I had a slightly different theory about why Dickens burned the letters.
I believe that I put the idea of burning the letters into Dickens’s head.
In the Christmas 1854 edition of Household Words, in my story “The Fourth Poor Traveller,” the narrator, a lawyer, says, “My experience in the law, Mr Frank, has convinced me that if everybody burnt everybody else’s letters, half the Courts of Justice in this country might shut up shop.” The courts of justice, such as they were, were very much on Charles Dickens’s mind in those days as he wrote Bleak House and then again in 1858 when his wife’s family threatened to drag him into court for various injustices to Catherine, including, one presumes, adultery.
And just a few months before Dickens had committed his letters to the bonfire, I had written of burning a letter in my novel The Woman in White, which was then being serialised in Household Words, carefully edited by Dickens. In my tale, Marian Halcombe has received a letter from a certain Walter Hartright. Marian’s half-sister, Laura, is in love with Hartright but has agreed to fulfil her promise to her dying father to marry someone else. Hartright is ready to sail away to South America. Marian decides not to tell Laura about the contents of the letter.
I almost doubt whether I ought not to go a step farther, and burn the letter at once, for fear of it one day falling into wrong hands. It not only refers to Laura in terms which ought to remain a secret forever between the writer and me; but it reiterates his suspicion—so obstinate, so unaccountable, and so alarming—that he has been secretly watched.… But there is a danger in my keeping the letter. The merest accident might place it at the mercy of strangers. I may fall ill; I may die—better to burn it at once, and have one anxiety the less.
It is burnt! The ashes of his farewell letter—the last he may ever write to me—lie in a few black fragments in the hearth.
My theory, such as it is, is that this scene from The Woman in White made a profound impression upon Dickens at the time that he was working so very, very hard to create a second and secret life with Ellen Ternan, but also that—for whatever reason—it was his daughter Kate’s marriage to my brother in July of 1860 that finally forced him to burn his correspondence and, I am almost certain, to convince Ellen Ternan to burn all letters he had sent her in the past three years. I am certain that Dickens saw Katey’s marriage to Charles Collins as a form of betrayal from within his family, and it is not too much to speculate that he could then imagine his daughters and sons, but especially his daughter Kate, she who everyone agreed was so much like him, betraying him yet again by selling or publishing his correspondence when he was dead.
Dickens had aged terribly in the years between 1857 and 1860—some say that he went from being a youth to an old man with almost no pause for middle age along the way—and it could very well have been his brush with illness and the spectre of death at that time which reminded him of my letter-burning scene and prompted him to get on with destroying all evidence of his inner thoughts.
“I know what you’re thinking, my dear Wilkie,” Dickens said suddenly.
The other men looked startled. Swathed in their layers of wool, they had been watching the weak sun set beneath the layer of clouds to the west across the rolling, frozen Kentish fields.
“What am I thinking, my dear Dickens?” I said.
“You’re thinking that a great bonfire here would warm us wonderfully,” said Dickens.
I blinked at this, feeling the stiffness of my frozen lashes against my icy cheeks.
“A bonfire!” cried the young Dickenson. “What a capital idea!”
“It would be if we weren’t needed inside to join the women and children in their Christmas Day games,” said Dickens, clapping his heavy gloves together with a sound like a rifle shot. Sultan shied suddenly, leaping sideways against the leash and cowering as if a real rifle had been fired at him.
“Warm punch for everyone!” cried the Inimitable, and our procession of woollen spheroids with bright scarves waddled into the house behind him.
I ABSENTED MYSELF from the felicity of playing games with the children and women and sought the refuge of my room. I always stayed in the same guest room at Gad’s Hill Place and I was quietly relieved to discover that it was still mine, that I had not been demoted in recent months. (Because of the crowding with family staying over the holidays and the Mysterious Guests still to arrive that evening, Percy Fitzgerald had been relegated to a room in the Falstaff Inn across the street. I found this odd, since Percy was an old friend and certainly deserved a room in Dickens’s home much more than did the Dickenson orphan, who was staying in the house. But I had long ago given up trying to understand or predict Charles Dickens’s whims.)
I should note here, Dear Reader, that I had never shared my late-night laudanum insight that Dickens was planning to kill young rich-orphan Edmond Dickenson (all having something to do with scarlet geraniums spilled about the landscape and hotel room like blood) with Inspector Field or with anyone else. The reason is obvious—it was a late-night laudanum revelation, and although some of those have proven priceless to me as a novelist, it would be hard to describe to the squinting Inspector Field the chain of hidden logic and drug-induced intuition that had led to the insight.
But back to my room at Gad’s Hill Place. Although I told Caroline otherwise after long stays with Dickens, his home was a comfortable refuge for guests. Every guest room had a marvellously comfortable bed in which to sleep, several expensive and equally comfortable items of furniture, and—always, in every guest room and in some hallways and public rooms—a table covered with writing materials, including headed notepaper, envelopes, cut quill pens, wax, matches, and sealing-wax. All this was arranged in a room that was invariably clean, scrupulously neat, and impeccably comfortable.
Each guest at Gad’s Hill would also find himself with a veritable library to choose from in his room, with several volumes set out on the bedside table. These books would have been chosen specifically by Dickens for that particular guest. On my bedside table were a copy of my own The Woman in White—not the inscribed one I had personally given to Dickens but a newly purchased one with the pages not yet cut—as well as Spectator essays, a copy of 1001 Arabian Nights, and a volume of Herodotus with a leather bookmark set in a chapter on the ancient historian’s Egyptian travels, which opened to a discussion of Sleep Temples.
Above a dressing room mirror in my room was a card which read—“Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family AGES!”
I knew something about that extended visit. One night over wine, Dickens had described the friendly Dane (who spoke very little English, which must have made his long stay with the Dickens family even more stressful) as “a cross between my character Pecksniff and the Ugly Duckling, Wilkie. A very heavy Scandinavian cross to bear for a week, much less for two fortnights and more.”
But when I frequently told Caroline or Harriet, after several days or even weeks as a guest at Gad’s Hill, that the stay had been “a trial,” I meant it in a more literal sense. Despite Dickens’s very real good humour and very real efforts always to set his guests at ease, seeing to their every comfort, catering to them in conversation at all meals and gatherings, there was also a very real sense of being judged by the Inimitable when one was a guest in his home. At least I felt that. (My guess is that poor Hans Christian Andersen—who had commented, without complaining, on the brusqueness of Katey and Mamie and the boys during his long stay here—had not noticed the impatience and occasional censure from his host.)