CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

In November, Dickens previewed his murder in front of an intimate audience of a hundred of his closest friends.

For more than a year now, the Inimitable had been negotiating with Chappell and Company for yet another reading tour—what he called his “farewell series of readings.” Chappell had suggested seventy-five readings, but Dickens—whose illness, weakness, and list of other ailments were increasing almost daily—insisted on a hundred readings for a round sum of £8,000.

His oldest friend, Forster, who had always opposed reading tours for the very real reason that they kept Dickens from writing novels and always left him exhausted, weak, and ill, told the Inimitable flatly that if the author attempted one hundred readings now, in his current condition, it would kill him. Frank Beard and the other doctors whom Dickens had seen more frequently in the past year, fully agreed with Forster. Even Dolby, whose continued presence in Dickens’s life depended totally upon these tours, felt it was a bad idea to enter into one now and a terrible idea to attempt one hundred separate readings.

And no one in Dickens’s circle of family, old friends, physicians, and trusted advisors thought that he should include the Nancy Murder as part of his farewell tour. Some, like Wills and Dolby, simply thought it was far too sensationalist for such an honoured and revered author. Most others, like Beard, Percy Fitzgerald, Forster—and me—were all but certain it would kill him.

Dickens perversely saw the coming exhaustion of travel and performance, not to mention the mental anguish of travelling on railways every day, as (he told Dolby) “a relief to my mind.”

No one understood Dickens’s attitude in this except me. I knew that Charles Dickens was a sort of male succubus—he not only brought hundreds and thousands of people under his personal mesmeric, magnetic control at these readings, but he sucked the energy out of them as he did so. Without this need and ability, I was sure, Dickens would have died of his ailments years ago. He was a vampire and needed public occasions and audiences from which to drain the energy he needed to stagger on another day.

So he and Chappell agreed on his terms of one hundred readings in exchange for £8,000. The Inimitable’s American Tour—which, he had confessed to me, had brought him to the verge of total prostration—had been scheduled for eighty readings but, in the end, reduced to seventy-six because of a few cancellations. It was Katey who had told me (long before our 29 October meeting) that Dickens’s labours in America had brought in total receipts of $228,000 against expenses in that country—mostly travelling, rental of halls, hotels, and a 5 percent commission to the American agents of Ticknor and Fields—of not quite $39,000. Dickens’s preliminary expenses in England had been £614, and, of course, there had been Dolby’s commission of £3,000.

This suggests that Dickens’s profits from the American readings in 1867–68 should have amounted to a small fortune—a serious fortune for any of us in the writing trade—but he had chosen to do his tour only three years after the Americans’ Civil War had ended. That war had lowered the value of the dollar everywhere, and by early summer of 1868, the American currency had yet to go back to its earlier and more normal exchange value. Katey had explained to me that if her father had simply invested his American Tour earnings in securities in that country and waited for the dollar to regain its old level, his profits would have been almost £38,000. Instead, he had paid a 40 percent tariff for converting his dollars to gold at the time. “My profit,” he had bragged to his daughter, “was within a hundred or so of twenty thousand pounds.”

Impressive, but not reflective of the travel, labour, exhaustion, and diminishment of his authorial vigour that the tour had demanded.

So perhaps his current deal with Chappell was, after all, as much about simple greed as it was about his theoretical vampiric needs.

Or perhaps he was attempting suicide by reading tour.

I admit, Dear Reader, that this final possibility not only occurred to me and made sense to me, but confused me. At this point, I wanted to be the one to kill Charles Dickens. But perhaps it would be tidier if I merely helped him commit suicide this way.

DICKENS HAD BEGUN his tour in his favourite venue of St James’s Hall in London back on 6 October, but without the Murder as part of it. He knew that there would be a necessary hiatus in his travels and readings—the national general election was to be held in November, and he would have to set aside his tour during that campaign if for no other reason than the fact that there would be no suitable public halls or theatres to rent while the politicians were on the rampage. (It was no secret that the Inimitable supported Gladstone and the Liberal Party, but more—his closer friends knew—because he had always detested Disraeli than for any great hopes he had in the Liberals’ carrying out the sort of reform that he, Dickens, had always advocated in his fiction, non-fiction, and public advocacy.)

But even the easier, Murder-less October readings—London, Liverpool, Manchester, London again, Brighton, London—took a great toll on him.

In early October, Dolby had told me of the Chief’s high spirits and joy at renewing his readings, but two weeks into the actual tour and Dolby was admitting that his beloved boss was not sleeping on the road, suffered terrible bouts of melancholy, and was terrified every time he boarded a railway carriage. The slightest bump or swerve, according to Dolby, would cause the Chief to cry out in terror for his life.

More to Frank Beard’s concern, Dickens’s left foot was swelling again—always a sign of more serious troubles—and his old problems of kidney pain and bleeding bowels had returned more fiercely than ever.

Even more telling, perhaps, were the reports through Katey via my brother that Dickens was weeping frequently and was on occasion almost inconsolable during these early travels. It was true that Dickens had suffered enough personal losses during the summer and early autumn.

His son Plorn—now almost seventeen—had sailed in late September to join his brother Alfred in Australia. Dickens had broken down weeping at the station, which was totally unlike the coolness the Inimitable usually showed at family partings.

In late October, as his tour began wearing so heavily on him, Dickens learned that his brother Frederick, from whom he had been estranged for many years, had died. Forster told me that Dickens had written him—“It was a wasted life, but God forbid that one should be hard upon it, or upon anything in this world that is not deliberately and coldly wrong.”

To me, during a rare dinner shared at Vérey’s in London during a gap in his reading schedule, Dickens said simply, “Wilkie, my heart has become a cemetery.”

By the first of November, with Nancy’s Murder looming in two weeks, my brother reported Katey overhearing the Inimitable telling Georgina, “I cannot get right internally and have begun to be as sleepless as sick.”

And he had again written Forster, “I have not been well and have been heavily tired. However, I have little to complain of—nothing, nothing; though, like Mariana, I am weary.”

Forster, who was weary himself in those days, had shared the note in confidence—the conceit was that there was a circle of us, Dickens’s closest friends, who were monitoring his health with concern—but admitted to me that he could not immediately place the “Mariana” reference.

I could and did. And it was hard to suppress a smile as I recited to Forster Mariana’s lines from Tennyson’s poem to which I was certain Dickens was referring—

“… I am aweary, aweary,