Read Wanting for Free Online

Dickens, ‘I’ve never claimed to be consistent. Besides, I’m weary, my dear Wilkie. I was three parts mad and one part delirious rushing at Hard Times .’
    ‘It brought Household Words good times,’ said Wilkie.
    ‘It left me all done in.’
    Wilkie knew that Dickens’ magazine, in which his novels would first appear as serials, was more than a major source of income for the novelist. It also mattered that it, as with everything Dickens touched, was not just a success, but an ever greater success.
    ‘I am beyond a novel just now,’ Dickens was saying,‘but I need some tale to help sell our Christmas edition of the magazine.’ And then, on seeing a bowed, beetle-like figure in a far corner, he brightened. ‘Why, it’s Douglas Jerrold—he’ll give us something.’
    On being waved over, Jerrold, his bright eyes bluer than ever beneath huge eyebrows that sat over his sharp little face like watchful moths, was delighted to see Dickens but declined a drink, saying he had been somewhat off-colour the last few months. Instead, he told a short and funny story about sherry negus and Jane Austen’s brother, with whom he had served in the navy.
    ‘I read one of Austen’s once, I think,’ Dickens ruminated. ‘Who these days would read more?’
    ‘Macaulay,’ said Jerrold.
    ‘Precisely,’ said Dickens. ‘Unlike you, Douglas, she didn’t understand that what pulses hard and fast through us must be there in every sentence. That is why, since her death, she has suffered ever greater obscurity rather than growing popularity—and that is why I really must have you write something for our Christmas edition.’
    ‘If I could, Charlie, I would. But I’m busy with a new play and I couldn’t see my way clear to do anything for you till next spring.’
    After Jerrold left, Dickens played with his large wedding ring, sliding it off, rolling it around his fingernail. Though he did not say it, something in his meeting with Lady Jane Franklin had resonated in an unexpected and as yet intangible way with him. He could not let it go. He slid the ring back on.
    ‘What do you think, Wilkie, if I did a little paper on Dr Rae’s report, taking the argument against its probabilities?’
    At his home, Tavistock House, Dickens more closely studied The Illustrated London News . Outside, the London morning was almost as dark as night; inside, the hiss of his gas lights comforted him as he read Dr Rae’s account. So too, he concluded with relief, did the content. The man had no gift for story.
    Dickens put the paper down, moved the bronze statuette of duelling frogs to the centre of his desk and set to work. He opened with some quick, telling jabs, and diverted for a moment to praise Dr Rae deftly, thereby eliminating the possibility of his article being construed as a personal attack.
    Then, and only then, in the manner of the barristers he had reported on in his youth, Dickens began to sow doubt over every detail of Dr Rae’s account—from the utter impossibility of accurate translation from the Esquimau’s argot, to the very real possibility of multiple and even opposing interpretations arising from the savages’ vague gestures. He questioned the process of butchering and cooking up a fellow human. ‘ Would the little flame of the spirit-lamp the travellers may have had with them have sufficed for such a purpose? ’ he wrote.
    Feeling better with the piece, with himself, with life, he halted, reread this last sentence, and then underlined thephrase may have had . The case was building, and he was now feeling words rushing his goose-quill along, leaving trails of ink, blue as ice, leading him and his readers to that strange and terrible world.
    He turned to the inescapable matter of the mutilation of the bodies. ‘ Had there been no bears thereabout, to mutilate the bodies; no wolves, no foxes? ’ He didn’t answer his own rhetorical question—let the reader answer, he told himself, scurrying straight on to another