Her sister Mamie was there—here, on this very spot where I now stood in Dickens’s back yard overlooking the frozen fields and bare, distant forests of Kent—and Mamie did implore her father not to destroy the letters. Dickens’s response was—“Would to God every letter I had ever written was on that pile.”

When the files and drawers of Dickens’s study were empty that day, his sons Henry and Plorn had roasted onions on the ashes of the great bonfire until a sudden afternoon rainstorm drove everyone inside. Dickens later wrote me—“It then rained very heavily… I suspect my correspondence of having overcast the face of the Heavens.”

Why had Dickens burned his legacy of correspondence?

Just the previous year, in 1864, Dickens had told me that he’d written to his old friend the actor William Charles Macready—

Daily seeing improper uses made of confidential letters in the addressing of them to a public audience that have no business with them, I made not long ago a great fire in my field at Gad’s Hill, and burnt every letter I possessed. And now I always destroy every letter I receive not on absolute business, and my mind is so far at ease.

What improper uses? Some friends whom Dickens and I had in common—of the few who had learned of the mass burning— speculated that the Inimitable’s difficult and public separation from Catherine (made public mostly through his own poor judgement, we should remember) had terrified him into imagining would-be literary biographers and other literary ghouls in the days and months after his demise poring over his confidential correspondence of so many years. For decades, these mutual friends speculated, Charles Dickens’s life and work had been public property. He would be damned, they believed, if reactions from friends to his most private thoughts should also be gawped and gaped at by the curious public.

I had a slightly different theory about why Dickens burned the letters.

I believe that I put the idea of burning the letters into Dickens’s head.

In the Christmas 1854 edition of Household Words, in my story “The Fourth Poor Traveller,” the narrator, a lawyer, says, “My experience in the law, Mr Frank, has convinced me that if everybody burnt everybody else’s letters, half the Courts of Justice in this country might shut up shop.” The courts of justice, such as they were, were very much on Charles Dickens’s mind in those days as he wrote Bleak House and then again in 1858 when his wife’s family threatened to drag him into court for various injustices to Catherine, including, one presumes, adultery.

And just a few months before Dickens had committed his letters to the bonfire, I had written of burning a letter in my novel The Woman in White, which was then being serialised in Household Words, carefully edited by Dickens. In my tale, Marian Halcombe has received a letter from a certain Walter Hartright. Marian’s half-sister, Laura, is in love with Hartright but has agreed to fulfil her promise to her dying father to marry someone else. Hartright is ready to sail away to South America. Marian decides not to tell Laura about the contents of the letter.

I almost doubt whether I ought not to go a step farther, and burn the letter at once, for fear of it one day falling into wrong hands. It not only refers to Laura in terms which ought to remain a secret forever between the writer and me; but it reiterates his suspicion—so obstinate, so unaccountable, and so alarming—that he has been secretly watched.… But there is a danger in my keeping the letter. The merest accident might place it at the mercy of strangers. I may fall ill; I may die—better to burn it at once, and have one anxiety the less.

It is burnt! The ashes of his farewell letter—the last he may ever write to me—lie in a few black fragments in the hearth.

My theory, such as it is, is that this scene from The Woman in White made a profound impression upon Dickens at the time that he was working so very, very hard to create a second and secret life with Ellen Ternan, but also that—for whatever reason—it was his daughter Kate’s marriage to my brother in July of 1860 that finally forced him to burn his correspondence and, I am almost certain, to convince Ellen Ternan to burn all letters he had sent her in the past three years. I am certain that Dickens saw Katey’s marriage to Charles Collins as a form of betrayal from within his family, and it is not too much to speculate that he could then imagine his daughters and sons, but especially his daughter Kate, she who everyone agreed was so much like him, betraying him yet again by selling or publishing his correspondence when he was dead.

Dickens had aged terribly in the years between 1857 and 1860—some say that he went from being a youth to an old man with almost no pause for middle age along the way—and it could very well have been his brush with illness and the spectre of death at that time which reminded him of my letter-burning scene and prompted him to get on with destroying all evidence of his inner thoughts.

“I know what you’re thinking, my dear Wilkie,” Dickens said suddenly.

The other men looked startled. Swathed in their layers of wool, they had been watching the weak sun set beneath the layer of clouds to the west across the rolling, frozen Kentish fields.

“What am I thinking, my dear Dickens?” I said.

“You’re thinking that a great bonfire here would warm us wonderfully,” said Dickens.

I blinked at this, feeling the stiffness of my frozen lashes against my icy cheeks.

“A bonfire!” cried the young Dickenson. “What a capital idea!”

“It would be if we weren’t needed inside to join the women and children in their Christmas Day games,” said Dickens, clapping his heavy gloves together with a sound like a rifle shot. Sultan shied suddenly, leaping sideways against the leash and cowering as if a real rifle had been fired at him.

“Warm punch for everyone!” cried the Inimitable, and our procession of woollen spheroids with bright scarves waddled into the house behind him.

I ABSENTED MYSELF from the felicity of playing games with the children and women and sought the refuge of my room. I always stayed in the same guest room at Gad’s Hill Place and I was quietly relieved to discover that it was still mine, that I had not been demoted in recent months. (Because of the crowding with family staying over the holidays and the Mysterious Guests still to arrive that evening, Percy Fitzgerald had been relegated to a room in the Falstaff Inn across the street. I found this odd, since Percy was an old friend and certainly deserved a room in Dickens’s home much more than did the Dickenson orphan, who was staying in the house. But I had long ago given up trying to understand or predict Charles Dickens’s whims.)

I should note here, Dear Reader, that I had never shared my late-night laudanum insight that Dickens was planning to kill young rich-orphan Edmond Dickenson (all having something to do with scarlet geraniums spilled about the landscape and hotel room like blood) with Inspector Field or with anyone else. The reason is obvious—it was a late-night laudanum revelation, and although some of those have proven priceless to me as a novelist, it would be hard to describe to the squinting Inspector Field the chain of hidden logic and drug-induced intuition that had led to the insight.

But back to my room at Gad’s Hill Place. Although I told Caroline otherwise after long stays with Dickens, his home was a comfortable refuge for guests. Every guest room had a marvellously comfortable bed in which to sleep, several expensive and equally comfortable items of furniture, and—always, in every guest room and in some hallways and public rooms—a table covered with writing materials, including headed notepaper, envelopes, cut quill pens, wax, matches, and sealing-wax. All this was arranged in a room that was invariably clean, scrupulously neat, and impeccably comfortable.