Wanting

6

BUT WHAT OF DICKENS? For those who had followed the greatest mystery of the age, the prospect of the most popular writer of the day putting forth his view on the sensation of the rumours of cannibalism was irresistible. ‘The Lost Arctic Voyagers’ was published in Household Words just in time for Christmas 1854—no better time, Dickens told Wilkie one evening, to be comfortably warm, kindly thinking of those who were wretchedly cold. Dr Rae’s poor prose proved no opponent, the piece triumphed, the edition sold exceptionally well, and Dickens’ argument won the day: if Sir John had perished, it would have been nobly, gloriously, heroically; not as a goggle-eyed barbarian.

Thus did Dickens ally his name with the salving of an empire’s anguish, and no one was ungrateful. On this basis, Lady Jane donned black mourning. Her life’s work of turning her dull husband into a great man, finally relieved of his ongoing and colossal ineptitude, began to bear fruit. Dickens spoke at fundraising dinners she organised for yet more rescue expeditions, the goal—with the favourable absence of evidence—now to proclaim Sir John’s undoubted success in finding the elusive Northwest Passage.

Less successful were Wilkie Collins’ attempts to raise his companion’s spirits through drinking and periwinkling. A taint was upon Dickens. For, having dispensed with Dr Rae and the cannibals, he could not himself escape the growing sense that some greater authority seemed to have turned the whole world into a gaol yard. No matter what accolade or geegaw of success or standing came his way, whatever compliment, congratulation, ovation or award was granted him, all iron was rusty and all stone slimy, all air stank and all light was fading. Still, there was for him only one way, and that way was forward, ever forward, never stopping.

By autumn he had begun a new novel raging against government men and government absurdity, the heart-killing world of government regulations and government offices, and at the end of it he was even angrier and sadder and more lost in the thickening ice floes of his own life. For once, words had not rescued him, great as the success of Little Dorrit—as he had called his new novel—was proving in serial.

He continued with his marriage. He continued to believe that, like everything else in his life, it would be righted by the sheer force of his will. He had trouble staying in the same room as his wife, but he stayed nevertheless. He continued to argue in his writing for domesticity, and tried not to think that perhaps this was the very thing in life that had escaped him, that perhaps it did not really exist, or, if it did, it was just one more prison bar.

He kept seeing the cold whiteness of the Northwest Passage, and he kept feeling himself trapped in it with Sir John’s corpse. He kept dreaming he was one of a party of lost sailors, making their wretched way through a polar world both terrible and extraordinary, who finally stumble on Sir John’s iced ship. Here, they know, is salvation, for here there will be warmth and food; here there will be those who know how to find their way home. But a search of the silent, chill cabins reveals only frozen corpse after frozen corpse.

Something was guttering within him, no matter how he fed the flame. He chose to embody merriment in company; he preferred solitude. He spoke here, he spoke there, he spoke everywhere; he felt less and less connection with any of it. He walked more than ever, he travelled overseas ever more; yet on the inside he felt as still as a seized cog. Nothing moved.

He resolved to live a year in solitude in the Swiss Alps with monks and St Bernards. He resolved to move to Australia. He resolved to escape from himself, yet there was no escape. He felt such pity for the beggars and the downfallen he saw everywhere, the ragged people to whom he often spoke, but he could not understand why his wife, to whom he now almost never spoke, seemed fearful and sullen, why she spoke little to him, and why, when she did, it was so often sharp. He suspected he hated himself. He felt he might burst if he did not press on.

On the train to Dover, he read a whaling captain’s description of how, at a certain point in winter in the polar regions, the drifting pack ice joins together into one frozen mass, and any ship so unfortunate to be trapped is unable to move and is squeezed tighter, ever tighter, and everyone waits as the turpentine drips out of the boards slowly being crushed, everyone listens to the ache of the tormented timbers, everyone can do nothing but wait, not knowing if the boat will break and they will then die. It could have been a description of his own life.

‘I believe no two people were ever created with less in common!’ he cried out to Wilkie on the Montmartre one evening, as with a noisy crowd they watched two Turks wrestling: one large and covered in filthy scabs, the other small and oddly tenacious. ‘It is impossible…’ For a moment he seemed lost for words. ‘There is no interest, empathy, confidence, sentiment, tender union of any kind,’ he said dully, as if he were reporting on the effluvium of a cesspit.

Wilkie did not know what to do—to express sympathy would be to encourage what perhaps should not be encouraged, rash words that might later be regretted; not to react was to look callously indifferent to what was clearly consuming the man. Fortunately, before he had decided how he would respond, Dickens was again talking.

‘It is an immense misfortune to her,’ he said, shaking his head, seeming to be uncharacteristically bewildered. ‘It is an immense misfortune to me. She is the only person I have ever known with whom I cannot get on somehow or other. I know I have many…faults…’ He shook his head again, as if he were working on a jigsaw puzzle in which pieces cannot be made to fit. ‘Which,’ he said, and now tried to soldier on, ‘belong to my exercise of fancy. But I am patient and considerate at heart, and I would have beaten out a better journey’s end than we have come to, if I could…’

Again Wilkie was faced with the impossibility of knowing how to respond, and for a second time Dickens recovered and went on, but in a darker, more bitter, more determined strain, saying Catherine had never overly cared for her children and showed little affection. In front of them, the scabby Turk finally pinned his opponent to the ground. Around them, the crowd roared its approval, then laughed when the Turk spat on the face of his compatriot.

After the evening of the Turkish wrestlers, Wilkie did not hear Dickens speak of his marriage again—or not at least until things had reached such a sorry pass that he could speak of little else. In the meantime, Dickens’ activity grew even more frantic: he walked more and more, slept less and less; he attended ever more events and took on ever more burdens. He found himself, one evening, sitting with Wilkie in a Covent Garden theatre watching Romeo and Juliet. The mingled reality and mystery of the show, the poetry, the lights, the company, the dazzling changes of glittering and brilliant scenery, so delighted Dickens that when he came out onto the rainy street at midnight, he felt as if he were tumbling from the clouds into a rancorous world of mud and noise and misery.

To delay that fall a few moments more, he tried to lift himself back up by talking of his next amateur theatrical, which he staged every new year at Tavistock House. Family and servants and friends stood in for actors. Money from the tickets was given to one worthy cause or another, and Dickens’ productions had become quite an event in the London calendar.

‘The problem is that the year is creeping by,’ said Dickens to Wilkie, ‘and I still have no idea what our next play might be.’

As the two headed down a dingy street toward a house recommended by Wilkie as ‘particularly excelling in sybarite pleasure’, the confusion of splendid deaths at the end of the play they had just watched and Dickens’ keen interest in Franklin’s expedition came together in Wilkie’s mind to suggest a solution.

‘Wild ideas are on me again, Wilkie,’ Dickens was telling his companion. ‘Wilder than ever, of going to Paris—Rouen, Switzerland, anywhere—somewhere I can write aloft in some queer inn room. I’m restless, Wilkie.’

‘Imagine,’ began his companion, ‘if your next Twelfth Night play had as its setting that chill, white world.’

‘I need a change, Wilkie, but I am obliged to live in a home with a wife. They say Christ was a good man, but did he ever live with a woman?’

Wilkie coughed.

Wilkie liked women. He found Dickens’ railing against women difficult. Unlike his older friend, he was neither sentimental nor conventional about them, and he would come to manage living with two women, without marrying either. Wilkie also had unusual opinions on mesmerism, the spontaneous combustion of human beings, and scrofula, and his opinions on all such matters interested Dickens.

‘That world,’ continued Wilkie, flurrying his fingers as, in the flaring gaslight, he for a moment beheld not a great man of letters in his prime, but a poor creature preternaturally old, ‘where Parry conquered…’ Briefly he was unsure if the idea had chimed, then he began to suspect it may have been a very bad one. He battled on. ‘And where Franklin died.’

Dickens turned and stared intensely at Wilkie, and all Wilkie could hear was the odd sound of him sucking his tongue. Then, in a conspiratorial way, Dickens leant in close.

‘Once we’re inside,’ he said, ‘let’s order two fingers of their very worst blue gin and five toes of their very best midshipman.’

And Dickens’ smile lit up his face, and he turned towards the door as it opened.

‘Of course, it is inspired by Franklin,’ Wilkie called after him. ‘And…though the story is a fancy, it is a fancy drawn from the deepest truth. And how much better if it can show Englishmen meeting their ends nobly rather than as savages, their finest qualities triumphing over their basest.’

‘Yes,’ Dickens said, his back still turned. ‘Most impressed. More than impressed. Charmed. A mighty, original notion for a play.’ As Dickens led the way up the worn stone steps and the mist around them turned a ruddy yellow from the gaslight spilling out, he looked back, still smiling. ‘And you, dear Wilkie, must be the one to write it.’

On entering the house and its warm, enveloping sounds, its overripe scent of cheap perfume, Wilkie had the sense he had simply been given a task Dickens was happy to be freed of.

‘You want that line to remain then?’ asked Wilkie, when some months later he came to Tavistock House to inspect the improvements being made in preparation for the performance. There was, thought Wilkie, something changed in Dickens since he had seen him a fortnight before.

‘Which line?’ said Dickens loudly, as the two men made their way along the corridor, advancing into a babel of noise. He seemed to be holding himself differently, with a new vigour and delight in his very posture.

‘Where Wardour cries out,’ cried out Wilkie, ‘“The only hopeless wretchedness in this world is the wretchedness that women cause!”’

‘You can’t makes sense of his character without it,’ Dickens shouted back, as though it were another simple instruction of the type he issued daily at the office of Household Words, too apparent to demand explanation. Had not women failed him all his life? His mother. Maria Beadnell. His wife. Was it not obvious?

Wilkie coughed.

‘Never give in to your stomach, Wilkie,’ said Dickens, ‘and your stomach will end up giving in to you!’ He pointed a heavily ringed index finger at Wilkie. ‘Now there’s another line that must go in! You see, Wilkie, that is Franklin’s experience and his lesson. We all have appetites and desires. But only the savage agrees to sate them.’

And with that, Dickens swung open the door to reveal the chaos and cacophony of a score of carpenters and painters hard at work in a room that bore no resemblance to what Wilkie remembered as the children’s schoolroom. Paint pots adorned every available ledge and table, crates of tools lay scattered hither and thither, and at one end a bay window was being taken out and an altogether larger alcove built to house the stage. A labourer was heating size in a great crucible wedged into the fireplace and the room reeked of it, while gasfitters seemed perplexed as they installed extra pipes and lights.

‘Is it the Chatham Dockyard?’ asked Wilkie.

‘It is our theatre,’ said a thrilled Dickens, beaming and spreading his arms out. ‘The smallest theatre in London but a real theatre nonetheless!’

And then Wilkie realised that not only the room had undergone a transformation.

‘I like your beard, Dickens,’ said Wilkie. ‘Very fashionable.’

Dickens tweaked his newly sprouted whiskers.

‘I grew them for the role. I find myself more and more inhabiting, almost living, the part of Richard Wardour. Why, just yesterday I must have strolled the best part of twenty miles, and the best part of that was terrifying the locals of Finchley and Neasden into thinking I was a starving and demented polar explorer soon to perish for want of food or warmth, bearded and fully in part. I have it all committed to memory now, Wilkie, every line of yours up here,’ he said, tapping his goatish head. ‘Do you know what appeals so much about the Arctic?’ he said, and smiled once more. ‘There are no women there.’ And then he was gone to give the gasfitter advice on the placement of a row of jets.

Wilkie coughed.

At first, Dickens had not wished to invest his name in a project that was not fully his. He simply threw his friend ideas for story, a good line here or there. Yet as Little Dorrit grew and grew into a prison bigger than it was ever meant to be, the single ray of light shining into his cell was Wilkie’s new play.

But it was only after Wilkie suggested Dickens should take the part of one of the play’s main characters, a villain to be called Richard Wardour, that his interest quickened. And it was only when he began to see that a man such as Wardour was not half as dislikeable as Wilkie had presented him that he became deeply involved. For Wardour’s character interested Dickens, and the more he thought about him, the more oddly close and familiar he seemed. Dickens began stealing time from the final instalments of his novel for Household Words to pen yet one more quick letter or card to Wilkie outlining cuts and making changes to his latest draft of the play, which, at Dickens’ suggestion, was to be called The Frozen Deep.

‘What is so marvellous about your play,’ he told Wilkie, returning from his conversation with the gasfitter, ‘is the way you’ve created such a man as Wardour—seemingly the worst, but with an unexpected depth. Somewhere near Neasden, I realised that what I must do with Wardour is thaw his frozen deep. I was thinking how we should alter the ending slightly, for he is not all evil—’

‘Far from it,’ agreed Wilkie, who really didn’t agree at all—he had conceived the part of Wardour as a grotesque, of a type that Dickens had so enjoyed playing, to much laughter, in previous Tavistock House plays. That Dickens now saw Wardour as some serious creation, rather than an opportunity to score cheap applause, astonished Wilkie, but, ever open to the undertow of life, he went along with it.

Dickens led Wilkie to a long, dusty table strewn with large rolls of paper, which Dickens unfurled to show his friend sketches and plans for the scenic backdrops. Wilkie murmured the name at the bottom of one sketch in approval. It was no less than William Telbin, the celebrated landscape painter. There seemed no one Dickens had not roped in to lend a hand.

‘Wonderful,’ said Wilkie, meaning it. His friend’s energy, his capacity to invest such industry in even a folly such as this, an amateur theatrical, he always found overwhelming, amusing and oddly moving. ‘Simply wonderful.’

‘Here, in the first act,’ said Dickens, pointing to a sketch of a harbour with a decaying coaching house to one side, ‘on the very eve of the departure of a great Arctic expedition, our heroine, Clara Burnham, pledges her undying love to Frank Aldersley—cue applause for Mr Collins—an officer of one of the two ships setting out on this perilous mission. He little knows that on the other ship is no other than Richard Wardour—a role I will seek to inject with a perfectly electric pathos—the ardent admirer Clara once spurned, who has most solemnly vowed to avenge himself on Aldersley for stealing Clara from him!’

‘So,’ said Wilkie, knowing how Dickens loved to tell and retell his tales as a way of testing their mettle, ‘we begin by presenting Wardour as a villain, but as the play progresses, you think it better if he is revealed as perhaps a more tragic figure?’

‘He does strike me,’ said Dickens, ‘as a man forever seeking and never finding true affection. Is that not the case?’

Now dimly suspecting the appeal of Wardour, Wilkie, rather than answering Dickens’ question, replied by reinventing the play. ‘I have wondered,’ he said, ‘how moving for an audience it might be if, at the end, Wardour is transformed—if he chooses to sacrifice himself so that the girl he loves wins the man she loves, although it is in Wardour’s power to let that same man die and take the girl for himself.’

Dickens was silent, but his lips were moving, as if engaged on some gargantuan piece of mental arithmetic, adding and subtracting, dividing and recalculating. ‘A death is good,’ he said at one point, ‘very good,’ and then he went back to his silent mumblings. ‘And do you know why?’ he unexpectedly demanded of Wilkie. ‘Because even Wardour, finally, is not a savage!’ His bearded face was beaming. ‘Is that not so?’

Wilkie pondered if it was so for a moment. If it had been clear that villainy was previously the very bedrock of Wardour, it was equally clear it no longer was. And what had been meant to be the lightest of entertainments was taking on some other dimension.

‘I always felt,’ ventured Wilkie, ‘that Wardour was so much more than a simple villain.’

Dickens nodded.

‘Driven low by cruel Nature,’ suggested Wilkie.

Dickens nodded more vigorously.

‘Bowed by Fate, undoubtedly,’ continued Wilkie, encouraged. ‘But a savage, never…’

‘A savage, my dear Wilkie, be he Esquimau or an Otaheitian, is someone who succumbs to his passions. An Englishman understands his passions in order to master them and turn them to powerful effect. Was and is that not Franklin? And here we have a man poisoned by his passions,’ Dickens continued, unfurling another roll of paper across which was scrawled ACT III, ‘but who, at the end, with both ships trapped in the Arctic ice, and horror all around—’ Dickens paused. The unrolled sketch showed a ship’s deck. Dickens shook his head. ‘No, this won’t do. Not now. Not with such a dramatic dénouement. We need towering cliffs of ice. The terror of the sublime. Because Wardour finally chooses something far better than allowing his rival to die: he sacrifices himself in order that Frank Aldersley can have Clara—a rather splendid redemption, I think.’

And with that, he picked up a pencil stub and ran a line through the sketch.

So Dickens continued over the final eight weeks, altering lines here, adding monologues there, changing plot everywhere. As the story drifted like pack ice then froze into a fixed shape, he was also attending to the invention of the world of the play—the sets, the costumes, the casting, the props—to such an extent that when the play’s programme was published, Wilkie, whose name still appeared as its author, thought it prudent to have added on the title page ‘Under the Management of Charles Dickens’.

For Dickens was stage director, very often stage carpenter, scene arranger, light setter, property man, prompter and bandmaster. He had authentic Arctic costumes made for the explorers, employed and trained ‘snowboys’, whose job it was to scatter paper snow onto the stage from above, and substituted hammocks for the beds to impart the necessary veracity. On his nocturnal walks, he devoted himself more and more to the frozen deep rather than little Dorrit, falling into the part of Wardour, shouting out his lines as he went, walking himself into new lines, venturing farther and deeper into the treacherous shoals of ice that entrapped his own lost soul.

One final matter irritated him, though. Why would Wardour sacrifice himself? Somehow, something was lacking in their invention, which insufficiently explained why a bad man would do such a good thing. Then, while out walking one night, he realised Richard Wardour was not bad at all; rather he was good, a good man who might rescue himself—and with what?—with love! Lack of love had iced Wardour’s soul, and love rescues his soul from the ice, such a love that he would lay down his life for another!

‘Young and loving and merciful,’ he cried out to Clerkenwell, Wardour’s voice now filling his throat. ‘I keep her face in my mind, though I can keep nothing else. I must wander, wander, wander—restless, sleepless, homeless—till I find her!’

And then Dickens halted, puzzled, lost. Who was this woman? She didn’t exist. It was all delusion.

In the new year of 1857, after four weeks of full dress rehearsals, a hundred people crammed into the refurbished schoolroom at Tavistock House—among their number members of parliament, judges, ministers and several journalists—to watch Dickens, his family and friends perform The Frozen Deep.

The cast was all the old crew—or nearly all, Douglas Jerrold still being unwell—the children, of course, Wilkie, Freddie Evans, Augustus Egg, John Forster, Catherine’s sister Georgina Hogarth, who played a Scottish nurse with second sight, and a Scottish servant getting some laughs as an Esquimau. But Dickens stole the show.

He had gone so far as to invite theatre reviewers, and they, along with the rest of the audience, were stunned by the intensity of Dickens’ performance, particularly in the closing scenes when, clad in rags, he transformed from a man about to murder his rival in love, to one who, as music specially composed for his death scene swelled and rose, sacrifices himself for that same love.

‘He has won the greatest of all conquests,’ said Wilkie as Frank Aldersley, standing over his friend’s prostrate form. ‘The conquest of himself.’

Strangely, as he uttered these, the play’s closing words, in that moment preceding the curtain’s fall and the rapturous applause that followed, Wilkie felt a growing irony that he thought best to keep to himself.

He soon came to see that success is deaf to irony. Dickens was lauded in The Times and The Illustrated London News as having the powers of the best of professional actors, while The Athenaeum went even further: his performance, it declared, ‘might open a new era for acting’.

Shaking her head, Mrs Ternan closed The Athenaeum and put it down on the train seat next to her. A new era for acting! Opposite, a young man looked askance, for Mrs Ternan was dressed in black mourning, and was—improbably, impossibly and clearly disrespectfully—laughing. The train lurched around a bend and braked at the same time, its whistle screeching, with the effect of throwing everyone in the third-class carriage back and forth. When the train resumed a more settled ride and the passengers their original seating, she contained herself and apologised.

‘My sister,’ she said. ‘We buried her this morning in Salford.’ And then she would have burst into tears, if she were someone other than Mrs Ternan. But tears were what she wept on stage; tears were what she worked so hard to elicit from audiences; tears were art and art’s reward. This, though, was life. Mrs Ternan’s vicissitudes had trained her to laugh at life rather than be broken by it. ‘Never,’ she said to herself. Though she was a thoughtful woman, she lived by this unthinking mantra. Never ever give in. Never ever complain. Never ever admit to failure.

She crossed her hands in her lap so that he might not see the darned holes in her gloves, inwardly cursed herself for not having warmer clothing to wear in the unheated carriage, and looked out of the misty window as though she could see something of the iced landscape beyond as the train steamed northwards.

Still, the matter of the review amused her, and if it were not for her determination to remain respectable, she would have laughed again. A gentleman and his untrained children in front of a paper house! It may have been some new form of mesmerism, but it most certainly wasn’t theatre. And Mrs Ternan most certainly knew what theatre was; after all, she had been treading the boards—damp, rotten, creaking, splintered—since she was three. And though she believed in the theatre of Shakespeare and Molière, it had not repaid her passion. Here she was, she thought, fifty, alone, with three daughters, renting a very small house on the outskirts of London, with little income and, it would seem, diminishing prospects.

It wasn’t the life she had expected when, as a young woman, she’d looked to become another Mrs Siddons; when she had made more money than Fanny Kemble in Boston; when she played opposite Charles Kean; when she was celebrated for her acting in both the Old World and the New, and adored for her looks; when she had married a young Irishman of great ambitions—but he had died insane in Bedlam, and she had aged, and the good roles became fewer and the need to take whatever was offered grew stronger. She had journeyed through the provinces, lived on beer and bread and slimy old meat, trudged back and forth between damp lodgings and distant theatres, laid her dead young son out in a cot and then worked three nights in a row, coming home to his cold body each night, until she had enough to pay for his funeral.

She was determined for something better for her three daughters, but it was hard to know what that might be. There was the one-time Infant Prodigy—as she had been billed—her eldest daughter, Fanny, who had so enchanted audiences with her performances as a child but had not been able to carry that magic into her young adult life; there was Maria, ever able, but without overwhelming beauty or talent, equally destined for neither greatness nor fortune. Then there was her youngest, Ellen, who had also been on stage since she was three, who had danced polkas, played boys in tights, performed with acrobats, sang solos and duets and choruses, but who now, at eighteen, had the looks but not the vivacity on stage that might bring fortune.

Times were not good. Fanny and Maria had boldly attempted to set up a school for young ladies the previous summer, another form of fancy; it began with hope and an empty house and ended with neither. Though her friends in theatre helped in finding parts, Mrs Ternan could no longer rely on the Cordelias and Desdemonas that had once brought her a good living. Maria had a fortnight of bit parts at the Regency but nothing beyond it, while Fanny had found steady, if not starring, work as Oberon in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

She picked up The Athenaeum again, and took out the letter she had used as a bookmark, the letter that bore the news of Louisa’s death. She had been just fifty-three, with four children. Mrs Ternan did not know how much longer she might go on before she might suffer similarly—perhaps dying on stage like poor old John Pritt Harley, who had dropped like a stone a few nights before while playing Bottom, with poor Fanny standing right there next to him. And if she died, thought Mrs Ternan, what then would happen to her girls?

For the time being, she was able to continue to trade on the memory of her beauty and past triumphs, on her friendships and the acumen she had accrued over the course of a life of beds shared with children and bedbugs, of cheating theatre managers, threadbare clothes and the illusion of merriment. If she had often to make clear her respectability and virtue in face of a world that viewed her profession as little better than public prostitution, it was also a life not without its compensations: if you could through talent gain the public’s favour, you were able, in some measure, to live independent of men, of whom she had a diminishing opinion. It was a better world than that of governesses and seamstresses. But it was still harsh and terrifying, and all that sustained her was the friendship of other actors.

On the night she had received the news of Louisa’s death, leaving her the only surviving member of her family, Mrs Ternan had stifled her weeping with a pillow so her daughters would not hear her heart breaking and would never suspect what she now knew: that every death of those you love is the death also of so many shared memories and understanding, of a now irretrievable part of your own life; that every death is another irrevocable step in your own dying, and it ends not with the ovation of a full house, but the creak and crack and dust of the empty theatre. Mrs Ternan felt an infinite darkness beckoning; she resolved only that she would face it bravely. What could a gentleman and his children playing at theatrics know of any of it?

The young man was now looking at Ellen, who had travelled with Mrs Ternan to the funeral and who was sitting at the other end of the bench seat, engrossed, as always, in another novel. With great care, Mrs Ternan had mended Fanny’s old out-of-doors dress for Ellen to wear to the funeral; it did not look shabby, nor was its fawn colour—now faded to a dull grey—lurid, but, she felt, entirely respectable. To make it clear that the young attractive woman was not some fallen girl, but a chaperoned young lady, Mrs Ternan held out The Athenaeum to her.

‘Read this, my darling, and kindly tell me if you think you can ever trust a glowing review.’ She passed the magazine over; she was insistent. ‘For my money, I think never,’ she smiled, thinking how, until the final curtain swept her forever away, she would keep the show going. ‘Never ever.’

With the play that had buoyed him for so many months now over, Dickens lapsed into melancholy. He returned to writing Little Dorrit. In an ever-growing frenzy, he did not realise he was writing himself. London seemed damper, darker and dingier than ever, and everything and everybody on the streets and on the page felt entombed and dying. As he lived his crowded life, he wondered how it was possible to feel so alone. His solitude terrified him.

He dosed himself more frequently with laudanum. Those who objected that Little Dorrit was his gloomiest novel got no argument from him. It was also his most successful, its sales in serial form exceeding all his previous works. He was so alone. He resolved to endure. He would sacrifice all. He could not bear to talk to his wife. He was forty-five. He and Catherine no longer recognised each other, no longer could apprehend in the other pain, sorrow, regret. He could feel something breaking.

Was it the world? Was it him? He had been drawing on something within to keep writing his books, to play Dickens, and it was some reserve he no longer had. His soul was corroding. Certain blows rained down on him, all the more incomprehensible and unsayable because of his external success. It was a slow loss of life, or vitality, or somesuch, some force that joined him with others, and it was that joining with others that he found harder and harder. It was as if the more of him there were in his books, the less of him in life. He might have spoken about it if he knew anyone who might have understood, but, not understanding it himself, that was impossible. He was falling and falling and he did not know how to stop.

Winter gave way to spring. He finally bought Gad’s Hill, the home in Kent he had dreamt of owning since, as a child, he walked past it with his father. He remembered himself as a queer small boy listening intently as his father told him that, if he were very persevering and worked very hard, he might some day come to own it. He had persevered. He had worked hard. He had talent—some said genius. He had Gad’s Hill as proof. It should have felt an affirmation. It didn’t.

Genius—what was it? Increasingly it felt an agony. Yet only in his work did Dickens truly feel that he became himself, only as he took on the mask of this and that character did he discover the very truth of who he was. His novels were true in a way life was not. Why, even Katy had accused him that his characters in his novels were more real and dear to him than his children. He denied it, he laughed it off, he resented it. He moved his family to Gad’s Hill, but he remained most nights in London, sleeping in a small suite he kept above the Household Words office. He feared his work was eating up his soul. Talent, genius—were these just names for his determination to continue excavating himself until only a corpse remained to offer death?

He looked in the large mirror he had hung opposite his desk to observe his own face as it played out the part of this character or that. But all he saw was a face that could have been any man and no man, somebody who in his relentless mimicry of everybody had become nobody. He had met most of the great men of his age and been invariably disappointed. I have no peer, he thought. How he missed Richard Wardour!

The rain pattered down erratically, as if troubled by some guilty secret; the city through which he was once more nightwalking was a hundred heavy shades of pewter. Yet it was the only real home he had, wandering those foul rookeries and casual wards, mazes of misery with their half-naked inhabitants and oilskin doors and broken windows, the wretched courtyard where a wraith-like woman drooled as she sucked opium from a rude pipe contrived from a penny ink bottle. Above, he saw the wild moon and clouds rolling restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed. Finally light staggered down into the streets of the Great Oven. He made it back to his rooms an hour after dawn.

He went straight to his desk. He felt his thoughts start stuttering and then words spat and fizzed, and one word led to another and then that in turn led more along. In this way, he knew, wars, revolutions, conspiracies, love affairs and novels were made, but nothing could empty Dickens’ head of something beyond words: it was fit to burst with everything that could never be said.

‘The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the wholly wild night is in pursuit of us,’ he found himself writing in his notebook; ‘but so far we are pursued by nothing else.’

It made no sense. Why was the night in pursuit? And who was us and we? Who would walk with him?

The strange journey to where Dickens would find us and we began a week later when he travelled by railway from Gad’s Hill up to London. A man with a collapsing Stilton for a head entered Dickens’ carriage. He sat down, opened a newspaper, then almost as soon as it was fanned out, folded it back up and turned to the passenger next to him. He spoke as though reporting an advertisement for chamber pots.

‘Douglas Jerrold is dead.’

Dickens was stunned. Why, he had seen his good friend only the week before, and though Jerrold had said he had been sick, he had put it down to the inhaling of fresh paint from his study window.

It had been a wretched enough morning already. Katy had bought a bonnet and Catherine had felt it perfectly fine. He liked seeing his daughters look as splendid as she did in the bonnet, but the cost! the cost! His children had no idea about money—they were as spendthrift as his own father had been, and, he feared, perhaps as doomed.

He had shouted at Katy, who had shouted back, and then Catherine shouted, then it seemed that there could be nothing said unless it was by shouting. Then he had stopped and in a whisper begged for them all to stop, to stop such madness as this, to stop falling apart, to come together once more as a family. But it was a speech, words, and no one cared a fig for it, and Catherine was weeping again and Katy was standing at her side, glowering at him.

All he could do was try to steady himself by returning to work, to some new project in which he might once more bury himself alive. But Little Dorrit was done, the last instalment at the printer, and he had no project before him other than Household Words.

By the time Dickens saw Wilkie at the Household Words office, his thinking had made several leaps. Knowing there was no private income in Jerrold’s family, Dickens proposed to Wilkie that they stage some benefit performances of The Frozen Deep for the widow and her children. After all, its initial run of just four performances had caught the attention of London, and had not he and Wilkie both been met frequently with requests to reprise the play from every section of society, up to and including the Queen herself?

And so it was that on the fourth of July, a command performance of The Frozen Deep was given at a new, larger venue—the Royal Gallery of Illustration—for Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their family; among the other guests were King Leopold I of Belgium, Prince Frederick William of Prussia, and his fiancée, Princess Victoria, and even such luminaries as Hans Christian Andersen. This was followed by three additional performances at the same venue over the next few weeks. Dickens was once more Wardour, and his performance an even greater sensation.

‘If that man would go upon the stage,’ exclaimed Thackeray in the foyer afterwards, ‘he would make £20,000 a year!’

But for all the success The Frozen Deep enjoyed, despite the expensive ticket prices, insufficient funds were raised to sustain Mrs Jerrold. Dickens, emboldened by his success, his spirits raised by once more playing Wardour, decided to stage a further series of performances in a much larger venue that would hold an audience big enough to raise the money needed. He settled on the Manchester Free Trade Hall, a magnificent new building which could seat two thousand people.

If the size solved one problem, it created another. Dickens became convinced that his amateur actresses would not be able to project their voices sufficiently loudly and dramatically in such a cavernous theatre. Engaging and charming as his daughters and servants were in a small space, where their dramatic failings somehow created a kind of domestic charm, in a great theatre he feared that they would simply be viewed as mediocre, even ludicrous. He would need to find professional actresses.

The working entrance to the Haymarket Theatre was a furtive door protruding into a side alley, from which the summer morning heat was raising a chutney of odours. With the toe of a boot, Dickens flicked aside the oyster shells splattered with bird droppings that were piled over the entrance steps. A filthy urchin, clad in only a torn waistcoat, rode a pig past, chattering in some gibberish Dickens took to be Gaelic, with two other semi-naked children walking alongside. A starling flew out of a hole above the door, to the shrill sound of hungry fledglings, as Dickens entered the dark and rather grim hall. He made his way towards the distant sound of music and dancing feet, to that place he loved above all others, where hearts can be at once disciplined and undisciplined, that world where, given a mask, lies speak the truth.

After twice getting lost, he came upon the backstage, a confusion of beams, bulkheads, ropes and rollers, and such a mixing of gaslight and daylight, of long shadows and short shadows, that none of the natural laws of the universe seemed any longer to apply. And sitting amidst it all, striped by the shadows, was a young blonde woman silently sobbing.

‘Why, goodness gracious, Mr Dickens, when you said soon, I did not realise it meant this very morning in the midst of rehearsals!’

Dickens turned to see a sturdy but not unattractive woman.

‘Mrs Ternan, I knew you would be busy, but I have a proposal that I wished you to hear as soon as possible.’

He looked back to the crying young woman, whom he now recognised as one of Mrs Ternan’s pretty daughters; he had admired her on stage the evening before.

‘I’m afraid Ellen here feels that she is undone in the final scene when she must appear in the ripped dress. She feels it leaves too much of her leg revealed. You see, Mr Dickens’—and at the mention of his name, Dickens swung around to face Mrs Ternan—‘I have trained my daughters to be respectable and actresses, and not to view the two as incompatible. They are not common players.’

‘Mr Cornford of the Regent’s Playhouse spoke very highly of both the character and ability of your family, Mrs Ternan.’

When he had watched Ellen Ternan, who to Dickens looked a pretty sixteen, perform as Hippomenes in a play called Atlanta, he had thought she seemed competent. Her calves were also rather attractive. But he understood from Mr Cornford that one of her sisters was outstanding and her mother was much respected, and that all four female professionals were reliable, respectable and, not least importantly, available on the dates the Manchester Free Trades Hall was booked.

‘If you wished, I could speak with the manager about costuming…’ Dickens’ eye strayed back to the girl. Her large eyes a piercing blue. Her stockings very thin. Her legs—

‘Oh, I need not worry, Mr Dickens. I will have my way and my daughter will not be cheapened; her name and our name will not be so easily lost.’

From the high gallery windows, with their little strip of sky, there fell a strong beam of light. Dickens felt its unexpected warmth, its nourishing goodness.

‘No one will speak to the manager,’ said the girl suddenly. ‘I simply shall play my role as I see fit’—she lifted her head up high with a flourish as she spoke—‘and that shall be that.’

‘Ruin ought be, if ruin must come, ruinously worthwhile,’ said Dickens, knowing he was now playing and not quite able to restrain himself.

Mrs Ternan feared business was being lost.

‘And your proposal, Mr Dickens?’

But the girl appeared not to be listening when he replied. She was watching his hands. They darted about like the wings of a wild bird in a cage.