Wanting

4

As IT HAPPENED, it was said he had rather gone off the boil. Lord Macaulay had told her the man’s latest novel was little more than sullen socialism, its plot implausible and the whole ruined by his cheap pamphleteering. She had not read it, preferring the classics to entertainments. He was no immortal like Thackeray.

Looking up at him as she picked up the teapot and leaned forward, Lady Jane Franklin saw a small man who seemed worn beyond his middle years. Though he still wore his hair in a dandyish long cut, it was thinning and greying, framing a gaunt, furrowed face. She wondered if the real question were not whether his books would survive him, but whether he would much longer survive his books. Still, while alive, he remained the most popular writer in the land. While he lived, his opinion could move governments. And as long as he continued to draw breath, he was the best ally she could hope to make.

‘More tea?’ she asked.

He accepted with a smile. She ignored the stubby fingers holding out the saucer and cup—more befitting, she felt, of a navvy than a novelist—just as she ignored the overly bright clothing, the excess of jewellery, the way he seemed to be devouring her just as he had the poppyseed cake, all in a greedy rush, leaving on his lips a jetsam of yellow crumbs and black seeds. He put her in mind of a shrivelling hermit crab staring out of its gaudy shell. It all might almost have been disagreeable, were it not for who he most certainly was. That she did not ignore.

‘Milk, Mr Dickens?’

And so that wintry morning in London she told him her story, burnished bright and honed sharp by countless telling, of the expedition, a task only the English in their greatness would even dare contemplate: to go where none had ever been; to discover at the very edge of the world the route of which men had for centuries only dreamt, the fabled Northwest Passage through the Arctic ice.

Though Dickens knew much of it—who did not?—he listened patiently. Lady Jane spoke of the two splendid ships, the Terror and the Erebus, returned from their epic Antarctic voyage and fitted out with the most modern engineering marvels: steam engines and retractable screw propellers, copper sheathing, steam heating, even a steam-powered organ that could automatically play popular tunes. By virtue of a remarkable new invention, they carried an abundance of food preserved in thousands of tin-plate canisters. And she made all this detail of the expedition—the most expensive, most remarkable ever to be sent out by the Royal Navy—fascinating, even compelling.

But it was on the calibre of the officers and crew that she dwelt—the very finest of Englishmen, including the remarkable veteran of the southern polar exploration, Captain Crozier, and finally its leader, her husband, Sir John Franklin: his indomitable character, his gentle but inexorable will, his remarkable capacity for leadership, his extraordinary and heroic contribution to Arctic exploration, his embodiment of all that was most virtuous in English civilisation. But nothing had been heard of him or his one hundred and twenty-nine men since they sailed for the northern polar regions nine years before.

‘Is it any wonder, then, that this mystery has captured the imagination of the civilised world?’ said Lady Jane, trying not to be distracted by the sound of Dickens sucking his tongue in odd concentration. ‘For how is it possible for so many so remarkable to vanish off the face of the earth for so long without trace?’

Sitting there, he had a vision that would become inescapable, at once a talisman, a mystery, an explanation and a lodestone—the frozen ship, leaning on some unnatural angle, forced upwards and sideways by the ice, immense white walls rearing behind its dipping masts, the glitter of moonlight on endless snow, the desolate sound of men moaning as they died echoing across the infinite expanse of windswept white. In its strange hallucinatory power, Dickens had the odd sensation of recognising himself as ice floes, falling snow, as if he were an infinite frozen world waiting for an impossible redemption.

‘Greatness like Sir John’s comes but once in an age,’ he said, seeking to wrench his fancy free from these terrible visions. ‘A Magellan, a Columbus, a Franklin—they do not vanish, neither from the earth nor from history.’

Lady Jane Franklin had extensive acquaintances, bad breath, and was dreaded in more than one circle. There was no accounting for her triumphs. It was said that she was a woman of beguiling charm, but looking at her that morning, Dickens could see little of it. Rather than the black of a widow’s weeds, she wore a green and purple dress, down the front of which hung a bright pendant showing Sir John in white Wedgwood profile—an odd touch, Dickens felt. It was as if Sir John were already an ice man.

‘What with all that bunting, she was more a semaphore station than a Lady of the Realm,’ he later told his friend Wilkie Collins, ‘signalling the Lords of the Admiralty and the Ladies of Society one thing and one thing only: My husband is not dead! Is it gaudy or godly,’ he added, ‘to pronounce one’s marital loyalty so?’

Still, none seemed immune to her message—how could he deny it? She spoke of her personal communications with the highest, not only in England but around the world. Everyone from the Muscovy Czar to American railroad millionaires had sent out rescue missions, and every mission had returned with nothing.

Yet Lady Jane maintained her determined love, her refusal to accept a mystery as a tragedy. Nothing had elevated a woman higher in the eyes of the English public than her refusal to sink with grief. And though her husband had left nine years before—with three years of food and almost as much fanfare—the English public, ever pleased, as Dickens well knew, with the possibility of outrageous coincidence, agreed that she was right; the English public was certain that there was no reason at all to suggest that Sir John—a great Englishman in the stoutest English company ever assembled for such a venture—would not endure where even savages could survive.

‘And now this,’ Lady Jane said, her voice suddenly Arctic ice itself, taking from a side table a folded newspaper and passing it to Dickens. ‘I’m sure you’ve read it.’

He hadn’t. But of course he had heard of it. It was The Illustrated London News, and one article bore numerous green ink markings. It was an account by a noted Arctic explorer, Dr John Rae, of the remarkable and gruesome discoveries he had made in the farthest polar reaches. The dreadful news had flown around London, amazed Europe and stunned the Empire.

It appeared a terrible possibility, Lady Jane went on, from Dr Rae’s evidence, and from the more incontrovertible assembly of relics he had brought back—broken watches, compasses, telescopes, a surgeon’s knife, an order of merit, several silver forks and spoons with the Franklin crest, and a small silver plate engraved ‘Sir John Franklin, K. C. H.’—that all of the expedition had most tragically perished. She had to admit to the possibility. She did not deny it—but it remained, until irrefutable evidence emerged, only a possibility.

As an old newspaperman, Dickens found newspapers an ever less satisfactory form of fiction. He skimmed the opening columns. They recounted how, after much adventuring, Dr Rae had met with Esquimaux who possessed bric-a-brac clearly from Franklin’s expedition; after numerous careful interviews, Rae had put together a chilling tale. Dickens’ eyes halted at a passage down the side of which ran a long wavering green line. It was the only passage he read properly.

‘But this,’ said Lady Jane finally, ‘is not a possibility. This is unbearable.’

It was astonishing.

‘From the mutilated state of many of the bodies and the contents of the kettles,’ Dickens read a second time, admiring the marvellous detail of the kettles, ‘it is evident that our wretched Countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative—cannibalism—as a means of prolonging existence.’

‘It is a lie,’ said Lady Jane. ‘A nonsense. And its sensational airing is an insult to the memory of these greatest of Englishmen.’

Handing the newspaper back, Dickens studied her face closely.

‘If my husband has perished, he has none but me left to save his honour from such slander. If he is alive, then how is it possible to ask either the great or the many for further help to find him if Dr Rae’s view prevails?’

And now, for the first time, Dickens understood that her sole purpose was to seek his help in damning Dr Rae and his account. Lady Jane wanted him to put an end to these dreadful rumours of Sir John eating his fellows. Well, thought Dickens as he continued to listen solemnly, he would have to eat something to maintain that enormous bulk of his.

‘You see, Mr Dickens, the question that arises?’

‘I do see, Lady Jane.’

And he did. This famous woman wanted his help. He, who had known such shame as the son of a man imprisoned for debt; he, a one-time bootblack labeller, a scribbler and chancer got lucky. He had made of himself something, indeed everything; and here, in Lady Jane’s every word, he had undeniable proof of it: a celebrated Lady of the Realm wanting from him what even the powerful did not seem to possess. He, the debtor’s son, was now to be the creditor.

‘Can such testimony be trusted?’ she asked.

‘Can rat cunning ever be called truthful witness?’

‘Indeed,’ said Lady Jane, momentarily startled. ‘That’s precisely it.’ She halted, lost in some distant, elusive thought, then spoke as if reciting something learnt long ago by painful rote. ‘Rats, we know, have cunning,’ she said slowly, ‘but we do not think such cunning equates with humanity or civilisation. While they are rewarded, they pretend to one thing. Yet they are capable of the grossest deceit of…’

Lady Jane was falling into some unexpectedly deep feeling that for a moment made her stammer. Mistaking this as grief for her husband, Dickens was touched by what was clearly a more genuine emotion than she had hitherto shown. He had found something unearthly, even ridiculous, in her triumphant rendering of her husband. Part of him despised such nonsense. But another part of him wanted to share in it, to shore up its leaking holes, to buttress and burnish this improbable story of English greatness and English goodness.

‘I did what I…’ she began, but then for an instant she thought somebody, something was tugging at her skirts. She twisted around in her seat, expecting to see a small girl in a red dress. But there was no one. A friend had written some years before from Van Diemen’s Land telling her what had become of Mathinna.

Lady Jane longed to stand up, run away; wished for someone, anyone, to wash and soothe her, comfort her. She wished to be held. She wished to feel her dress being tugged. She saw red garments unloose parrots, possums, snakes. When she was young, she had wanted to be known as sweet. She was not sweet. She had fallen such a long way. She remembered the softness of those dark eyes; the sight that once had angered her and now moved her so, of those bare feet.

‘Their destiny,’ her correspondent had concluded, ‘can only be interrupted by kindness, but never altered by it.’

I am so alone, she thought. Those bare, black feet. She had burnt the letter and then done something uncharacteristic. She had cried.

She looked up. Her head steadied her reckless heart which had once, long ago, caused her such trouble. Though she feared the great novelist might find her aged and vile, she wanted her words to accord with common sense.

‘I have had experience of such people,’ said Lady Jane finally, and her voice oddly hardened. ‘Not the Esquimaux, but similar savages. The Van Diemonians—’

‘Cannibals?’ Dickens interrupted.

Lady Jane remembered her last sight of the bedraggled child, alone in the muddy squalor of that courtyard. She felt gripped by pain, as if in a terrible retribution she only dimly apprehended, as though it were a vengeance that might consume her completely as the ice had her husband. She forced herself once more to smile.

‘Your husband,’ said Dickens. ‘I cannot begin to compass your terrible—’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not that I…’ She paused. She thought she smelt damp sandstone. ‘It is difficult,’ she went on—but what was she saying? Still she went on, trying to fashion belief and certainty out of words that felt comfortable. ‘It is impossible to form an estimate of the character of any race of savages from the way they defer to the white man when he is strong.’

‘I beg to say,’ said Dickens, smiling, ‘that I have not the least belief in the noble savage.’

‘Of course, such things are not unknown, even to white men. After all, in Van Diemen’s Land there were cases of escaping convicts taking vile resort in eating each other. But they were men devoid of religion, a hundred times worse than the most barbarous heathens because they had turned away. You see, Mr Dickens, the distance between savagery and civilisation is—’

But had she not said such things before? Something seemed wrong—with her reasoning, or her memory, or how she had once behaved. Just when she felt uncharacteristically faint and lost, Dickens rescued her.

‘The distance, Ma’am, is the extent we advance from desire to reason.’ He would not tell her his whole life was an object lesson in control of one’s passions; that it was what had led him to sit there with her that very day.

‘I do not entirely agree with those that say it is a matter of science,’ said Lady Jane. ‘Rather it is an affair of the spirit.’

She stood up and went to a display cabinet, from which she took a wooden box. Sitting it on the mahogany guéridon between her and Dickens, she raised the lid. Inside, cushioned by red felt, were a few folded letters and a yellowing skull.

‘It is a king of the Van Diemonian savages, Mr Dickens. I have shown it to several professors and men learned in phrenology. To test them, I did not say who it once was. Some found irrefutable signs in the skull’s shape of degeneracy, others of nobility. It appears it is both.’

‘The convict, the Esquimau, the savage: all are enslaved not by the bone around their brain,’ said Dickens, reaching across and closing the lid, ‘but by their passions.’ He raised his hand with a flourish, as he did when performing. ‘A man like Sir John is liberated from such by his civilised and Christian spirit.’

‘Exactly,’ said Lady Jane.

‘As for the noble savage, I call him an enormous nuisance and I don’t care what he calls me. It is all one to me whether he boils his brother in a kettle or dresses as a seal. He can yield to whatever passion he wishes, but for that very reason, he is a savage—a bloodthirsty wild animal whose principal amusement comes from stories at best ridiculous and at worst lies.’

‘Lies, you say, Mr Dickens?’

‘I do say, Lady Jane. Terrible, wretched, disgusting, mirroring lies. Here we have a race of thieving, murdering cannibals asserting that England’s finest were transformed into thieving, murdering cannibals—what remarkable coincidence!’

‘They had evidence, Mr Dickens,’ said Lady Jane.

‘Murderous thieves produce damning evidence of murderous thievery—and what do we do?’ said Dickens, picking up The Illustrated London News. He waved it as a parliamentarian would a deficient bill, his triumphant smile perfectly judged. ‘Broadcast their story of innocence, that’s what!’

Later, when he came to kiss her liver-spotted hand in farewell, Lady Jane asked him if it was in his power to question such a story.

‘I only know I am in yours,’ replied Dickens brightly.

But as the door of Lady Jane’s home closed behind him and he faced the morning gloom, thick flakes of soot eddied around him like black snow, and nothing seemed bright. He made his way from Pall Mall in a hansom cab, through mud and shit so thick and deep that dogs and horses seemed formed from it. People dissolved in and out of the dirty fog like fen monsters, like wraiths, filthy rags wrapped around their faces to ward off the cholera miasma that had carried away six hundred souls only a month before. London seemed all stench and blackness: blackness in the air and blackness in his eyes, blackness in his very soul begging to be white once more as he made his way home to his family.

Family, of course, was everything by that morning in 1854—families alike and unlike, families happy and unhappy—for across classes and suburbs and counties, family had arrived like the steam train, unexpectedly but undeniably. Everybody had to be family and all had to celebrate family, whether it was the young queen and her consort or the poorest factory worker. Like any boom, there were opportunities to be had in family, and just as there were railway speculators, there were family speculators. Few had gambled so boldly and profited so handsomely as Lady Jane, the exemplary devoted wife, or Dickens, the very bard of family. But celebrating family was one thing. Practising it, Dickens had discovered, was something else again.

Because it had been raining too much and he had been gloomy too often, because he felt something too close to failure stalking him like a shadow, because he wanted light and needed to know he was still moving forward in all things, because he felt cold and the cold was growing, that evening he proposed to his wife, Catherine, that they go to Italy the following month. But she did not want to: the children had commitments of one type or another, and besides, her condition, after ten children, did not make travelling a welcome prospect.

Then, after what he felt was an innocent comment from him about her weight, which, as he said, was a simple truth, Catherine abruptly stood and walked out. According to their daughter, Katy, who rushed in soon after, angry at him, at her, at the whole miserable, wretched house they were doomed together to inhabit, along with all the other children, domestics and dogs and birds, her mother had now taken to her bed.

Her bed! thought Dickens, turning away from Katy. Again and again, over and over, back to her bed she would go after every argument, where she would once more become a heaving mound of feather quilt, rheumy eyes and stifled sobs. The last time, he had remonstrated, argued, apologised and, when daring, touched her on her forehead, her cheeks, her lips—but she had recoiled as if bitten by a mad dog. This time he did nothing. Weighing his options, he realised he had none, that somehow something was so broken that no word or action would fix it.

The situation, he knew, was felt painfully by all in the house, a house that seemed to breed only quarrels—between son and daughter, between elder and younger, between governess and servants—the whole house was wracked by a wretched spirit and even the furniture seemed to bear grudges against the walls. There seemed no end to the misery, and, impossibly, everything just went on and on. But that night, rather than fight with his wife, he was mortified to realise that he lacked even the passion to continue the argument.

Rather than go and see her, he put on his coat. A long time ago he had fled from himself into Catherine, but now he was fleeing from Catherine into himself. Then, he had needed her and tunnelled into her to protect himself from all that roamed inside his head, all that he now kept at bay with his ceaseless external activity. It was said he had chosen to marry above himself; but no cynic is ever truly cynical, and he had loved her. But her very presence now brought on in him a wordless anguish. Now he would rather walk to Lands End and back than stay the night in bed with his wife.

He could not bear her misery, nor her listlessness. He could not forgive the way she withdrew from her sacred duties as a wife and a mother into a lethargy that seemed to worsen with each new birth—surely a cause for jubilation, not melancholy?—and how she grew fatter and duller with each passing day. Why did she resort to the grapeshot of domestic life—the caustic aside, the peremptory embrace, the sudden, terrible glance of knowing contempt—and why did he respond with pettiness, with rage, with absence? The worse it got, the less he understood and the more she retreated, and the more she gave ground the greater grew his conviction it was all her fault. Could there be two souls less suited to living together?

His thoughts reformed as the Erebus and the Terror, thrown up on their sides by the ice, their masts casting diagonal lines across the frozen deep, the wind raising a dirge in their icicle-hatched rigging. And the ice and the cold and keening wind were all him and he was at the same time buried within it; for twenty years, had not his marriage been a Northwest Passage, mythical, unknowable, undiscoverable, an iced-up channel to love, always before him and yet through which no passageway was possible?

And so he decided to go out and, as he so often did now, walk the night away. Walking was his pressure valve, and he the steam engine fit to explode without it. Looking, thinking, improvising scenes, rehearsing monologues and dialogues and inventing plots, he walked miles and miles, ever deeper into the mysterious labyrinth of the greatest city in the world. As clatter, hovels, cries and stench filled his being, he would keep on walking, the filthy dross of the everyday stirring in his alchemist’s head and transforming into the pure gold of his fancy.

Once, he had loved to watch and mimic and recall, joining it all in one merge as glorious and muddy as the streets through which he wandered, knowing nothing was coincidence and everything happened for a reason. But now there was a dreariness about all things for him.

There were the ‘little periwinkles’—as Wilkie Collins called ladies of the night—to be opened when he went on a jaunt with his friend around the theatres and streets, and though this and all he had ought to have been enough, somehow, for some reason for which he could not find words, it no longer was. Much as he tried to suppress the dangerous, undisciplined thought, he wanted something more—but what he wanted, he could not say.

He felt a curtain lowering on some other world he had visited for a few brief years in his youth: a carnival world, with the brightest of swirling rings, a circus tent he was permitted to enter for a short time only, and for a shorter time yet to be the ringmaster, before being cast out once more into the bootblack night. He was panicked, fearful at the fading of some light he could not describe but which had once illuminated his world.

At some point, he knew, he would return to home and a snoring Catherine. He would fall into a strange slumber in rhythm with his walking: half-awake, half-asleep, possessed of the strangest dreaming. Was it the laudanum he took more frequently of a night to ease his sleep? Or was it just what life had become? Slowly he would feel better, as his characters talked to him, as he came to understand what it was, other than air, that they all wished to breathe.

After a few short hours’ sleep, he would awaken before dawn to the sound of carts heading to market laden with produce, and the noise of the streets below his bedroom would soothe him. By some miracle life had not stopped. As he slowly came to his senses, he would again feel an immense surge of relief that, even in the brief hours that he slept, the wondrous world had continued spinning, and he with it.

‘It’s not her fault,’ he heard Katy say behind him, as he went to open the front door.

Startled from his reverie, he turned and looked at her. She was fifteen, a dark beauty and, like him, forceful and quick. He loved all his children, but only with Katy did he share an understanding. She spoke to him in a way no one else dared.

‘That Dora died. She was a baby. Maman did all she could.’

‘Of course,’ he said, as gently as he was able. ‘Of course it’s not your mother’s fault.’

‘Sir, the immortal flame of genius burns in his bosom,’ Wilkie Collins was saying to John Forster at the Garrick when Dickens, unseen by both men, arrived. They were discussing a scandal involving a well-known painter and two women.

Wilkie Collins had a very large head that teetered on a particularly small body, and the oddity of his looks was accentuated by a bulging left temple and a depressed right temple, so that viewed from one side he seemed a rather different man than when viewed from the other. Outside of an anatomist’s bottle, he was one of the queerest things Forster had ever seen. Forster did not like the way Dickens had in recent times taken rather a shine to this odd young man who was, Forster felt, usurping his own position as Dickens’ intimate.

‘The genius,’ continued Wilkie, ‘of English—’

‘Never mind,’ said Forster, ‘about his genius, Mr Collins.’ He said the word as though it were a protracted illness. ‘We don’t have genius in this country unless it is accompanied by respectability. And then, not to put too fine a point upon it, in a word, so to speak, we are very glad to have it—very glad indeed.’

‘My dear Mammoth,’ said Dickens, coming up behind the two men, placing one hand on Forster’s great shoulder before sitting down on the green Moroccan divan next to Wilkie. ‘How splendid to see both my fine friends together. Shall we share a sherry negus?’

But Forster was having neither sherry negus nor any of it, and, making some excuses, stood up and left. Dickens seemed unperturbed by his friend’s abrupt departure; it was, as he put it after, ‘part of the Mammoth’s glacial patrimony’. He went on to tell Wilkie about his meeting with Lady Jane Franklin.

‘I am rather strong on voyages and cannibalism,’ he said, finishing his story.

‘And ice?’ asked Wilkie.

‘Very strong on the ice,’ said Dickens, raising a hand to signal a waiter. ‘Blue as gin. Sometimes feel I’m shipwrecked there myself.’

Wilkie Collins’ nerves were still good; he was yet to invent the detective novel, to be celebrated by his age as one of the great novelists and thereafter forgotten, to have his health fail, to take so much opium to ward off the pain that he would come to believe he had a doppelgänger, the Ghost Wilkie. The world for Wilkie was a promise yet to fracture into phantoms, his eyes were yet to turn into bags of blood, and the great Dickens was a friend and mentor. He holidayed with Dickens, he played with Dickens, and he even worked for Dickens on the novelist’s magazine, Household Words. Life had yet to shape him and he continued to believe he shaped his own life. He was young, quick-witted and, moreover, agreeable to whatever was Dickens’ fancy, and when that fancy was periwinkling, Wilkie knew some of the finest halls and houses to frequent. But in this case he was at a loss to know how to agree or what to agree with.

‘All those fricassees of the famous beneath mountains of ice, great men meeting noble deaths—do you think it’s exactly your sort of story?’

‘And the kettles,’ said Dickens. ‘Don’t forget the kettles.’

‘But only a week ago you said you were about to embark on a new novel and weren’t to be burdened with any writing jobs that came between you and it.’

‘Well,’ said Dickens, ‘I’ve never claimed to be consistent. Besides, I’m weary, my dear Wilkie. I was three parts mad and one part delirious rushing at Hard Times.’

‘It brought Household Words good times,’ said Wilkie.

‘It left me all done in.’

Wilkie knew that Dickens’ magazine, in which his novels would first appear as serials, was more than a major source of income for the novelist. It also mattered that it, as with everything Dickens touched, was not just a success, but an ever greater success.

‘I am beyond a novel just now,’ Dickens was saying, ‘but I need some tale to help sell our Christmas edition of the magazine.’ And then, on seeing a bowed, beetle-like figure in a far corner, he brightened. ‘Why, it’s Douglas Jerrold—he’ll give us something.’

On being waved over, Jerrold, his bright eyes bluer than ever beneath huge eyebrows that sat over his sharp little face like watchful moths, was delighted to see Dickens but declined a drink, saying he had been somewhat off-colour the last few months. Instead, he told a short and funny story about sherry negus and Jane Austen’s brother, with whom he had served in the navy.

‘I read one of Austen’s once, I think,’ Dickens ruminated. ‘Who these days would read more?’

‘Macaulay,’ said Jerrold.

‘Precisely,’ said Dickens. ‘Unlike you, Douglas, she didn’t understand that what pulses hard and fast through us must be there in every sentence. That is why, since her death, she has suffered ever greater obscurity rather than growing popularity—and that is why I really must have you write something for our Christmas edition.’

‘If I could, Charlie, I would. But I’m busy with a new play and I couldn’t see my way clear to do anything for you till next spring.’

After Jerrold left, Dickens played with his large wedding ring, sliding it off, rolling it around his fingernail. Though he did not say it, something in his meeting with Lady Jane Franklin had resonated in an unexpected and as yet intangible way with him. He could not let it go. He slid the ring back on.

‘What do you think, Wilkie, if I did a little paper on Dr Rae’s report, taking the argument against its probabilities?’

At his home, Tavistock House, Dickens more closely studied The Illustrated London News. Outside, the London morning was almost as dark as night; inside, the hiss of his gas lights comforted him as he read Dr Rae’s account. So too, he concluded with relief, did the content. The man had no gift for story.

Dickens put the paper down, moved the bronze statuette of duelling frogs to the centre of his desk and set to work. He opened with some quick, telling jabs, and diverted for a moment to praise Dr Rae deftly, thereby eliminating the possibility of his article being construed as a personal attack.

Then, and only then, in the manner of the barristers he had reported on in his youth, Dickens began to sow doubt over every detail of Dr Rae’s account—from the utter impossibility of accurate translation from the Esquimau’s argot, to the very real possibility of multiple and even opposing interpretations arising from the savages’ vague gestures. He questioned the process of butchering and cooking up a fellow human. ‘Would the little flame of the spirit-lamp the travellers may have had with them have sufficed for such a purpose?’ he wrote.

Feeling better with the piece, with himself, with life, he halted, reread this last sentence, and then underlined the phrase may have had. The case was building, and he was now feeling words rushing his goose-quill along, leaving trails of ink, blue as ice, leading him and his readers to that strange and terrible world.

He turned to the inescapable matter of the mutilation of the bodies. ‘Had there been no bears thereabout, to mutilate the bodies; no wolves, no foxes?’ He didn’t answer his own rhetorical question—let the reader answer, he told himself, scurrying straight on to another telling blow.

Would not the men, he now asked, if starving, have fallen prey to scurvy? And does not scurvy finally annihilate the desire to eat and, in any case, annihilate the power? Having readied and teased the reader with his trail of false leads and tempting possibilities, Dickens sprang his trap and revealed what he believed was almost certainly the truth behind the mystery.

‘Lastly, no man can, with any show of reason, undertake to affirm that this sad remnant of Franklin’s gallant band were not set upon and slain by the Esquimaux themselves.’

He paused, his attention momentarily distracted by an odd thought.

‘We believe every savage to be in her heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel.’

Realising his error, he crossed out her and wrote above it his. But did these words not sum up his own folly so many years before? And that odd thought took on the form and name of a woman, and Dickens muttered two words.

‘Maria Beadnell.’

And how that name irritated him, angered him, enraged him, reminded him of his wretched origins and the myriad humiliations he had determined never again to suffer. Before he had become Charles Dickens the brilliant, the beneficent and the virtuous genius of letters, he had been Charles Dickens the impetuous, the overly earnest and the not infrequently foolish unmarried youth.

Maria Beadnell. Then, he had presented himself to her banker father as an inferior. He never made that mistake again. His answer to hierarchy was his own uniqueness. He had even refused invitations from the Queen herself. He entered society now at his pleasure, on his terms.

Maria Beadnell, his first love, the mistaken impulse of his once undisciplined heart. And these words, undisciplined heart, constantly came back to him—a warning, a fear, the terror of who he might really be. He saw them in dreams inscribed upon the walls of unknown houses, found them appearing unbidden in his writing.

Maria Beadnell and her vile family had treated him as little better than a corpse to play with, to feast upon for their own amusement. Yet looking back, he reasoned that it was his rightful punishment for having given in to his passions rather than keeping them firmly under control. After all, wasn’t that control precisely what marked the English out as different from savages?

‘Answer me, undisciplined heart!’ he went so far as asking in one novel. But it never did. And so instead he bound and chained it, buried it deep, and only such severe disciplining of his heart allowed him his success, prevented him from falling into the abyss like his debtor father, like his wastrel brothers; from becoming, finally, the savage he feared himself to be.

Determined to banish these loathsome thoughts from his mind, Dickens attempted to return to Dr Rae and the cannibals, but it was impossible. For now he only had one thought, and that thought one name. And after twenty-five years, Maria Beadnell—now Mrs Winter, married, Dickens presumed, to some acceptable dreariness—had written to him, and they had met at a dinner conveniently and respectably staged at a friend’s home.

Love—what of it?

He looked at her withered flesh, her thin lined lips, her bull neck dissolving into the lines of her bosom, crazed as old varnish. She had grown broad and was constantly short of breath, panting like an aged spaniel. Dickens turned to the other guests and said, with a smile and not without ambiguity:

‘Mrs Winter is a friend of childhood.’

Once, he had mistaken Maria Beadnell’s dull emptiness for enigmatic mystery. And now she, where once contemptuous of him in youth, was flirtatious in middling years—with her ‘Charlie this’ and ‘Charlie that’—how vile it all was! How repellent human beings could be! Fat and dull and full of phlegm, which she provoked into lava-like rumbling with her attempted coquettish giggle, the result was that he caught her cold and lost whatever affection he once had for her.

A few years before, he had even put her in the story that was so much his own, David Copperfield, casting her as the one whom David marries: Dora Spenlow. And as he sat there in his study that dark morning, attempting to rescue Sir John, there arose within Dickens another bitter memory he found unbearable: it was while writing this tale of his idealised life, of his unrequited love finally requited, of reshaping the world to just what he wanted it to be, that his ninth child was born and he had named her Dora.

How strange, how eerie he found it, then, when a few months after killing Dora in David Copperfield, his own little Dora would die. He had the horrid sense that the world warped to his fancy, but only to mock him in the cruellest way possible.

Outside his study, Dickens could hear his younger children running up and down the corridor, squealing and crashing into walls. He went and shut the second door he had specifically built for the purpose and returned to his desk. The sounds of his family were now distant and muted, but he had lost his train of thought altogether.

He put down his quill, stood and went to a bookcase and searched for several minutes, all the time wondering why he had ever wanted Maria Beadnell. Now he thanked God for her father’s prejudice against the lowly. He had a wife, the women of his books, the periwinkles of his nights. It was enough—it had to be.

Dickens’ eyes roamed the shelves until finally he found Sir John Franklin’s Journey to the Polar Sea. After two passes through the book, he found the pages he vaguely remembered; they were, he could now see, even more admirably suited to his purpose than he could have hoped. Whatever the truth of the book, it revealed Franklin as an infinitely better writer than poor old Dr Rae. Sir John Franklin, Dickens recognised, was surely as fine a creation of Sir John Franklin’s own pen as Oliver Twist was of his.

There were several passages in which Sir John recounted how, when utterly reduced by starvation at the nadir of his celebrated 1819 expedition, with eleven of his twenty men dead, there was a level of decency they never abandoned. Rather than countenance the thought of cannibalism, Sir John had eaten his own boots. Dickens felt cheered. That was an Englishman. Stout heart, stewed boots, decency dressed up as diet.

Feeling the pump was now primed, he began to narrate the story: how, when Franklin’s first expedition was starving, the Iroquois hunter Michel conceived ‘the horrible idea of subsisting on the bodies of the stragglers’, probably even killing one or two expeditioners to this end, and how Sir John Richardson then marvellously shot the devil through the head—‘to the infinite joy,’ Dickens now wrote, ‘of all the generations of readers.’

His pen was once more moving in accordance with his fancy, his spirits rising with its life-giving flow. This is what he did! Who he was! He lived and found and knew himself only in story, and in this act of writing Dickens sensed himself becoming joined to Sir John’s doomed journey, and to that strange frozen world that held all their mysteries. He thought of how such great spirits as these would always endure stoically to the end, as would he in his marriage. Sir John would not make the error that the Iroquois Michel was condemned to because of race, that error of passion Dickens himself had once made because of youth. Had he not yearned to bite into Maria Beadnell’s thighs as keenly as the Esquimaux had wanted to feast on old Sir John’s gentlemanly drumsticks? But the mark of wisdom and civilisation was the capacity to conquer desire, to deny it and crush it. Otherwise, one was no better than the Iroquois Michel or an Esquimau.

The heart of the matter was obvious. The words of a savage could not be taken as the truth, ‘because he is a liar’. Besides, it was clear that cooked and dissevered bodies among this or that tattoo’d tribe proved only one thing.

‘Such appropriate offerings to their barbarous, wide-mouthed, goggle-eyed gods,’ he wrote, feeling rather persuaded himself now on the matter, ‘savages have been often seen and known to make.’

Dickens was worked up now, coming in for the end, music swelling in his ears. His hatred of his long ago inability to rise above his passions somehow became the same thing as the disappointment he felt women had been to him through his life—his mother, Maria Beadnell, his wife, the periwinkles—and he thought of the womanless Sir John with a momentary envy.

‘The noble conduct and example of such men, and of their own great leader himself, under similar circumstances,’ he now wrote, ‘outweighs by the weight of the whole universe the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilised people, with domesticity of blood and blubber.’

He rounded it off with the dying fall of a requiem service, a tempered oration on why the dead deserve defending and cherishing—God knew, when his time came, he would. He would burn his letters in a bonfire; it would take most of the day. He would create a real double-world stranger than any of his fictions, more convoluted than any plot. He would bind friends to his secrets. He would demand confidences be kept beyond the grave.

And he would pay the cost, immense and crippling, of his ultimate failure to discipline his own great undisciplined heart. It would be the price of his soul.