As recently as this past May of 1889, when an inquisitive and impudent young correspondent asked me directly about the rumour of my long use of stimulants, I responded thusly—
I have been writing novels for the last five and thirty years and I have been regularly in the habit of relieving the weariness which follows on work of the brain—declared by George Sand to be the most depressing of all forms of mortal fatigue—by champagne at one time and brandy (old cognac) at another. If I live until January next, I shall be sixty-six years old, and I am writing another work of fiction. There is my experience.
Well, I believe on this cool day of 23 September that I shall not live ’til January next, when my birthday would have sent the bells tolling sixty-six times. But already I have lived five years longer than my teetotalling father did and some twenty years longer than my dear brother, Charles, who never used a stimulant stronger than the rare sip of whisky as long as he lived.
Charley died on 9 April, 1873. He died of cancer of the bowel and stomach, which was precisely what Dickens had always insisted that Charley was suffering from, despite all our protests to the contrary. My only consolation is that Dickens had been dead almost three years by the time Charley finally succumbed and went under. I would definitely have had to murder Charles Dickens if I’d heard him gloating about the correctness of his diagnosis when it came to my dear brother.
Shall I summarize the nineteen years I have lived since the summer of the Inimitable’s death? It hardly seems worth the effort for either of us, Dear Reader, and lies outside the purpose and purview of this memoir. And equally outside your range of interest, I am sure. This was about Dickens and Drood, and there your curiosity lies, not in your modest and unworthy narrator.
Suffice it to say that Caroline G— returned to my home at Number 90 Gloucester Place in the early autumn of 1870, just weeks after… weeks after Dickens died and after her husband of the time disappeared. (Since Joseph Clow’s mother had recently suffered a series of strokes, it was as if no one noticed that he had disappeared, and his wife with him. Enquiries were made by a few mildly interested parties, but all of Mr and Mrs Clow’s bills had been paid, all debts met, the rent for their tiny house paid to the end of July, and the house itself sealed up tidily and emptied of all clothing and personal possessions before the couple were found to be missing—and then the house and its few pieces of cheap furniture were taken over again by the party who had rented it to them—and the few people who had known the Clows at all assumed that the hard-drinking workingman and his unhappy bride had moved away. Most of his ruffian friends believed that the unlucky plumber and his accident-prone wife had moved to Australia, since after a few drinks Clow had always threatened precisely such a sudden departure.)
By March of 1871, I was once again legally listing Mrs Caroline G— on the parish records as my housekeeper. Carrie was delighted to have her mother home and never—to my knowledge—asked a single question as to how Caroline had extricated herself from the bad marriage.
On 14 May of 1871, my younger daughter, Harriet—named after my mother, of course—was born to “Mrs Martha Dawson.” Martha and I had a third child—William Charles Collins Dawson—who was born on Christmas Day in 1874.
I hardly need tell you that Martha continued to get fatter during and after each pregnancy. After William was born, she made no pretense of trying to shed the weight that hung on her like great slabs of lard. It was as if she had given up caring about her appearance. I had once written about Martha R— that she was a fine specimen of that type of girl I liked, “the fine fleshy beef-fed English girl.” But all that fleshy beef-feeding had a predictable effect. If I had been asked to rewrite that sentence in 1874, it would have read—“She is the perfect specimen of a vast, fleshy, girl-fed English beef.”
If Caroline G— ever heard about Martha and the children, even after I moved them all to 10 Taunton Place to be more comfortable and closer to my own home, she never once mentioned it or let on that she knew. If Martha R— ever heard or knew that Caroline G— was living with me at Number 90 Gloucester Place (and then, in more recent years, on Wimpole Street) from 1870 onward, she never once mentioned it or let on that she knew.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW about my literary career after Dickens’s death, Dear Reader, I shall summarise it for you in a single cruel sentence: the World thought it and I were a success, while I knew all along that my career and I had conspired to become the most dismal of failures.
As Dickens had before me, I eventually took to giving public readings. My friends told me that they were delightful and a success. I knew—and the honest critics reported both here and in America—that they were mumbling, lifeless, incoherent failures.
As Dickens had before me, I continued to write books and turn them into plays whenever possible. Each book was weaker than the one before it and all were weaker than my masterpiece, The Moonstone, although I have seen for many years that The Moonstone was no masterpiece. (And it was the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood that made me see that.)
Perhaps my unpopularity with the public—for that is what it has been, Dear Reader from my future—began just days after Charles Dickens’s death, for it is then that I privately approached Frederick Chapman of the publishers Chapman and Hall and suggested to him that I could complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood for them if they so chose. I let them know that while no notes for the remainder of the book were in existence—and it was true that none of Dickens’s usual marginal notes and outlines on blue paper have ever come to light for the unfinished portions of Drood—Dickens had taken me (and me alone) into his confidence before the end. I—and I alone—could finish the writing of the entire second half of The Mystery of Edwin Drood for only a nominal fee and equal credit as author (just as the co-authorship of our earlier collaborations had been registered).
Chapman’s response totally surprised me. The publisher was furious. He let me know that no man in England, no matter how gifted the writer might be or might think he was—and he implied that he did not think me all that gifted—could ever fill the shoes of Charles Dickens, even if I had a hundred completed outlines in my pocket. “Better that the world never knows who killed Edwin Drood—or indeed, if Edwin Drood is dead,” he wrote me, “— than a lesser mind pick up the Master’s fallen pen.”
I thought that last metaphor very garbled and grotesque indeed.
Chapman even swore that he would never let the slightest whisper of my offer to him slip out (and warned me never to tell anyone) for fear that “You shall then inevitably and irretrievably become the most hated and assuredly assumed and presumed presumptuous man in all of England and the Empire and the World.”
How even a publisher and editor could write and express himself that poorly, in a sentence that spavined, I have no idea to this day.
But rumours and whispers against me did begin about that time and that is—as I say—when the active dislike of me by the public seems to have begun in earnest.
AS DICKENS HAD BEFORE ME, I did a reading tour of the United States and Canada. Mine was in 1873 and 1874, and it could objectively be categorised as a total disaster. The travel by ship and by train and by coach exhausted me even before the tour was really under way. The American audiences seemed to agree with the English audiences that my readings lacked energy, even audibility. I was never well during the entire tour and reached a point where not even massive ministrations of my laudanum—which I found oddly hard to find and purchase in the States—could bring back any energy or pleasure. The American audiences were idiots. The entire nation was composed of prudes and bluestockings and boors. While the French had never had the least problem with Caroline travelling with me, the Americans would have been scandalised at the very idea of a woman not my wife in my entourage—so I had to suffer my travels and illnesses and nightly humiliations on stage without her help for those long months in America.