The Dons and Mr. Dickens Read online

  The Dons and Mr. Dickens

  The Strange Case of the Oxford Christmas Plot

  A Secret Victorian Journal

  Attributed to Wilkie Collins

  Discovered and Edited by

  William J. Palmer

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2000 by William J. Palmer

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition April 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-735-7

  Also by William J. Palmer

  The Detective and Mr. Dickens

  The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens

  The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

  For Christy. Are you happy now?

  Editor’s Note

  The origins and provenance of these “Secret Victorian Journals” of Wilkie Collins have been clearly described in the editor’s prefaces to the three earlier volumes in this series. This editor, however, once again wishes to express his deepest appreciation to Mr. Allerdyce Clive, the Special Collections Curator of the library of the University of North Anglia, for his professional assistance and his support of completely open editorial access to these manuscripts.

  Collins’s first commonplace book, published under the commercial title The Detective and Mr. Dickens, was composed almost immediately after Dickens’s funeral in 1870. The other journals, all of which reside in the Sir William Warrington Collection (Sir William having been the personal solicitor of Wilkie Collins), were composed between 1870 and Collins’s death in 1889. All are handwritten. They seem to have provided Collins with a vehicle for memory of his mentor and closest friend, Charles Dickens. Although composed in the 1870s and 1880s, these journals narrate events that actually took place in the 1850s when Collins was but a young aspiring novelist still learning his art from the greatest writer of the age.

  The three previously published journals each described a specific case of detection undertaken by Dickens and his detective friend, Inspector William Field of the Metropolitan Protectives, London’s first professional police force. Two of those volumes also explored a sensitive subtext, that of Dickens’s growing love for and involvement with Miss Ellen Ternan, a young actress who would become Dickens’s mistress for the last seventeen years of his life. Miss Ternan plays a prominent part in this latest journal as well. Also, the previously published journals introduced a rogues’ gallery of friends, colleagues, and criminals with whom Dickens and Field consistently interacted.

  The Detective and Mr. Dickens, the first published journal, which recounted the case of the theatre district murders that the Victorian tabloids christened “The Macbeth Murders,” introduced Serjeant Rogers, Field’s loyal second in command; Irish Meg Sheehey, a street prostitute and one of Field’s prized informers; and Tally Ho Thompson, a reformed highwayman and professional thief-turned-actor who nonetheless cannot seem to resist the continued practice of the tricks of his former trades.

  In The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens, Irish Meg had become Wilkie Collins’s kept mistress and Tally Ho Thompson became the central suspect in a murder case which the Grub Street tabloids christened “The Medusa Murders.” Also in this second journal, the personages of Sleepy Rob the cabman, and Captain Hawkins and his loyal Serjeant, Bert Moody (and Bert’s obscene parrot), were introduced.

  In The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens, which involved the affair of “The Feminist Phantom,” as the newspapers of the time called it, the reader was introduced to Angela Burdett-Coutts, heiress to and manager of Coutts Bank, and one of the most powerful women in Victorian England. That third memoir chronicles the solving of a murder within the burgeoning Victorian feminist movement.

  What is different about these commonplace books in terms of literary history is that they are not written in the usual abbreviated diary form that characterizes the vast majority of the private journals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather, Collins chose to compose his private journals in a novelistic style (complete with chapter-like divisions, narrative structures, and realistic dialogue) parallel to that of his novel manuscripts. These “secret journals,” as Collins has called them in earlier prefaces, were clearly never meant for publication until long after their participants were dead, if ever. And Collins was fully cognizant of the fact that the absence of any publishing ambitions for the journals freed him to compose them with little or no regard for the repressive inhibitions which so limited both the style and subject matter of Victorian fiction.

  As did the first three Collins commonplace books, this memoir begins with a brief preface set in the time of composition (the 1870s) rather than the time of the actual narrated events (1853). Typically, the opening meditation focuses upon the impetus that catalyzed his memories of the particular case and set him to writing once again. As he consistently reiterates, these private journals are about the evocative power of memory. They are Wilkie Collins’s way of bringing back to life his closest friend and the most powerful influence upon his career. This series of personal factual mini-novels dramatizes that great man’s biography as no biographer ever could.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Prefatories

  November 1, 1871

  It is All Saints Day as I sit down once again to begin filling another little leather book from Lett’s Apothecary and Sundries. What more fitting day to take the time to remember one’s closest friend so prematurely gone? What more fitting day to remember one of the great (and good) men of our strange dark age? None of us was a saint then, but we were gentlemen all, and trying to do the right thing.

  I remember a conversation we once had about how somebody had to stand up for the right. I can see it as if it were only yesterday, the four of us—Field and Rogers, Dickens and myself—in the Lord Gordon Arms. I think, if memory serves, that this particular evening occurred just after the unsatisfactory resolution of the first “Dr. Palmer the Poisoner” affair.* I remember that the whole conversation began with Field expressing his frustration at the outcome of that case.

  “Don’t seem worth the effort goin’ after rich gentlemen like Ashbee* and that Dr. Palmer, does it?” Field complained. “We brought neither of ’em to the dock.”

  “Then why do you do it?” Dickens asked.

  “Because I won’t be just a policeman of the poor.” Field’s voice was serious, almost sad. “But these rich scofflaws prey upon the poor and the innocent, kill their own wives, for God’s sake!”

  I know this was an especially tender subject for Field because he had lost his own beloved wife to consumption some years before.

  “They are bad laws that protects the rich and only punishes the poor”—he thumped decisively on the table with his thick forefinger—“and that ain’t right. Our slippery Dr. Palmer should be on his way to the gallows!”

  “But what can be done?” Dickens tried to console him. “There was no evidence to be found, no witnesses left alive.”

  “Aye. No one knows that better than me.” Field had that set look of relentless pursuit in his eye that we had seen many times before. “This time ’ee escapes, but ’ee shall never escape me. Someday ’ee will murder again and William Field will be waiting there to take ’im up.”

 
; “But it seems so unjust,” Dickens opined, “as if God has just disappeared from our world.”

  “Ah, but you must learn, Dickens,” and Inspector Field’s gruff voice had calmed to an almost philosophical resignation, “that my world, the streets, is not the world of your novels. In my world, God truly is gone and all the villains do not get punished and all the crimes do not get solved and all the women are not angels and all their lovers are not always faithful. It is a world where everything does not get tied up neatly with a ribbon on the last page,” and he chuckled at the cleverness of his thought.

  “Yet even you,” Dickens’s voice was quiet, “in your determination to pursue this Palmer, express a sense of an ending, a clear need for resolution.”

  “You can’t always end things right,” Rogers broke in.

  “The only sense of an ending I ’ave is death,” Field laughed as he rose to go, “and it’s one I don’t want written for many more chapters.”

  That evening, as Dickens and I walked home through the gaslit city smoking our cigars, he could not let the subject rest. It had gotten under his collar and was chafing his sense of justice.

  “Wilkie, we have been on duty with Inspector Field on two cases where a rich and powerful villain has escaped unpunished. Can the rich get away with anything? Have the poor no rights? They starve in our cities. We send them off to fight our wars and die on foreign fields. But our rich get away with murder.”

  “But Field has not given up.” I tried to interject a positive point into what I sensed for Dickens was becoming almost a statement of his own social despair.

  “No, Wilkie, but I feel sorry for Inspector Field. He is a fair man at the mercy of the courts and a country that is still unfair.”

  That evening was one of those rare moments when we Victorian gentlemen actually unburdened ourselves. Ours is such a reticent age. We always seem to be narrating ourselves from a safe distance. In a way, it was that sort of recognition of the unjust reality of our world that lay at the very heart of the Oxford affair.

  This particular episode in Charles’s and my relationship with Inspector Field is, perhaps, the one I remember most fondly. In those years, when I was but an apprentice novelist, it was a rare time that I ever commanded the stage over either Dickens or Field. But in this instance, I was the one who knew the territory, who could read the text of the world. Oxford was very familiar to me, for I had resided there with little respect and no distinction at Brasenose for two years before coming up to London.

  * * *

  *Dr. William Palmer was suspected of poisoning his wife and her maid in the case of “The Medusa Murders,” which is detailed in Collins’s second journal (published as The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens). But that case was never resolved and Dr. Palmer went free for lack of evidence. However, here Collins refers to the “first” Dr. Palmer affair, seeming to imply that this particular villain and Field met again. They certainly did, since Field arrested Palmer for poisoning his fourth wife in 1855 (see the final footnote on the last page of The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens).

  *Lord Henry Ashbee, the villain of the very first case upon which Dickens and Collins accompanied Inspector Field, that of “The Macbeth Murders,” published as The Detective and Mr. Dickens.

  A Murder in Limehouse Hole

  November 25, 1853—Evening

  It had been a regular Bleak House day all day in London. Implacable November weather, indeed! Dickens had described it “inimitably” only eighteen months earlier in the opening of his great novel of the city. I remember all of that day vividly, not just the shocking events of the evening. As I look out my window here in 1871, I can almost see back to 1853 and the day on which the Oxford affair began.

  The entire city of London was smothered in a heavy blanket of fog. Just stepping outside one’s doorway was dangerous. It was a dirty and diseased metropolis. It seemed that London could not stop growing in those days, that the people would not stop coming, that the houses would not stop falling down, that the poor and the sick would not stop begging and dying in the streets, that the dust would not stop accumulating in the doorways and alleys, that the smoke would not stop blackening the buildings, that the criminals would not stop preying upon the innocent and unsuspecting, that the rush of Victorian commerce would stop for no one and threatened to carry us all away.

  London that long-ago November was indeed an oppressive place, but this particular affair of detection in which Dickens and I once again would go “on duty with Inspector Field”* would be the first “case” which actually forced Field to expand his sphere of detective influence outside the city.

  That particular implacable November day, Dickens and I had barricaded ourselves in the Household Words offices on Wellington Street. For once in his life, Dickens seemed to be on top of the game. He actually seemed happy, not his customary restless self. Catherine and the children had chosen to remain at Broadstairs until mid-December in hopes that the sea air would be more beneficial to her faltering health than the pestilential mists of London. The new passenger trains that seemed to be going so many places did not yet travel to Broadstairs. So, pleading the hardship of winter travel, Dickens went to the family only every other week’s end. But the real reason for his happiness was that his distance from his domestic hearth gave him more time to spend with his beloved Ellen, more time to lavish upon that May-December relationship, which those who knew him (besides myself and Irish Meg, who already knew for certain) such as Angela Burdett-Coutts, Wills, Thackeray, Forster, Macready, were beginning to suspect had gone beyond the benevolent interest of an older patron or guardian for his young ward.

  On that particular implacable November day of which I write, Ellen Ternan had just closed in Macready’s The Taming of the Shrew, in which she had played three small parts. But she was an established member of the company and was just waiting for the getting up of the next offering, which was rumoured to be a Sheridan comedy.

  That is not to say that Charles’s instinctive restlessness was completely subdued. He still took his frequent night walks, only he did not as often ask me to accompany him, and, I only speculate, his evening walks frequently had a precise destination (the backstage door at Covent Garden), and he did not always return home, to the Household Words offices that is, until the following morning. Indeed, one morning I actually arrived at the offices a bit early, at eight instead of my usual time, and met Dickens at the doorstep, just coming in. He made some hurried excuse that he had just gone out for some air, but the state of his clothes when he removed his greatcoat indoors gave a different evidence. (Who knows? Maybe I was somewhat of a detective after all.)

  As for me, I was bored, even somewhat confused. Irish Meg had been at work in her clerk’s job at Coutts Bank for almost eleven months and each day seemed a new carnival for her in the bustling theatre of commerce. What bothered me, I suppose, is that she seemed so pleased with herself in her new life and so little concerned with me and the life we had shared together for so long.

  On that day in question, however, Dickens and I had truly battened down the hatches at the Household Words office when Inspector Field, his pull-toy Serjeant Rogers, and our latest case came a-knocking. It was probably about five in the afternoon because dusk was already taking the city into custody when I descended the stairs from Dickens’s second-storey office-cum-living quarters to open the door upon Field and Rogers.

  “Wilkie, is ’ee ’ere?” Field demanded. “I think the two of you can be of ’elp to us on this ’un,” he explained as I ushered them in and up the stairs.

  “Field, what is it?” Dickens met us at the top.

  All of our editorial work was forgotten, the dinner which we had not yet ordered was forgotten, the brutality of the weather was forgotten, perhaps even his Ellen was momentarily forgotten, because from the excited look on Charles’s face as he extended his welcoming hand to Field, it was clear that he sensed we were about to embark on another case of detection.

  “We ’ave a murder in
Lime’ouse ’Ole,” Field went straight to the point.

  Rogers and I exchanged glances: his, as usual, tightlipped and grim; mine, as usual, fraught with alarm.

  “Chinaman?” Dickens shot right back at him.

  “No, and that is why I’ve come for your ’elp, the two of you,” and he nodded in my direction as a way of including me whether I desired to be included or not.

  “If it is not a Chinaman dead in Limehouse Hole,” Dickens pursued his line of inquiry, “then who is it?”

  “A white man, not a yellow man,” Serjeant Rogers solemnly pronounced.

  “A rather well-dressed, full-bearded, bespectacled man, without a single paper of identification upon ’im,” Field gave a full description. “I’d ’oped that you two might come and take a look at ’im. Per’aps you can see something that Rogers and I can’t see.”

  “Yes, of course.” Dickens was absolutely gleeful. “Wilkie, our coats.”

  But Field stopped him in mid-rush as he was scrambling for his waistcoat.

  “We’ll go in the Protectives’ coach, Charles. I’ve got two constables guarding the corpse,” and his voice took on a tone of warning, “but you’ve got to be careful down there. It is Chinatown, you know, and you never quite know what is going on. Stay in our shadows. If anything out of the common ’appens, let Rogers and me ’andle it.”

  “Fine. We understand perfectly, don’t we, Wilkie?” And he nodded his head with an eager anticipation that I did not at all share.

  “A gentleman murdered in Limehouse Hole,” Dickens mused aloud as he climbed into the police coach whose horses stood like smoke-breathing dragons tethered to a gas lamp at the curbstone. “Rather unusual that, eh?”