“The Chief began the tour by reading from his Christmas story ‘Doctor Marigold,’ ” whispered Dolby although we were far away from Dickens. “But it didn’t quite work, at least not to the Chief’s satisfaction—and I do not have to tell you that he is the ultimate perfectionist—so he improves it while leaning towards more of the old favourites: the death scene of Paul from Dombey and Son, the Mr, Mrs, and Miss Squeers scene from Nicholas Nickleby, the trial from Pickwick, the storm scene of David Copperfield, and, of course, A Christmas Carol. The audiences can never get enough of A Christmas Carol.”
“I am sure they cannot,” I said drily. I was on record for noting my disdain for the “Cant and Christmas season.” I also noticed that Dolby’s stammer was not present when he whispered. How very strange such afflictions are. Having been reminded of afflictions, I removed the small travelling flask that now held my laudanum and took several swallows of it. “I am sorry I cannot offer you some of this,” I said to Dolby in a conversational tone, unintimidated by Dickens’s still reciting snippets of this and that from his distant stage. “Medicine.”
“I understand perfectly,” whispered Dolby.
“I am surprised that ‘Doctor Marigold’ did not please the masses,” I said. “Our Christmas Issue with that story sold more than two hundred and fifty thousand copies.”
Dolby shrugged. “The Chief got laughs and tears with it,” he said softly. “But not enough laughs and tears, he said. And not at precisely the right times. So he set it aside.”
“Pity,” I said, feeling the careless warmth of the drug enter my system. “Dickens rehearsed it for more than three months.”
“The Chief rehearses everything,” whispered Dolby.
I did not know how I felt about this absurd appellation of “Chief” that Dolby had assigned to Dickens, but the Inimitable himself seemed to enjoy the title. From everything I could perceive, Dickens enjoyed almost everything about the big, burly, stammering bear of a manager. I had no doubt that this common theatrical tradesman was usurping the position of close friend and occasional confidant that I had held with Dickens for more than a decade now. Not for the first time—and not for the first time under the clarity of laudanum—I saw precisely how Forster, Wills, Macready, Dolby, Fitzgerald—all of us—were mere planets vying and contesting to see who could circle the closest revolutions around the grizzled, flatulent, lined, and greying Sun that was Charles Dickens.
Without another word I rose and left the theatre.
I HAD INTENDED to return to the hotel—Dickens would go there to rest the few hours before his performance, I knew, but would withdraw into himself, not engaging in conversation until after the long night of readings was over—but found myself wandering the dark and sooty streets of Birmingham, wondering why I was there.
Eight years earlier, in the autumn of 1858—after I had accompanied Dickens on that fool’s errand of a trip north pursuing Ellen Ternan (being convinced by Dickens that we were travelling as research for our collaboration on Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices) and after I had almost died on Carrick Fell—I returned to London with my eye firmly fixed on the theatre. Immediately after the success of The Frozen Deep the previous year, the famous actor Frederick “Frank” Robson had purchased my earlier melodrama The Lighthouse—which Dickens had starred in just as he had in The Frozen Deep—and on 10 August, 1857, my dream of becoming a professional dramatist came true. Dickens sat with me in the author’s box and applauded as others did (I confess to standing and taking a bow during the ovation) but “ovation” may be too strong a word; the applause sounded rather more respectful than enthusiastic.
Reviews of The Lighthouse were equally respectful and tepid. Even gentle John Oxenford of the Times wrote—“We cannot avoid the conclusion that The Lighthouse, with all its merits, is rather a dramatic anecdote than an actual drama.”
Despite this effluvium of tepidity, for months in 1858 I had—to use a phrase I shared with Dickens then—exhausted my brains in the service of more theatrical composition.
It was Dickens’s son Charley, just back from Germany and sharing impressions of a grisly place there in Frankfurt called the Dead House, who gave me my inspiration. I immediately put pen to paper and dashed off a play called The Red Vial. My two lead characters were a lunatic and a lady poisoner (I have always had a fascination with poison and those who poison). I set the main scene of The Red Vial in the Dead House. I confess, Dear Reader, that I thought the set and setting wonderful—a room full of corpses all laid out on cold slabs under sheets, each with a finger wrapped in a string that led upward to a dangling alarm bell, should one of the “dead” not be dead at all. The entire macabre setting reached into the deepest areas of our fears of premature burial and the walking dead.
Dickens himself said little when I proposed the idea and later when I read him the actual sections of the play as I finished them, but he did visit London’s asylum in quest of small details that would add more believability to my lead lunatic. Robson, who had done such a fine job in The Lighthouse, accepted the play for the Olympic Theatre and took the role of the lunatic. I enjoyed the rehearsals immensely, and all of the actors involved assured me that the play was wonderful. They agreed with my premise that although London theatre-goers had become a lumpen lot with dulled minds, a sufficiently strong stimulation might awaken them.
On 11 October, 1858, Dickens accompanied me to The Red Vial’s premiere performance and arranged an after-theatre supper party for me and my friends at his now wifeless home at Tavistock House. A group of at least twenty of us sat together during the performance.
It was a disaster. While my friends shuddered at the delightfully morbid and melodramatic parts, the rest of the audience snickered. The loudest snickers came at the climax of my Dead House scene where—too obviously, according to critics after the fact—one of the corpses rang the bell.
There was no second performance. Dickens tried to be upbeat during all the rest of that endless night, telling jokes at the expense of London audiences, but the supper at Tavistock House was very trying for me. As I later overheard that brat Percy Fitzgerald say—it was a real case of funeral baked meats.
But the disaster of The Red Vial did nothing to dissuade me from my decided course of simultaneously disturbing, fascinating, and repelling my fellow countrymen. Shortly after the wild success of The Woman in White, I was asked the secret of my success and I modestly told my interlocutor—
1. Find a central idea
2. Find the characters
3. Let the characters develop the incidents
4. Begin the story at the beginning
Compare, if you will, this almost scientific artistic principle with the haphazard way that Charles Dickens had thrown his novels together over the decades: pulling characters out of the air (often based willy-nilly on people in his own life) without a thought as to how they might serve the central purpose, mixing in a plethora of random ideas, having characters wander off into incidental occurrences and unimportant side-plots having nothing to do with the overriding idea, and often beginning his story in mid-flight, as it were, violating the important Collins principle of first-things-first.