Dan Simmons - Drood

This horrified Lady Franklin, of course, and she rejected the report in its entirety (even going so far as to hire another ship, out of her own dwindling fortune, to resume the search for her husband). Dickens also was appalled—and fascinated—by the idea.

He began publishing articles on the reported tragedy then in his journal, Household Words, as well as in other magazines. At first he was simply doubtful, stating that the report was “hasty… in the statement that they had eaten the dead bodies of their companions.” Dickens told us that he had consulted “a wilderness of books”—although he cited no specific sources—to prove that “the probabilities are all against poor Franklin’s people having dreamed of eating the bodies of their companions.”

As the rest of the nation either began to believe in Rae’s report (he did claim the government’s reward for conclusive proof of Franklin’s fate) or to forget, Dickens’s denial turned to serious anger. In Household Words he launched a scathing attack on “the savage”—his phrase for all non-whites, but in this case the scheming, lying, untrustworthy Esquimaux whom John Rae had lived with and interviewed. Dickens in our time was, of course, considered a radical liberal, but those credentials were not impeached when he spoke for the majority of Englishmen and wrote— “… we believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel.” It was simply impossible, he argued, that any of Sir John Franklin’s men had “prolonged their existence by the dreadful expedient of eating the bodies of their dead companions.”

Then our friend did a very strange thing. From the “wilderness of books” he had consulted to support his opinion, he chose 1001 Arabian Nights —one of the most important books from his childhood, as he had told me several times—to prove his point. He wrote in summary— “In the whole wide circle of the Arabian Nights, it is reserved for ghoules, gigantic blacks with one eye, monsters like towers of enormous bulk and dreadful aspect, and unclean animals lurking on the sea shore…” to resort to eating human flesh, or cannibalism.

So there you have it. Quod erat demonstrandum.

IT WAS IN 1856 that Dickens took his campaign against the possibility of cannibalism amongst Sir John Franklin’s noble men to a new level… and one which would intimately involve me.

While we were sojourning together in France—Dickens called me his “vicious friend” on such voyages and the time in Paris “our dangerous expeditions” (although while he enjoyed the night life and occasional conversations with young actresses, the writer never availed himself of the women of the night as I did there)—he came up with the idea that I write a play, to be performed at Dickens’s home at Tavistock House. Specifically it was to be a play about a lost Arctic expedition such as Franklin’s in which the Englishmen showed courage and valour. It also, he explained, had to be a story about love and sacrifice.

“Why don’t you write it, Charles?” was my obvious response.

Well, he simply could not. He was beginning work on Little Dorrit, giving readings, putting out his magazine… I was to write it. He suggested the title The Frozen Deep, since the play would not only be about the northern wilderness, but about the secret depths of the human heart and soul. Dickens said that he would aid me with the scenario and “do the odd editorial chore,” which I immediately understood to mean that the play would be his and I would just be the mechanism to put words on paper.

I agreed to do it.

We began work on it in Paris—or rather I began work on it while Dickens flitted in and out between dinners with friends, banquets, and other social occasions—and by the end of that hot summer of 1856 we were both at his home in London. Our habits, writerly and otherwise, did not always mesh. In France, I enjoyed the Casino until the early morning hours and Dickens insisted on breakfast between eight and nine. There were more than a few occasions where I had to breakfast alone on pâté de foi gras around noontime. Also, in both Tavistock House and later at Gad’s Hill, Dickens’s work hours were between nine AM and either two or three PM, and everyone in the house, family and guests alike, was expected to stay equally busy during that time. I have seen Dickens’s daughters or Georgina pretend to read proof sheets while Dickens was locked away in his study. At that time—it was before the second Wilkie Collins had begun to fight me for my writing desk and instruments—I preferred working late at night, so I often would have to find a nook in the library in Dickens’s home where I could smoke a cigar and nap in privacy during the day. And more than a few times Dickens would emerge unexpectedly from his study to roust me out of my hiding place and order me back to work.

My work—our work—on the play continued through the autumn of that year. I had conceived of a main character (to be played by Dickens, of course) named Richard Wardour—a sort of combination of what was known about the indomitable Sir John Franklin and his second-in-command, a rather common Irish fellow named Francis Crozier—and my idea was that the Wardour character would be older, perhaps not very competent (after all, the men on Franklin’s Expedition had, apparently, all died), and a bit demented. Perhaps even somewhat of a villain.

Dickens completely rewrote this idea, changing Richard Wardour into a young, intelligent, complex, angry, but—in the end—totally self-sacrificing character. “Perpetually seeking and never finding true affection” was the phrasing in Dickens’s voluminous notes on the re-creation of his character. He wrote many of the character’s monologues by himself and actually kept them to himself until our final rehearsals (yes, I was one of the primary actors in the amateur production). When visiting or staying at his home, I would see Dickens starting out or ending his twenty-mile walks through the country fields of Finchley and Neasden, rehearsing his Wardour monologues in a booming voice— “Young, with a fair sad face, with kind tender eyes, with a soft clear voice. Young and loving and merciful. I keep her face in my mind, though I can keep nothing else. I must wander, wander, wander—restless, sleepless, and homeless—till I find her!”

With hindsight, it is easy to see the truth and depth of these sentiments in Charles Dickens that year when his marriage was ending (and ending by his own choice). The writer had spent his entire life waiting for and searching for that fair sad face with the kind tender eyes and soft clear voice. For Dickens, his imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life, and he had imagined this true, virginal, attentive, young, beautiful (and merciful) woman since his own youth.

My play premiered at Dickens’s Tavistock House on 6 January, 1857—Twelfth Night, which Dickens always celebrated with some special programme, and his son Charley’s twentieth birthday. The author had gone to great lengths to make the experience as professional as possible: having carpenters turn the schoolroom at his home into a theatre that could hold more than fifty people comfortably, ripping out a small stage that was already there and replacing it with a full-size one in the bay windows; having a musical score composed for the play and hiring an orchestra to perform it; hiring professionals to design and paint the elaborate scenic backdrops; spending a small fortune on costumes—he later bragged that we “polar explorers” in the production could walk straight from London to the North Pole in the authentic polar gear we were wearing; and, finally, supervising the theatrical gas lighting himself even while devising elaborate lighting effects that could simulate every hour of the odd polar day, evening, and sunlit Arctic night.