The Animator: Adam Thirlwell on Charles Dickens

This review of Michael Slater's biographical study of Charles Dickens is by Adam Thirlwell - a critic more wayward than James Woods or Wyatt Mason, perhaps because, as a fiction writer, his approach is more idiosyncratic, with less laying down of laws and more of a search for a personal method.

He is a critic who hits and misses with his insights - somehow that's part of the narrative tension in his generously cerebral and wide-ranging novel, Miss Herbert - but he is more than capable of enthusing a reader to visit or revisit a text with a new perspective.

This review, from The New Republic led me to read The Old Curiosity Shop, a novel everyone thinks they know even without reading it, but its many surprises are indicated in Thirlwell's piece, which looks at Dickens' output as a whole, and is, in its way, as good a overview of Dickens than the ones given by George Orwell or GK Chesterton.

I.

For a long time, everyone has known that Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century, the city where the modern was invented: the society of the spectacular. But everyone was wrong. The capital of the nineteenth century was London. Think about it. Walter Benjamin’s symbol of the Parisian modern was the arcade. The arcade! In London-according to the social campaigner Henry Mayhew, there were 300,000 dustbins, 300,000 cesspools, and three million chimneys. It was there that the truly modern was invented: industrial, overpopulated dirt. Its symbol was the slum. London was managed by a majority of minority trades, all in the business of garbage: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, toshers. And London’s greatest describer, who converted the ghostly industrial city into a new world of words, was a novelist who could taxonomically and poetically enumerate, say, the varieties of polluted fog: “Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy day, but there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City--which call Saint Mary Axe--it was rusty-black.”

And yet, in public, this same writer could also put on an act like this:

Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, that to the earnestness of my aim and desire to do right by my readers, and to leave our imaginative and popular literature more closely associated than I found it at once with the private homes and public rights of the English people, I shall ever be faithful,--to my death-in the principles which have won your approval. [Loud applause.]

Charles Dickens gave this sincere speech in Sheffield, the city of steel factories, in December 1855, on being presented by the mayor with a service of cutlery. It is unbelievable, perhaps, but it is true: that, too, is the voice of the most avant-garde European novelist of the nineteenth century.

Of all his impersonations, Dickens’s greatest was his fluent mimicry of what the bourgeois public imagined that a novelist should be--through prefaces to his novels, which offered doctored accounts of their geneses as serial sketches in magazines; through his efforts on behalf of the Guild of Literature and Art, or his work with the Royal Literary Fund; through his collected editions (he supervised the following editions: the Charles Dickens, the Cheap, the Library, the Diamond, the People’s, and the Hachette). He had a mania for canonization, for the public paraphernalia of authorship.

And this extended, most importantly, to his biography. Dickens died in June 1870. Seventeen months later, in November 1871, the first Life of Dickens was published by his friend John Forster--an eminent man of letters, the biographer of Goldsmith, Swift, and Landor--who had been appointed Dickens’s biographer by Dickens himself. Dickens gave Forster autobiographical fragments, manuscripts, letters--which were all to be kept secret until the posthumous biography. On its publication, it revealed how autobiographical much of his writing had been--“watered,” as one critic wrote, “with tears of self-compassion.” The pain in Dickens, it turned out, was less a moral philosophy than a natural identification with the marginalized, the defenseless, the lost. And yet such autobiographical pain did nothing to change the essential idea of Dickens as a moralist, and of his novels as didactic agents of social comment.

But the era of psychology, and of social reform, were not alive to the energy in Dickens’s art. His real greatness, I think, lay elsewhere: in his savage, magical style. With the appearance of Michael Slater’s extraordinary biography, which exuberantly tracks the mercurial energy of Dickens’s publication history--as well as his editing and his public readings--it is possible to be accurate to Dickens’s wild originality, the career of his career.

The premise of this new biography is very simple, and wholly admirable. “Mindful of Dickens’s words in his will about resting his claims to the remembrance of his country upon his published work,” Slater declares, “I have focused primarily upon his career as a writer and professional author.” The salacious reader will find the occasional brothel, the passing prostitute. But Nelly Ternan, the actress implicated in Dickens’s separation from his wife around 1857 or 1858, is only a background figure: partly because Slater scrupulously refuses to speculate on unavailable evidence, but also because of his emphasis on that adjective “professional.” The furious energy of Dickens’s production in this biography is astonishing. As well as his novels, Slater gorgeously includes also “the context of the truly prodigious amount of otherwriting that he was constantly producing alongside the serial writing of those books”--the “short stories, sketches, topical journalism, essays, travel writing and writings for children, polemical pieces in verse as well as prose.”

This is a biography of a writer as writer. It is therefore quite unique. “Overfamiliar metaphor,” writes Kundera in The Art of the Novel: “The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel. A novelist’s biographers thus undo what a novelist has done, and redo what he undid.” This is not true of Slater. “All their labor cannot illuminate either the value or the meaning of a novel,” adds Kundera. I have always agreed with him; but this great book allows one to imagine a more delicate biographical form--a heuristic instrument for the analysis of spectral themes.

For Dickens’s life--like one of his novels, with its parallel plot--was ghosted by two central motifs. He is the connoisseur of characters acquiring, in the words of the old cliché, a life of their own--like Dr. Marigold, who “came flashing up in the most cheerful manner, and I had only to look on and leisurely describe it.” But he is also the connoisseur of corpses. In Paris, the hidden twin to Dickens’s London, his favorite destination was the morgue. Dickens digested the dead with gusto. He was drawn to the morgue--“dragged by invisible force,” by “the attraction of repulsion.” And this is Dickens’s subject, the invention of his style: the uneasy, queasy hinterland where it is alluringly unclear what is alive and what is not.

One day, in 1911, Kafka finished reading a biography of Dickens and then turned to his diary:

Is it so difficult and can an outsider understand that you experience a story within yourself from its beginning, from the distant point up to the approaching locomotives of steel, coal, and steam, and you don’t abandon it even now, but want to be pursued by it and have time for it, therefore are pursued by it and of your own volition run before it wherever it may thrust and wherever you may lure it.

In this marvelous sentence, where the subject writing and the subject written sinuously swap places, Kafka identifies the mobile essence of Dickens’s lesson for fiction. His great subject is the force that gives anything animation at all. His work constitutes a sustained examination of the conditions for lifelikeness.

Dickens can animate anything. Even an oyster opener: for what happens to oyster openers, wonders Dickens, in an improvised moment in a letter from Montreal in 1842, when oysters are out of season? “Do they commit suicide in despair, or wrench open tight drawers and cupboards and hermetically-sealed bottles for practice? Perhaps they are dentists out of the oyster season. Who knows?” Dickens’s animating style discovers the uncanny energy of the commonplace. For Dickens is the great novelist of junk: the décor of hotel restaurants, the clutter of secondhand shops, the wallpaper in pretentious dance schools. London was supremely the city of the industrial, and the industrial was so savagely modern that it was impossible to keep up: everyone lived among the outmoded, among cherished objects which had lost their use value. This was Dickens’s discovery--the surreal poetry of what is obsolete, or seems to be obsolete. His life was spent observing how much a life became a collection of useless, loved objects.

London was the capital of the nineteenth century, and Dickens was its greatest flaneur. In London he walked and walked--making sure of his “fifteen miles a day”: “If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.” He was the great ambulatory writer. In particular, he liked to walk at night. Slater’s biography records how much he was the genie of gaslight--able to compare, for instance, the quality of gaslight in London and in Paris: “London is shabby by daylight, and shabbier by gaslight. No Englishman knows what gaslight is, until he sees the Rue de Rivoli and the Palais Royal after dark.” In Paris, illuminated, Dickens could therefore be found “wandering into Hospitals, Prisons, Dead-houses, Operas, Theatres, Concert Rooms, Burial-grounds, Palaces, and Wine shops”--which all became a private “rapid Panorama.” In 1855, he mentions “some of the strange places I glide into of nights in these latitudes.” The idea of gliding is wonderful; but then Dickens has a whole vocabulary of flaneuring. In London, he asks a friend to come with him on one of his “great, London, back-slums kind of walk[s].”

It was on these walks that Dickens discovered the everyday--his profane illuminations. When his sketches, which first appeared in magazines, were collected in book form, Dickens added a new term, with its hesitant hyphen: “Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People.” But the border between his early sketches and his serial fiction is distinctly porous. His style swarms everywhere. And the everyday was “lumber,” it was junk:

The walls were garnished with one or two large maps; and several weather-beaten rough great coats, with complicated capes, dangled from a long row of pegs in one corner. The mantel-shelf was ornamented with a wooden inkstand, containing one stump of a pen and half a wafer, a road-book and directory, a county history minus the cover, and the mortal remains of a trout in a glass coffin.

The style of this flaneuring novelist was, then, founded on the observation of the city. Like all great novelists, of course, he tried to occlude the sources of his style. In one of his earliest sketches, “The Prisoner’s Van,” he included a brief manifesto (which he cut when the piece was collected into a book):

We have a most extraordinary partiality for lounging about in the streets. Whenever we have an hour to spare, there is nothing that we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy--walking up one street and down another, and staring into shop windows, and gazing about us as if, instead of being on intimate terms with every shop and house in Holborn, the Strand, Fleet-street and Cheapside, the whole were an unknown region to our wondering mind.

Dickens had the talent not to be averse to the shameful emotions--prurience, or curiosity, or self-deception, or hypocrisy: the shameful emotions without which no noble knowledge would ever be acquired. His style was formed in the voyeuristic city--London, with “that great heavy canopy,” as he wrote to Bulwer Lytton in 1851, “lowering over the housetops.” The walker alive to the smoggy city of junk: this was Dickens. And the usefulness of the city was very simple. London was a laboratory where the human was transformed into surface in as concentrated a form as possible. Or, as one of his best critics, John Carey, puts it, Dickens’s territory was “the border country between people and things, where Dickens’s imagination is mostly engaged.” And so it was where everything was always on the point of transforming from the animate into the inanimate, or vice versa. For anything, and anyone, can undergo a metamorphosis: it just depends on the strength of someone else’s will, desire, fetish--or belief.

II.

In his novels of reanimation, Dickens went for ghosts, for guilt, for bottled fetuses and effigies: for murder. His necromantic imagination needed corpses. Dead bodies are his constant prop. What else could he do? His subject was how strange the transition was between the live and the dead. But the motifs are all subject to the mechanics of his sentences. A sentence, for Dickens, was the medium in which he could investigate how reversible lifelikeness was. The effect of Slater’s book--so lavishly truffled with quotations from the vast range of his prose--is to emphasize how thoroughly Dickens was inhabited by this process of style. His life was itself a constant experiment of writing, of quickening by form. And so we must take the time to enumerate the elements of Dickens’s sentences. They constitute the true events, after all, of any novelist’s biography.

In 1869, in his inaugural address as president of the Birmingham & Midland Institute, Dickens confessed something to his audience: “My own invention or imagination, such as it is, I can most truthfully assure you, would never have served me as it has, but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention.” Drudgery is the ritual of Dickensian transformation. It enabled inspired detailing, such as a slum with its “starved white horse who was making a meal of oyster-shells.” And it also produced exuberant squiggles: a child reading the newspapers, “which are so very large in proportion to himself, shorn of his hat, that when he holds up The Times to run his eye over the columns, he seems to have retired for the night, and to have disappeared under the bedclothes.” And it emerged in the full dense complexity of a sentence like this: “Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.” The sentence describes a comic apocalypse--but then Dickens’s style itself may be called a comic apocalypse, energized by the twin engines of personification and metaphor, where everything and everyone can be transformed into the uncannily alive or the uncannily dead. So it becomes impossible to say how far a metaphor is ornament, or instead a precise description of what is seen.

Dickens’s techniques are constant experiments with what we accept to be real. And so, alongside the metaphoric transformation of the everyday, he loved inversely to transform everyday metaphoric activity into literal sentences. The revolutionary Russian critic Shklovsky once suggested that literary style was there to increase our knowledge of reality: “to lead us to a ‘vision’ of this object rather than mere ‘recognition.’” His example was Tolstoy’s baroquely literal description of an opera: “In the middle of the stage sat young girls in red bodices and white skirts. One young girl, very fat, and attired in white silk, was sitting separately on a low bench to which a green cardboard was attached from behind. They were all singing something.” But Dickens had been there already--more intensely, poetically literal than Tolstoy--watching Macbeth at the Theatre Royal in Chatham, confused by the ontology of double casting: “Many wondrous secrets had I come to the knowledge of in that sanctuary: of which not the least were, that the witches in Macbeth bore an awful resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good King Duncan couldn’t rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it and calling himself somebody else.”

His sentences are festivals of the flickering, the passing, the dying, the obsolete. He inherits the use of junk allusion invented by the English poets: by Pope, and Swift, and Dryden--the geniuses of mock epic. (Henry Fielding’s description of what he was up to in his novels was, significantly, this doubly oxymoronic definition: a “comic Epic-Poem in Prose.”) In The Pickwick Papers, the everyday kitsch allusion is duly incorporated: “‘Mrs. Leo Hunter has many of these breakfasts, sir,’ resumed the new acquaintance--‘“feasts of reason, sir, and flows of soul,” as somebody who wrote a sonnet to Mrs. Leo Hunter on her breakfasts, feelingly and originally observed.’” For what is more junk than unwittingly plagiarizing Pope, the greatest ironist of the glibly serious? But Dickens’s true innovation is to incorporate this kitsch appropriation of the classics into his own mobile narrative voice, as in his Hamletian description of

the Harmonic Meeting at the Sol’s Arms; where the sound of the piano through the partly-opened windows jingles out into the court, and where Little Swills, after keeping the lovers of harmony in a roar like a very Yorick, may now be heard taking the gruff line in a concerted piece, and sentimentally adjuring his friends and patrons to Listen, listen, listen, Tew the wa-ter-Fall!

(The Sol’s Arms, I should add, whose tables are hyper-realistically “ornamented with glutinous rings in endless involutions, made by pots and glasses.”)

The profound innovation of Dickens’s style is in this way of describing the human as endless superficiality, infinitely bathetic: a bricolage of bric-a-brac. His profundity is precisely in the refusal of depth. He is often attacked for the creation of caricatures, not characters. As a binary opposition, this seems as uselessly simplistic as Forster’s division of characters into the flat and the round. It fails to honor the way his vision of what is real, what is alive, is tense with what is dead. His characters, therefore, are necessarily collections of repetitions. When describing the character of Skimpole in Bleak House, Dickens described him as “a delightful manner reproducing itself under my hand.” A character, for Dickens, is a self-reproducing entity; as artificial as a self--another system of repetition.

Famously, Dickens’s daughter Mamie recorded interrupting her father at composition--when he was, she said, performing a “facial pantomime” in front of the mirror. Dickens did not invent: he imitated, he mimicked. “I don’t invent it--really do not, but see it, and write it down.” Instead of the novel as psychology, he copied out his hallucinations: the repetitive gestures of his characters’ bodies, the repetitive jingles of their speech. With these gestures and jingles, he constructed the collages of his scenes:

“We are all weak creeturs,” said Mrs. Corney, laying down a general principle.

“So we are,” said the beadle.

Nothing was said, on either side, for a minute or two afterwards. By the expiration of that time, Mr. Bumble had illustrated the position by removing his left arm from the back of Mrs. Corney’s chair, where it had previously rested, to Mrs. Corney’s apron-string, round which it gradually became entwined.

“We are all weak creeturs,” said Mr. Bumble.

Every novel by Dickens is already an illustrated novel. The actual illustrations are just confirmations, tautologies.

III.

But it is not just the sentences. Dickens’s form is the novel, after all. His plots, like his sentences, are forms of resurrection. All Dickens’s great novels--from Dombey and Son, through Bleak House and Little Dorrit, toOur Mutual Friend--use multiple plots that resolve themselves, gradually, into one: characters are reborn under new names, or discover their true bloodline. Each individual plotline seems unrelated. But every novel turns out, in the end, to be a family romance. And this formal property possesses its artisanal double; the resurrections of Dickens’s style--from Dombey and Son onward--were facilitated by his new way of working: to use folded sheets of paper, divided into sections, to plan out his novels in their serial parts and chapters. With this, he planned the ballet of his characters, the choreography of his plots.

Early in his career, in Oliver Twist, Dickens defended the novel as a place for steep transitions--like “all good murderous melodramas” where the comic and the tragic alternate, “as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon.” Some readers thought that this was overly dramatic, but for Dickens it was the structure of “real life.” The difference was that in real life we did not notice the transitions “from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments,” because “there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on.” This principle of transition was the central method by which Dickens constructed a fiction. Like a morgue, it was a system that produced the irony of transition: the abrupt juxtaposition of the living and the dead.

It was a lesson, the reader discovers, that he would learn himself. (Life is so philistine in its exaggerated care for form!) On April 14, 1851, Dickens gave a speech to the General Theatrical Fund dinner, praising the resilience of the actor who came “from scenes of affliction and misfortune--even from death itself--to play his part before us.” And then Dickens left the dinner--and was told that his infant daughter, “with whom he had been happily playing just before leaving home,” had died.

Life, as always, had a double plot. Later, when he was writing Little Dorrit, Dickens wrote a note to himself, wanting to intensify this way in which a plot could enact deaths and resurrections--a plot would be a structure to produce the parallels that would unify the vast city: “People to meet and part as travellers do, and the future connexion between them in the story, not to be now shewn to the reader but to be worked out as in real life. Try this uncertainty and this not-putting of them together, as a new means of interest.”

In his essay “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today,” written in 1944, Sergei Eisenstein hailed Dickens and his use of the intercut double-plot as the ancestor of cinema--the inventor, in prose narrative, of montage. Montage, after all, depended on parallel action. “Griffith arrived at montage through the method of parallel action, and he was led to the idea of parallel action by--Dickens.” Eisenstein went on to describe both “Griffith’s montage exposition” and also “a montage progression of parallel scenes, intercut into each other.” I admire this invocation of Dickens, alongside the early art of cinema; but it is important to see how Dickens’s art of montage was more advanced than Eisenstein’s. The idea of the parallel is everywhere in Dickens’s notes. In August 1862, about to begin work on Our Mutual Friend, he remarked to Forster about his germinating idea of a structure: “bringing together two strongly contrasted places and two strongly contrasted sets of people with which and with whom the story is to rest, through the agency of an electric message.”

An electric message! This is Dickens’s description of a parallel, and its importance, I think, is this. The parallel allows a novel to become a whole force field, a living and expanding universe--an animating network of motifs--or, in his terms, a network of “shadowings.” As he told Wilkie Collins--that other master of melodrama--a plot was an impersonation of fate: “I think the business of Art is to lay all that ground carefully, but with the care that conceals itself--to shew by a backward light, what everything has been working to--but only to SUGGEST, until the fulfilment comes. These are the ways of Providence--of which ways, all Art is but a little imitation.”

Dickens, the novelist, impersonated Providence. This is another way of saying that he impersonated the city. It is the city, after all, where such fateful parallels happen with the densest rhythm. The city, as Eisenstein knew, is where montage was invented: “that head-spinning tempo of changing impressions with which Dickens sketches the city in the form of a dynamic (montage) picture.” London was the capital of the nineteenth century, and its form was montage.

Dickens, it is true, used the montage form to prove that the rich could not separate themselves from the poor, to prove the “connexion” that existed “between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!” He was hysterically exercised by the way in which civilization could ignore the fact that it was barbaric. Before Walter Benjamin’s famous late thesis on history--“there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”--Dickens had already noted the inanimate animation. The urban graveyard at the center of the city, “with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life”: “a shameful testimony to future ages, how civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together.”

But this does not imply that Dickens had a coherent politics. In his essay, Eisenstein criticized the implications of Griffith’s montage: “the structure that is reflected in the concept of Griffith’s montage is the structure of bourgeois society.... And this society, perceived only as a contrast between the haves and the have-nots, is reflected in the consciousness of Griffith no deeper than the image of an intricate race between two parallel lines.” Eisenstein, I assume, would have been similarly infuriated by Dickens. Dickens, after all, annoyed Brecht, and he dismayed Lukács, who lamented “the limitations of Dickens’s social criticism, his sometimes abstract-moral attitude towards concrete social-moral phenomena.” But why must Dickens have a politics? He was a novelist. He had a style instead.

Dickens’s politics was just a mode of feeling. He had been marked, after all, by one particular experience of living death--when he worked at a blacking factory off the Strand in 1824, when he had just turned twelve, and his family was almost bankrupt. Slater records the humiliating everyday detail: along with his partner, Bob Fagin (Fagin!), Dickens worked, with remarkable speed and dexterity, at the window--so remarkably, writes Slater, that passersby “used to stop to stare admiringly in at the window by which they worked.” Dickens was transformed into a spectacle. And this experience comprehensively haunted him. Every time Dickens let his imagination become frivolous, the Blacking returned. At Christmas, the Dickens family played a parlor game in which everyone had to remember a sentence made up by the family, and add another phrase. According to his son Henry, “My father, after many turns, had successfully gone through the long string of words, and finished up with his own contribution, ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30, Strand!’”

A theory of the political in literature needs a theory of feeling: this is a conclusion that may be drawn from the life, and the biography, of Dickens. A theory of junk needs a corresponding theory of the sentimental. The sentimental, after all, is just the junk of feeling, its hollow repetition. Dickens often described himself having “a real good cry” when he wrote. Such outbursts were constant. On April 21, 1849, writing in The Examiner, Dickens quoted from an inquiry into a recent scandalous case of children who had died of cholera in a baby farm. When the scandal was uncovered, the surviving children had been taken to the Royal Free Hospital--where the nurses fed them milk and bread. And, Dickens reported, there was a child who could not eat: “No; he held up his hand, and said, ‘Oh, nurse, what a big bit of bread this is!’”--“a little touch,” added the writer, “of a peculiarly affecting kind, such as the masters of pathos have rarely excelled in fiction.”

The masters of pathos: there is real admiration in that phrase. Dickens was not at all embarrassed by the sentimental. And yet he was also an expert in compassion, which was not fake. He institutes the modernist examination of fake and true feeling: what is live and what is not. “I should not like to hear the charge of sentimentality made against this strain that runs through Bleak House,” observed Nabokov rightly, at his lectern, in his Lectures on Literature. “I want to submit that people who denounce the sentimental are generally unaware of what sentiment is.” And he added: “Dickens’s great art should not be mistaken for a cockney version of the seat of emotion--it is the real thing, keen, subtle, specialized compassion.”

The compassion is there most decisively in Dickens’s generous precision to minor characters. Like, say, Mrs. Piper, who comes to the Sol’s Arms in order to present her minor evidence at an inquest:

Mrs. Piper lives in the court (which her husband is a cabinet-maker), and it has long been well beknown among the neighbours (counting from the day next but one before the half-baptizing of Alexander James Piper aged eighteen months and four days old on accounts of not being expected to live such was the sufferings gentlemen of that child in his gums) as the Plaintive--so Mrs. Piper insists on calling the deceased--was reported to have sold himself.

Mrs. Piper is just a flicker in that vast electric network that Dickens called Bleak House--and she is permanent. With Mrs. Piper, the reader comes upon the center of Dickens’s life-giving style, in the care lavished so quickly on lesser figures. For there is also truth in cliché, in the way a self freezes into its gestures. In the end, the self can be content with very little--like a cabman who is given twopence, which he receives “with anything but transport, tosses the money into the air, catches it over-handed, and retires.” Nabokov commented: “this gesture, this one gesture, with its epithet ‘over-handed’--a trifle--but the man is alive forever in a good reader’s mind.” And then he added: “A great writer’s world is indeed a magic democracy where even some very minor character ... has the right to live and breed.” This, in the end, is the flimsy, ethereal, convincing politics of Dickens’s prose: not in his speeches, or his newspaper campaigns, but in the democracy of his fiction, in its massive crowd of animate extras.

IV.

The medium in which these minor characters lived was the mixing and refining solution of Dickens’s voice. Among all the Dickensian system of repetitions, the most repeated element is Dickens himself: his prose style. At his audience with Queen Victoria in 1870, he may have commiserated sedately over “the price of butchers’ meat, and bread,” but he was really a revolution of one. And the key to this revolution, to this style, may be found in his performances.

Around 1843, when he was writing A Christmas Carol, Dickens changed the way he wrote. He developed a more performative system of punctuation: a musical notation of semicolons. And it was also in A Christmas Carol that Dickens allowed his prose to become an electric message between the novelist and the absent reader: “Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.” When he came to give his famous performed readings, he chose to begin with A Christmas Carol--but he cut that passage, because at last there was no need to remind the absent reader of the absent novelist’s presence.

Before he became a novelist, Dickens had considered becoming an actor. With his assiduous precision, he had practiced “even such things as walking in and out, and sitting down in a chair.” His hero was Charles Matthews, who would come on stage as himself, in evening dress--and then play all the parts, culminating in a final bravura “monopolylogue.” It was an early form of stand-up. And this solo performance of multiple imitations formed the nucleus of Dickens’s style: a new form of prose, based on mimicry.

Mimicry, of course, is based on an idea of the human as repetition. “How easily peculiarities may be acquired by negligence,” observed Matthews, “and how difficult they are to eradicate when strengthened by habit.” Dickens made this offhand observation central to the art of the novel: a sustained analysis of how far the repetitive is the essence of a character, or the appropriation of a self by the other. Dickens is the great comic impersonator. In the vocabulary of the nineteenth century, he is the great assumer. He impersonated other people, and he impersonated himself. This is why his biography is of such prickly and absorbing interest. He performed his own multiple imagination.

He wanted to be ghostly. He liked the idea of the novelist as ghost--as in his idea of an editing persona for his magazine, Household Words: “I want to suppose a certain SHADOW ... a kind of semi-omniscient, omnipresent, intangible creature” which would “loom as a fanciful thing all over London ... a sort of previously unthought of Power going about.” But this was simply a way of describing his infinite vampiric style. And the main subject he haunted was himself. This was the secret he imparted to a Russian admirer, another genius of “good murderous melodramas,” who came to interview him in the summer of 1862. Dostoevsky, who was not yet the author of Crime and Punishment or Demons or any of his major novels, later recounted Dickens’s theory:

There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.

Toward the end of his life, Dickens decided to add to his repertory of readings the murder of Nancy by her lover Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist. In performance, he continued to create the tale, to embellish the novel, adding extra detail--such as Sikes’s dog, his paws bloodstained, “crawling as if those stains had poisoned him!!” Famously, his enactment of the guilty murderer made Dickens feel like a murderer: he wrote to the painter Frith in November 1868 that his acting was “horribly like, I am afraid”--“I have a vague sense of being ‘wanted’ as I walk about the streets.” A short while earlier, in April 1867, Dickens had written to his friend Robert Lytton that with his performed readings, with “this interpretation of myself (then quite strange in the public ear),” he had hoped to hint at “some new expression of the meaning of my books.” The new meaning, I think, was simple. It was the living proof that Dickens--with gas jets rigged up to shine brightly on his face, because he was, after all, the flaneur of gaslight--had invented the narrator as impersonator.

From Paris, on May 16, 1863, Dickens published an essay in his magazine Household Words. His essay featured the Paris morgue. In particular, it noted the variety of expressions adopted by the tourists when looking at the corpses (adopted by the flaneur, looking at the world):

there was a wolfish stare at the object.... And there was a much more general, purposeless, vacant staring at it--like looking at waxwork, without a catalogue, and not knowing what to make of it. But all these expressions concurred in possessing the one underlying expression of looking at something that could not return a look.

The Paris morgue was the hidden, concentrated form of London--of life. In the horrified italics of this asymmetrical looking, where the world is observed in the form of a waxwork, the disturbed energy of Dickens’s art and life may be found. So horrified by the inanimate, by the world’s junk, Dickens gave himself the infinite task of quickening everything, of impersonating everything--a demiurgic task of animation, through the precarious immortality of art.

Unwritten Novels - Doris Lessing

I like to imagine that I am reading a piece headed ‘Unwritten Novels’:

Just sent for review, a parcel of reprints of neglected Victorian novels, each of unique interest and illuminating, as only literature can, areas of 19th-century life known hitherto only to historians. (It was a historian who said: ‘It is to the glory of the novelists, and the shame of the historians, that it is the former who have written the novels which present the past to the common reader.’) John Mercury is an exciting tale about those men who, risking transportation and prison, smuggled on carts and mail coaches, then up and down the railways, batches of pamphlets, broadsheets, newsheets, all clandestinely printed or copied out by hand – the ‘alternative press’ of those days, a 19th-century English samizdat – about the lives and conditions of workers and their families, their aspirations for a better life. The New Jerusalem Maker is a psychological novel about a group of Chartists who live for the future, their own present comfort neglected, in an intense interaction, inspired by the fumey influences of Shelley, Byron and Blake. The charismatic Charles Hoop, orator and visionary, compels men, women and children into his orbit, not always to their benefit. Dame Betty: Her School tells how the widow of an Army captain, left destitute, taught the neighbours’ children in her tiny cottage in Spitalfields. The story is written by one of her pupils, a grown woman, when this and similar schools were closed in favour of compulsory state education. The room where the children – many of whom turned out to be remarkable – were taught was described in the inspector’s report as ‘damp, insanitary and ill-equipped.’ The Shadow Running. This country was host to revolutionaries from all over Europe, always on the move, outwitting the Police and Home Office spies, smuggling letters, pamphlets, instructions. This shadow world of intrigue and passion (revolution was ever a begetter of sexual intensity) and the type of person who later, with the coming of ‘the media’ would be terrorists, will be found instructive by the authorities even now. This novel foreshadows Dostoevsky’s The Devils. Not to be missed. Divas of the Divan, based on an exchange of letters between Florence Nightingale’s doctor and the explorer Isabella Bird’s doctors, throws light on how clever women suffering from the miseries and frustrations of middle-class Victorian life used invalidism, often consciously, but even more interestingly, unconsciously, to protect their vulnerabilities and nurse their talents; ‘The Psychopathology of the Sofa’ is the subtitle. A Butterfly Under a Stone by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She and her sisters, unknown to her father, brothers and later, her husband, befriended a poor girl dying of tuberculosis in ‘The Rookeries’, which were, after all, not a mile from their house. This fine and compassionate novel was the result.

Unfortunately these novels and a thousand others were never written. Why not?

There are some subjects it is almost impossible to believe have never found a novelist. How about Marx’s household? It was a composite of Victorian dramatic stereotypes: the illegitimate child by the servant, the set-aside wife, mysterious and conspiratorial visitors, reprehensible relatives and the noble-minded philanthropic benefactor. And the exploited, suffering daughter. There is Kapp’s biography of Eleanor, letters, history books. No novel – though Marx’s deplorable son-in-law appears in The Doctor’s Dilemma, I think, and he apparently inspired Meredith’s The Tragic Comedians, that dry, urbane, witty, grown-up tale about revolutionary politics in Europe. Out-of-print. I wonder why?

I first began to brood about unwritten novels in the late Fifties, after the Twentieth Congress. (Everyone over a certain age will know what I mean: youngsters, even the politically minded, ask, what was that?) I knew I had lived through an extraordinary time, but now it was over. What had ended was a political atmosphere – and this is always impossible to describe to later people, who are living in a different, equally compelling atmosphere, nearly always inimical to the first. (In the last few weeks we have seen a similar sudden change, one that no one foresaw, and the way we all thought so recently will rapidly seem improbable. Young ones are already asking their elders: ‘How was it possible you did that?’) What I looked back on – 1941, the date of Russia entering the war – was a fever, a ferment, an intoxication, every possible social idea up for grabs, from feminism to communal living, all based – and in areas that extended far beyond the Communist Party – on a goody-and-baddy scenario: the Soviet Union was good, everyone else, bad. The further I get away from that stretch of years, the more of a lunacy it seems, a paranoia essenced – but that is false memory trying to instal itself, trying to discount the atmosphere of then, which is the whole point. What I particularly wanted to know was: had this kind of thing happened before? How nice to read a novel about the men and women of the Communist movement before 1905, when they split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The personal dislocations must have left everyone scarred. Or why not a novel about the Chartists, the flesh-and-blood stuff, not the propaganda: I had already observed how the (small) historical events of which I had been part had frozen into tidy stories that tended to leave out certain people and events, often the key ones, as if these had about them something abrasive and raw and itchy that could not be included. And the atmosphere that had made everything possible had evaporated. There were whole tracts of the 19th century that literature hadn’t covered at all, though Dickens and Hardy and Meredith between them had done a good deal. Well, I would write a novel that would convey the atmosphere, the taste and the feel of the politics of a certain time. Roll on the decades, and they are setting The Golden Notebook in history and politics classes, and I couldn’t be more pleased.

But why the missing books? The most surprising lacunae are in the Second World War. Hundreds and thousands of women were in uniform, drove vehicles, worked on the land and in Intelligence and in offices. They made munitions, cooked in canteens, suffered the Blitz. (Or enjoyed it. One old woman said: It made a nice change.) Where is The Landgirl and Luigi (after Lawrence), where the novel about the icy run to Murmansk, or the Battle of the Atlantic – where we nearly lost the war – told by the sensitive young officer later sunk in the Repulse in the Pacific, and picked out of the water to fight again in the Med? Where the novel, rather than the memoirs, of the POW camps in Germany, the internment camps in Southern Rhodesia, Australia (the latter housing improbable mixes of fascists and antifascists boxed up together for the duration). In the Second World War camps to train pilots were set up in Southern Rhodesia (at least ten of them) Kenya, Australia, Canada, South Africa. This meant moving – how many men? Millions? – on ships pursued, and sometimes sunk, by submarines, meant building camps like towns – but all-male – in countries that often struck these involuntary tourists as unlikeable or – sometimes – as politically oppressive as the countries we were fighting. I know that is how Southern Rhodesia seemed to many men of the Air Force. All this was an extraordinary feat of organisation. Has anything like it ever happened before? Yet people have forgotten all about these camps, these men. They are not in literature, except, glancingly, in my Children of Violence. The fate of the ground crew – the men who serviced the aircraft and ran the camps, and stayed put, sometimes for years – was to be bored. Boredom is conducive to the production of literature. But no, nothing, not a word. Where are the novels about the Second Front in Europe, Dunkirk, the evacuation of Singapore, the war in Burma (Yes, India did all right), the war in North Africa, Army camps in Britain? Very well, let’s look at what we have. Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy, about combatants; Olivia Manning’s trilogies, mostly about civilians dodging death, deportation or destitution while contending armies reel back and forth. Alexander Baron’s From the City, from the Plough. The Cruel Sea. Sharp, sardonic sketches, in New Writing, Shaving through the Blitz, by one Fanfarlo. Fragments of verse remain, none as sharp or as painful as Brooke’s, or Sassoon’s or Owen’s.

Dark angel who art clear and straight
As cannon shining in the air
Thy blackness doth invade my mind
And thunderous as the armoured wind
That rains on Europe
Is thy hair.

(Was there really such a poem?) Prokosch wrote an intensely romantic novel set in Lisbon, that clearing-house for spies. Have I left much out? I don’t think so. Where is our equivalent of Elsa Morante’s History, that marvellous novel that says everything about what it was like in Italy during World War Two? No, Britain was not invaded, but was bouleversed, changed for ever. Very few British people (or Americans) were actually killed, but millions were shifted from one part of the country to another, from one country to another, from continent to continent. Civilians were involved, for the first time ...

Are we approaching that perennial theme, the Sensibility of the Writer – not everybody’s favourite?

A clue or two. A few years ago I was invited to address a gathering of industrialists and business people in Toronto. I was intrigued: it appeared that the wife of that year’s chairman had suggested a writer might make a nice change for the weekly get-together. Several hundred people, a third of them women, had turned up. One point I made was that it is literature, not history, which has created a map of this or that society. (I was talking about the novel not from an aesthetic point of view, but as information: for instance, a businessman friend of mine, when he is sent off to some new town or country, goes to the library for all the novels from there. That’s where you learn what a place is like, says he, not from blueprints and pamphlets.) We all know about pre-revolutionary Russia because of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov and the rest. Up got a businessman, a prominent one, it seems, to make the point that before the Revolution in Russia an industrial revolution was well under way, but it nowhere appears in literature. Our view of that Russia is entirely created by intellectuals, not one of whom, not even Gorki, had anything to do with manufacture or industry. I was naturally delighted that this point was being made by a capitalist, and not by the Canadian equivalent of Comrade Len, Lit. Sec. of the Marxist-Socialist-Revolutionary Party of West Ealing.

Another point: why do people engaged in business and industry, the engine of all the world’s societies, capitalist, socialist – and, now, Communist – never write novels? You can hardly think of a serious novel about the machinations in the committee rooms, the clandestine struggles to steal technology, the arms trade, the men who build dams and pipelines, the international conferences where the destinies of nations are decided, let alone the day-to-day being in an office which is the lot of millions. (Yes, Something happened... Heller). Was it, I wondered aloud, that the aristocratic disdain for business (still alive and well, so I’m told, in this country) has percolated down to the intellectuals (sorry, shorthand) of this country, and then, somehow, to this country’s ex-colonies? There are levels of society in Britain, including some of the most socially aware people, where it is enough to mention ‘business’ or ‘businessman’ to see delicate little moues – of distaste, imaginary skirts being drawn aside. Not so in America, where some people have to make regular visits just to get some relief from all these genteel sensibilities.

Why, I enquired, did not the members of this distinguished audience go off and write novels about their fascinating lives? One after another got to their feet, to say they indeed cherished dreams of writing novels, but it had not occurred to any of them that their business lives were interesting. One man confessed that when he retired he would write about his teenage passion for the girl next door, for this had coloured his life. Another planned something like A Sportsman’s Sketches about his hunting trips with his dog. A woman said she would write about her recent divorce and the consequent psychoanalysis.

If that enquiring sociologist from Mars (or from one of Jupiter’s moons) decided to use the good literature of the last three hundred years as a map of our societies, the 18th century would be fairly well-chartered, but the gaps would be serious in the 19th – and you could read all of 20th-century novels and never suspect that it is trade that makes the world go round. Bad literature – yes, comics, airport literature – but that’s a different matter and a different article.

Charles Dickens' Prompt Copies

Session 6

Dickens Onstage: Up Into the Clouds Together From The New York Public Library On December 3, 1844, Dickens gave a private reading of The Chimes (the second of the Christmas Books) before a select circle of friends that included Thomas Carlyle, Daniel Maclise and John Forster. It was, by all accounts, a stunning performance. The night before, he read the same work to William Macready, the famous actor-manager. "If you had seen Macready," he wrote exultantly to his wife, "undisguisedly sobbing, and crying on the sofa, as I read--you would have felt (as I did) what a thing it is to have Power." These early performances, which gave Dickens the first intimations of his overmastering power as a performer, were, as Forster would write in his Life of Charles Dickens, "the germ of those readings to large audiences by which, as much as his books, the world knew him in his later life." It has been said that the most interesting relationship of Dickens's life was his lifelong affair with the public. It was certainly the most intense. The prompt-copies The prompt-copies NYPL, Berg Collection Explore selected pages from two of the special editions, or prompt-copies, used by Dickens in his public performances, including that of A Christmas Carol (shown here) and Sikes and Nancy. Dickens left traces of his art as a riveting storyteller in the texts he prepared for the stage. These volumes, known as prompt-copies, were special versions of his stories that he personally prepared for his public readings, the largest surviving number of which are now held by The New York Public Library's Berg Collection. When on stage, Dickens placed the prompt-copies before him on his reading desk; if he forgot a line or lost his place during a performance (a rare occurrence), he could then glance down for his prompt. Most were small editions that Dickens had privately printed specifically for use in his stage performances, each then handsomely bound up in his library binding. The only known prompt-copy of A Christmas Carol, however, was assembled by inlaying the pages of a regular edition (in this case, the 12th, published in 1849) into larger sheets, and again the whole was then bound up nicely for Dickens, and bears his bookplate. Each prompt-copy--more working manuscript than crib--served as a canvas for Dickens's brilliance as both editor and performer, the pages heavily marked up with carefully worked-out cues and stage directions, which he would eventually have memorized to perfection, as indeed he would individual readings in their entirety. There are as well numerous cuts, revisions, comments, editorial symbols, and transitional or "bridge" passages inserted in manuscript, reflecting the continuous "sculpting" of the readings as Dickens polished and tightened them so that each would achieve its maximum effect in performance. In the Carol prompt-copy, for example, one can trace the evolution of the reading, which formed a popular part of the bill from the beginning of Dickens's career on the stage in 1853, to the very last of his "Farewell Readings," in London, on March 15, 1870. An intricate network of revisions, deletions and pointers to the performer ("Weird"--"run on"--"clean over") documents Dickens's constant reworking of the text, which gradually reduced the length of the reading from three hours to a more dramatically effective hour-and-a-half. NYPL, Berg Collection Broadside announcing an appearance by Dickens on December 29, 1858, in the Lecture Hall at Chatham in Kent (not far from Gad's Hill), closing with the audience favorite, and the most frequently performed of his readings, The Trial from Pickwick. NYPL, Berg Collection "A foul deed," the murder of Nancy by Sikes in Oliver Twist, an original pencil and watercolor drawing by F.W. Pailthorpe. Dickens's reenactment of Nancy's horrible murder and Sikes's gruesome death as he flees his pursuers left audiences gasping. NYPL, Berg Collection "The Last Chance," an original pencil, pen and watercolor sketch by George Cruikshank, showing Bill Sikes in his flight from the angry mob, just moments before he plunges to his death. The prompt-copy of Sikes and Nancy, the harrowing reading from Oliver Twist, is of particular interest not only because of the extensive alterations made to the printed text, but because it was the last reading prepared by Dickens before he retired from the stage. NYPL, Berg Collection The printed itinerary of Dickens's reading tour for the autumn of 1858; Georgina Hogarth's copy, with her annotations. On July 22 Dickens read in London for the last time that summer; after a mere 10 days rest, he began this ambitious tour, which would take him throughout the English provinces, Scotland and Ireland. Throughout, the text and margins hold his profuse manuscript changes, deletions, additions and markings for emphasis, showing him working towards the most telling platform effects. On many pages Dickens wrote out dramatic memoranda ("Terror To The End") to help guide his interpretation during the reading, thus preserving fascinating clues to his manner of presentation on stage as well as traces of the atmosphere he strove to evoke in specific scenes. The original conclusion of Sikes and Nancy, in which Sikes slipped quietly out of the room after the murder of Nancy, seems to have given Dickens some trouble. Several friends at the trial performance, including Wilkie Collins, insisted that the reading ended too suddenly and without the poetic justice of Sikes's death provided in Oliver Twist. At first, Dickens demurred, but within weeks he was at work, newly fashioning a "fierce and passionate rush for the end," drawing primarily on material from chapter 48 of the novel. Initially Dickens had been concerned that Sikes and Nancy might strike audiences as "so horrible" that they would be frightened away from future readings altogether; but in the end, the gripping drama he crafted from Oliver Twist proved to be one of his most acclaimed performances. Dickens threw himself into the awful story with such ferocity that audiences gaped at him with fixed expressions of horror, as if he himself "had been going to be hanged." Golden fetters Dickens gave his first public readings in December 1853, in Birmingham. A series of three for charity, they were rapturously received. "They lost nothing," he reported after a performance of the Carol, "misinterpreted nothing, followed everything closely, laughed and cried ... and animated me to the extent that I felt as if we were all bodily going up into the clouds together." The prime of his powers NYPL, Berg Collection An original pen-and-ink drawing by F.A. Fraser of the final scene of Great Expectations, in which Pip and Estella, after a separation of many years, meet again on the desolate property where Miss Havisham's house once stood. Dickens's warmth, histrionic flair and expressiveness evoked tears, applause, shrieks, laughter, hisses, and shouts of "Hear, hear!" from his audiences, who responded to the most memorable troopers of his great repertory company as if they were old acquaintances. It must have been quite a night at the theater. After attending the final evening in Boston during Dickens's second American tour, poet John Greenleaf Whittier marveled, "Another such star-shower is not to be expected in one's life-time." Dickens toured incessantly, some said compulsively, on both sides of the Atlantic for the last fifteen years of his life. In late 1857, as the tense situation of his private life was working toward the separation from Catherine that would take place the next spring, he told Forster, who always opposed the readings as beneath a great writer's dignity: "I can see no better thing to do that is half so hopeful in itself, or half so suited to my restless state." The next year he turned professional, and he drove himself relentlessly, refusing to cancel performances no matter the state of his health. (In April 1869, "half dead" with overwork and the pressures of touring, Dickens cancelled a "farewell reading" at Preston along with subsequent engagements only when his physician unequivocally ordered "instant rest.") Once on stage, "a lithe, energetic man, of medium stature," invariably with a red carnation in his button-hole, Dickens rarely glanced at the text before him, for through rigorous preparation and rehearsal he made himself, as he said, "master of the situation." He played variations on the readings, continually adding new material and even "slashing" whole sections (as one reviewer noted) on the wing; inspired both by the moment and by his profound rapport with the audience, and avoiding the mechanical repetition of effects and gestures that had scored the night before, Dickens kept each performance a miracle of freshness and invention. He did nothing by rote, he took everything on himself, and the house responded, as one American admirer said, not with applause, but with "a passionate outburst of love for the man." NYPL, Berg Collection The wrapper of Our Mutual Friend No. 7, published in November 1864. During the late 1850s and 1860s Dickens published his final three novels: A Tale of Two Cities (1859), a historical novel set during the French Revolution; Great Expectations (1860-61; 1861), a mysterious and deeply affecting tale following a young man making his way in the world; and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65; 1865), a very dark exploration of the materialistic forces shaping society and the corrupting power of wealth, which has aptly been called Dickens's Waste Land. All three novels show him working with undiminished imaginative force and, if anything, even greater subtlety and artistry. Throughout the 1860s, Dickens suffered increasingly from exhaustion and poor health, and yet his drive remained remarkable, his restlessness often nearly manic. Those close to him fretted that as he amassed thousands of pounds through his lucrative public readings, he was surely shortening his life by pushing himself so recklessly. ("While engaged in these readings," G.A. Sala mused sadly after his death, "his life must have been that of a convict in golden fetters.") Yet he continued to tour tirelessly, and in the summer of 1867, America--and the riches to be made there--began to beckon. And as it had twenty-five years earlier, America again welcomed Dickens like a conquering hero when he returned to the States for a tour that stretched for more than four months, with readings continuing from December 2, 1867 to April 20, 1868. Performances averaged four evenings a week. "Well, the work is hard, the climate is hard, the life is hard," Dickens would write to Forster, "but ... the gain is enormous." A return to America The 1867 pocket diary NYPL, Berg Collection Explore two openings from Dickens's little pocket diary for 1867, which miraculously escaped the fate of the bulk of his private papers (the fire). Dickens's pocket diary for 1867, in which he recorded in a miniscule but generally legible hand his engagements, readings and travels for the year, gives a sense of the pace of his daily life in the months leading up to the American trip. There are as well some fascinating glimpses into the heart of the man: Ellen Ternan, Dickens's "beloved Nelly," is a constant, if cryptic presence in the diary (as "N.") until he sailed for America on November 9. Much is packed between the tattered covers of the tiny (measuring only 2.5 x 4.5 inches) diary. The readings in England and Ireland. Dinners and evenings at the theater. The many trips from Gad's Hill to London and back, and from London to Slough (the village where Ellen Ternan lived in a small cottage at which one "Charles Tringham" called frequently). Notes on the day's weather. A footnote to the month of April reading, "N. ill latter part of this month." And then an entry on September 29, "at 12 o'k Forster and Dolby. Decide to go." The last words are heavily underscored (back from a scouting trip to the States, Dickens's manager George Dolby had pronounced the prospects very bright). Dickens had hoped that Nelly would be able to join him in America during the tour, although how he thought he could keep her hidden from the prying eyes of the American press, or even how he was going to introduce her to his many terribly distinguished American friends, is a mystery. Nevertheless, Dickens worked out a plan to bring her over with his trusted confidante H.W. Wills (and no doubt with the assistance of Forster and his sister-in-law Georgina, as well). Everything was arranged methodically and with the strictest secrecy. In his pocket diary, Dickens wrote out the coded texts of two telegrams: Tel: all well means You come Tel: safe and well means You don't come. NYPL, Berg Collection Check for £100 drawn for "American Fares" by Dickens, dated October 9, 1867, presumably to cover the costs of passage to the States for him and his entourage. The plan was simple; the "you" was Ellen. Depending on what he had decided, Dickens would send one or the other message to Wills in London the day after his arrival in the States. Then, Wills would forward Dickens's "exact words" via the next day's post to Ellen, who was in Florence. It is the latter telegram that was sent, for although Dickens missed his "Princess" intensely, Ternan remained in Europe. Landing at Boston on November 19, Dickens devoted the remainder of the month to a round of dinners there with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Longfellow and his American publisher James T. Fields and his vivacious wife, Annie, who were his dearest friends in America. Thanksgiving dinner was spent at Longfellow's. In early December, the readings began. Dickens spent the month shuttling between Boston and New York (he found the railways appalling). Although he began to suffer from what he called the "true American catarrh," he kept to a schedule that would have challenged a much younger man, even managing, as the pocket diary for December shows, to squeeze in some sleighing in Central Park. Dickens opened in Boston, on the evening of December 2, 1867, with two sure-fire audience favorites, A Christmas Carol and The Trial from Pickwick. The next morning, a Boston paper reported: Mr. Charles Dickens opened his peculiar entertainment in Tremont Temple ... before as large an audience as could be comfortably crowded into that hall, in which all the poets, philosophers, sages and historians of this city and vicinity were mingled like plums in a Christmas pudding ... The entertainment is unlike anything we have ever seen in this country. It is rather a dramatic recitation than a reading, references to the book being very infrequent, and all the parts being recited with appropriate voice and action ... The audience last evening were in the best of spirits from the start ... and the first mention of well-known characters--especially Pickwick, Sergeant Buzfuz, and inimitable Sam Weller--was received with tempests of applause ... Boston had been "perfectly mad" for him, but, at least according to Harper's Weekly, New York greeted Dickens with an even greater frenzy of excitement, and scalpers did in fact have a field day. And as for Dickens, the metropolis astonished. "Everything in it," he said, "looks as if the order of nature were reversed, and everything grew newer every day, instead of older." NYPL, Berg Collection Explore a gallery of portraits of Dickens taken at the studio of Jeremiah Gurney in New York City during the novelist's second triumphant tour of America. The overwhelming demand for tickets in New York even inspired one speculator to get his hands on a proof of the tickets; he then arranged to have some thousands of them printed up, "with the intention of imposing on the public." Fortunately, George Dolby found out about the scheme when he arrived in New York to make arrangements for the tour. Indignant, he visited the printer, who, it turned out, had been duped, and who happily "broke up" his type. The forger was turned over to the police, and the fraudulent tickets destroyed. Dolby then devised his "own private stamp" with which he marked the back of each New York ticket to discourage further forgery. So successful were the first New York readings that it was announced that a second course of tickets would go on sale at Steinway Hall at 9 a.m., on December 11. However, as Harper's reported, "the throng of purchasers began to assemble at ten o'clock on the night before, and at least 150 persons waited in the line or queue all night. When the sale began not less than five hundred persons, including two women, were in the line." Although in poor health and often literally prostrate from exhaustion during the tour, Dickens, ever the trooper, refused to cancel any performances, even under doctor's orders. "No man had a right," he maintained, "to break an engagement with the public, if he were able to get out of bed." On February 23, 1912, nearly half a century after those memorable performances in Steinway Hall, the New York Sun published a touching letter from one Chauncey K. Buchanan, of Tarrytown, New York, who had been there: I heard Charles Dickens read in Steinway Hall in 1868. I accompanied my teacher ... and two or three of my schoolmates about my age, 17. Possibly the impression Dickens made on me is of interest, though I cannot recall definitely the two selections given, because since then I seem to hear his voice in every dramatic passage of his I read. His personal appearance was somewhat repugnant to me. I disliked his "vest" of velvet and the heavy gold chains across it from pocket to pocket. I compared his attire to that of my father, so unobtrusive, not considering that the latter was a mere mercantile man ... In fact, I was at first much disappointed, for I expected to see and hear what was more than a mere man. When the reading, however, was well under way, I found myself laughing and sobbing. The latter surprised and irritated me much. It was the first time I had cried in public and I tried to quell my tears, but in vain. So Dickens sustained the jet of tears grudgingly evoked from his hearer ... So I am sure he was a great reader, actor and preacher, deftly blended in all he rendered. The output of the man was a largess of the gods to us poor mortals. NYPL, Berg Collection A letter from Dickens to James T. Fields, dated Boston, February 27, 1868, in which he tells his friend (and American publisher) that it would be "madness" for him to go out after that night's reading (he has been suffering from a terrible cold). The American trip was a colossal and very gratifying success, netting Dickens, it is estimated, a truly staggering £20,000; but he was ill much of the time and he was very homesick, far from all he loved. On Christmas Eve, Dickens wrote to Wills, enclosing a letter to his beloved Nelly, which Wills was to forward to her in Italy. "I would give £3,000 down (and think it cheap)," he told Wills, "if you could forward me, for four and twenty hours only, instead of the letter." Of the correspondence of Dickens and Ternan, not a shred has survived. Dickens returned to England in May 1868 with plans already in the works for a new series of readings. It was now that Sikes and Nancy began to take shape, the coup de théâtre that would shock audiences and send Dickens's pulse skyrocketing.