“Nothing like that,” said Dickens. Kate often irritated her father, but his response to her taunt tonight was filled with equanimity. “I have decided to create a new art form altogether. Something the world has never experienced—has never imagined! — before this.”
“Another—eh—eh—a new—eh—eh, that is to say—by God, Dickens!” offered Macready.
The author leaned to his left and said softly to Cecile, “My dear, of all men at this table, your husband knows best the beauty and power of the new endeavour I shall be embarking upon in a very few weeks.”
“You’re going to become a full-time actor, Father?” chirped up Henry, who had seen his father on the amateur stage his entire life and who had been tossed around by him on that same stage during the early performances of my The Frozen Deep.
“Not at all, my boy,” said Dickens, still smiling. “I daresay that our friend Wilkie at the other end of the table here might have a glimmer of what I have in mind.”
“I have no clue whatsoever,” I said truthfully.
Dickens set both hands on the table and spread his arms in a way that reminded me of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. That thought had hardly entered my mind before another followed fast on its heels—If this is the Last Supper, which amongst us here is Judas?
“I have authorised Wills to negotiate on my behalf with Messrs Chappell of New Bond Street for an engagement consisting of at least thirty readings,” continued Dickens. “While the negotiations have only yet begun, I am quite confident that this shall happen and that it shall herald a new era of my career and of public entertainment and education.”
“But Father,” cried Mamie, obviously shocked, “you know what Dr Beard has said to you during your recent illnesses—degenerations of some functions of the heart, the need for more rest—your previous reading tours have so exhausted you…”
“Oh, nonsense,” cried Dickens but with even a broader smile. “We are considering appointing Mr Dolby there…”
The huge man blushed and bowed his head.
“… as my business manager and companion on these trips. Chappell would organise all business and administrative arrangements, as well as pay for my own and Mr Dolby’s and probably Mr Wills’s personal and travelling expenses. All I shall have to do is to take my book and read at the appointed place and hour.”
“But reading from your books is hardly… what did you call it, Father?… a new art form,” said Katey. “You’ve done it many times.”
“So I have, my dear,” agreed Dickens. “But never the way I shall on this and future tours. As you know, I never simply… read from my books, although sometimes I feign to. All of my performances are done from memory and I reserve the right to edit, conflate, alter, and rewrite scenes to a great extent… even improvise completely upon occasion, just as the Eminent Tragedian here has done count-less times to the betterment even of Shakespeare.” He patted Macready’s arm.
“Ah—yes—I, of course—but, Bulwer-Lytton, yes, I would gag away at will,” said Macready, reddening under his pale skin and wrinkles, “but the—er—er—the Bard. By God… never!”
Dickens laughed. “Well, my prose is not the Bard’s. It is not inscribed in stone anywhere like Moses’ Commandments.”
“But still,” said my brother, “a new art form? Can any reading be such?”
“Mine shall be from this tour forward,” snapped Dickens. His smile had faded.
“Your readings are already unique in their tone and brilliance, sir,” said young Dickenson.
“Thank you, Edmond. Your generous spirit is appreciated. But in my future readings, beginning on this tour and continuing… as I said… perhaps for many years, I plan to bring to the proceedings a totally unprecedented level of theatricality combined with a true understanding of the manipulation of animal magnetism.”
“Magnetism, by Jove!” exploded Dolby. “Sir, do you propose to mesmerise the audience as well as to entertain them?”
Dickens smiled again and stroked his whiskers. “Mr Dolby, I shall assume that you read. Novels, I mean.”
“Indeed I do, sir!” laughed Dolby. “I have enjoyed all of yours and also Mr Collins’s here… Mr Collins at the end of the table to my right, I mean to say.” He turned to me. “That book Armadale that Mr Dickens’s press published for you, Mr Collins. Wonderful stuff, sir. That heroine—Lydia Gwilt, I believe her name was. What a woman! Wonderful!”
“We did not have the pleasure of publishing that book of Mr Collins’s in serial form,” Dickens said formally. “Nor shall we have the honour of publishing it in book form. It shall appear in May of the coming year from another publisher. Although I am delighted to be able to say that we are in the process of wooing our dear Wilkie back to publish his next novel in All the Year Round.”
“Ah, wonderful, wonderful!” said Dolby, all hearty good cheer. He had no idea of the faux pas he had committed with his praise.
Indeed, my most recent novel, Armadale, riding on the success of The Woman in White that had appeared in Dickens’s Household Words, had been serialised—with a much higher payment for me—in The Cornhill Magazine. And it was to come out in full book form from Smith, Elder & Company, who also published The Cornhill.
But this was not the full faux pas, nor the reason that Dickens’s face—beaming and relaxed and eager just a moment earlier—now looked pinched and old. The reason for his change of mood was, I am certain, precisely the heroine Lydia Gwilt whom Dolby had been so inopportune to mention.
At one point I had had Lydia, who was no stranger to pain, hers and that of those mortals close to her, say in the novel—
Who was the man who invented laudanum? I thank him from the bottom of my heart, whoever he was. If all the miserable wretches in pain of body and mind, whose comforter he has been, could meet together to sing his praises, what a chorus it would be! I have had six delicious hours of oblivion; I have woke up with my mind composed.
I had heard through numerous intermediaries, my brother and Katey included, that Dickens had not been pleased with those words… nor with the general tolerant tone towards laudanum and other opiates shown throughout the novel.
“But you were going to tell us how our act of reading novels relates to the new art form of your proposed readings,” I said to Dickens down the length of the cluttered table.
“Yes,” said the Inimitable, smiling towards Cecile Macready as if in apology for the interruption of his narration. “You know the incomparable and—I would dare say—unique feeling one has when reading. The focus of attention to the exclusion of all sensory input, other than the eyes taking in the words, one has when entering into a good book?”
“Oh, rather!” cried Dickenson. “The world just fades away. All other thoughts just fade away! All that remains are the sights and sounds and characters and world created for us by the author! One might as well be anaesthetised to the mundane world around us. All readers have had that experience.”
“Precisely,” said Dickens, his smile back in place and his eyes bright. “This happens to be precisely the receptive state a person must be in for a mesmeric therapist to be able to do his work. It is, through the judicious use of language, phrases, descriptions, and dialogue, a form of lowering the reader into the same sort of receptive state of mind that a patient under Magnetic Influence must feel.”
“By God!” cried Macready. “The—er—the audience at the theatre enters into just such an—a—a—sort of receptive trance. I have always said that the—er—er—audiences are the third point of the collaborative—ah—collaborative triangle with the playwright and the actor.”
“Exactly,” said Dickens. “And this is the crux of my new performing art as opposed to mere readings. Building upon the receptive state of the audiences—so much more intense even than that of readers alone at home or in a railway carriage or even sitting in their gardens—I intend to use the incipient magnetism, combined with my voice and words, to put them into an even deeper receptive and appreciative and collaborative state than either literature or theatre alone could produce.”