To be honest with you, Dear Reader who lives and breathes in such a remote branch of my future that no hint of my candour could possibly get back to anyone who loved Charles Dickens, I am… was… almost certainly always shall be… ten times the architect of plot that Charles Dickens ever was. For Dickens, plot was something that might incidentally grow from his marionette-machinations of bizarre characters; should his weekly sales begin slipping in one of his innumerable serialised tales, he would just march in more silly characters and have them strut and perform for the gullible reader, as easily as he banished poor Martin Chuzzlewit to the United States to pump up his (Dickens’s) readership.
My plots are subtle in ways that Charles Dickens could never fully perceive, much less manage in his own obvious (to any discerning reader) meandering machinations of haphazard plotting and self-indulgent asides.
Impudent and ignorant people, such as this orphan-whelp Edmond Dickenson, were always saying that I was constantly “learning from Charles Dickens,” but the truth is quite the opposite. Dickens himself admitted, as I have mentioned earlier, that his idea for self-sacrificing Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities had come from my character of Richard Wardour in The Frozen Deep. And what was his “old woman in white” in Great Expectations, the much-ballyhooed Miss Haversham, if not a direct steal from my central character in The Woman in White?
I SETTLED DOWN to my solitary meal. I enjoyed coming to this club because of how the chef here prepared lark pudding, which I considered one of the four great works produced by my present age. Tonight I decided to dine relatively lightly and ordered two types of pâté, soup, some sweet lobsters, a bottle of dry champagne, a leg of mutton stuffed with oysters and minced onions, two orders of asparagus, some braised beef, a bit of dressed crab, and a side of eggs.
While enjoying this modest repast at my leisure, I recalled that one of the few things I had ever liked about Dickens’s wife was her cooking—or at least the cooking she oversaw at Tavistock House, since I had never seen the woman actually don an apron or lift a ladle. Years ago Catherine Dickens had (under the name Lady Maria Clutterbuck) brought out a volume of recipes, based on what she served regularly at their home at Devonshire Terrace, in a book called What Shall We Have for Dinner? Most of her choices were to my liking—and many were visible on my table here this evening, although not in such plentitude or with an equal glory of gravies (I consider most cooking as simply a prelude to gravies)—as her tastes had also run towards lobsters, large legs of mutton, heavy beefs, and elaborate desserts. There were so many variations of toasted cheese in Catherine’s volume of recipes that one reviewer commented—“No man could possibly survive the consumption of such frequent toasted cheese.”
But Dickens had. And had never put on a pound over the years. Of course, it is possible that his habit of briskly walking twelve to twenty miles a day might have something to do with that. I am, myself, of a more sedentary nature. My inclinations, as well as my chronic illness, keep me close to my desk and couch and bed. I walk when I must but recline when I can. (It was a ritual of mine, when spending time at Tavistock House or Gad’s Hill Place, to hide in the library or some empty guest room until two PM or three PM—whenever Dickens finished his writing labours and came hunting for someone to go on one of his confounded forced marches with him. Of course, it was a ritual of Dickens’s to seek me out—often tracking me by the smell of my cigar smoke, I realise now—so I was often good for a mile or two of Dickens’s long walks, which would be less than twenty minutes or so at his impossible pace.)
This night, I could not decide between two desserts, so—Solomon-like—I chose both the lark pudding and the well-cooked apple pudding. And a bottle of port. And coffees.
While finishing my pudding I noticed a tall, aristocratic, but very old man rising from a chair across the room and for an instant thought it was Thackeray. Then I remembered that Thackeray had died on Christmas Eve of 1863, almost a year and a half ago.
I had been in this very club, a guest of Dickens, when the older writer and the Inimitable had reconciled after several years of cold silence. That breach had begun during the height of the madness surrounding Dickens’s separation from Catherine, when he was most vulnerable. Someone at the Garrick Club had mentioned that Dickens was having an affair with his sister-in-law, and Thackeray, evidently without thinking, had said something to the effect—“No, it is with an actress.”
Word got back to Dickens, of course. It always did. Then a young journalist friend of Dickens’s, part of his “squad” as it was said then, a certain Edmund Yates (who, like Iago, always had a lean and hungry look, I thought), had written a truly unpleasant and dismissive profile of Thackeray in Town Talk. Deeply stung, the old gentleman-writer noted that both he and Yates were members of the Garrick and asked the club to expel the younger man on the grounds that his conduct in writing such a piece had been “intolerable in the society of gentlemen.”
In an astounding act of insensitivity towards his old friend Thackeray, Dickens had taken the young man’s part in the dispute and then resigned from the Garrick himself when the membership committee had agreed with Thackeray and expelled the journalist.
So it was here in the Athenaeum Club, years later, that the breach was finally healed. I had heard Dickens describe the reconciliation to Wills. “There I was hanging up my hat in the Athenaeum,” he said, “when I looked up and saw Thackeray’s haggard face. The man looked like a ghost, Wills. He looked as dead as Marley and lacked only the chains. So I said to him, ‘Thackeray, have you been ill?’ And we struck up a conversation after the years of silence and shook hands and all now is as it was before.”
This is very touching. It is also very false.
I happened to have been in the Athenaeum that night, and both Dickens and I saw Thackeray trying to struggle into his coat. The old gentleman was speaking to two other members. Dickens, coming in, passed close by the old writer without giving him a glance. I was putting away my stick and hat and Dickens had already passed Thackeray and had his foot on the stair when the older author chased after Dickens, catching him on the stairway. I heard Thackeray speak first and then hold out his hand to Dickens. They shook hands. Then Dickens went into the dining room and I watched Thackeray return to his interlocutor—I believe it was Sir Theodore Martin—and I heard him say, “I am glad I have done this.”
Charles Dickens was a kind and frequently sentimental man, but he was never the first to mend a quarrel. A fact that I would be reminded of soon enough.
AS I TOOK A CAB HOME, I thought about Dickens’s queer plan to seek out this phantom named Drood.
As I was listening to Dickens tell his story of the Staplehurst disaster that morning, I had gone through shifting opinions on the veracity of the “Mr Drood” commentary. Charles Dickens was not a liar. But Charles Dickens was also always convinced of the veracity and truth of whatever position he took on any subject and—through his telling, but especially through his own writing—he would always convince himself that something was true, simply because he said it was, even when it was not. His various public letters blaming his wife, Catherine, for the separation eight years earlier, a separation that was obviously his idea, his need, and his instigation, is a perfect example of this phenomenon.