I could, Charlie, I would. But I’m busy with a new play and I couldn’t see my way clear to do anything for you till next spring.’

After Jerrold left, Dickens played with his large wedding ring, sliding it off, rolling it around his fingernail. Though he did not say it, something in his meeting with Lady Jane Franklin had resonated in an unexpected and as yet intangible way with him. He could not let it go. He slid the ring back on.

‘What do you think, Wilkie, if I did a little paper on Dr Rae’s report, taking the argument against its probabilities?’

At his home, Tavistock House, Dickens more closely studied The Illustrated London News. Outside, the London morning was almost as dark as night; inside, the hiss of his gas lights comforted him as he read Dr Rae’s account. So too, he concluded with relief, did the content. The man had no gift for story.

Dickens put the paper down, moved the bronze statuette of duelling frogs to the centre of his desk and set to work. He opened with some quick, telling jabs, and diverted for a moment to praise Dr Rae deftly, thereby eliminating the possibility of his article being construed as a personal attack.

Then, and only then, in the manner of the barristers he had reported on in his youth, Dickens began to sow doubt over every detail of Dr Rae’s account—from the utter impossibility of accurate translation from the Esquimau’s argot, to the very real possibility of multiple and even opposing interpretations arising from the savages’ vague gestures. He questioned the process of butchering and cooking up a fellow human. ‘Would the little flame of the spirit-lamp the travellers may have had with them have sufficed for such a purpose?’ he wrote.

Feeling better with the piece, with himself, with life, he halted, reread this last sentence, and then underlined the phrase may have had. The case was building, and he was now feeling words rushing his goose-quill along, leaving trails of ink, blue as ice, leading him and his readers to that strange and terrible world.

He turned to the inescapable matter of the mutilation of the bodies. ‘Had there been no bears thereabout, to mutilate the bodies; no wolves, no foxes?’ He didn’t answer his own rhetorical question—let the reader answer, he told himself, scurrying straight on to another telling blow.

Would not the men, he now asked, if starving, have fallen prey to scurvy? And does not scurvy finally annihilate the desire to eat and, in any case, annihilate the power? Having readied and teased the reader with his trail of false leads and tempting possibilities, Dickens sprang his trap and revealed what he believed was almost certainly the truth behind the mystery.

‘Lastly, no man can, with any show of reason, undertake to affirm that this sad remnant of Franklin’s gallant band were not set upon and slain by the Esquimaux themselves.’

He paused, his attention momentarily distracted by an odd thought.

‘We believe every savage to be in her heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel.’

Realising his error, he crossed out her and wrote above it his. But did these words not sum up his own folly so many years before? And that odd thought took on the form and name of a woman, and Dickens muttered two words.

‘Maria Beadnell.’

And how that name irritated him, angered him, enraged him, reminded him of his wretched origins and the myriad humiliations he had determined never again to suffer. Before he had become Charles Dickens the brilliant, the beneficent and the virtuous genius of letters, he had been Charles Dickens the impetuous, the overly earnest and the not infrequently foolish unmarried youth.

Maria Beadnell. Then, he had presented himself to her banker father as an inferior. He never made that mistake again. His answer to hierarchy was his own uniqueness. He had even refused invitations from the Queen herself. He entered society now at his pleasure, on his terms.

Maria Beadnell, his first love, the mistaken impulse of his once undisciplined heart. And these words, undisciplined heart, constantly came back to him—a warning, a fear, the terror of who he might really be. He saw them in dreams inscribed upon the walls of unknown houses, found them appearing unbidden in his writing.

Maria Beadnell and her vile family had treated him as little better than a corpse to play with, to feast upon for their own amusement. Yet looking back, he reasoned that it was his rightful punishment for having given in to his passions rather than keeping them firmly under control. After all, wasn’t that control precisely what marked the English out as different from savages?

‘Answer me, undisciplined heart!’ he went so far as asking in one novel. But it never did. And so instead he bound and chained it, buried it deep, and only such severe disciplining of his heart allowed him his success, prevented him from falling into the abyss like his debtor father, like his wastrel brothers; from becoming, finally, the savage he feared himself to be.

Determined to banish these loathsome thoughts from his mind, Dickens attempted to return to Dr Rae and the cannibals, but it was impossible. For now he only had one thought, and that thought one name. And after twenty-five years, Maria Beadnell—now Mrs Winter, married, Dickens presumed, to some acceptable dreariness— had written to him, and they had met at a dinner conveniently and respectably staged at a friend’s home.

Love—what of it?

He looked at her withered flesh, her thin lined lips, her bull neck dissolving into the lines of her bosom, crazed as old varnish. She had grown broad and was constantly short of breath, panting like an aged spaniel. Dickens turned to the other guests and said, with a smile and not without ambiguity:

‘Mrs Winter is a friend of childhood.’

Once, he had mistaken Maria Beadnell’s dull emptiness for enigmatic mystery. And now she, where once contemptuous of him in youth, was flirtatious in middling years—with her ‘Charlie this’ and ‘Charlie that’—how vile it all was! How repellent human beings could be! Fat and dull and full of phlegm, which she provoked into lava-like rumbling with her attempted coquettish giggle, the result was that he caught her cold and lost whatever affection he once had for her.

A few years before, he had even put her in the story that was so much his own, David Copperfield, casting her as the one whom David marries: Dora Spenlow. And as he sat there in his study that dark morning, attempting to rescue Sir John, there arose within Dickens another bitter memory he found unbearable: it was while writing this tale of his idealised life, of his unrequited love finally requited, of reshaping the world to just what he wanted it to be, that his ninth child was born and he had named her Dora.

How strange, how eerie he found it, then, when a few months after killing Dora in David Copperfield, his own little Dora would die. He had the horrid sense that the world warped to his fancy, but only to mock him in the cruellest way possible.

Outside his study, Dickens could hear his younger children running up and down the corridor, squealing and crashing into walls. He went and shut the second door he had specifically built for the purpose and returned to his desk. The sounds of his family were now distant and muted, but he had lost his train of thought altogether.