Dan Simmons - Drood

Within two days—he was meeting Carlyle for the last time— Dickens’s arm was in a sling.

Still he went on, continuing the reading series as planned. His pulse rose to 114—then 118—then 124.

At each intermission, Beard had two strong men ready to half-carry Dickens to his dressing room, where the Inimitable would lie panting, too breathless to speak except for meaningless syllables or incoherent sounds, for at least a full ten minutes before the author of so many long books could speak a single coherent sentence. Then Beard or Dolby would help Dickens take a few swallows of weak brandy mixed with water and Dickens would rise, put a fresh flower in his lapel, and rush back onto the platform.

His pulse rate continued to rise at each performance.

On the first evening of March 1870, Dickens performed his final reading from his beloved David Copperfield.

On 8 March, he murdered Nancy for the last time. Some days after that, I happened to meet Charles Kent in Piccadilly, and over luncheon Kent told me that on his way to the stage for that final Murder, Dickens had whispered to him, “I shall tear myself to pieces.”

According to Frank Beard, he had already torn himself to pieces. But he went on.

It was in the middle of March—right when the tour was taking its greatest toll on the man—that the Queen summoned Dickens to Buckingham Palace for an audience.

Dickens had not been able to walk the previous evening or that morning, but he managed to hobble into Her Majesty’s presence. Court etiquette did not allow him to sit (although the previous year, receiving the same honour, old Carlyle, announcing that he was a feeble old man, had helped himself to a chair and etiquette be d— ned).

Dickens stood throughout the interview. (But so did Victoria, leaning slightly on the back of a sofa—an advantage denied to the author standing racked in pain in front of her.)

This interview had come about partially because Dickens had shown some American Civil War photographs to Mr Arthur Helps, Clerk of the Privy Council, and Helps had mentioned them to Her Majesty. Dickens had forwarded the photographs to her.

With his usual sense of mischief, Dickens had sent the hapless Helps a note in which he pretended to believe that he was being summoned to the palace in order to be made a baronet. “We will have ‘Of Gad’s Hill Place’ attached to the title of the Baronetcy, please,” he wrote, “— on account of the divine William and Falstaff. With this stipulation, my blessing and forgiveness are enclosed.”

Reports were that Mr Helps and other members of the court were quite beside themselves with embarrassment over the misunderstanding until someone explained the Inimitable’s sense of humour to them.

During the interview with the Queen, Dickens quickly turned the subject to the prescient dream that President Abraham Lincoln was purported to have had—and told others about—the night before he was assassinated. Such portents of imminent death were obviously on the Inimitable’s mind at that time, and he had brought up the Lincoln dream with many of his friends.

Her Majesty reminded him of the time she had attended the performance of The Frozen Deep some thirteen years earlier. The two discussed the evident fate of the Franklin Expedition for a few moments, then the current state of Arctic exploration, and then somehow got onto the perennial issue of the servant problem. From there the long royal audience’s conversation shifted to national education and the appalling price of butcher’s meat.

I can only imagine and envision, Dear Reader, much as you must so many decades beyond all this, how that audience must have looked and sounded, with Her Majesty standing next to the sofa and behaving, as Dickens later told Georgina, “strangely shy… and like a girl in manner,” and Dickens standing ramrod straight yet seemingly relaxed, perhaps with his hands clasped behind him, while his left leg and foot and left arm were throbbing and aching and threatening to betray him into collapse.

Before the audience ended, Her Majesty is reported to have said softly, “You know, it is one of our greatest regrets that we have never had the opportunity to hear one of your readings.”

“I regret it as well, Ma’am,” said Dickens. “I am sorry, but as of just two days ago, they are now finally over. After all these years, my readings are over.”

“And a private reading would be out of the question?” said Victoria.

“I fear it would be, Your Majesty. And I would not care to give a private reading at any event. You see, Ma’am, a mixed audience is essential to the success of my readings. This may not be the case with other authors who read for the public, but it has always been the case for me.”

“We understand,” said Her Majesty. “And we also understand that it would be inconsistent for you to alter your decision. We happen to know, Mr Dickens, that you are the most consistent of men.” She smiled then, and Dickens later confided to Forster that he was sure she was thinking of that time thirteen years before when he had flatly refused to appear before Her Majesty still in his costume and makeup after the comedic farce that had followed The Frozen Deep .

At the close of the interview, the Queen presented him with an autographed copy of her Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands and asked for a set of his works. “We would prefer, if it is possible,” she said, “that we receive them this afternoon.”

Dickens had smiled and bowed slightly but said, “I ask once again for Your Majesty’s kind indulgence and for a bit more time in which I shall have my books more suitably bound for Your Majesty.”

He later sent her the complete set of his works bound in morocco leather and gold.

THE FINAL READING PERFORMANCE he had mentioned to the Queen occurred on 15 March.

On that last evening, he read from A Christmas Carol and from the Trial. They had always been the crowds’ favourites. His granddaughter, tiny Mekitty, was present for the first time that night, and Kent later told me that she had trembled when her grandfather— “Wenerables” she called him—had spoken in strange voices. She wailed beyond consolation when she saw her Wenerables crying .

I was there in the audience that night—in the back, unheralded, in the shadows. I could not stay away.

For the last time on this Earth, I realised, English audiences were hearing Charles Dickens give voice to Sam Weller and Ebenezer Scrooge and Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim.

The audience was huge and overflowing. Crowds had gathered outside the hall’s two entrances on Regent Street and Piccadilly hours before the event. Later, Dickens’s son Charley told my brother that “I thought I had never heard him read so well and with so little effort.”

But I was there and I could see the effort that Dickens was using to keep himself composed. Then the trial scene from The Pickwick Papers was over and—as he always did—Dickens simply walked off stage.

The huge audience went berserk. The standing ovation verged on sheer hysteria. Several times Dickens returned to the platform and then left again and each time he was called back. Finally he calmed the crowd and gave the short speech that he obviously had been labouring on for some time and which he now had to overcome his visible emotions to give—tears were pouring down his cheeks in the gaslights while his granddaughter wailed in the family’s box.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it would be worse than idle—for it would be hypocritical and unfeeling—if I were to disguise that I close this episode in my life with feelings of very considerable pain.”

He spoke briefly of those fifteen years during which he had been reading to the public—of how he had seen such readings as a duty to his readers and to the public—and he spoke of that readership’s and public’s sympathy in return. As if in recompense for his departure, he mentioned that The Mystery of Edwin Drood would soon appear (the audience was too rapt and silent and transfixed even to applaud this happy news).