How I moaned at reading this! And how Charles Dickens would have roared with laughter if he could have read his old newspaper enemy grovelling so in its editorial hypocrisy.
The Dean of Westminster, far from being deaf to such outcries, sent word to the Dickens family that he, the Dean, was “prepared to receive any communication from the family respecting the burial.”
But Georgina, Katey, Charley, and the rest of the family (Harry had rushed home from Cambridge too late to see his father alive) had already been informed that the little graveyard at the foot of Westminster Castle was overcrowded and thus closed to further burials. Dickens had, upon occasion, expressed the thought that he might like to be buried at the churches of Cobham or Shorne, but it turned out that these graveyards were also closed to future interments. So after the offer came from the Dean and Chapter of Rochester to lay Dickens’s remains to rest inside the Cathedral itself—a grave had already been prepared in St Mary’s Chapel there—the Inimitable’s family had tentatively accepted when the note from Dean Stanley of Westminster arrived.
Oh, Dear Reader, how I adored the irony of the idea of Dickens’s corpse being encrypted for all Eternity mere yards from where I had planned to slide his skull and bones into the rubble-strewn wall of the Rochester crypt. I still had the copy of the crypts’ key that Dradles had made for me! I still had the short pry bar that Dradles had given to me (or sold to me for £300 and a lifetime annuity of £100 might be a more accurate way of thinking about it) with which I was to slide back the stone into the wall.
How wonderful! How totally delicious! I read all this in my morning letter from Charley and wept over my breakfast.
But, alas, it was not to be. It was too perfect to be true.
With Dickens’s corpse in the house beginning to moulder in the June heat, Forster (how he must have loved this primacy, at long last!) and Charley Dickens came up to London to confer with the Dean of Westminster.
They informed the Dean that Dickens’s will bound them, in no uncertain terms, to an absolutely private and unannounced funeral with no possibility whatsoever of any public homage. Dean Stanley agreed that the great man’s wishes should be obeyed to the letter—but allowed that the “desire of the nation” should also be obeyed.
Thus they went ahead with burying Charles Dickens at Westminster Abbey.
To add insult to injury in all this—as was almost always the case in my two decades of dealings with Dickens, Dear Reader—I had my allocated role in this unceremonious ceremony. On 14 June, I went to Charing Cross to meet the special train from Gad’s Hill and to “accept” the coffin bearing the mortal remains of Charles Dickens. The coffin was removed, as per the dead man’s instructions, to a bare hearse devoid of funeral trappings (pulled by horses devoid of black feathers). It might have been a delivery waggon for all the fuss this vehicle and its team showed.
Again in keeping with Dickens’s commands, only three coaches were permitted to follow this hearse to the Abbey.
In the first coach were the four Dickens children remaining in England—Charley, Harry, Mary, and Katey.
In the second coach were Georgina, Dickens’s (mostly-ignored-in-life) sister Letitia, his son Charley’s wife, and John Forster (who undoubtedly was wishing that he could be in the first coach, if not in the actual coffin alongside his master).
In the third coach rode Dickens’s solicitor, Frederic Ouvry, his ever-loyal (if not always discreet) physician Frank Beard, my brother, Charles, and me.
The bell of St Stephen’s was tolling half-past nine in the morning as our small procession reached the entry to the Dean’s Yard. No word of this burial had got out—a small triumph there of the Inimitable’s will over the habits of the press—and we saw almost no one lining the streets on the way. The public was banned from the Abbey that day.
As our carriages rolled into the courtyard, all the great bells began tolling. With help from younger men, we old friends carried the coffin through the western cloister door along the Nave and into the South Transept to the Poets’ Corner.
Oh, Dear Reader, if my fellow pallbearers and mourners could have read my thoughts as we set that simple oak box down in the Poets’ Corner. I have to wonder if such obscenities and imaginative curses had ever been thought in the Abbey of Westminster Cathedral, although some of the poets interred there certainly would have been up to the task had their brains been functioning rather than rotting to dust.
A few words were said. I do not recall who said them or what they were. There were no singers, no choir, but an unseen organist played the Dead March as the others turned away and filed out. I was the last to leave and I stood there alone for some time. The bass notes from the huge organ vibrated the very bones in my burly flesh, and it amused me to realise that Dickens’s bones were similarly vibrating inside his box.
I know you would have preferred to have those bones dropped unmarked into the wall of Dradles’s favourite old ’un’s crypt in Rochester, I thought to my friend and enemy as I looked down at his simple coffin. The good English oak was adorned only with the words CHARLES DICKENS.
This is still too much, I thought when I finally turned to leave and join the others outside in the sunlight. Far too much. And it is only the beginning.
It was very cool and properly dim under the high stone vaultings of the Abbey. Outside, the bright sunlight seemed cruel in comparison.
Friends were allowed to visit the still-open grave, and later that day, after many medicinal applications of laudanum and some of morphia, I returned with Percy Fitzgerald. By this time there was a wreath of roses on the flagstones at the foot of Dickens’s coffin and a huge bank of shockingly green ferns at his head.
In Punch, a few days later, the cloying elegy bellowed—
He sleeps as he should sleep—among the great
In the old Abbey; sleeps amid the few
Of England’s famous thousands whose high state
Is to lie with her monarchs—monarchs too.
And, I thought again as Percy and I came out into the evening shadows and June garden scents, it is only the beginning.
Dean Stanley had given permission for the grave to be left open for a few days. Even that first day, the afternoon papers brayed the news. They were on the story the way dear old Sultan used to leap upon any man in uniform—worrying, tearing, chewing, and worrying it some more.
By the time Percy and I left when the Abbey closed at a few minutes after six o’clock—five days almost to the minute from when Dickens had sobbed and wept a single tear and finally condescended to quit breathing—there were a thousand people who had not yet received admittance, silently and solemnly queued up.
For two more days the grave remained open and for two more days the procession too long and endless for anyone to find its tail kept filing past. Tears and flowers were dropped into the grave by the thousands. Even after the grave was finally closed and a great block of stone bearing Dickens’s name was slid into place above it—for months after this theoretical closure—the mourners kept coming, the flowers kept appearing, the tears kept falling. His headstone soon became invisible under a huge mound of fragrant, colourful blossoms and it would stay that way for years.
And it is only the beginning.
When Percy—who was blubbering as fiercely as had Dickens’s tiny granddaughter Mekitty when she had seen her “Wenerables” cry and speak in strange voices on stage the previous spring—and I left that evening of 14 June, I excused myself, found an empty and private area behind high hedges in the surrounding gardens, and bit into my knuckles until blood flowed in order to stop the scream rising in me.
And that was only the beginning.
LATE THAT NIGHT of 14 June I paced back and forth in my empty house.
George and Besse had returned from their twenty-four-hour vacation on 9 June and I had promptly fired them, sending them packing that evening. I gave neither reason for terminating their employment nor any letters of recommendation. I had not yet gotten ar
ound to hiring their replacements. Carrie would be stopping by the next day—a Wednesday, one week from the day that Dickens and I had agreed to meet after dusk outside the Falstaff Inn—but that would be a brief interruption before she went off for her monthly visit to her mother in Joseph Clow’s home.
In the meantime, I had the huge house to myself. The only sounds coming through the windows flung high for spring were the occasional rumbles of late-night traffic going by and the rustle of foliage as gentle breezes stirred the branches. Beneath that, there came the occasional scrape and scratch—like dry twigs or thorns brushing against thick wood—of whatever remained of poor little Agnes, clawing at the boarded-up doorway to the servants’ stairs.
On the first two days after I’d heard of Dickens’s death, the rheumatical gout pain had diminished astonishingly. Even more astonishing—and exciting to me—was the absence of any movement in my skull. I became certain that when Dickenson, Barris-Field, and Drood himself had somehow rendered me unconscious amidst the scarlet geraniums in Dickens’s flower bed six days ago this night, Drood had removed the scarab from my brain.
But that day, during the carrying-in of the coffin to Poets’ Corner and later with Percy, the old pressure and pain and skittering behind my eyes and even the sound of the beetle-burrowing in my brain had all come back.
I had self-administered three healthy injections of morphia on top of my usual nightly allocation of laudanum, but still I could not sleep. Despite the warmth and open windows, I built a large fire in my study fireplace.
Something to read… something to read!
I paced before my high bookcases, now pulling down a book I had promised to read or finish, standing by the fireplace or near the candles on the shelves or by the lamp on my desk as I read a page or two, then thrusting the volume back in its place.
That night, and every day and night since, seeing a book spine missing from its allotted space on my shelves reminded me of the stone that I should have removed from the wall of Dradles’s crypt. How many bones and skulls and skeletons are thrust into the void of such missing or unwritten books?
Finally I took down the beautiful leather-bound copy of Bleak House that Dickens had inscribed and given to me two years after we had met.
I chose Bleak House without actively thinking about it because, I now believe, I both admired and hated that book as much as any writing in the dead man’s ouevre.
I had been inhibited from telling any but a very few confidants of how absurd I found Dickens’s much-lauded writing to be in that book. His occasional first-person narration by “Esther Summerson” was the height of this absurdity.
I mean, Dear Reader (if the unworthy book has survived until your time, which I very much doubt—although I truly believe that The Moonstone will and has), just look at Dickens’s chosen primary metaphor that opens the book—that fog! It appears, it becomes the central metaphor, and it creeps off, never to be used as such again.
What amateur writing! What a failure of theme and intention!
And just look, Dear Reader—as I was madly doing that night of Dickens’s funeral, flipping through the pages with the intensity of a lawyer seeking a precedent by which to save (or, in this case, condemn) his client—at how ridiculous the totally unbelievable coincidences are in that book… and how unbelievably cruel the character of the always-a-child Harold Skimpole was, since we all knew at the time that he had based Skimpole on our common acquaintance Leigh Hunt or… there is the abject failure of his late-in-the-book mystery element, so inferior in every way to that in The Moonstone or… the shifting and contradictory impressions of Esther’s looks after she has suffered the smallpox (I mean, was she disfigured or not!? Now yes! Now not at all! What a conspiracy of auctorial incompetence wrestling with narrative dishonesty) and then… but look here first!… look, if you will, at that entire narration by Esther Summerson! What do you say to that? What can you—or any honest reader sitting in judgement—say to that!
Esther begins her narration with the poorly educated and naive child’s view we might expect for a poorly educated and unworldly child—she speaks in near-infant’s sentences such as (I riffled and tore at the pages to find this)—“My dear old doll! I was such a shy thing that I seldom dared to open my lips, and never dared open my heart, to anybody else.… O you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be expecting me!”
You are pardoned, Dear Reader, if you suddenly were required—as I was— to rush to the water closet to vomit at that line.
But Dickens forgot that Esther thinks and speaks in such a manner! Before long, “Esther” is describing simple scenes with pure Dickensian alliteration and effortless assonance—“the clock ticked, the fire clicked”—and not long after that the poorly educated girl is narrating entire pages, complete chapters, with the devastating incantatory eloquence of Charles Dickens and Charles Dickens alone. What a failure! What a sheer travesty!
And then, on that night of Dickens’s funeral—or most likely it was the next day now, for had I not heard, unnoticed hours earlier, the ticking clock toll midnight above the clicking fire?—I was paging madly through the now-torn book to find more ammunition in my skirmish (if not war) to convince you, Dear Reader, (and perhaps my exhausted self) of the newly dead man’s long-overlooked mediocrity, when I came upon the following passage. No, not a passage, actually, more of a fragment… no, a mere sliver of a fragment of a passage, the kind of thing that Dickens constantly dashed out without later revision or any serious conscious effort at the time.
Esther has travelled, you see, to the inn at the town near the harbour of Deal to see Richard, her dearest female friend’s future husband and a young man with Fate and Unhappiness and Obsession and self-inflicted Tragedy expectantly hanging about him like a flock of crows (or what the Americans call buzzards) on the branches in a leafless November tree—expectantly hanging about him, waiting for their inexorable time to come, as surely as they always have and continue to do about me.
Over Esther’s shoulder, Dickens allows us to catch a glimpse of the harbour. There are many boats there and more appear, as if by magic, as the fog begins to rise. Like Homer in the Iliad, Dickens briefly catalogues the ships becoming visible, including a great and noble Indiaman just back from India. And the author sees this—and makes us see this—just “when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea.”
Silvery pools in the dark sea.
Pools in the sea.
My one exercise and indulgence, Dear Reader, is hiring a crew to do the work and taking a yacht up along the coast. It was on just such an outing that I met Martha R——. I have seen the sunlight on the sea thousands of times and have described it in my books and stories scores of times—perhaps hundreds of times. I have used words such as “azure” and “blue” and “sparkling” and “dancing” and “grey” and “white-topped” and “ominous” and “threatening” and even “ultramarine.”
And I had seen that phenomenon of the sun “making silvery pools in the dark sea” scores or hundreds of times but had never thought to record it in my fiction, with or without that swift and certain and slightly blurred sound of the sibilants Dickens had chosen for its description.
Then, without pausing even for a breath (and possibly not even to dip his pen), Dickens had gone on having the fog in the harbour lift over Esther’s shoulder by writing, “these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed… ,” and I knew in that instant, with my agitated, scarab-driven eyes merely passing over these few words in these short sentences, that I would never—not ever, should I live to be a hundred years of age and retain my faculties until the last moment of that life and career—that I would never be able to think and write like that.
The book was the style and the style was the man. And the man was—had been—Charles Dickens.
I threw the expensive, personally inscribed, moroccan-leather-bound and gold-leaf-edged copy of Bleak House into the ticking and clicking and crackling and cackling and f??
?— ing fire.
Then I went upstairs to my room and tore my clothes off. They were sodden with sweat and I swear to this day that I could smell not just the overpoweringly sweet stench of the graveside flowers on them all, down to my clinging under-linens, but also the sweeter stink of the grave soil heaped nearby to make the hole—the final void—for the waiting (waiting for all of us) oak box.
Naked, laughing, and shouting loudly (although I forget what I shouted or why I laughed), I fumbled out the key and then fumbled open the requisite locks to get to Hatchery’s pistol.
The metal thing was heavier than usual. The cartridges were, as I have endlessly described to you, still there in their nest.
I thumbed back the happy hammer and set the round ring of muzzle to my sweaty temple. Then I remembered. The palate. The softest way to the brain.
I started to put the long steel phallus in my mouth, but then could not. Without even lowering the hammer, I threw the useless thing into my linen drawer. It did not discharge.
Then, before bathing or getting into my pyjamas and robe, I sat down at the small secretary in my bedroom (near where the Other Wilkie usually sits when he takes dictation on the Gods of the Black Lands) and wrote a brief but very clear and concise letter. Setting it aside for personal delivery—not for posting—the next day, I finally went in for my bath and then to bed and then to sleep, skittering scarab or no scarab.
I left the front door unlocked and the windows open wide for burglars—if there were any who would dare burgle a home that the Master Drood had honoured with his visit—and the candles and kerosene lamps and the fire in the fireplace all burning downstairs. I had not even replaced the fireplace screen after burning Bleak House.