June 9, 1870—Charles Dickens, whose prolific career included forerunners of the modern crime
novel, left a few mysteries of his own when he died at age 58 of a stroke at
his country home Gad’s Hill Place, in Rochester, England, including:
*How did he intend to finish the novel on which he
was working at the time of his death, The
Mystery of Edwin Drood?
*Was he at home at the time of his fatal stroke?
*Why were his wishes for a simple burial disregarded?
The following is what we know—or don’t—about these
questions:
*Drood: Unlike
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last
Tycoon, Dickens left no notes for how his book might turn out. We only know,
based on the number of installments, that he had reached the halfway mark of
the novel. Writing in installments for magazine publishing helped him to adjust
plots and characterizations by gauging ongoing reader reaction, but it also
deprived us of knowing his final destination for what turned out to be his last
book.
*Dickens’
whereabouts on the day before his death: In her judicious 2011 biography, Charles Dickens, Claire Tomalin reviewed the recollections of his beloved
daughter, sister-in-law, and a local doctor called to Gad’s Hill. His careful
concealment of involvement with his much younger mistress, Ellen (Nelly) Ternan,
led Tomalin to offer an alternative scenario for the day of his stroke, one
that she admitted was “a wild and improbable story, but not an entirely
impossible one”—i.e., that, instead of suffering his stroke at home, Dickens collapsed at the home of Nelly, who—to preserve
her lover’s reputation and her own—got him, with some help, into a hackney cab,
where he was conveyed back to his own home.
*Burial: Dickens’
will specified that he wished to be “buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious,
and strictly private manner; that no public announcement be made of the time or
place of my burial; that at the utmost not more than three plain mourning
coaches be employed; and that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak,
black bow, long hat-band, or other such revolting absurdity.” That is hardly
what occurred. In the end, his remains were brought to the Valhalla of English
literati: Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. In a very revealing article this past February in Smithsonian Magazine, Leon Litvack disclosed that this circumvention
of Dickens’ wishes was engineered by his friend and eventual biographer, John
Forster, and the dean of Westminster, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, both of whom
stood to gain by creating an unstoppable groundswell of public opinion on
behalf of this move.
(Incidentally, the involvement of Nelly Ternan in
this closing chapter of Dickens’ story remains as murky as much else: At the
final services, Dickens’ estranged wife Catherine was excluded; accounts of
those present note that 14 mourners were in attendance. Many, but not all, were
specifically named. It is possible that Nelly was the unnamed attendee.)
It is natural that Dickens, a spellbinding
storyteller given to astonishing plot twists, left a few in his own life. But I
could not write this post without considering his larger legacy.
Dickens pioneered so much in the writing and
marketing of modern fiction, but his influence on the crime novel receives less
attention than it should. From Oliver
Twist to The Mystery of Edwin Drood,
he continually turned his attention to its significant presence in
Victorian England.
Just as masters of the genre have discovered in the
past century, such subjects offers unique and abundant opportunities to
consider both twisted individual psychology and larger social pathologies. In
other words, the forces of injustice create the preconditions for crime, its
exploiters and victims.
In contemporary America, where the police are
increasingly regarded as abusers of power, it may come as a shock that
Dickens sees the London police force as a bulwark of the moral order. The
Dickens novel I was assigned in a college Victorian Literature course, Bleak House, even creates one of the
first detectives in fiction: Inspector Bucket.
A post from the Web site “Read Great Literature” offers the presence of this character as a reason to love
this novel, noting his resemblance to my favorite TV sleuth, Peter Falk’s Lieutenant
Columbo: his humble nature, his dogged pursuit of clues, and even a beloved
wife!
Above all, Dickens recognized that crime, like
injustice, left untold victims in its wake, and it needed to be countered not
just with the highly rational faculties of Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin or
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but with a fearless commitment to truth
and a stout heart. That type of person would be a champion of the underdog like
Dickens himself, as summarized by George Orwell:
“In the case of Dickens I see a face that is not
quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face
of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing,
with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the
face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the
open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in
other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated
with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending
for our souls.”
