The Last Dickens

known as trade courtesy, however: when an American publisher made an agreement to be the publisher of a foreign book, other American publishers would respect it. The Harper brothers were notorious, though, for printing cheap, unauthorized editions (making their own changes to the text, sometimes carelessly and sometimes to suit an English topic better to an American audience). They'd leave the Harper torch off the title page and sell the spurious edition in railway cars or on the street or by subscription.

Thus, Major Harper's alluding to The Mystery of Edwin Drood was a reminder that Harper could undermine the enormous investment by Fields, Osgood & Co. in Drood by flooding their own cheap editions into the marketplace. The demand would be high for Dickens's new book, and what would the typical hardworking American reader choose? Spend two dollars for the book from Fields, Osgood & Co.- or seventy-five cents from one of Harper's hawkers or peddlers?

The Boston publisher would be powerless to stop it.

Charles Dickens's five-month-long reading tour of the United States arranged by Fields and Osgood in the winter of 1867-68 had proven an enormous success. It felt historic even as it was happening. Thousands heard him perform. Osgood worked industriously during the tour, charged with the duties of a treasurer and with meeting Dickens's sometimes fickle demands, in addition to smoothing over conflicts and troubles. At the end of the tour, there were a hundred thousand dollars in profits in the pockets of the “Chief”-as he was called by Dickens's manager, Dolby.

Fields, Osgood & Co. made money on the readings-5 percent of gross receipts-but their real reward for the faith they had shown in Charles Dickens was yet to come. That would come with the publication of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

The whole world awaited it, as had been true of each Dickens novel since The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist placed the former court reporter's name before the public thirty-five years before. Dickens alone, among all the writers of popular fiction of the day, could employ wit and discernment, excitement and sympathy, in equal parts in each one of his books. The characters were no mere paper dolls, nor were they thinly veiled extensions of Charles Dickens's own persona. No, the characters were utterly themselves. In a Dickens story, readers were not asked to aspire to a higher class or to hate other classes than their own but to find the humanity and the humane in all. That is what had made him the world's most famous author.

This time the wait for a new book had been nearly five years, longer than any other interval between books in the past. “The public is ripe for it!” Fields had said. Drood would tell the story of a young gentleman-Edwin Drood-an honest though ambling character who vanishes after provoking the jealousy of a devious uncle named John Jasper, a respectable citizen with a double life as a drug fiend. Dickens promised in his letters to Fields that the book would be “very curious and new” for his readers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson had been sitting in Fields's office when Fields and Osgood had read Dickens's letter about the novel.

“I am afraid Dickens has too much talent for his genius,” Emerson announced in his way of an old oracle bored by his own pronouncements.

“How do you mean, my dear Waldo?” asked Fields. A publisher in the trade as long as Fields would never be roused by one writer kicking another.

“His face daunts me!” Emerson exclaimed at the Dickens photograph on the wall showing a strong but weather-beaten profile, the far-off look in the strict military eye. “You and Mr. Osgood would persuade me that he is a genial creature. You would persuade me that he is a sympathetic man superior to his talents, but I believe he is harnessed to them. He is too consummate an artist to have a thread of nature left.”

Emerson did not realize how much his publishers needed Dickens and could no longer depend only on the likes of Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes-nor even their Concord Sage, Mr. Emerson-to keep them afloat. Years earlier, the mutual admiration society of Boston brought floods of readers to the publishing house for their novels and poems. Effortlessly, Longfellow's sensation, The Song of Hiawatha, had flowed from the presses and out the doors of bookshops in Os-good's first months of working at the firm! Now the best Osgood seemed able to do was to persuade Dr. Holmes to write a pale sequel of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table; smile at Mrs. Stowe over a well-intended morality novel half as courageous as Uncle Tom; or encourage Longfellow's slow labor on his long, somber poem about Jesus Christ, The Divine Tragedy, though republishing Longfellow's controversial Divine Comedy translation, yet again, would be more lucrative.

Osgood felt the Furies chasing him: each day, having to meet irritated authors’ demands for free copies or for solace when books passed into the dreaded land of the “out of print.” Drowning themselves in the Frog Pond in disappointment. Montague Midges, from two offices down the hall, would report the higher author payments needed to fill the pages of their magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. Osgood would look over his shoulder at sluggish, heavy literary productions always reported as “almost half finished!” like Bryant's translation of Homer and Taylor's Faust, neither of which could realistically sell enough, even once completed, to make up for their costs. Osgood was overseeing a ship rocking at sea, with the storms worsening.

Dickens's new book could change that.

Harper had a point, Osgood had thought the day of their meeting, though he would never admit it. Maybe a publisher had become little different from the toy maker, and maybe an author's name couldn't survive twenty years. “Except for Charles Dickens,” Osgood said to himself. “He transcends the rest. He makes literature into books, and books literature. Harper's toys be damned.”

Then, early that summer, the news arrived.

“JAMES!” FIELDS HAD rushed into Osgood's office breathlessly. “We received it over the cable wires! God grant it as some mistake!”

Osgood panicked before he knew what to panic about. It was so rare that Fields would address his young partner informally, or that he'd exhibit such a show of emotion in proximity to the female bookkeepers-who all looked up from their copying and probably blotted a dozen words in one instant-or that he would be running at all. Then Osgood noticed one of their employees crying into her bare hands before she could find a handkerchief. And Rebecca was looking over at Osgood as though she had a thousand words waiting on her lips. He had the sickening feeling of everyone else knowing something terrible had transpired.

The sympathetic look of her green eyes made Osgood want to take Rebecca's counsel-to have the news, whatever it was and however bad- delivered by her.

But Fields had already flown through his office door, gesticulating wildly as he pushed it shut. “Charles Dickens… dead!” he finally managed to blurt out.

The Boston newspapers had received the obituaries from that morning's London papers and had sent a wire on to their office. Fields read from it aloud, emphasizing the details as though the subject might still be saved by quick thinking: “The pupil of the right eye was much dilated, that of the left contracted, the breathing stertorous, the limbs flaccid until half an hour before death, when some convulsion occurred…”

Further details included that Dickens had spent his final day working on The Mystery of Edwin Drood when, pen in hand, he had begun to feel sick. He had just finished the final words of the sixth installment of the story-the halfway mark through the book, which was to be composed of twelve serialized parts. Soon after, he fell down and never recovered.

“Dickens dead!” Fields exclaimed, shaking bodily. “How is it…! I cannot believe it! A world without Dickens!”

Men and women wept or sat bewildered and silent in the offices as word spread. “Charles Dickens is dead,” was repeated by all who heard it, to whomever they saw next. Nearly everyone in the publishing house had met Mr. Dickens when he had come for his tour two years before. Though it was difficult to feel Charles Dickens to be your friend, it was instantaneous to feel oneself his. How much life was in him-not just his own but each of his characters whose lives he had performed in front of so many thrilled audiences during his visit! No one who had ever met Dickens could imagine him gone. A man who had-Osgood remembered someone saying-a man who had exclamation points for eyes. How could such a man die?

“Charles… Dickens… Forty miles…” Fields was mumbling still in a crestfallen fog after they had sat in silence almost an hour. “I must remain on watch at the wires in case it was a mistake.” Dickens had only been a few years older than Fields-whose own sick headaches and hand aches had grown worse. Fields turned back to Osgood on his