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years before, he had even put her in the story that was so much his own, David Copperfield , casting heras the one whom David marries: Dora Spenlow. And as he sat there in his study that dark morning, attempting to rescue Sir John, there arose within Dickens another bitter memory he found unbearable: it was while writing this tale of his idealised life, of his unrequited love finally requited, of reshaping the world to just what he wanted it to be, that his ninth child was born and he had named her Dora.
    How strange, how eerie he found it, then, when a few months after killing Dora in David Copperfield , his own little Dora would die. He had the horrid sense that the world warped to his fancy, but only to mock him in the cruellest way possible.
    Outside his study, Dickens could hear his younger children running up and down the corridor, squealing and crashing into walls. He went and shut the second door he had specifically built for the purpose and returned to his desk. The sounds of his family were now distant and muted, but he had lost his train of thought altogether.
    He put down his quill, stood and went to a bookcase and searched for several minutes, all the time wondering why he had ever wanted Maria Beadnell. Now he thanked God for her father’s prejudice against the lowly. He had a wife, the women of his books, the periwinkles of his nights. It was enough—it had to be.
    Dickens’ eyes roamed the shelves until finally he found Sir John Franklin’s Journey to the Polar Sea . After two passes through the book, he found the pages he vaguely remembered; they were, he could now see, even more admirably suited to his purpose than he could have hoped.Whatever the truth of the book, it revealed Franklin as an infinitely better writer than poor old Dr Rae. Sir John Franklin, Dickens recognised, was surely as fine a creation of Sir John Franklin’s own pen as Oliver Twist was of his.
    There were several passages in which Sir John recounted how, when utterly reduced by starvation at the nadir of his celebrated 1819 expedition, with eleven of his twenty men dead, there was a level of decency they never abandoned. Rather than countenance the thought of cannibalism, Sir John had eaten his own boots. Dickens felt cheered. That was an Englishman. Stout heart, stewed boots, decency dressed up as diet.
    Feeling the pump was now primed, he began to narrate the story: how, when Franklin’s first expedition was starving, the Iroquois hunter Michel conceived ‘the horrible idea of subsisting on the bodies of the stragglers’, probably even killing one or two expeditioners to this end, and how Sir John Richardson then marvellously shot the devil through the head—‘ to the infinite joy ,’ Dickens now wrote, ‘ of all the generations of readers .’
    His pen was once more moving in accordance with his fancy, his spirits rising with its life-giving flow. This is what he did! Who he was! He lived and found and knew himself only in story, and in this act of writing Dickens sensed himself becoming joined to Sir John’s doomed journey, and to that strange frozen world that held all their mysteries. He thought of how such great spirits as these would always endure stoically to the end, as would he in his marriage. Sir John would not make the error that theIroquois Michel was condemned to because of race, that error of passion Dickens himself had once made because of youth. Had he not yearned to bite into Maria Beadnell’s thighs as keenly as the Esquimaux had wanted to feast on old Sir John’s gentlemanly drumsticks? But the mark of wisdom and civilisation was the capacity to conquer desire, to deny it and crush it. Otherwise, one was no better than the Iroquois Michel or an Esquimau.
    The heart of the matter was obvious. The words of a savage could not be taken as the truth, ‘ because he is a liar ’. Besides, it was clear that cooked and dissevered bodies among this or that tattoo’d tribe proved only one thing.
    ‘ Such