By the second week of December, the only thing that was disturbing my peace of mind was the lack of an invitation to Gad’s Hill Place for Christmas.
I was not sure that I would have accepted the invitation that year (there had been subtle but obvious tensions between the Inimitable and myself in the preceding months, my suspicion of the author’s being a murderer among them), but I certainly expected to be invited. After all, Dickens had more or less said the last time I saw him that I would be receiving the usual invitation to be a houseguest.
But no invitation arrived at my mother’s cottage. Each Thursday afternoon or Friday mid-day, before or after my visit to King Lazaree’s den, I would drop in on Caroline to pick up my mail and to make sure that she and Carrie had enough money to meet all accounts, but still there arrived no invitation from Dickens. Then, on the sixteenth of December, my younger brother, Charles, came down to Southborough to spend the day and brought with him an envelope addressed to me in Georgina’s distinctive hand.
“Has Dickens said anything to you about Christmas?” I asked my brother as I searched for my knife to open the invitation.
“He has said nothing to me,” Charley said sourly. I could tell that his ulcers—or what I then thought were his ulcers—were hurting him. My talented brother was listless and downcast. “Dickens told Katey that there would be the usual houseful of guests.… I know the Chappells are coming down to Gad’s Hill for a few days, and Percy Fitzgerald for the New Year.”
“Hmm, the Chappells,” I said while unfolding the letter. These were Dickens’s new business partners in the reading tours and, I thought, interminable boors. I decided that I would definitely not stay at Gad’s Hill for the full week that I usually tarried if the Chappells were going to be there for any extended length of time.
Imagine my surprise when I read the letter, which I reproduce here in its entirety—
My Dear Wilkie—
This is a pretty state of things!—That I should be in Christmas Labour while you are cruising about the world, a compound of Hayward and Captain Cook! But I am so undoubtedly one of the sons of Toil—and fathers of children—that I expect to be presently presented with a smock frock, a pair of leather breeches, and a pewter watch, for having brought up the largest family ever known with the smallest disposition to do anything for themselves.
But as some of us must labour while others adventure onward and outward, we still extend to you the heartiest of Christmas greetings—should these greetings catch up to you during your farflung peregrinations—and wish you the most prosperous of new years.
Yr. Most Obedient Servant and Former Fellow Traveller,
Chls. Dickens
I fairly dropped the letter in my amazement. Thrusting it at Charley, who read it with a quick glance, I spluttered, “What does this mean? Does Dickens somehow believe I have gone sailing somewhere?”
“You were in Rome in the autumn,” said my brother. “Perhaps Dickens believes you are still there.”
“I returned quickly to try to save the doomed production of The Frozen Deep at the Olympic Theatre,” I said with some asperity. “I saw Dickens after I got back. There is no possibility that he does not know I am in England.”
“He may believe you returned to Rome or Paris,” said Charley. “For there was some speculation about that in the clubs, after you had told acquaintances that you had some business to settle in Paris. Or perhaps Dickens is preoccupied, thinking mostly of his children. Katey, as you know, is despondent much of the time. Mamie has fallen out of favour in London society. And his youngest son has been a great disappointment. Dickens recently told Katey that he had decided that Plorn should be sent to Australia to become a farmer.”
“What the deuce does that have to do with my invitation to Christmas?” I cried.
Charley only shook his head. It was obvious that I had deliberately been left off Dickens’s Christmas guest-list this year.
“Wait here,” I said to my brother, who needed to catch the early train back to London. I went into Mother’s sewing room, found her stationery with the address of the Tunbridge Wells cottage on it, and began a quick missive—
My Dear Charles:
I am neither touring the world like Captain Cook nor visiting Rome or Paris. As you must already know, I am visiting my mother near Tunbridge Wells and I would be available for . . .
I stopped, crumpled the sheet, threw it in the fire, and found a blank sheet of stationery in my mother’s secretary.
My Dear Dickens,
I return your Christmas greetings—in my absence this Holiday, please give the ladies a bow from me, and the children sweets in my name—and regret that I shall not be able to see you until sometime in the New Year. Rather than cruising the world like Captain Cook or touring Scotland and Ireland like an itinerant juggler, I am—as you may know—deeply involved in an investigation into a Missing Person or Persons that may have the most profound consequences. I look forward to surprising you with the imminent results of this investigation.
All of my love and Christmas cheer to Georgina, Mamie, Katey, Plorn, the Family, and your Christmas guests.
Yr. Most Obedient Detective,
Wm. Wilkie Collins
I sealed and addressed the note and—when giving it to Charley, who was pulling on his travelling cloak—said with the utmost seriousness, “This must be delivered into Charles Dickens’s hands and his alone.”
CHRISTMAS AND MY BIRTHDAY were most happy occasions for me in Mother’s presence—and in the snug warmth of the Tunbridge Wells cottage, with its constant cooking smells and undemanding female company—but because both of those holidays fell on a Tuesday, I did not see Caroline until the Thursday of each of those weeks. (It was on Thursday the tenth of January that I returned to London with all of my luggage, work, and research materials, but since that was my night for King Lazaree and my pipe, I did not actually move back to the house on Dorset Square until the afternoon of Friday, 11 January.)
Caroline was not pleased with me and found innumerable small ways to show me her displeasure, but in my time away at Tunbridge Wells I had learned how to place less stock in Mrs G——’s pleasure or displeasure.
During the weeks that followed in early 1867, I spent more and more of my time at my club, using the Athenaeum’s wonderful library as my primary research centre, taking my meals there, frequently sleeping there, and generally spending less and less time at my Melcombe Place address, where Caroline and Carrie still resided full-time. (Martha R—— remained in Yarmouth during this period.)
Since my business often brought me to the offices of All the Year Round (where, indeed, I still had an office of my own, albeit shared with other staff members and regular contributors from time to time), I heard much from Wills and others about Dickens’s new tour. Thick envelopes of galley proofs and other magazine materials were constantly being mailed out, chasing Dickens from Leicester to Manchester to Glasgow to Leeds to Dublin to Preston. Amazingly, Dickens managed to get back to London at least once a week to give a reading at St James’s Hall in Piccadilly and to come to the offices to deliver his own manuscripts, to check up on the books, and to work at editing the writing of others. He rarely got back to Gad’s Hill on these flying visits but would sleep in his rooms above the office here or, frequently, at his private address in Slough (near Ellen Ternan).
I did not happen to cross paths with Dickens during this time.
Various stories of woe, hardship, and Dickens’s amazing courage (or good luck) filtered back to the office and were repeated to me by Wills or Percy Fitzgerald or others.
It seemed that Dickens was still recovering from the discovery— this had been in the autumn, while I was briefly in Rome—that his personal servant and valet of the past twenty-four years, a dour and dyspeptic (I thought) but discreet shade of a man named John Thompson, had been regularly stealing from his master. Eight sovereigns had disappeared from these very offices at Wellington Street North, and when the theft was dis
covered, the sovereigns had quickly reappeared. But too late for Thompson, whose years of petty thefts from his employer had now come to light. Dickens sacked the man, of course, but could not bear to give the thief a “bad recommendation.” He sent Thompson off to future employment with a vague but not clearly negative letter. According to Percy Fitzgerald, Dickens had been almost distraught at this betrayal, although all the Inimitable had said to Percy about his emotions was “I have had to walk more than usual before I could walk myself into composure again.”
That composure seemed more and more rare if recent reports from Dolby to Wills were to be believed. Dickens was suffering more than ever from “nervous exhaustion,” brought on, no doubt, by the rail travel—his reaction to the Staplehurst accident seemed to grow more, rather than less, pronounced as the months went by—and early in the tour, on only his second night in Liverpool, Dickens became so faint by the end of the first part of his performance that he had to be physically helped to a sofa backstage, where he lay prostrate until it was time for him to put on a fresh boutonnière and go out for the final part of the strenuous reading.
During his reading in Wolverhampton (the first reports had this incident occurring in Birmingham proper rather than its smaller neighbour, so I had first pictured the old theatre there as I had seen it the night the illusion of Drood had threatened me), a wire holding one of the reflectors above Dickens’s head began to burn red-hot. The heavy bulb of this reflector projected out over the stalls and was suspended by a single, strong copper wire, but a new gas man only recently having joined the tour had mistakenly placed an open gas-jet beneath this supporting wire.
Dolby had seen the wire turning first red and then white and, shifting from foot to foot in his anxiety, had stage-whispered out to the reading Dickens, “How long shall you be?” while gesturing wildly at the heated wire. Dickens must have appreciated the danger: when the wire burned through, the heavy reflector would come crashing down to the stage, but not before careering through the maroon-cloth stalls and screens erected around the Inimitable. The result would be instant conflagration. The flammable screens themselves ran almost to the ancient cloth curtains above. Once the overheated wire parted, there was little doubt that the stage—and almost certainly the theatre—would go up in flames within minutes, if not seconds.
Dickens, still reading without missing a word or gesture, calmly showed Dolby two fingers behind his back.
The distraught stage manager did not know what this meant. Was the Chief telling him that he would be finished in two minutes or that the wire would be parting in two seconds? Dolby and Barton, the gas man, could do nothing but shuttle back and forth offstage, bringing sand and buckets of water and preparing for the worst.
Dickens, it turned out, had seen the wire heating in the middle of his reading and had coolly calculated how long it would take for the copper to burn through. Working from those quick mental calculations, the Inimitable had improvised instant alterations to the rest of his reading—editing and conflating as he went—and reached the end only seconds before the wire would have melted and parted. (Dickens had figured when Dolby signalled him that he had two minutes left before the reflector would have come crashing down.) The curtain closed, Barton ran out and turned off the misplaced flame, and Dolby—according to his later testimony to Wills—came close to fainting as Dickens patted him on his wide back, whispered, “There was never any real danger,” and calmly went out to take his curtain call.
All these breathless reports from Dickens’s tour were of little interest to me. None mentioned Drood, and I had my own literary work to do (more important, in my humble opinion, than reading one’s old work to audiences of bumpkins in the provinces).
As I’ve mentioned, I settled into doing my preliminary reading and researching at my club, the Athenaeum. The club was most helpful—moving my favourite wing chair to a place by the window where the weak winter and spring light would be at its best, providing a small table for my materials, and appointing several of the servants to seek out the volumes I needed from the club’s expansive libraries. I also appropriated Athenaeum stationery for my notes and kept these in a series of large white letter envelopes.
My first job was to gather information, and here my years as a journalist served me well (even as that profession had equally served Dickens, although I might remind you, Dear Reader, that I had been a true journalist and Dickens had written primarily as a mere court reporter).
For weeks I copied out pertinent entries on India, on various Hindoo cults, and on gems from Encyclopaedia Britannica, the eighth edition, copyright 1855. I also found a new book by a certain C. W. King, The Natural History of Gems, published in 1865, very helpful. For my specific India backgrounds that I thought might open The Serpent’s Eye (or possibly The Eye of the Serpent), I consulted J. Talboys Wheeler’s newly published The History of India from the Earliest Ages and both 1832 volumes of Theodore Hook’s The Life of General Sir David Baird. The diligent servants at the club also sought out and provided relevant articles in recent issues of Notes and Queries.
And thus the early outlines of my magnum opus began to take shape.
I had known for some time that the plot would revolve around the mysterious disappearance, in England, of a beautiful but cursed diamond brought from India—a diamond sacred to some Hindoo thuggee sort of cult—and that the mystery would unfold in a series of accounts from various viewpoints (rather as Dickens had done in Bleak House, but, more pertinently, as I had done to better effect in The Woman in White). Because of my preoccupation—“distraction” might be the better word—with the whole Drood issue at this time, the story would hinge upon such themes as Eastern mysticism, mesmerism, the power of mesmeric suggestion, and opium addiction. The solution to the theft (as I knew from an early point in my envisioning of the tale) would be so shocking, so unexpected, so clever, and so unprecedented in the nascent field of detection fiction that it would astonish all English and American readers, including such supposed practitioners of such sensationalist serial authorship as Charles Dickens himself.
As is true of all writers of Dickens’s and my level of accomplishment, I was never free to pursue just one writing project. (Dickens, while he prepared for and then travelled on tour, had written his usual Christmas novella, was editing All the Year Round, was completing elaborate forewords for the special edition of his works, and was generating ideas for novels even while writing actual stories such as his strange “George Silverman’s Explanations,” kindled, he told me later, by Dolby’s and his coming across the ruins of Hoghton Towers between Preston and Blackburn. That ruined old manse happened to crystallise all the disparate, floating fragments of ideas Dickens had been playing with for some time, but rather than support a novel—which he needed in order to offer something for serialisation in All the Year Round—it provoked this strange story of a neglected childhood so very similar to Dickens’s own. [Or at least to what he thought of as his childhood of neglect and want.]
So it was with my own multiple and often overlapping literary and dramatic efforts that spring of 1867. My rewritten The Frozen Deep had failed the previous autumn at the Olympic Theatre, this despite the fact that my revised version was, I believe, much improved, after I had rewritten the character and passions of Richard Wardour, the character Dickens had—I was about to write “played” but “occupied” might be a more precise word—making the man both more adult and believable, freeing the character from Dickens’s pathos and overly sentimental gestures.) But my hopes for a theatrical breakthrough remained high, and that spring—when my health and research commitments allowed—I travelled back and forth to Paris to consult with François-Joseph Régnier (whom I’d met through Dickens more than a decade earlier) of the Comédie-Française, who was eager to adapt The Woman in White to the stage there. (It was already the rage in Berlin.)
My own goal was to sell Régnier and the French theatre-goers (and thence English theatre-goers) on an adaptation of Armadale, whic
h I was certain would be warmly and enthusiastically received, despite what Dickens had considered its controversial aspects.
Caroline, who loved Paris beyond her limited means of expressing such emotion, all but begged to go with me, but I was firm: it was a business trip and there would be no time for shopping, explorations, or any social engagements outside the strict regimen of theatre business.
That month I wrote to Mother from my hotel in Paris—“I have breakfasted this morning on eggs and black butter, and pig’s feet à la Sainte Mènéhould! Digestion perfect. St Mènéhould lived to extreme old age on nothing but pig’s trotters.”
Régnier and I attended a new opera at which the theatre was packed, the intensity was astounding, and the experience was electrifying. Also electrifying were those “very special little periwinkles”—as Dickens and I used to call the attractive young actresses and demimondaines so available in a culture where the night life was as rich and varied as the food—and with a bit of guidance from Régnier and his friends, I blush to say that I did not have to spend an evening or night alone (or even with the same periwinkle) the whole time I was in Paris. Before returning to London I remembered to pick up a handpainted card of the city for Martha—she loved such trifles—and a lovely chiffon robe for Carrie. I also purchased some spices and sauces for Caroline’s kitchen.
My second night back at Melcombe Place after my return from Paris, I may have taken too much (or too little) laudanum, for I found it difficult to sleep. I was tempted to go to my study to work, but the inevitable confrontation with the Other Wilkie (even though he had shown no recent signs of violence in his attempts to seize my papers or pens) dissuaded me. Instead, I was standing at the window of my bedroom (Caroline had found reasons to sleep in her own room) when I saw a familiar shadow near the lamp post at the end of the street near the square.