The Detective and Mr. Dickens Read Free

“clinging vines” generally turning out to be “climbers.” I never have, through all the years, gotten on well with Forster. He and I were often in each other’s company and always civil, but it was no secret that neither was comfortable in the presence of the other. Dickens was attached to each of us for different reasons. Forster was his closest advisor and confidant. I was his court jester and dining companion; he liked me with him when we walked out at night because I was young and stout. What lurking robber was going to accost a tall man with a powerful stride accompanied by a wide-shouldered, thick-wristed bulldog?
    As we walked, he noticed everything, pointed out the smallest details, the light on the water, sinister bills posted on dirty walls, shadowy wretches slouching into dark byways, or sleeping in doorways. He was constantly making writing plans. “I can use this place,” he would say, as we looked out over the Thames from the railing on London Bridge. Or, “That sound, mark it, it’s perfect!” he would exclaim, as a posh coach, its velvet curtains drawn tight, clattered past, and was swallowed by the fog, only to leave its receding sound lingering in the air. None of our night walks were ever planned. The night of the Manning hanging, however, was different.
    Leech, his illustrator, suggested it. It was to be a historical moment in the annals of London crime and Punch had commissioned Leech to capture this triumph of British justice, morality, and barbarism. Leech invited Dickens to accompany him to the hanging, and Charles, in turn, invited me.
    “Leech will be at his sketchbook the whole time,” he insisted. “You must come, Wilkie, I’ll need support in this.”
    As usual, he was manifestly right.
    Though the expedition had been Leech’s idea, once underway, it became Dickens’s project. He made all the arrangements, like some playwright blocking out the movements of his actors. He reserved space for our dinner, and rented space on a rooftop overlooking the gallows so that our view would be unobstructed.
    “Young Wil,” he said excitedly, “it is going to be a night we will all remember.” Night indeed! In all his planning, he only overlooked one small detail: sleep! When I had the temerity to point out that his schedule demanded we remain awake all night, he snorted once, then chuckled slyly. “I’ll wager it is not the first time you’ve watched the sun rise, Wilkie, in rather unwholesome circumstances.”
    The hanging was to be carried out at dawn on November thirteenth, but our plan was to spend the night at the site of the command performance. Both Forster and William Wills, a man Dickens had met at the Daily News , joined our party that evening. At Dickens’s urging, we all muffled up, and walked out to dinner. On the way, Dickens engaged Forster and Wills in animated conversation concerning a plan for a new periodical, a weekly, that he wanted to start up. Leech and I walked silently behind, he carrying a small carpetbag containing his sketchbooks and the utensils of his trade.
    “We’ll call it The Shadow,” Dickens insisted to Forster and this Wills person, who seemed the real target of his arguments. “To bind it all together will be the ubiquity of its conductor, a mysterious personality called the Shadow, who may go into any place by sunlight, moonlight, starlight, firelight, candlelight, gaslight—who may be in the theatre, in the palace, the House of Commons, the prisons, the churches, the railroad, in the sea, in every dirty byway and crumbling tenement and pestilent alley of every rookery and rats’ castle of this great verminous sinkhole of London. I want him to loom as a fanciful thing, so that everybody, from the Queen to the most destitute crossing sweep, will be wondering, ‘What will the Shadow say about this? Is the Shadow here? Does the Shadow know?’ I have not breathed this idea to anyone, but I have a lively hope that it is an idea, and that out of