But he did not do this. He went straight to Nancy.

I know, Dear Reader, that I have described the Inimitable’s own notes on an early summer draft of his reading script for this scene, but I cannot tell you how inadequate those notes—or my own poor powers of description, as honed by writing prose as they may be—are in describing the next forty-five minutes.

Perhaps, Dear Reader, in your incredibly distant future of the late twentieth or early twenty-first century (if you still even bother measuring time in terms of Years of Our Lord), you have, in your advanced scientific alchemy, created some looking glass that can peer back through time so that you can watch and listen to the Sermon on the Mount or Pericles’ orations or Shakespeare’s original performances of his plays. If so, I would suggest that you add to your list of Historical Orations Not to Be Missed a certain Charles Dickens’s presentation of Bill Sikes murdering Nancy.

He did not leap immediately to the details of the Murder, of course.

You may remember my earlier descriptions of Dickens’s readings—the calm demeanor, the open book held in one hand although never truly referred to, the element of theatricality coming primarily through the wide range of voices, dialects, and postures as Dickens recited. But never before had he fully acted out the scene he was reading.

With the Murder, Dickens began slowly but with much more theatricality than I had ever seen from him (or any author reading his work). Fagin, that evil Jew, came alive as never before—wringing his hands in a way that suggested both eager anticipation of money stolen and guilt, as if he were trying to wash away the blood of Christ even as he schemed. Noah Claypole came across even more cowardly and stupid than he had in the novel. Bill Sikes’s entrance made the audience shudder in anticipation—rarely had male brutality been so conveyed through a few pages of dialogue and the dramatic portrayal of the drunkard thief and bully’s demeanor.

Nancy’s terror was palpable from the beginning, but by the time of her first of many shrieks, the audience was pale and totally absorbed.

As if showing us the boundary between all of his previous readings over the decades (not to mention the weak and inferior efforts by his imitators) and this new era of sensationalism for him, Dickens tossed aside his book of reading script, left his reading stand, and literally leaped into the scene he was depicting for us.

Nancy shrieked her entreaties.

Bill Sikes growled his relentless fury. There would be no mercy despite her cries—“Bill! Dear Bill! For God’s sake, Bill! For God’s sake!”

Dickens’s voice filled St James’s Hall so thoroughly that even Nancy’s final, whispered, dying entreaties could be heard as if each of us in the audience were on stage. During the few (but terrible) silences, one could have heard a mouse stirring in the empty balcony behind us. We could actually hear Dickens panting from the exertion of bringing his invisible (all too visible!) club down on the dear girl’s skull… again! Again! Again!

Dickens used the powerful lighting to amazing effect. Now he is on one knee as Nancy, the lighting showing only the bent-back head and two pale hands raised in useless imploring. Now he is rearing back as Bill—the club raised behind his shoulders and his body suddenly, impossibly, larger and burlier and taller than Dickens had ever been, the deep shadows filling his eye sockets except for the terrifying whites of Sikes’s not-sane eyes.

Then the beating—and clubbing—and beating again—and worse clubbing. The dear girl’s dying voice, growing duller and fainter as both life and hope departed, caused the breathless audience to gasp. One woman sobbed.

When Nancy’s pleading ceased, there was an instant of relief—even hope—that her entreaties had been listened to by the brute, that some small bit of life would be left to the battered form, but even as many in the audience chose that second to open their eyes, then Dickens roared out Sikes’s loudest and most insane bellows and began clubbing the dying girl again, then the dead girl, then the shapeless mass of battered and bleeding flesh and hair beneath him.

When he was finished, crouched over the body in the same terrible attitude that his son and my brother had first glimpsed in the meadow behind Gad’s Hill Place, Dickens’s laboured gasping for air filled the hall like the bellows of some deranged steam machine. I had no idea whether the panting was real or only part of his performance.

He finished.

Women in the audience were sobbing. At least one was hysterical. Men sat rigid, pale, with their fists clenched and jaw muscles working. I realised that Percy Fitzgerald next to me on one side and Dickens’s old friend Charles Kent on the other were both struggling to take in a breath.

As for me, the stag beetle scarab behind my eyes had gone crazy during the reading, turning and burrowing and boring from one part of my brain to another. The pain had been beyond description, yet still I could not close my eyes or block my ears to shut out the Murder, so mesmerising had it been. As soon as Nancy was well and truly dead, I pulled out my silver flask and took four long drinks of laudanum. (I noticed that other men were drinking from similar flasks.)

The audience was silent for a long moment after Dickens finished, returned to his lectern, straightened his lapels and cravat, and bowed slightly.

For that moment, I thought there would be no applause and that the obscenity that was the Murder of Nancy would never be perpetrated on stage again. The Chappells would hear their verdict in the shocked silence. Forster, Wills, Fitzgerald, and all of Dickens’s other friends who had advised against this will have been justified.

But then the applause began. And rose in volume. And continued to rise as people began to stand throughout the hall. And would not end.

Soaked with sweat but smiling now, Dickens bowed more deeply, stepped out from behind his high reading table, and gave a magician’s gesture.

Members of his stage crew trotted out and the screens were whisked aside in an instant. The maroon-violet curtains pulled back.

On the stage was revealed a long, shining banquet table piled high with delicacies. Bottles of champagne lay cooling in countless silver buckets of ice. A small army of formally attired waiters stood ready to open oysters and send the champagne corks flying. Dickens gestured again and called his invitation (over a second round of enthusiastic applause) for everyone to come up on stage and partake of refreshments.

Even this part of the evening had been carefully staged. As the first men and women filed shakily onto the stage, the powerful gaslights illuminated their flushed faces and the men’s gold studs and the women’s colourful dresses in a wonderful manner. It was as if the performance were still under way but now all of us were to be included in it. With a terrible but darkly thrilling shock, we realised that we were all attending the wake of the murdered Nancy.

Finally on stage myself, I stood back from the banquet and eavesdropped on what people were saying to Dickens, who was all smiles behind a flurry of his handkerchief as he continued mopping his wet brow and cheeks and neck.

Actresses such as Mme Celeste and Mrs Keeley were among the first to reach him.

“You are my judge and jury,” Dickens said happily to them. “Should I do it or not?”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes, oui, yes,” breathed Mme Celeste. She looked to be close to fainting.

“Why, of course do it!” cried Mrs Keeley. “Having got at such an effect as that, it must be done. It must be. But I must say…” And here the actress rolled her large black eyes very slowly, very dramatically, and enunciated the rest of her line with elaborate slowness, “… the public have been looking for a sensation these last fifty years or so, and by heaven they have got it!”