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).
“From these garish lights,” he concluded, stepping slightly closer to the gaslights and to his silent (except for the soft weeping) audience, “I now vanish forevermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, affectionate farewell.”
He limped from the stage then, but the relentless roars of applause brought him back one last time.
His cheeks wet with tears, Charles Dickens kissed his hand, waved, and then limped off the stage for the final time.
Walking back to Number 90 Gloucester Place through light showers that March night, a new unopened letter from Caroline Clow—more carefully detailed abuses, I was sure—in my pocket, I drank heavily from my silver flask.
Dickens’s public—that mob of public which I had seen and heard roar that very night—would, whenever that d— ned beloved writer of theirs finally chose to die, insist on having him buried in Westminster Abbey next to the great poets. I was now certain of that. They would get him there if they had to carry his corpse on their rough-wooled shoulders and dig the grave themselves.
I resolved to take a day off from my writing the next day—a Wednesday—and go to Rochester and visit the cathedral and seek out Mr Dradles and there make my final arrangements for Charles Dickens’s true demise and interment.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Ere is the block,” whispered Dradles, patting the face of a stone in the wall that looked like all the others in the gloom. “And ’ere the tool to ’andle ’er with.” In the weak lantern light, I saw him reach deep into his layers of flannel and moleskin and filthy canvas and bring out a pry bar as long as my forearm. “And ’ere on top, you see, the notch I chiselled in, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins, sir. Easy as the front door key to your very own ’ouse, you see.”
I could not really see the niche at the top of the block where it met the mortar, but the flat end of the pry bar found it. Dradles grunted rum fumes at me as he leaned all his weight on the upper part of the bar. The stone screamed.
I write “screamed,” Dear Reader, rather than “screeched” or “scraped” or “made a loud sound” because the noise this stone block made sliding back several inches out of its ancient place in the wall of the crypt was precisely that of a woman screaming.
I helped Dradles remove the surprisingly heavy block and set it on the dark, dank stones of the curving crypt stairs. The lantern showed a rectangular hole which I was sure was far too small for my purposes. When Dradles dropped the iron bar on the floor behind me, I confess I jumped several inches.