The Final Recollections of Charles Dickens (16 page)

“A graceful woman,” Ellsworth noted. “Capable of doing honour to Wingate's name and reflecting credit on his proprietorship. Quite ornamental, too, no doubt.”

When the interviews were done, I sat with the inspector in the parlour.

“Do you suppose he has much money with him?” I asked.

“I should think that he has pocketed a good amount in one way or another,” Ellsworth answered. “The total of what has been left behind for his investors will be expressed in arithmetic by a circle. But the money he has will soon be gone. And whatever object he pursues after that, he will do so crookedly.”

“Will you find him?”

“The world is a large place. To search for him would be hopeless. We will leave his discovery to time and chance and to Heaven's pleasure.”

“Then he goes free.”

Ellsworth shook his head.

“We are well to be rid of him. I am a practical man, Mr. Dickens. His flight confirms his guilt. And he is being punished more than the law would have allowed.
Despite what we know in our hearts, the proof to convict him in a court of law is not there. He has left behind most of what he owned. What the world thinks of him now and how it looks at him will be the haunting demon of his mind. He will imagine pursuers in every place. He will see them pointing at him in the street, seeking him out among the crowd, and whispering behind wherever he goes. He will hear their footsteps outside his window when he is shut up in his room in bed at night. He will be restless everywhere. Under the circumstances, that is the best punishment we could have hoped for.”

“And that is all?”

“I know his kind. He will not do well.”

Book 3

CHAPTER 10

On Saturday, the second of April, two days after Geoffrey and Amanda Wingate fled from London, I married Catherine Hogarth. The ceremony took place in Saint Luke's Church. I understood more fully by then that my romance of Catherine was a love born of ambition more than the heart. But it was too late to turn back.

We lay together for the first time in the wedding bed that night. Catherine giggled. She squealed. I knew that I had erred horribly. I closed my eyes and imagined myself with another as the dungeon door of marriage slammed shut upon my life. I would never be free.

Toward the end of April, I returned to the Wingate home with Benjamin Ellsworth for one last look about. Well-muscled men were moving heavy furnishings, while two gentlemen with pens made out inventories in preparation for auction. Workers sat upon pieces of furniture never made to be sat upon and ate bread
and cheese off other pieces of furniture never made to be eaten from. Chaotic combinations of belongings appeared. Mattresses and bedding in the dining room; glass and china in the conservatory; the great dinner service in heaps on the divan in the parlour.

Wingate's flight had loosened tongues. The nature of his business was now clear. Investors had given him money to invest in various financial undertakings. By contract, he was allowed to retain a modest percentage of each investment as his commission. In practice, he had invested only a small portion of the money that was entrusted to him and appropriated the rest for his own personal use.

Men who should have known better—some honest, some not—deferred to his every word. They fawned and flattered and smiled as he showed them neatly kept balance sheets that detailed the manner in which he had turned their ten thousand pounds into twenty thousand.

The nature of the supposed investments allowed for the fraud. The entirety of the principle for an annuity comes in at the beginning and then dribbles back in small payments to the holder. The premiums for life assurance policies that Wingate purported to purchase were paid in advance. If the holder of a policy died, premiums paid to purchase fictitious policies for other holders covered the death benefits. Investors were told that their money was invested in the stock of various companies. They received dividends regularly and were assured that their principle was growing. In fact, there was no principle. It was imaginary wealth. Fraud concealed more fraud. Through it all, Wingate spent
lavishly to maintain his luxurious way of life. By the time he fled, there was little for him to liquidate and take with him.

“It is remarkable,” Ellsworth told me. “People gave their money to Wingate to invest, and they knew no more about him than they might know about a man they met at the tailor shop. Men have such extraordinary powers of persuasion when exerted over themselves. The next criminal in delicate disguise who is comfortable living outside the law for the purpose of swindling will succeed as well.”

Two days later, the pulpit of the auctioneer was erected. Something within me compelled my return for the auction. Herds of vampires were overrunning rooms, sounding glasses with their knuckles, striking discordant notes on the harp, balancing the silver spoons and forks, punching the cushions of chairs and sofas with their dirty fists, opening and shutting all the drawers, examining the threads of the drapery and linen. A vile-looking woman with a screeching voice won the bid on the lavender silk gown that Amanda had worn on the evening that I went with her to the ballet. There was not a secret place in the whole house.

It would have been just if Florence Spriggs and Lenora Pearce had been allowed to claim a portion of the gain from the sale of the house and its contents. But wealthy investors who suffered losses in Wingate's scheme had already staked their claim.

All day long, there was a retinue of moving carts in the street outside the residence. Then it was over. Nothing was left. As I rode home that night, I asked myself how much Amanda had known of her husband's
ways. I asked, as I would do a thousand times in later years, why she had taken me to bed. It was folly to think that I was the only man she had seduced in that manner. And yet . . .

The road she had chosen lay before her. She would follow it with her own self-willed step, and I would travel mine. I did not know where she was, only that there was an immeasurable distance between us and an empty place in my heart.

Catherine soon became pregnant, and we moved to a house at 48 Doughty Street. It was significantly larger than my previous rooms and reflected optimism with regard to my financial future.

There was a print run of one thousand copies of the first installment of
The Pickwick Papers
. Disappointing sales led to a smaller printing of the next three installments. Then the character of Sam Weller—Samuel Pickwick's valet—was introduced, and sales soared. Forty thousand copies of the twentieth and final installment were printed.

The success of
Pickwick
gave me my first taste of renown. It had been publicly acknowledged in a publisher's advertisement that “Boz” was in fact Charles Dickens. I was keenly alive to the praise that sounded in my ears. Then I took what was perhaps the most important step upon my journey to becoming an author.

It was a time in England when eighteenth-century customs with regard to labour, schools, orphanages, and democracy itself were being reevaluated. The Poor
Law Amendment Act of 1834 had replaced a system of parish-by-parish measures intended to deal with the problems of the poor. Or rather, the problems posed by the poor. It called for a centralised system of workhouses to be built, with no person receiving assistance from the state unless he or she lived in one. The poorhouses were kept in abominable and scandalous condition. Separate institutions were maintained for children, able-bodied men, able-bodied women, and the old. Families were torn apart. Mothers were separated from their children. Wages were less than those paid to the poorest free labourer.

I wanted to speak to the poor houses and to what it is like to live at the lowest levels of society. I did so through the eyes of a child: Oliver Twist.

Oliver stood for countless children born and bred in neglect. They have never known what childhood is, never been taught to love a parent's smile or to dread a parent's frown. The gaiety and innocence of childhood are unknown to them. Talk to them of parental solicitude and the merry games of infancy, and they will stare at you with unknowing eyes. Tell them of hunger and beggary and the streets, and they will understand.

They sleep at night packed close together, covered only by their ragged clothes. There are some who, lying on their backs with upturned faces, bear more the aspect of dead bodies than of living creatures. A few among the youngest of the children sleep peacefully with smiles upon their faces. As morning takes the place of night, their smiles fade away.

I wrote
Oliver Twist
with greater power than I had been able to summon up before. Friends told me that
publishing in installments was a low form of commerce and that, by continuing in that form, I would encumber my future. I resisted their warnings and did as I would do with my writing throughout my life.

Oliver Twist
spoke directly to the people. It portrayed the innate goodness and suffering of common men and women, the random nature of death, and the triumph of good over evil. Its serialisation made it accessible to all. Men and women gathered together with the publication of each installment, combined their resources for the one-shilling purchase price, and searched for one who could read aloud to the others.

The bond between my readers and myself was now a personal attachment. I was aware that my work was capable of stirring feeling among the downtrodden and also of influencing the debate among the powerful on matters of importance.

Whoever is devoted to an art must deliver himself wholly up to it. Ambition and hard work were the keys to my success. As a rule, I woke at seven o'clock each morning, took a cold shower, ate breakfast, and wrote from nine until three in the afternoon. On some days, I ate a modest lunch at my desk. I wrote with a goose quill pen and blue ink an average of two thousand words each day. After writing, I walked for several hours, dined at six, and retired by midnight.

When I wrote, my work had complete possession of my thoughts. My creations spoke to me. When I sat with pen and paper, reality and imagination were so blended that it was impossible to separate them in my mind. A voice kept whispering to me: greatness.

I wrote with speed.
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge
. I became a businessman as well as an author to ensure that I was fairly paid. When I was a child, the family had endured frequent moves as a matter of necessity as my father sought to evade his creditors. Now we moved by choice to an even larger house near Regent's Park at 1 Devonshire Street.