On 14 May of 1871, my younger daughter, Harriet—named after my mother, of course—was born to “Mrs Martha Dawson.” Martha and I had a third child—William Charles Collins Dawson—who was born on Christmas Day in 1874.
I hardly need tell you that Martha continued to get fatter during and after each pregnancy. After William was born, she made no pretense of trying to shed the weight that hung on her like great slabs of lard. It was as if she had given up caring about her appearance. I had once written about Martha R—— that she was a fine specimen of that type of girl I liked, “the fine fleshy beef-fed English girl.” But all that fleshy beef-feeding had a predictable effect. If I had been asked to rewrite that sentence in 1874, it would have read—“She is the perfect specimen of a vast, fleshy, girl-fed English beef.”
If Caroline G—— ever heard about Martha and the children, even after I moved them all to 10 Taunton Place to be more comfortable and closer to my own home, she never once mentioned it or let on that she knew. If Martha R—— ever heard or knew that Caroline G—— was living with me at Number 90 Gloucester Place (and then, in more recent years, on Wimpole Street) from 1870 onward, she never once mentioned it or let on that she knew.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW about my literary career after Dickens’s death, Dear Reader, I shall summarise it for you in a single cruel sentence: the World thought it and I were a success, while I knew all along that my career and I had conspired to become the most dismal of failures.
As Dickens had before me, I eventually took to giving public readings. My friends told me that they were delightful and a success. I knew—and the honest critics reported both here and in America—that they were mumbling, lifeless, incoherent failures.
As Dickens had before me, I continued to write books and turn them into plays whenever possible. Each book was weaker than the one before it and all were weaker than my masterpiece, The Moonstone, although I have seen for many years that The Moonstone was no masterpiece. (And it was the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood that made me see that.)
Perhaps my unpopularity with the public—for that is what it has been, Dear Reader from my future—began just days after Charles Dickens’s death, for it is then that I privately approached Frederick Chapman of the publishers Chapman and Hall and suggested to him that I could complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood for them if they so chose. I let them know that while no notes for the remainder of the book were in existence—and it was true that none of Dickens’s usual marginal notes and outlines on blue paper have ever come to light for the unfinished portions of Drood—Dickens had taken me (and me alone) into his confidence before the end. I—and I alone—could finish the writing of the entire second half of The Mystery of Edwin Drood for only a nominal fee and equal credit as author (just as the co-authorship of our earlier collaborations had been registered).
Chapman’s response totally surprised me. The publisher was furious. He let me know that no man in England, no matter how gifted the writer might be or might think he was—and he implied that he did not think me all that gifted—could ever fill the shoes of Charles Dickens, even if I had a hundred completed outlines in my pocket. “Better that the world never knows who killed Edwin Drood—or indeed, if Edwin Drood is dead,” he wrote me, “— than a lesser mind pick up the Master’s fallen pen.”
I thought that last metaphor very garbled and grotesque indeed.
Chapman even swore that he would never let the slightest whisper of my offer to him slip out (and warned me never to tell anyone) for fear that “You shall then inevitably and irretrievably become the most hated and assuredly assumed and presumed presumptuous man in all of England and the Empire and the World.”
How even a publisher and editor could write and express himself that poorly, in a sentence that spavined, I have no idea to this day.
But rumours and whispers against me did begin about that time and that is—as I say—when the active dislike of me by the public seems to have begun in earnest.
AS DICKENS HAD BEFORE ME, I did a reading tour of the United States and Canada. Mine was in 1873 and 1874, and it could objectively be categorised as a total disaster. The travel by ship and by train and by coach exhausted me even before the tour was really under way. The American audiences seemed to agree with the English audiences that my readings lacked energy, even audibility. I was never well during the entire tour and reached a point where not even massive ministrations of my laudanum—which I found oddly hard to find and purchase in the States—could bring back any energy or pleasure. The American audiences were idiots. The entire nation was composed of prudes and bluestockings and boors. While the French had never had the least problem with Caroline travelling with me, the Americans would have been scandalised at the very idea of a woman not my wife in my entourage—so I had to suffer my travels and illnesses and nightly humiliations on stage without her help for those long months in America.
And I had no Dolby to organise my reading-tour life. The one manager I hired to oversee the production of one of my plays in New York and Boston—one of several theatrical premieres I had arranged for my tour there—tried to rob me blind.
In February of 1874, in Boston and in other urban pimples on that blank white canvas of a map they call New England, I spent time with the leading lights of American literature and intellectual life—Longfellow, Mark Twain, Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—and I have to say that if these men were the “leading lights,” then the glow of literature and intellectual life in the United States was very dim indeed. (Although I did enjoy a verse tribute that Holmes wrote and performed in public for me.)
I realised then and still believe now that the majority of Americans in those crowds who jostled to see me or who paid to hear me read, did so just because I had been a friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens. Dickens was the ghost that I could not leave behind. Dickens was the Marley-face on the knocker who greeted me every time I approached a new door.
I saw Dickens’s old friend James T. Fields and his wife in Boston—they took me out for a fine dinner and then to the opera—but I could tell that Annie Fields thought little of me, and I was not surprised when, sometime later, I read the following report she had made of me in private but which quickly found its way to public print—
A small man with an odd figure and forehead and shoulders much too large for the rest of him. His talk was rapid and pleasant but not at all inspiring.… A man who has been fêted and petted in London society, who has overeaten and overdrunk, has been ill, is gouty, and in short is no very wonderful specimen of a human being.
All in all, the only truly companionable and relaxed time I had during all those months in America was when I went down to stay with my old friend the French-English actor Fechter, he of Dickens’s Christmas-gift Swiss chalet, at Fechter’s farm near Quakertown, in the province of Pennsylvania.
Fechter had become a drunk and a raving paranoid. The once distinctive (if not overly handsome, since he specialised in villains) actor was now—all agreed—gross and bloated in both appearance and manner. Before leaving London forever, Fechter had quarrelled with his theatrical partners there—he owed them all money, of course—and then had quarrelled with and publicly insulted his leading lady, Carlotta Leclercq. When he went off to Pennsylvania in America to marry a girl named Lizzie Price—another actress but one with no discernible talent—no one even thought it pertinent to mention to Miss Price that Fechter already had a wife and two children in Europe.
Fechter died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1879 in a condition—one London obituary reported—of being “universally despised and isolated.” His passing was a special blow to me, since even during my last visit to him in Quakertown six years before his death, he had once again borrowed money from me and never paid it back.
Last year as I write this (with blobs), or perhaps it was the year before—1887—at any rate, sometime shortly after I had moved from Number 90 Gloucester Place to where I currently am living (and dying) at 82 Wimpole Street (Agnes
was beginning to scream, you understand, and I do not believe that I was the only one who could hear her, since Mrs Webb and the other servants avoided being near the boarded-up staircase at all costs) and…
Where was I?
Oh, yes, last year or the year before, I was introduced to Hall Caine (I can only trust, Dear Reader, that you know who he is—was—as well as Rossetti, who introduced us), and Caine looked at me a long time and his impressions of me later found print:
His eyes were large and protuberant, and had the vague and dreamy look sometimes seen in the eyes of the blind, or those of a man to whom chloroform has just been administered.
But I was not so blind then that I did not notice his horrified appraisal. I said to Caine that day, “I see that you can’t keep your eyes off my eyes, and I ought to say that I’ve got gout in them, and that it is doing its best to blind me.”
Only by then, of course, and for many years before that, I used the word “gout” to mean “beetle”—to mean “scarab”—to mean “Drood’s insect burrowed into my brain behind my aching eyes.” And it was doing its best to blind me. It always had been.
ALL RIGHT . . . Reader. I know that you could not care less for my history or pains or even the fact that I am dying as I labour to write this for you. All you want to hear about is Dickens and Drood, Drood and Dickens.
I have been wise to you from the start… Reader. You never cared about my part of this memoir. It was always Dickens and Drood, or Drood and Dickens, which kept you reading.
I started this memoir years ago with the hopeful dream that you knew me and—much more importantly—that you knew my work, had read my books, had seen my plays. But no, Reader there in the indifferent future, I know now that you have never read The Woman in White or even The Moonstone, much less my Man and Wife or Poor Miss Finch or The New Magdalen or The Law and the Lady or The Two Destinies or The Haunted Hotel or A Rogue’s Life or The Fallen Leaves or Jezebel’s Daughter or The Black Robe or Heart and Science or “I Say No” or The Evil Genius or The Legacy of Cain—or the book I am working so hard on now, when I can write at all, and which is being serialised in the Illustrated London News, my Blind Love.
You know none of these, do you… Reader?
And in your arrogant future, as you glide to the bookstore in your horseless carriage and come back to your underground home illuminated by garish electric lights, or perhaps even read in your carriage that may have electric lights in it (anything is possible) or glide to the theatre in the evening—I trust you still have theatre—I hardly think that you have read my novels or seen stage productions of my The Frozen Deep (it was never Dickens’s, which was performed first in Manchester) or Black and White (which opened at the Adelphi) or The Woman in White (which opened at the Olympic) or Man and Wife (which opened at the Prince of Wales) or The New Magdalen (which opened at the Olympic and also premiered in New York while I was there) or Miss Gwilt (which opened at the Globe) or The Dead Secret (which opened at the Lyceum Theatre) or—at long last—The Moonstone (which opened at the Olympic) or…
Just writing the above has exhausted me, stolen the last of my strength.
All those thousands upon thousands of days and nights of writing—writing through unspeakable pain and intolerable loneliness and in utter dread—and you… Reader… have not read or been in the audience for any one of them.
To hell with it. To hell with you.
It is Drood and Dickens you want. Dickens and Drood. Very well, then—here, with my last drops of mortal energy—it is after 9 AM—I shall give you Drood. You can have Drood up your hairy arse, Reader. This page is more blobs than words, but I do not apologise. Nor do I apologise for the language. I am sick of apologising. My entire life has been one endless round of apologies after another for no reason.…
I once thought that I could see into the future—“precognition” is the term that those on the far edges of science use for this ability—but I was never certain whether my second-sight was real or not.
Now I am sure. I can see every detail of the rest of my life, and my ability to see clearly into the future—even as my own eyes are failing—is no less impressive for the fact that “the rest of my life” now consists of less than two hours. So please forgive the future tense. It shall be—as they say—short-lived. I shall write this now, while I still can, because I see forward until then, into later in this very morning, until the very end of my life, peering forward into those final moments when I shall no longer be able to write.
DROOD HAS BEEN WITH ME, in one way or the other, every day of the nineteen years and three months since Charles Dickens died.
When I looked out into the rain on a cold autumn or winter night, I would see one of Drood’s minions—Barris or Dickenson or even the dead boy with the strange eyes, Gooseberry—across the street, staring at me.
When I walked the streets of London, trying to lose some of this weight that now will never leave me except by rotting away, I could hear the footsteps behind me of Drood’s men, Drood’s watchers. And always there were the dark shapes and bright eyes in the alleys.
Imagine, Reader, if you can, what it is like to be in the arse-end village of, say, Albany, New York, where there are more cuspidors than people, and doing a reading in some great draughty freezing dark hall while a blizzard rages outside—I was helpfully told that more than 900 people had attended Charles Dickens’s reading there sixteen years earlier—and I had perhaps twenty-five people. But among them, above them, sitting in the shaky old balcony that had been sealed off for that night’s performance, sat Drood, his lidless eyes never blinking, his sharp-toothed smile never wavering.
And the provincial Americans wondered why my readings were so muted and stilted and lifeless.
Drood and his minions and his scarab have drained the life out of me, Reader, day by day and night by night.
Every time I open my mouth for one of Frank Beard’s increasingly frequent examinations, I expect him to cry out—“Dear God! I see the black carapace of a huge beetle blocking your throat, Wilkie! Its pincers are eating you alive!”
Drood has been there at the premieres of my plays and at the failures of my novels.
Did you see the game of revelations I have been playing with my titles, Reader?
The Two Destinies. I had such once. But Dickens and Drood chose the more terrible for me.
The Dead Secret. This has been my heart. Towards the women who have shared my bed (but never my name) and the children who share my blood (but also never my name).
A Rogue’s Life. I need not even comment.
Man and Wife. The only trap I have succeeded in avoiding, even while being caged in all others.
“I Say No.” My entire life.
The Evil Genius. Drood, of course.
The Legacy of Cain. But have I been Cain, or Abel? I once thought of Charles Dickens as my brother. My only regret about my attempt at killing him was that I did not succeed, that Drood took that pleasure from me.
Do you see… Reader? Do you see how vile and terrible Charles Dickens’s curse was upon me?
I did not and do not believe for a second that Drood was some mesmeric suggestion, made on a casual whim in June of 1865 and living on to curse every day of my life since then. But if Dickens had done that—if there were no Drood—what an abominable and vicious act that would have been. Dickens would have deserved to die and have his flesh burned away in the pit of quick-lime for that crime alone.
But if he had not suggested Drood to my unconscious and opium-laced writer’s mind in a bout of forgotten (by me) mesmerism in 1865, how much more cruel and calculating and unforgivably terrible the fact that he said he did—that he had the cure for Drood in a few minutes’ session with his swinging watch and the simple command “Unintelligible” to bring me out of the nightmare that has been my life.
Dickens deserved to die for that alone. Many times over.
And most of all… Reader… Dickens deserved to die and be damned because, despite al
l of his weaknesses and failings (both as a writer and as a man), Charles Dickens was the literary genius and I was not.
This curse—this constant knowledge, as painful and as irrevocable as Adam’s awful awakening after being seduced into eating from the apple from the Tree of Knowledge—has been worse even than Drood. And nothing is worse than Drood.
BLIND LOVE. That is the book I have been writing and of which I have finished a first draft. I will not, I know this moment, live long enough to polish it.
But Blind Love for whom?
Not for Caroline G—— or Martha R——. My love for them has been provisional, rational and rationed, grudging at the best of times, and always—always—governed by lust.
Not for the grown and growing children—Marian, Harriet, and William Charles. I am glad they are alive. I can say little more than that.
Not for my books or the labours it took to produce them. I loved none of them. They were, like my children, mere products.
But, God help me, I loved Charles Dickens. I loved his sudden, infectious laugh and his boyish absurdities and the stories he would tell and the sense—when one was with him—that every moment was important. I hated his genius—that genius which eclipsed me and my work when he was alive, and has eclipsed me more every year that he has been dead, and which—I am certain of this, Faithless Reader—shall eclipse me even more in your unobtainable future.
I HAVE THOUGHT often, in the past nineteen years, of Dickens’s last little story he told me. The one about him as a poor young man walking the streets of London while feeding cherries out of his bag to the big-headed boy riding on his father’s shoulders. The boy ate all the cherries. His father never knew.
I think that Dickens told the story backwards. I think he was stealing cherries out of the boy’s brown bag. And the father never knew. Nor did the world.
Or perhaps this has been my secret story. Or perhaps Dickens had been stealing the cherries from me as I rode on his shoulders.