“It’s these accursed muggy days this winter which prey upon the mind, Wilkie,” said Dickens. “Then, after three or four days of unusually warm humidity, these constant cold snaps batter one’s morale like a mace. But—have you noticed? — it never snows. I would give anything for the simple, cold, snowy Christmases of my childhood.”
It was true that there was no snow on the ground in London or at Gad’s Hill this particular Christmas. But we were in one of the cold snaps he had described and our afternoon walk that Christmas Day—Percy Fitzgerald came along, as did young Dickenson and Dickens’s real son Charley, but my brother Charles stayed in the house—resembled more a waddling procession of insensate and multiple-layered bundles of wool than it did a gentlemen’s outing. Even Dickens, who usually seemed oblivious to the rain or heat or cold, had added a thicker topcoat than he usually wore on walks and a second wool muffler, red, wound about his collar and lower face.
Besides the five of us men, there were five dogs with us on that outing: Linda, the lumbering Saint Bernard; Mary’s little Pomeranian, living up to her name of Mrs Bouncer; Don, the black Newfoundland; the great mastiff named Turk; and Sultan.
Dickens had to restrain Sultan on a thick leash. The dog also required a leather muzzle. Percy Fitzgerald, who’d given Dickens the Irish bloodhound as a puppy the previous September, was happy to see Sultan almost grown and obviously healthy, but when Percy approached to pet the hound, Sultan growled ferociously and snapped within the constraints of his muzzle as if he were determined to bite Fitzgerald’s hand off at the wrist. Percy drew back, frightened and mortified. Dickens seemed strangely pleased.
“Sultan continues to be gentle and obedient with me,” he told us. “But he is a monster with most other living creatures. He has chewed through five muzzles and often comes home with blood on his snout. We know for certain that he bolted a certain blue-eyed kitten whole, but Sultan did show agonies of remorse for that dastardly deed… or at least agonies of indigestion.”
As young Edmond Dickenson laughed, Dickens added, “But notice that Sultan has growled and snarled at all of you… except for Wilkie here. While Sultan is loyal only to me, there is some strange affinity between that dog and Wilkie Collins, I tell you.”
I frowned over the rim of my wool scarf. “Why do you say that, Dickens? Because we both come from Irish stock?”
“No, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens from behind his own red scarf. “Because you both can be dangerous unless properly restrained and treated with a strong hand.”
The idiot Dickenson laughed again. Charley Dickens and Percy merely looked puzzled at the comment.
Because of the cold, or because of Dickens’s pity on his guests, or perhaps because of Dickens’s own health problems, the afternoon walk was more of a leisurely stroll around the property than the usual Dickensian marathon. We ambled to the barn and looked in on the horses, including Mary’s riding horse, Boy; the older Trotty Veck; and the always serious-demeanoured Norwegian pony named Newman Noggs. As we were standing in the clouds of warm exhalations of the horses’ breath, feeding carrots to them, I remembered my summer visit here to see Dickens right after the Staplehurst accident and how the Inimitable’s nerves could not bear even the slow trot of Newman Noggs pulling the basket cart. That cart and Noggs’s harness, which was hanging on the wall of the stable, were decked out today as they usually were with a lovely-sounding set of Norwegian musical bells, but it was too cold to go for a ride.
We left the stables, and Dickens—with Sultan straining at the leash ahead of him—led us through the tunnel to the chalet. The green summer cornfields beyond had died into jagged expanses of frozen brown stubble. The Dover Road was all but empty this grey Christmas Day—a single, tilted hayrick waggon could be seen moving slowly far down its frozen-mud expanse. Brittle grass crackled and split asunder under our boots.
After leaving the empty chalet, our procession followed Dickens to and through the field behind his house. Here the writer paused and looked at me and for a second I flattered myself that I knew exactly what he was thinking.
Here on this very spot, a mere five years earlier, on a lovely day in the first week of September, Charles Dickens had burned every bit of correspondence he had received in the past three decades. With his sons Henry and Plorn hauling basket after basket of letters and files out from his study, and with his daughter Mamie begging him not to destroy such priceless literary and personal artefacts, Dickens burned every letter he had ever received from me, from John Forster and Leigh Hunt, from Alfred Tennyson and William Makepeace Thackeray, from William Harrison Ainsworth and Thomas Carlyle, from his American friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Washington Irving and James T. and Annie Fields, and from his wife, Catherine. And from Ellen Ternan.
Later, Katey told me that she had argued with her father as she held the letters in her hands, argued as she recognised the handwriting and signatures of Thackeray and Tennyson and so many others, and had begged him to think of posterity. But Katey, for whatever reason, was lying to me when she told that story. Kate was actually on her honeymoon in France with my brother, Charles, on 3 September, the day Dickens suddenly decided to burn all of his correspondence. She had not even learned of it until many months later.
Her sister Mamie was there—here, on this very spot where I now stood in Dickens’s back yard overlooking the frozen fields and bare, distant forests of Kent—and Mamie did implore her father not to destroy the letters. Dickens’s response was—“Would to God every letter I had ever written was on that pile.”
When the files and drawers of Dickens’s study were empty that day, his sons Henry and Plorn had roasted onions on the ashes of the great bonfire until a sudden afternoon rainstorm drove everyone inside. Dickens later wrote me—“It then rained very heavily… I suspect my correspondence of having overcast the face of the Heavens.”
Why had Dickens burned his legacy of correspondence?
Just the previous year, in 1864, Dickens had told me that he’d written to his old friend the actor William Charles Macready—
Daily seeing improper uses made of confidential letters in the addressing of them to a public audience that have no business with them, I made not long ago a great fire in my field at Gad’s Hill, and burnt every letter I possessed. And now I always destroy every letter I receive not on absolute business, and my mind is so far at ease.
What improper uses? Some friends whom Dickens and I had in common—of the few who had learned of the mass burning— speculated that the Inimitable’s difficult and public separation from Catherine (made public mostly through his own poor judgement, we should remember) had terrified him into imagining would-be literary biographers and other literary ghouls in the days and months after his demise poring over his confidential correspondence of so many years. For decades, these mutual friends speculated, Charles Dickens’s life and work had been public property. He would be damned, they believed, if reactions from friends to his most private thoughts should also be gawped and gaped at by the curious public.