He resolved to live a year in solitude in the Swiss Alps with monks and St Bernards. He resolved to move to Australia. He resolved to escape from himself, yet there was no escape. He felt such pity for the beggars and the downfallen he saw everywhere, the ragged people to whom he often spoke, but he could not understand why his wife,
to whom he now almost never spoke, seemed fearful and sullen, why she spoke little to him, and why, when she did, it was so often sharp. He suspected he hated himself. He felt he might burst if he did not press on.
On the train to Dover, he read a whaling captain’s description of how, at a certain point in winter in the polar regions, the drifting pack ice joins together into one frozen mass, and any ship so unfortunate to be trapped is unable to move and is squeezed tighter, ever tighter, and everyone waits as the turpentine drips out of the boards slowly being crushed, everyone listens to the ache of the tormented timbers, everyone can do nothing but wait, not knowing if the boat will break and they will then die. It could have been a description of his own life.
‘I believe no two people were ever created with less in common!’ he cried out to Wilkie on the Montmartre one evening, as with a noisy crowd they watched two Turks wrestling: one large and covered in filthy scabs, the other small and oddly tenacious. ‘It is impossible…’ For a moment he seemed lost for words. ‘There is no interest, empathy, confidence, sentiment, tender union of any kind,’ he said dully, as if he were reporting on the effluvium of a cesspit.
Wilkie did not know what to do—to express sympathy would be to encourage what perhaps should not be encouraged, rash words that might later be regretted; not to react was to look callously indifferent to what was clearly consuming the man. Fortunately, before he had decided how he would respond, Dickens was again talking.
‘It is an immense misfortune to her,’ he said, shaking his head, seeming to be uncharacteristically bewildered. ‘It is an immense misfortune to me. She is the only person I have ever known with whom I cannot get on somehow or other. I know I have many…faults…’ He shook his head again, as if he were working on a jigsaw puzzle in which pieces cannot be made to fit. ‘
Which
,’ he said, and now tried to soldier on, ‘belong to my exercise of fancy. But I am patient and considerate at heart, and I would have beaten out a better journey’s end than we have come to, if I could…’
Again Wilkie was faced with the impossibility of knowing how to respond, and for a second time Dickens recovered and went on, but in a darker, more bitter, more determined strain, saying Catherine had never overly cared for her children and showed little affection. In front of them, the scabby Turk finally pinned his opponent to the ground. Around them, the crowd roared its approval, then laughed when the Turk spat on the face of his compatriot.
After the evening of the Turkish wrestlers, Wilkie did not hear Dickens speak of his marriage again—or not at least until things had reached such a sorry pass that he could speak of little else. In the meantime, Dickens’ activity grew even more frantic: he walked more and more, slept less and less; he attended ever more events and took on ever more burdens. He found himself, one evening, sitting with Wilkie in a Covent Garden theatre watching
Romeo and
Juliet
. The mingled reality and mystery of the show, the poetry, the lights, the company, the dazzling changes of glittering and brilliant scenery, so delighted Dickens that when he came out onto the rainy street at midnight, he felt as if he were tumbling from the clouds into a rancorous world of mud and noise and misery.
To delay that fall a few moments more, he tried to lift himself back up by talking of his next amateur theatrical, which he staged every new year at Tavistock House. Family and servants and friends stood in for actors. Money from the tickets was given to one worthy cause or another, and Dickens’ productions had become quite an event in the London calendar.
‘The problem is that the year is creeping by,’ said Dickens to Wilkie, ‘and I still have no idea what our next play might be.’
As the two headed down a dingy street toward a house recommended by Wilkie as ‘particularly excelling in sybarite pleasure’, the confusion of splendid deaths at the end of the play they had just watched and Dickens’ keen interest in Franklin’s expedition came together in Wilkie’s mind to suggest a solution.
‘Wild ideas are on me again, Wilkie,’ Dickens was telling his companion. ‘Wilder than ever, of going to Paris—Rouen, Switzerland, anywhere—somewhere I can write aloft in some queer inn room. I’m restless, Wilkie.’
‘Imagine,’ began his companion, ‘if your next Twelfth Night play had as its setting that chill, white world.’
‘I need a change, Wilkie, but I am obliged to live in a
home with a wife. They say Christ was a good man, but did he ever live with a woman?’
Wilkie coughed.
Wilkie liked women. He found Dickens’ railing against women difficult. Unlike his older friend, he was neither sentimental nor conventional about them, and he would come to manage living with two women, without marrying either. Wilkie also had unusual opinions on mesmerism, the spontaneous combustion of human beings, and scrofula, and his opinions on all such matters interested Dickens.
‘That world,’ continued Wilkie, flurrying his fingers as, in the flaring gaslight, he for a moment beheld not a great man of letters in his prime, but a poor creature preternaturally old, ‘where Parry conquered…’ Briefly he was unsure if the idea had chimed, then he began to suspect it may have been a very bad one. He battled on. ‘And where Franklin died.’
Dickens turned and stared intensely at Wilkie, and all Wilkie could hear was the odd sound of him sucking his tongue. Then, in a conspiratorial way, Dickens leant in close.
‘Once we’re inside,’ he said, ‘let’s order two fingers of their very worst blue gin and five toes of their very best midshipman.’
And Dickens’ smile lit up his face, and he turned towards the door as it opened.
‘Of course, it is inspired by Franklin,’ Wilkie called after him. ‘And…though the story is a fancy, it is a fancy drawn from the deepest truth. And how much better if
it can show Englishmen meeting their ends nobly rather than as savages, their finest qualities triumphing over their basest.’
‘Yes,’ Dickens said, his back still turned. ‘Most impressed. More than impressed. Charmed. A mighty, original notion for a play.’ As Dickens led the way up the worn stone steps and the mist around them turned a ruddy yellow from the gaslight spilling out, he looked back, still smiling. ‘And you, dear Wilkie, must be the one to write it.’
On entering the house and its warm, enveloping sounds, its overripe scent of cheap perfume, Wilkie had the sense he had simply been given a task Dickens was happy to be freed of.
‘You want that line to remain then?’ asked Wilkie, when some months later he came to Tavistock House to inspect the improvements being made in preparation for the performance. There was, thought Wilkie, something changed in Dickens since he had seen him a fortnight before.
‘Which line?’ said Dickens loudly, as the two men made their way along the corridor, advancing into a babel of noise. He seemed to be holding himself differently, with a new vigour and delight in his very posture.
‘Where Wardour cries out,’ cried out Wilkie, ‘“The only hopeless wretchedness in this world is the wretchedness that women cause!”’
‘You can’t makes sense of his character without it,’ Dickens shouted back, as though it were another simple instruction of the type he issued daily at the office of
Household Words
, too apparent to demand explanation. Had not women failed him all his life? His mother. Maria Beadnell. His wife. Was it not obvious?
Wilkie coughed.
‘Never give in to your stomach, Wilkie,’ said Dickens, ‘and your stomach will end up giving in to you!’ He pointed a heavily ringed index finger at Wilkie. ‘Now there’s another line that must go in! You see, Wilkie, that is Franklin’s experience and his lesson. We all have appetites and desires. But only the savage agrees to sate them.’
And with that, Dickens swung open the door to reveal the chaos and cacophony of a score of carpenters and painters hard at work in a room that bore no resemblance to what Wilkie remembered as the children’s schoolroom. Paint pots adorned every available ledge and table, crates of tools lay scattered hither and thither, and at one end a bay window was being taken out and an altogether larger alcove built to house the stage. A labourer was heating size in a great crucible wedged into the fireplace and the room reeked of it, while gasfitters seemed perplexed as they installed extra pipes and lights.
‘Is it the Chatham Dockyard?’ asked Wilkie.
‘It is our theatre,’ said a thrilled Dickens, beaming and spreading his arms out. ‘The smallest theatre in London but a real theatre nonetheless!’
And then Wilkie realised that not only the room had undergone a transformation.
‘I like your beard, Dickens,’ said Wilkie. ‘Very fashionable.’
Dickens tweaked his newly sprouted whiskers.
‘I grew them for the role. I find myself more and more inhabiting, almost living, the part of Richard Wardour. Why, just yesterday I must have strolled the best part of twenty miles, and the best part of
that
was terrifying the locals of Finchley and Neasden into thinking I was a starving and demented polar explorer soon to perish for want of food or warmth, bearded and fully in part. I have it all committed to memory now, Wilkie, every line of yours up here,’ he said, tapping his goatish head. ‘Do you know what appeals so much about the Arctic?’ he said, and smiled once more. ‘There are no women there.’ And then he was gone to give the gasfitter advice on the placement of a row of jets.
Wilkie coughed.
At first, Dickens had not wished to invest his name in a project that was not fully his. He simply threw his friend ideas for story, a good line here or there. Yet as
Little Dorrit
grew and grew into a prison bigger than it was ever meant to be, the single ray of light shining into his cell was Wilkie’s new play.
But it was only after Wilkie suggested Dickens should take the part of one of the play’s main characters, a villain to be called Richard Wardour, that his interest quickened. And it was only when he began to see that a
man such as Wardour was not half as dislikeable as Wilkie had presented him that he became deeply involved. For Wardour’s character interested Dickens, and the more he thought about him, the more oddly close and familiar he seemed. Dickens began stealing time from the final instalments of his novel for
Household Words
to pen yet one more quick letter or card to Wilkie outlining cuts and making changes to his latest draft of the play, which, at Dickens’ suggestion, was to be called
The Frozen Deep
.
‘What is so marvellous about your play,’ he told Wilkie, returning from his conversation with the gasfitter, ‘is the way you’ve created such a man as Wardour—seemingly the worst, but with an unexpected depth. Somewhere near Neasden, I realised that what I must do with Wardour is thaw his frozen deep. I was thinking how we should alter the ending slightly, for he is not all evil—’
‘Far from it,’ agreed Wilkie, who really didn’t agree at all—he had conceived the part of Wardour as a grotesque, of a type that Dickens had so enjoyed playing, to much laughter, in previous Tavistock House plays. That Dickens now saw Wardour as some serious creation, rather than an opportunity to score cheap applause, astonished Wilkie, but, ever open to the undertow of life, he went along with it.
Dickens led Wilkie to a long, dusty table strewn with large rolls of paper, which Dickens unfurled to show his friend sketches and plans for the scenic backdrops. Wilkie murmured the name at the bottom of one sketch in approval. It was no less than William Telbin, the celebrated
landscape painter. There seemed no one Dickens had not roped in to lend a hand.
‘Wonderful,’ said Wilkie, meaning it. His friend’s energy, his capacity to invest such industry in even a folly such as this, an amateur theatrical, he always found overwhelming, amusing and oddly moving. ‘Simply wonderful.’
‘Here, in the first act,’ said Dickens, pointing to a sketch of a harbour with a decaying coaching house to one side, ‘on the very eve of the departure of a great Arctic expedition, our heroine, Clara Burnham, pledges her undying love to Frank Aldersley—cue applause for Mr Collins—an officer of one of the two ships setting out on this perilous mission. He little knows that on the other ship is no other than Richard Wardour—a role I will seek to inject with a perfectly electric pathos—the ardent admirer Clara once spurned, who has most solemnly vowed to avenge himself on Aldersley for stealing Clara from him!’
‘So,’ said Wilkie, knowing how Dickens loved to tell and retell his tales as a way of testing their mettle, ‘we begin by presenting Wardour as a villain, but as the play progresses, you think it better if he is revealed as perhaps a more tragic figure?’
‘He does strike me,’ said Dickens, ‘as a man forever seeking and never finding true affection. Is that not the case?’
Now dimly suspecting the appeal of Wardour, Wilkie, rather than answering Dickens’ question, replied by reinventing the play. ‘I have wondered,’ he said, ‘how
moving for an audience it might be if, at the end, Wardour is transformed—if he chooses to sacrifice himself so that the girl he loves wins the man she loves, although it is in Wardour’s power to let that same man die and take the girl for himself.’
Dickens was silent, but his lips were moving, as if engaged on some gargantuan piece of mental arithmetic, adding and subtracting, dividing and recalculating. ‘A death is good,’ he said at one point, ‘very good,’ and then he went back to his silent mumblings. ‘And do you know why?’ he unexpectedly demanded of Wilkie. ‘Because even Wardour, finally, is not a savage!’ His bearded face was beaming. ‘Is that not so?’
Wilkie pondered if it was so for a moment. If it had been clear that villainy was previously the very bedrock of Wardour, it was equally clear it no longer was. And what had been meant to be the lightest of entertainments was taking on some other dimension.