The Detective and Mr. Dickens Read Online Free PDF Page A

of ecstacy rolled like waves through the crowd. The husband and wife were hung side by side. Like demented marionettes, they performed their dance of death. The woman’s legs kicked out, as if trying to reach the faces in the front row. The husband died more meekly. He spasmed once or twice in midair, before going as limp as his backbone had been all his life. The unspeakable crowd spewed hate.
    “TO HELL, HUSSY!” they screamed.
    “BURN, DEVILS, BURN!”
    “DIE, WHORE! DIE AND BE DAMNED!”
    Dickens turned to me, “It’s a bloody raree-show!” he exploded. “Worse, it’s a bloody damned pagan sacrifice to Satan!”
    I wasn’t surprised at his emotion, his anger; what surprised me were his words. The man never cursed. It was as if he had too much respect for the language which was his constant companion to profane it.
    As we walked back over Hungerford Bridge, talk turned to Inspector Field. “That man is London’s real ‘Shadow,’” said Dickens. “I’ll bet he knows every inch of this city as if it were his own parlor. That man’s a good man for us to get to know, Wilkie.”
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* Hangings as widely-covered social events were something which the English had a tremendous fondness for and gave up grudgingly. In fact, though hangings were not nearly so public later as they were in Dickens’s time, it took the English over 100 more years to outgrow them. In 1955, Ruth Ellis, who had shot her high-society lover in the head, had the honor of being the last woman to be hanged in England.
* The generic nickname for a professional hangman.
* A gas-filled hand-torch which was also frequently used as a weapon.
* The generic English name for Asylums for the Insane.
* One subject of interest which weighs down the pages of first the Daily News and then Household Words and All The Year Round, yet which few biographers have observed or commented upon in any depth, is Dickens’s fascination with detectives, with the London underworld, with the intellectual aspects of crime solving.
* Criminal slang for thieves who dress as gentlemen and, usually in groups, work crowds at public gatherings.

At the Station House
    April 5, 1851
    Dickens started his weekly magazine that next year. He discarded the idea of “The Shadow.” Instead, he and Forster and Wills named the new periodical Household Words . I became one of its regular contributors.
    I continued as the favoured companion of Dickens’s night walks. During that period, when he was working so hard to get Household Words underway, his nocturnal forays served purposes much more complex than mere post-prandial exercise. They were his physical and psychological outlet. It was as if the long day working in the office brought him slowly to a boil, and his walks through the dark streets were his way of letting the pressurized steam escape. He prowled those streets like an obsessed spy. He had ordered a large brass bedstead brought into the Wellington Street offices, and had fallen into the regimen of spending the first four nights of the work week—Monday through Thursday—there, living like a bachelor. He, of course, rejoined his family in the country for the weekends. Mrs. Dickens, Kate, had been afflicted with a strange undiagnosable dizziness and headache since February of that year, and had been under the private medical care of Doctor Southwood Smith at Great Malvern.
    His father, John Dickens, died late in March of that year, rather suddenly, of an old urinary complaint which years before had forced him to retire from the Navy Pay Office. Dickens had known nothing of his father’s condition until summoned from Malvern to his father’s bedside when a bladder infection cast the old man into a violent delirium. John Dickens died the next morning with his son in attendance. Dickens had been a dutiful son, and had loved his father well, though there was evidence that he didn’t take the old man very seriously. Forster, for one, had accused him of creating Mister