I happened to be there when the telegram “Safe and well” arrived for Wills and was duly sent on to Ellen Ternan in Florence, where she was staying with her mother and family. How Dickens had ever imagined that Ellen might travel alone from Italy across the Atlantic to America I cannot imagine. The fantasy was simply another sign of how lost in his romantic dreams Dickens was at this time. I did learn later from Wills, almost by accident, that Dickens had known before he set sail that Americans would not have countenanced the presence of this single woman in Dickens’s small entourage. Dolby had sounded things out after his arrival and sent his verdict on the propriety of Ellen’s presence in a single telegraphed syllable—“No.”
Dickens and I had agreed that the stage adaptation of No Thoroughfare should be produced at the Adelphi Theatre as close to Christmas Day as possible and that our mutual friend Charles Fechter should play the villain, Obenreizer. I had first been impressed with Fechter’s performances almost fifteen years earlier and had met him in 1860 when he was in London to play in Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas. By common impulse, immediately upon that meeting, Fechter and I had dispensed with the tentative formalities of acquaintance and had become fast friends.
Born in London of an English mother and a German father, raised in France but having now chosen London as his home again, Fechter was a man of incredible charm and loyalty—the gift of the complete Swiss chalet to Dickens two Christmases ago had been typical of his generosity and impetuousness—but he had no more business sense than a child.
Fechter’s home in London may have been the only salon less formal than my own. Whereas I had the habit of leaving guests in Caroline’s care at the table if I had to rush off for a theatre engagement or somesuch, Fechter had been known to greet guests in his dressing gown and slippers and to allow them to choose which bottle of wine they preferred and take it with them to their place at the table. He and I adored French cookery and twice we put the inexhaustible resources of gastronomic France to the test by dining on one article of food only, presented under many different forms. I remember that we once had a potato dinner in six courses and another time an egg dinner in eight courses.
Fechter’s one flaw as an actor was terrible stage fright, and his dresser was known to follow him around with a basin backstage before the curtain went up.
This November into December I was hurriedly writing the script for the stage version of No Thoroughfare and sent proofs straight to Fechter, who reported that he had “fallen madly in love with the subject” and immediately collaborated on the dramatic scenario. I was not surprised that the actor loved the villainous lead character of Obenreizer, since Dickens and I had held Fechter in mind as we’d created him.
On the days when I rode the train out towards Rochester to Gad’s Hill Place, it was easy to think that Charles Dickens was gone for good—I still felt it quite probable that he would be, given the sad (if hidden from most) state of his health and the rigours of the American reading tour—and that I not only could someday but already was filling his place in the world.
By early December No Thoroughfare would be out in All the Year Round and I had no doubt it would be a great success. Certainly Dickens’s name had something to do with that—his Christmas stories had brought the public flocking to buy the Christmas Issue of his two different magazines for twenty years now—but it was also true that my Woman in White had sold better than some serialised Dickens tales and I was confident that The Moonstone would do even better in 1868. Sitting at the dinner table at Gad’s Hill Place with Georgina on my left, my brother, Charley, on my right, Kate down the table, and some of the other Dickens children there as well, it felt as if I had replaced the Inimitable as surely and easily and completely as Georgina Hogarth had replaced Catherine Dickens.
As for my ongoing research for The Moonstone, after contacting many people in my quest for first-hand knowledge about India (as well as in my search for details on Hindoo and Mohammadan religious practices), I was put in touch with a certain John Wyllie, who had served in the Indian province of Kathiawar during his time in the Indian Civil Service.
“There is no part of India… so fanatically Hindoo in religious and so startlingly barbarous in primitive ethics,” Wyllie said to me between great drams of brandy. He directed me to “a collection of Wheeler’s letters or articles in the Englishman… Eleusinian mysteries are a joke to the abominations there revealed.”
When I explained that my small group of Hindoos in The Moonstone would indeed be villainous but would also have a certain noble martyrdom about them, since they would have to spend decades propitiating their gods for violating their caste rule of never travelling across the “Dark Water,” Wyllie just scoffed and stated flatly that their reinstatement in caste would be more a question of bribes paid to the right Brahman parties rather than the lifelong quest for purification my tale required.
So I threw away most of the comments and advice from Mr John Wyllie, formerly of the Indian Civil Service, and went with the dictates of my Muse. For the English setting of my novel I simply reached into my memory of the Yorkshire coast. For the historical events—since the main part of the novel was to begin in 1848—I continued to rely upon the excellent library at the Athenaeum. The only thing I carried over from Mr Wyllie’s recommendations was the wild Indian province of Kathiawar; so few white men had been there and lived to tell about it that I decided I could make up its geography, topography, and particular brands and cults of Hindoo belief.
I continued working on the novel every day, even amidst the unimaginable demands of preparing No Thoroughfare for the stage.
News of our play had somehow arrived in the United States before the co-author of the tale upon which it was based. I received a letter from Dickens in which he announced that he had been met by theatrical managers immediately upon his arrival in New York; the men seemed to be under the impression that the script for No Thoroughfare was in the novelist’s pocket. Dickens asked me to send copies of each act as I finished it and added, “I have little doubt, my dear Wilkie, of being able to make a good thing of the Drama.”
There followed a flurry of correspondence back and forth in which Dickens announced that he was hurrying to find an American citizen to whom we could consign the MS, thus assuring the right of playing it in America while equally assuring that we would gain some profit from such a production. By Christmas Eve, Dickens had received my final copy of the play, prompting this reply from Boston: “The play is done with great pains and skill, but I fear it is too long. Its fate will have been decided before you get this letter, but I greatly doubt its success.…” The rest of the note was all about Dickens’s fear of the inevitable American pirating of some version of our story, but, in truth, I had lost real interest after the words “… but I greatly doubt its success.”
DESPITE ALL OF THE OBLIGATIONS upon my time and energy, I had honoured, in mid-December, a written request from Inspector Field to meet him at Waterloo Bridge. I anticipated the substance of what he had to say to me and I have to say that my prediction was not in error.