1865 On 9 June 1865, the 2.38 pm ‘tidal’ train, carrying ferry passengers from France, thundered through the Kent countryside towards London. Charles Dickens, incognito, was in a private first-class carriage with his mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother (strange, but true). In the rack above the antimacassars was Dickens’s surtout (a frock coat – he was a renowned dandy). Stuffed into its pocket was the manuscript of the next instalment of Our Mutual Friend, currently being serialised. All England was agog for what was written on those pages (the breakfast scene between the Boffins and the Lammles, as it happened).
It was touch and go as to whether Our Mutual Friend would go the way of Edwin Drood, into eternal incompleteness. At 50mph the train hurtled into an unrepaired viaduct at Staplehurst and flew off the rails. Warning signs had not been erected. All the first-class carriages, except Dickens’s, fell to the river bed far below, killing the passengers. His was suspended, precariously, between life and death. Dickens, ingeniously using workmen’s planks, rescued his two Ternan ladies. Once they were safe, he returned to the dangling carriage to rescue – at the risk of his life – his coat and, most importantly, the manuscript. Greater love hath no author.
Having taken care of his own, Dickens walked among the corpses, helping the injured. Biographers assume, plausibly, that he never quite recovered from this event. His son recalls him turning pale during later journeys. At the time, his main concern was that the press should not report who his travelling companions were: which they did not.
Dickens wrote a whimsical ‘postscript in lieu of a preface’ to Our Mutual Friend, commemorating his brush with the grim reaper:
On Friday the Ninth of June in the present year, Mr and Mrs Boffin (in their manuscript dress of receiving Mr and Mrs Lammle at breakfast) were on the South Eastern Railway with me, in a terribly destructive accident. When I had done what I could to help others, I climbed back into my carriage – nearly turned over a viaduct, and caught aslant upon the turn – to extricate the worthy couple. They were much soiled, but otherwise unhurt. The same happy result attended Miss Bella Wilfer on her wedding day, and Mr Riderhood inspecting Bradley Headstone’s red neckerchief as he lay asleep. I remember with devout thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever, than I was then, until there shall be written against my life, the two words with which I have this day closed this book:—THE END. September 2nd, 1865.