But what about Dickens’s biographical tale of Mr Drood?

What about it? Charles Dickens’s imagination could furnish a thousand such tales with only seconds of notice. In fact, the story of Drood’s childhood, English father, murdered Mohammadan mother… it all sounded contrived to a level far below Charles Dickens’s creative powers.

But, oddly enough, it was the part of the story concerning Drood’s abilities with mesmerism and Magnetic Influence that made me want to believe the bulk of the Inimitable’s tale. It also explained why Dickens, terrified now of riding in trains and even carriages, would come into London from Gad’s Hill at least once a week.

He was a student… or perhaps “acolyte” was a better word… of the Master Mesmerist named Drood.

AS I HAD KNOWN even before he had tried (and failed) to mesmerise me shortly after Staplehurst, Dickens’s fascination with mesmerism went back almost thirty years, to the time when the writer was known everywhere primarily by his early nom de plume of “Boz.” All of England was interested in mesmerism at that time: the phenomenon had been imported from France, where a “magnetic boy” seemed to be able to tell time on people’s watches and read cards in a mesmeric trance even while his head and eyes were heavily bandaged. I did not know Dickens then, of course, but he had described more than once how he had attended as many demonstrations of mesmerism as he could find in London. But it was the professor Dickens had mentioned, a certain John Elliotson from University College Hospital, who most impressed the young Boz.

In 1838, Elliotson used his Magnetic Influence to place his subjects—some of them patients at his hospital in London—into a much deeper trance than most mesmerists could achieve. From the depths of those trances, his men and women, boys and girls, not only made strides towards cures of chronic conditions, but also could be induced into prophetic and even clairvoyant states. The Okey sisters, both epileptics, not only left their wheeled chairs to sing and dance while mesmerised by Professor Elliotson, but also showed strong evidence of second sight under what young Dickens had been convinced had been a controlled condition. Dickens was, in other words, a convert.

For a man with no real religious convictions, Dickens became a true believer in animal magnetism and in the mesmeric powers that controlled this energy. You must remember, Dear Reader, the context of our times: science was making huge strides in understanding the underlying and interrelated energies and fluids such as magnetism and electricity. The flow and control of mesmeric fluid common to all living things, but especially to the human mind and body, seemed to Dickens to be as scientific and as demonstrable as breakthroughs shown by Faraday when he generated electricity with a magnet.

The next year, 1839, when Elliotson resigned his position of Professor of Principles and Practices of Medicine at University College—due to pressure, everyone understood, because of the sensational nature of his mesmeric demonstrations—Dickens supported the doctor in public, loaned him money in private, arranged for Elliotson to attend to Dickens’s parents and other family members, and—some years later—attempted to help the distraught and despondent doctor when he became suicidal.

Dickens never allowed himself to be mesmerised, of course. Anyone who thought that Charles Dickens might surrender such control of himself to another person, even briefly, did not know Charles Dickens. It was the young Boz, soon to be the mature Inimitable, who invariably sought to control other people. Mesmerism became just one of the tools he used, but it was one he would be interested in for the rest of his life.

It was not long, of course, before Dickens began attempting his own mesmeric experiments and therapies. By the time he was visiting America in 1842, Dickens told his friends there that he was regularly mesmerising Catherine to cure her of her headaches and insomnia. (Years later, he told me that he had been using animal magnetism to alleviate a much wider range of what he called “hysterical symptoms” exhibited by his hapless wife. He also confessed to me that his first mesmerism of his wife had been an accident; while discussing Magnetic Influence with some American friends he had been “holding forth upon the subject rather luminously,” making hand movements around his listeners’ heads and brushing their eyebrows simply to exhibit the proper procedures he himself had witnessed in demonstrations by experts, when he suddenly magnetised Catherine into hysterics. He had made more hand passes to bring her out of it, but that only succeeded in sending his wife into a deep mesmeric trance. The next night he again used Catherine as his subject in front of friends and shortly after that began his attempt to cure her of her “hysterical symptoms.”) From Catherine he moved on to applying his growing mesmeric abilities to a small circle of family and friends.

But it was with Madame de la Rue that Dickens’s use of Magnetic Influence led to trouble.

Madame Augusta de la Rue was the English wife of Swiss-born banker Emile de la Rue, director of the Genoese branch of the banking firm started by his grandfather. For a brief period starting in October of 1844, the year Dickens had brought Catherine to Genoa so that he could write there through the autumn and winter, the Dickenses and the de la Rues were neighbours and saw each other frequently in the small expatriate circle of Genoese society.

Augusta de la Rue suffered from symptoms of overwhelming nervousness that included insomnia, nervous tics, facial spasms, and attacks of anxiety so severe that they literally tied the poor woman in knots. People of a less sophisticated age than ours might have thought the woman possessed by demons.

Dickens proposed that he use his growing mesmeric abilities to help Madame de la Rue, and Emile, the lady’s husband, thought it a grand idea. “Happy and ready to come to you,” Dickens announced to her in one note, and for the next three months, through November and December of 1844 into January of 1845, the author was with her several times a day. Her husband was present for some of these sessions. (Emile valiantly attempted to learn the mesmeric arts from Dickens so that he could help his wife on his own, but, alas, Emile de la Rue had no talent for Magnetic Influence.)

Central to the mystery of Madame de la Rue’s malady was the presence of a lurking Phantom who haunted her dreams and somehow was the source of her illness. “It is absolutely essential,” Dickens instructed Emile de la Rue, “that this Phantom to which her incapacitating thoughts are directed and clustered around, should not regain its power.”

To keep this from happening, Dickens began responding to summonses from the de la Rues at any time of the day or night. Sometimes Dickens would leave Catherine alone in their cold Genoese bed and rush to Madame de la Rue’s bedside at four AM in order to help his poor patient.

Slowly Madame de la Rue’s spasms, tics, contortions, and sleepless nights began to ebb. Emile was delighted. Yet every day Dickens continued to magnetise her to ask more questions about the Phantom. To those who watched the mesmeric sessions in the parlour of the de la Rue mansion, it seemed very much like a séance, with Madame de la Rue—deep in her trance—reporting of dark and light spirit forms shifting around her in some distant location. And always with the Phantom trying to bring her under his or its control, while Charles Dickens valiantly attempted to free Madame de la Rue from the creature’s dark influence.

When Dickens and Catherine left Genoa in late January to continue their travels to Rome and Naples, Emile kept sending the author daily updates and diary entries reporting on his wife’s condition. Dickens wrote back that it was essential that the de la Rues join him in Rome no later than late February, and Emile de la Rue and his wife arranged to travel there early.