“Ahhh,” said Inspector Field again, but with more conviction this time. “Well, Mr Dickens… or Mr Tringham, if he prefers… goes to great lengths to hide his presence in Slough.”

“How is that?” I said.

“He dates his letters from Eton, telling his friends that he was merely walking in the Park there,” said Inspector Field. “And he walks miles across back fields from Slough to the Eton railway station, as if he chose to be noticed—if he were noticed at all—waiting for the train to London there rather than in Slough.”

I stopped on our walk and asked, “How do you know what Mr Dickens tells his friends in his private letters, Inspector? Have you been steaming open his mail or interrogating his friends?”

Inspector Field only smiled.

But all of these revelations, Dear Reader, would come about by the spring of 1866, and I must return us now to that bizarrely memorable Christmas of 1865.

WHEN DICKENS INVITED ME up to Gad’s Hill Place for Christmas Day, suggesting in his note that I stay through New Year’s, I accepted at once. “The Butler and the Butler’s Mother shall understand,” he wrote in the same note, referring to Harriet (whom we called Carrie ever more frequently as she matured) and her mother, Caroline, in his usual bantering way. I am not sure Caroline and Carrie did fully understand or appreciate my absence that week, but that was of little concern to me.

As I took the short train ride to Chatham, I held the Christmas Issue of All the Year Round in my hands—the one I’d just contributed to and helped put out and the one that held Dickens’s Christmas story “Cheap Jack” in it—and I thought about the warp and woof of the Inimitable’s fiction these days.

Perhaps it takes a novelist (or some Future Literary Critic such as yourself, Dear Reader) to see what lies behind the words of another novelist’s fiction.

I shall start with Dickens’s most recent Christmas tale:

Cheap Jack, the eponymous hero of the Inimitable’s little fable and a common name in our time for the travelling salesman who moved from village to village with his inexpensive wares, was written about a man whose wife was no longer with him, whose child was dead, and who—for professional reasons—must hide his feelings from the world. Dickens’s character was “King of the Cheap Jacks” and happened to be taking a paternal interest in a young girl with “a pretty face and bright, dark hair.” Was this a twisted self-portrait by the author? Was the young girl Ellen Ternan?

Dickens being Dickens, of course, the girl with the pretty face and bright, dark hair also happens to be deaf and dumb. What would a Dickens Christmas tale be without pathos and bathos?

“See us on the footboard,” Cheap Jack tells us of his time in front of audiences, “and you’d give pretty well anything you possess to be us. See us off the footboard, and you’d add a trifle to be off your bargain.”

Is Charles Dickens telling us here about the great abyss between his gay public life and persona and his private sadnesses and bone-deep loneliness away from the public eye?

And then there was his huge novel Our Mutual Friend, completed (as was “Cheap Jack”) the previous September and which had just ended its full run of nineteen installments in our All the Year Round.

It might truly take another professional author to see just how complex and dangerous a book Our Mutual Friend actually was. I had read it in instalments in our magazine over the past year and a half; I had heard Dickens read parts of it aloud to small groups; I had read some of the book in manuscript form; and after the final instalment was published, I had read it all again. It was incredible. For the first time in my life, I believe I hated Charles Dickens out of sheer jealousy.

I cannot speak for your age, Dear Reader, but already in our nineteenth century just approaching the two-thirds mark, tragedy was replacing comedy in the eyes and hearts and analytical minds of “serious readers.” Shakespeare’s tragedies were to be found on the stage more frequently than his brilliant comedies and they received more serious reviews and discussions. The sustained and profound humour of, say, a Chaucer or Cervantes was being replaced in the short list of masterpieces by the more serious tragedies and histories of both the classics and our contemporaries. If this trend continues, Dear Reader, then by the time you read this manuscript a century and more hence, the art and appreciation of comedies will be all but lost.

But this was a matter of taste. For years—decades now—the fiction of Charles Dickens had grown darker and more serious, allowing themes to dictate the structure of his novels and causing his characters to fit neatly (too neatly) into the pigeonholes of the overall thematic structure much like library cards might be shuffled into the proper drawer. (This is not to say that even the most serious Dickens novels of recent years had been without humour; I do not believe that Dickens could write something totally devoid of humour, any more than he could be trusted to stay completely serious at a funeral. He was truly irrepressible in that regard. But his topics had been increasingly serious as he abandoned the largely unstructured Pickwickian celebrations of life that had made him the Inimitable Boz and as social critique and social satire—all-important to him personally—had moved more towards the centre of his work.

But in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens had created a sustained comedic novel of more than eight hundred cramped pages without striking—as far as I could tell—a single false note.

This was incredible. It made my joints ache and my eyes burn with pain.

In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens had abandoned the grand motifs of Little Dorrit and Bleak House and Great Expectations and almost completely subordinated his personal and social opinions into a masterful display of language and nuance that came very close to perfection. Very close. The complexity of his characters in this book far surpassed anything he had done before; indeed, Dickens seemed to have resurrected many of his earlier characters and reimagined them with the focus of a newly gained maturity and a newly found sense of forgiveness. Thus the evil lawyer Tulkinghorn from Bleak House reappears as the young lawyer Mortimer Lightwood, but redeems himself as Tulkinghorn never could have. The vile Ralphy Nickleby is reborn as the bounder Fledgeby, but does not escape punishment as had Nickleby. (Indeed, the severe caning of Fledgeby by the other bounder, Alfred Lammle, is one of the high points in all of Charles Dickens’s long list of fictions.) Similarly, Noddy Boffin turns into a Scrooge who avoids becoming a miser; the old Jew Mr Riah atones for the sins of Dickens’s sometimes-criticised (especially by Jews) Fagin by not being a heartless money-lender but only the conscience-stricken employee of a Christian heartless money-lender; and Podsnap is—besides being a devastating portrait of John Forster (devastating and so subtle that Forster never recognised himself in the character, although everyone else did)—Podsnap is… Podsnap. The quintessence of Podsnappery. Which may well be the quintessence of our age.

Yet even while the tone and structure of Our Mutual Friend is one of flawless satiric comedy that would have honoured Cervantes, the underlying chiaroscuric background of the novel is dark to the point of despair. London has become a barren and stony desert, “cheaper as it quadrupled in wealth; less imperial as its empire widened.” It is “a hopeless city, with no rent in the leaden canopy of its sky.” The tones are sombre to the point of funereal, with even the sky being darkened by the inescapable fog from yellow and brown to an underlying creeping blackness—“a heap of vapour charged with muffled sounds of wheels and enfolding a muffled catarrh.” The city so beloved by Dickens is portrayed as either grey or dusty or dark or muddy or cold or windy or rain-swept or drowned in its own refuse and filth. Most commonly in Our Mutual Friend, it is revealed to be all these things at once.