Boz will be Boz

Chester, the walled English city that was once a prominent, fortified Roman army camp, was a bustling civilian settlement in 1869. On April 17 that year, The Chester Chronicle urged its readers to attend a dramatic reading the next day. Dubbed a “farewell reading”, it was supposed to be the last time audiences in Chester could see Britain’s most popular writer in action. Unfortunately, on April 18, the writer in question suffered a mild stroke and the organisers decided to call off the event.

And so it was that Chester was deprived of one last evening with Charles Dickens, the most popular novelist of his era and acknowledged today as one of the greatest writers of all time, the creator of immortal works such as A Christmas Carol , Great Expectations , David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities . Although Dickens recovered in a few weeks, enough to pull off one last set of “farewell readings”, he never returned to Chester — not that we know of, anyway.

Beginning of The End

Four years before the stroke in Chester, Dickens had travelled to France, ostensibly for a holiday. However, as his closest friend and manager John Forster knew, Dickens had another agenda — to meet his mistress Ellen Ternan, a young actress he met in 1857, during a production of The Frozen Hand , a play written by Dickens and his protégé, Wilkie Collins (who later wrote the iconic mystery novels The Moonstone and The Woman in White ). The then 45-year-old author was smitten by the 18-year-old Ternan and cast her in the play along with her mother Justine, also an actress. Dickens, of course, was a married man and his daughter, Kate (Perugini, his youngest child, who became a renowned painter), was slightly younger than Ternan.

Dickens’s side of the story is known, but a collection of 98 previously unseen letters now tells his wife Catherine’s version of their separation. The letters — discovered by University of York professor John Bowen, who first found them listed in a 2014 auction catalogue — were written by the author’s neighbour Edward Dutton Cook to a journalist. “He [Charles] discovered at last that she [Catherine] had outgrown his liking... He even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing,” Cook wrote.

Fearful of a scandal that could ruin his professional reputation, Dickens preferred to keep the affair quiet, even though he had divorced Catherine by the time he was in France. Accompanied by Ternan and her mother, Dickens boarded a ferry from Boulogne to Folkestone. The plan was to board a train from Folkestone that’d take the trio all the way to London. Unfortunately, Dickens’s celebrity status meant that even on the ferry, a co-passenger recognised him and later recorded his memories.

“Travelling with him was a lady not his wife, nor his sister-in-law, yet he strutted about the deck with the air of a man bristling with self-importance, every line of his face and every gesture of his limbs seemed haughtily to say — ‘Look at me; make the most of your chance. I am the great, the only Charles Dickens; whatever I may choose to do is justified by that fact.’”

The train ride from Folkestone to London proved to be worse still — on June 9, 1865, at about 3 in the afternoon, their London-bound train derailed at Staplehurst, Kent, killing 10 people and injuring dozens of others. The compartment where Dickens and Ternan were seated was the only one among eight first-class compartments that did not derail. Yet, a couple of passengers in it died even as Dickens tried to help them. Later, passengers described how the author tried to provide elementary care for the injured, running about with a hat full of water. In the ensuing chaos, he almost forgot his manuscript-in-progress, which would later become the novel Our Mutual Friend . Dickens ran back inside the wreck to recover it after the rescue mission was almost complete.

According to his children, as well as Forster, Dickens never quite got over the trauma of this accident. In the immediate aftermath, he lost his voice for two weeks. Another biographer, Claire Tomalin, mentions in her book Charles Dickens: A Life that after the accident, Dickens was always nervous while travelling by train.

His last bow

Dickens — who wrote under the pen-name Boz when he was first published — was a born showman. As a young man of 20, before his writing career began, he tried his hand at stage acting. But before his acting ambitions could be furthered, he was hired as a journalist at The Mirror of Parliament , covering the House of Commons. After his serialised novels became all the rage — not just in London, but throughout England and, indeed, America and beyond — Dickens channelled his youthful penchant for acting into a series of dramatic readings.

When the series began in 1853, the proceeds went to charity. But, by 1858, Dickens was performing for profit. He would pick high-stakes emotional scenes from his books and pay close attention to acting nuances that amplified these moments.

The Sikes-Nancy exchange from Oliver Twist was a fan favourite, as was the scene introducing the villainous Uriah Heep from David Copperfield (whose obsequiousness was famously inspired by Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish author who was a little obsessed with Dickens, writing fan mail to him for close to a decade).

Edgar Johnson, a Dickens biographer, wrote in 1952: “It was more than a reading; it was an extraordinary exhibition of acting (...) without a single prop or bit of costume, by changes of voice, by gesture, by vocal expression, Dickens peopled his stage with a throng of characters.” Travelling with a six-man entourage, Dickens embarked on a reading tour of America between December 1867 and April 1868, a venture that earned him £19,000, quite a fortune (if one were to adjust for inflation, that sum is equivalent to approximately £2 million today) and certainly much more than he — or any other published writer of his time — was earning through the printed word.

In his last years, therefore, Dickens embarked on his “farewell readings” with his characteristic sense of purpose. Too ill to travel frequently, most of these were in London, and the movers and shakers of the city thronged these events, eager to see the master novelist one last time. After the stroke in Chester, however, his health was firmly on the decline and he complained of giddiness and frequent headaches. Writing in The Guardian in 2004, former Cabinet speechwriter Matt Shinn described how these readings almost certainly accelerated Dickens’s demise.

“For all the extraordinary effect that they had, the story of Dickens’s public readings does not have a happy ending. By the late 1860s, the author’s family and friends were becoming concerned that the tours were taking too great a toll on his health, particularly after the Sikes and Nancy scene was added to the bill. ‘The finest thing I ever heard,’ Dickens’s son Charley told him, ‘but don’t do it.’ As with most other things in his life, Dickens pursued his readings with a compulsive energy that allowed him little time to rest.”

Doctor’s orders

The most entertaining story around Dickens’s last days is an entirely fictional one — The Unquiet Dead , the third episode of the first series of the revamped Doctor Who , originally broadcast in April 2005. The episode was written by Mark Gatiss, best known as the co-creator of the show Sherlock , where he also appears as Mycroft Holmes. In the Who episode, the time-travelling alien known only as the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), along with his companion Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), travels to Cardiff on Christmas Eve, 1869, even as Dickens (Simon Callow) is in the middle of one of his dramatic readings. Soon, the trio realises that Cardiff is being invaded by a gaseous entity called Gelth (Zoe Thorne), which takes over corpses and re-animates them to extend its own life. The Gelth corpses look a lot like ghosts, like Jacob Marley’s ghost from A Christmas Carol . Imagine Dickens’s surprise, then, when one of these ‘ghosts’ interrupts his performance.

There are delightful moments strewn throughout this episode, like the time Dickens sees Gelth in its true gaseous form and cries, “What the Shakespeare is going on?” We’re shown how Dickens prefers a good adventure over everything else. The Doctor, who is a big fan of A Christmas Carol , tells him that Rose’s life is in danger. Dickens immediately sets off on a high-speed chase in his private carriage, saying, “Why are we wasting my time talking about dry old books? This is much more important.”

There are also wicked little jibes, references to commonplace criticisms of Dickens’s novels. Some of his serialised books, such as The Old Curiosity Shop , were criticised for saccharine sentimentality and over-the-top characters. The Old Curiosity Shop was a real tearjerker, the story of an orphan, a 13-year-old girl called Nell Trent or ‘Little Nell’, who lived with her mentally unstable grandfather. Little Nell’s fate was so important to Dickens’s American readers that they would flock to the harbour, shouting a single, fearful question to incoming ships carrying the latest issue of Master Humphrey’s Clock (Dickens’s weekly journal): “Is Little Nell dead?”

Good, bad, ugly: Oscar Wilde criticised Dickens’s writing in his inimitable style, saying that Little Nell’s death in The Old Curiosity Shop moved him to “tears...of laughter”

Nell’s eventual death was a body blow to many readers, but not everyone was impressed. Oscar Wilde criticised the writing in his inimitable style, saying, “One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears... of laughter.” The Doctor echoes Wilde’s sentiments, saying that Little Nell’s death always “cracked him up”.

The Unquiet Dead ends on a typically Doctor Who bittersweet note. Dickens has by now realised that the Doctor is hundreds of years old and has not just seen but lived the future. He asks the all-important question, “My books, Doctor, do they last?” The Doctor replies, “Oh yes”, upon which Dickens asks, “How long?” The Doctor finally says, “Forever”, leaving Dickens with a satisfied smile on his face and a spring in his step as he bids adieu. Rose comments that the Doctor had probably given the old man a new lease of life and that he may yet create another masterpiece for his fans. The Doctor, however, tells Rose that in a matter of months, Dickens would die following another stroke.

This writer likes to believe that, thanks to the Doctor, Dickens died in 1870 knowing that his words would never be forgotten — it just makes for a better story. And you can be sure that Dickens remained, till the very end, devoted to crafting a bloody good story.

Aditya Mani Jha is a freelance writer based in Delhi