The tradesmen brought us no new books, or anything else, for that matter, that one could deem “new.” It seemed that everything which was essential and provident for human use in the year 1890 was replicated year after year after year upon their rumbling wooden hand-trucks and wobbling barrows. Nothing appeared that hadn’t been seen before. Nothing appeared that wasn’t historically familiar. How sad, we thought, that industrial progress had become so thoroughly arrested outside our border, when within the Dell, we continued to devise and invent and experiment in the name of societal improvement and technological advancement (that is, when we weren’t keeping too comfortably to the old and familiar ways ourselves).
It was not empty boast to say that the candles our chandlers fashioned and sold in the year 2000 burned almost twice as long as did those in use in 1890!
Enterprise, thy name was and always will be: Dingley Dell!
DINGLIAN DAY, August 14, a day set aside to acknowledge that day in 1890 upon which the works of Charles Dickens, the Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, the Holy Bible, a dictionary and atlas were placed by fate into the hands of all Dinglians to their perpetual betterment. A day of celebration and patriotic pride, marked by public readings of selections from the novels of Dickens, the Holy Bible, and poetry from The Companion.
OBSESSITOR, name given to a man or woman whose behaviour is characterised by monomania, a number of the most famous Dinglians being so diagnosed, with extreme cases requiring isolation, and less severe cases arguing only for tolerance and, when possible, exploitation of the prodigious knowledge acquired to the benefit of the commonweal.
TICKET PORTER. Following the dissolution of the Dingley Dell Post-Office as a direct result of the Post-Office Scandal of 1957, portage throughout the Dell was taken up by independent Ticket Porters — for voice messages, letters and small packages — and by the Punctual Parcel Delivery Company — for the delivery of larger packages — each service in short order proving a most acceptable and efficient replacement for the discredited post-office (and each proving far less prone to abuse of the mails through neglect and after-hour strumpet parties). Ticket porters are generally fleetfooted men and older boys who use horses only for priority deliveries, although the porters who serve the PPDC always employ a heavily laden van, which, during Advent season, is driven by a man who looks very much like Dickens’ Father Christmas.
Chapter the Fifth. Sunday, June 15, 2003
ll thoughts of the unfortunate Mrs. Pyegrave having been supplanted by those of Newman and his fretful father and fearful mother (as well as by those of his neither fretful nor fearful older sister Alice whose callous lack of concern for her brother I found to be rather remarkable), I was surprised to discover Antonia waiting for me outside the All Souls Church in the Dell, where I had been dispatched by my sister-in-law Charlotte to solicit a prayer from every morning worshipper on behalf of her missing son. Because I generally spent my Saturday nights in either lengthy scholastic lucubration or equally lengthy frivolous inebriation, both activities typically leaving me abed until nearly noon most Sunday mornings, I seldom found myself communing within these walls, though a friendship since boyhood with the church’s pastor, Vicar Upwitch, sent me to this beautiful edifice perhaps once a week to gather up my ecclesiastical chum and subject him to a lively session of beer-lubricated theological jousting at our favourite public-house (I the inveterate infidel, he the habited keeper of the faith).
“Trimmers! I must speak with you!” Antonia’s hand was upon my sleeve. Her expression gave urgency and some alarm.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
“Not here. Let us go into the garden.” Antonia’s anxious and furtive manner had drawn the attention of almost every congregant lolling and chatting upon the church lawn prior to the call to worship. There were awkward smiles for those with whom I was fairly well acquainted and polite nods for all the others as Antonia drew her hand through my arm and piloted me, without my having any say in the matter, to the small contemplative garden, which was presently cast in shadow by the church’s campanile towering next to it.
“Here, let us sit,” said Antonia, finally letting go of my arm and patting the wooden bench to which I’d been led under only minor duress. As Antonia smoothed and settled her skirts upon the slatted seat, she asked if there had been any word of my nephew Newman.
“None,” I answered, lowering myself to sit beside her.
“I can only hope that the boy will come to his senses before it’s too late. I am not a woman who prays, but I will keep your family close to my heart in the hours to come.”
“Thank you. So am I to assume that you have some news about Mrs. Pyegrave?”
“I have news and I have a request. The woman is all but dead; that much is clear. She may have expired already. I am certain now that there was some manner of foul play connected with the incident. Where is Muntle, your constabulary friend?”
“At the moment? Perhaps in Regents Park or anyplace else where he can sport about in the sun on his only day off. What is it you would have him do?”
“There’s someone who has a story I should like him to hear: Mrs. Pyegrave’s personal maid. Her name is Tattycoram.”
“From Dickens’ Little Dorrit.”
“Yes, I believe you’re correct there. It’s an odd name for an odd girl from an odd family — one of the mining families that reside in the hamlet of Blackheath. That is where all the domestic help is coming from these days — the young women and their hacking, wheezing older brothers with black lungs and all-but-empty prospects. That is her history. Here now is her present story: Tattycoram was with Mrs. Pyegrave yesterday when I went to see the woman at the hospital. The girl has grown quite devoted to her mistress and was weeping all the while that I was there, for Dr. Fibbetson had already come in and pronounced her insentient employeress dead, only to correct himself when Tattycoram solicited a second listen for the weak pulse.
“After I had got the distraught creature calmed down to such point as I could understand her through her sniffles, she consented to answer my query about her whereabouts on the night in question. She said that she had been standing just outside the room from which the tumble occurred. And did she, I asked her, overhear anything that took place within the room in those moments that preceded the tragedy? She nodded most solemnly. ‘And have you any reason not to tell me what you heard?’ I put to her. Now she shook her head. In a most desponding voice she replied that there was nothing to be gained from withholding, for the master of the house had just sacked her. He had arranged for a return to her family in Blackheath to-morrow afternoon, which, of course, means this afternoon. Given what she had heard, I asked her if she thought there could have been some reason for the fall, other than pure accident. ‘Upon my very life, I do!’ she had cried, before quickly clapping her hand over her mouth as if she had not intended to make so resounding a vocal declaration.