‌Eight

‘The Doncaster Unhappiness’

‘Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement; not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there.’

C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary

Charles Dickens & Wilkie Collins,
Cumberland to Doncaster, September 1857

And here comes Dickens. Racing up the country on the London express. Wheels spinning, engine roaring, throwing out steam and sparks and clouds of black smoke, battering through the stations, with horses and cattle (and even once a crowd of fear-stricken pigs) scattering across the fields in their wake. Dickens is riding high, first class, up front, on board with his friend Wilkie Collins, and even the voluble Wilkie must be temporarily stunned into silence in the presence of his employer, the Chief, the self-styled (half-mockingly, but with unassailable truth) ‘Inimitable’ Charles Dickens.

He is even more restless than usual. He had written to Wilkie only a few days earlier, pleading with him to come on a trip (‘anywhere’ would do), and had then dismissed Wilkie’s suggestion (‘Norfolk?’) and announced instead they were going to Cumberland, inspired, he told his friend John Forster in yet another of his many letters, by the thought of some ‘promising moors and bleak places’ he had read about in a book. This was The Beauties of England and Wales (Vol. III) by John Britton and Edward Wedlake Brayley, written in 1802 – and the fact is he’d just snatched it up and plumped for any old place, so long as it was somewhere North and not too far from Doncaster, where an eighteen-year-old actress called Ellen Ternan was due to appear later that month, with her mother and sisters, at the Theatre Royal. Dickens was forty-five years old, married to Catherine, with ten children, and right now he was being tossed around in the jaws of an existential, exponential mid-life crisis. ‘I want to escape from myself,’ he had written to Wilkie. As if that were ever possible.

He must have thought Wilkie would make the ideal travelling companion. For one thing, they knew each other well (there was that jaunt to Italy with Augustus Egg in 1853), and they could also use the trip to generate some articles for the magazine he edited, Household Words. There was never any question that this would be a real holiday for Dickens (nothing ever was, for long), but for the purposes of the journey, or rather the journalism, fictional stories and book that would emerge from their collaboration, he suggested they adopt the personas of ‘Two Idle Apprentices’ on a ‘Lazy Tour’. They called themselves Francis Goodchild (Dickens) and Thomas Idle (Wilkie) after Hogarth’s series of ten prints, Industry and Idleness. Which is pretty odd when you consider that in Hogarth’s version Francis Goodchild, a paragon of hard-working virtue, ends up Mayor of London while the shiftless Idle is hanged at Tyburn.

A joke, of sorts, runs through the book, The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, in which Goodchild/Dickens is not really lazy at all, but Idle/Wilkie is catatonically so. It is telling, or perhaps sad, and also infuriating, that Dickens was pretending to be a much younger man than he was, with time on his hands, going wherever the mood or the weather took them. This really wasn’t true. Dickens liked to plan ahead – and his and Wilkie’s rooms in Doncaster, not to mention a carriage and driver, were booked as soon as he decided on the trip, to coincide with the week of the St Leger Stakes, and most especially the arrival of the (probably) unsuspecting Ellen Ternan. And that’s the other great thing about Wilkie, Dickens must have thought: he was unmarried, and he had a mistress, a widow called Caroline Graves with a young child, so he was never going to give anyone a hard time about young actresses.

It is seven years since we left Wilkie in Cornwall and much has changed. Most obviously, he has allowed his inner bohemian to emerge, in his increasingly outspoken opinions, his fast-spreading beard and his flamboyant clothing (just like Dickens, he sports a florid waistcoat). He is now thirty-three years old. Since Rambles Beyond Railways appeared in early 1851, he has published five more successful and sensational works, including the novels Basil, Hide and Seek and – hot off the press – The Dead Secret. He is a contributor to Household Words and other magazines. His greatest fame is still ahead of him (The Woman in White in 1860 made him, briefly, the most sought-after man in London), but he is already a well-known literary figure. Being adopted by Dickens certainly helps. They have just co-written and starred in a play, The Frozen Deep, the preposterous plot suggested by Wilkie, which ran for four nights to vast applause at Dickens’s home in Tavistock Square (he had hired Britain’s greatest maritime painter to provide the scenery), before transferring to the professional stage in Manchester. And this is where Dickens had met the enchanting Ternan sisters and had given such an overwhelming performance in the character of Richard Wardour, the self-sacrificing sea captain who allows himself to freeze to death in order to save the life of his love rival (played by Wilkie), that Maria Ternan, Ellen’s older sister, appearing as Clara, the woman Wardour loves, had wept tears of genuine grief on stage, in front of an audience of thousands, straight into his open and gasping mouth.

So the train steamed north. At one point they thundered between Liverpool and Manchester (hello, Jack and Beryl) and Dickens, in the guise of ‘Francis Goodchild’, presses his nose to the window as the engine, ‘the greatest power in nature and art combined … shrieked in hysterics’, and ‘the pastoral country darkened, became coaly, became smoky, became infernal, got better, got worse, improved again, grew rugged, turned romantic; was a wood, a stream, a chain of hills, a gorge, a moor, a cathedral town, a fortified place, a waste’. After a lot more of this, they arrived in Carlisle. It looked, wrote Dickens, ‘congenially and delightfully idle’.

There is a bond, something umbilical, between Dickens and trains. He defined his age just as much as they did (and isn’t that a surprising thought?). You could almost say they grew up together. The first commercially successful steam locomotive started running in 1812, the year of his birth; and he turned eighteen when the railways came of age with the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. ‘The Age of the Railways’ jostles with the ‘Dickensian’. Of course, he was just a reporter to their all-conquering revolution, and filling his novels with their heat and fury, and no one can deny the way they transformed Britain and then the world, but even so, in his pomp, and on through the decades that followed, it was also Dickens who changed our language and our dreams. Readers in New York stormed the wharf when the final instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop was rumoured to be arriving by ship from London. ‘Tell us about Nell’, they screamed up at the sailors, ‘does she live?’ Printers’ lads would tear the sheets hot from their presses to find out what was happening to Oliver, Fagin and the Artful Dodger, Pickwick, Scrooge, Squeers, Sykes, Smike, Copperfield, Micawber, Pip, Uriah Heep … ‘I’m a very ’umble person’, ‘What larks, Pirrip!’, ‘Barkis is willin’’, ‘It was the best of times …’, ‘I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness …’, ‘Something will turn up’, ‘Fog everywhere’, ‘Wery good’, ‘A mist hung over the river’, ‘Please, sir, I want some more?’, ‘A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us every one!’ … ‘Bah humbug!’

Dickens and trains. When The Frozen Deep was booked into the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, Dickens and the rest of the troupe, plus hangers-on, piled into the train in London, and he led them all the way to the North in a whooping celebration, passing jokes and riddles out of the windows at the ends of their umbrellas and into the next carriages (there was no corridor). And George Dolby, the theatre impresario, tells how Dickens taught him to dance the hornpipe while lurching along in a train. And in 1865, the train was derailed in which Dickens was travelling back from France with lovely Ellen Ternan (Nelly to him by now), along with her mother, Frances, and it crashed off a broken bridge just outside Staplehurst in Kent. Dickens and the Ternans were in the first-class carriage, just behind the engine, and it remained attached, hanging almost vertically over the river. They weren’t badly hurt, just battered and pitched into a corner, and Dickens, grabbing his brandy and notebook, bundled the women away (there was still the risk of scandal) and scrambled down to the river, where he tended the wounded and the dying, and handed around his brandy and radiated limitless gigawatts of goodwill.

Before he and Wilkie left for Cumberland and then Doncaster in September 1857, Dickens had given his first ever public readings – of A Christmas Carol at St Martin’s Hall in Covent Garden – and 2,000 people had turned up to weep and scream and bellow their approval. It is not surprising it turned his head. Against the advice of his great friend John Forster, who thought public speaking was no way for a gentleman-novelist to behave, he spent the rest of his life being shunted across the country by train, express wherever possible, and into Ireland, rattling from city to city, drawing huge, insatiable crowds to see and hear him act out the highlights from his most popular works. It killed him in the end, only thirteen years after he’d given his first reading, struck dumb and then dead by a stroke (not his first) at his home in Gad’s Hill, near Rochester in Kent. He was only fifty-eight. His body was taken for burial by special train to Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, against his clearly stated wishes for a simple, local ceremony. A special train. Laid on for what was left of the Inimitable, whether he liked it or not.

Anyway. He’s not dead yet. He paces around Carlisle, finding it dull (although it perks up on market day) and then he chivvies Wilkie towards ‘a certain black old Cumberland hill or mountain, called Carrock, or Carrock Fell’, because he felt it ‘would be the culminating triumph of Idleness to ascend the same’. This is the hill he must have read about in his book The Beauties of England and Wales, which describes it as ‘a singular eminence … 520 yards above the surrounding meadows’. No one has since been able to work out why Dickens and Wilkie chose this particular hill in the Lake District to climb – they travelled close to Skiddaw after all – because there’s nothing especially exciting about Carrock Fell, certainly not compared to most of the rest of the area, but perhaps that helps explain why Dickens dismisses the whole Lake Country as having ‘vaunted himself a great deal more than his merits deserve’. So much for Wordsworth. Wilkie tagged along, although he was not keen on the idea of the climb. He said he was missing London already. And as for me, I’ve just been up a proper mountain, Snowdon, with Edith and Martin, so I am happy not to join them. As an ’umble tribute to the theme of ‘Idleness’, obviously.

In the event, their climb ended in disaster. They sat in the nearest inn, drinking whisky and eating oatcakes (rather like Edith and Martin), until a guide failed to appear and the innkeeper volunteered himself to lead them to the top. Dickens bounded ahead, outstripping the innkeeper (much to his delight), with Wilkie, who writes this part of the narrative, trailing behind. They got to the top in choking fog, and then got lost on the way down. Dickens is being insufferable with his new compass, which Wilkie is quietly pleased to see him drop and break, and the innkeeper keeps urging them to go ‘round’ the mountain in the hopes of reaching ‘a certain point’, before they can begin their descent. Wilkie is adamant that ‘when three men want to get to the bottom of a mountain, their business is to walk down it … and he put this view of the case, not only with emphasis, but even with some irritability’. He is overruled. He then falls behind in the fog, for the fifteenth time, slips on a rock in a stream, in his tiny little shoes, and tears his ankle ligaments. In the book, Dickens and the innkeeper have to help Wilkie in agony down the slopes and to safety; but in Dickens’s letter to his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, he makes out that he had to carry Wilkie like a baby, his big head bumping against his shoulder. There was always an edge of competitiveness to Dickens. People had to know who was boss. It would be depressing to think that the cliché is true and this is the way of most male friendships, but consider how Edith and Martin cared for each other all the way up and down Snowdon, even if they were cursing the days they were born.

It is a long time before Wilkie is able to walk again, and even then he is hobbling around with sticks, and this propels Dickens into an even higher pitch of activity. He moves them from hotel to hotel; he berates poor Wilkie for his idleness (he won’t even read, he scoffs – he just wants to dream and drivel about the perils of physical activity); and Dickens walks everywhere: twelve miles for the morning post, he crows, fairly astonishing their landlord. All under the guise of ‘Goodchild’ and ‘Idle’, of course, but away from these adopted characters Dickens is becoming irritated with Wilkie’s extreme slovenliness (Wilkie was chaotic, except in his choice of waistcoats) and his penny-pinching griping about the bills.

Hidden in plain sight in the pages of The Lazy Tour is a record of Dickens’s rising infatuation with Ellen Ternan. He knows it – he knows himself very well – but he can’t stop it. He wants to shout about it. His letters to friends and family are laden with unsubtle hints. He sighs and calls himself a ‘young lover’. ‘Goodchild’ is described as a young man who’s always in love, often with more than one woman at a time. He includes a short creepy story, about an evil old man who kills his young, ‘fair, flaxen-haired, large-eyed’ wife through willpower alone. ‘Die!’ he says to her, over and over, ‘Die!’ The name of this beautiful young bride is Ellen. You could say he is conflicted … He laughs at himself, and lets Thomas Idle say (because by this stage Dickens is writing almost every word in their collaborative book): ‘You can’t play. You don’t know what it is. You make work of everything. If you were to go up in a balloon, you’d make for Heaven.’ And he announces, as though it has just occurred to him, that they are off to the races at Doncaster.

It is where everyone else is heading. The train is packed with racegoers, with only one name on their lips, the mysterious John Scott, champion jockey, or ‘Joon Scott’ as Dickens sometimes transcribes him in broad Yorkshire, with all ‘t’harses … fly horses and omnibus horses of Doncaster and parts adjacent, rampant, rearing, backing, plunging, shying’. Dickens cannot shake the idea that he has wandered into a ‘Lunatic Asylum’, and peering out from his (pre-booked) hotel bedroom every morning, he ‘saw the Lunatics, horse-mad, betting-mad, drunken-mad, vice-mad’ and – he could have added – ‘love-mad’, or ‘Ellen-mad’, or ‘driven mad by a sudden, all-consuming horror of ageing and loss and missed promise’.

But how could Dickens, of all people, ever think that his life was not successful enough, or full enough, or rich enough? He only had thirteen years left to live. Did he sense it? He was ageing, fast – he looked older than his forty-five years – and while he was happy to be gadding around with Wilkie, he was also feeling hemmed and crushed by his responsibilities. He’d never had a childhood of his own (his father in prison for debt, young Charles sent out to work in the blacking factory), and now here he was, beset on every side: his useless, impoverished, importuning brothers, a wife he no longer loved, their ten children (his limp, hopeless sons, the daughters to marry off), an ageing, dependent mother, a new country house in Kent – the home of his childhood dreams – to rebuild and furnish, and his London home to maintain, magazines to edit, new books and articles to write, money (more and more money) to be made to keep the whole boiling afloat, and charities to run, societies to promote, reading tours to organize, letters, friends and theatricals, contracts to negotiate, copyright to protect – and so many stories to tell and teeming multitudes needing his help. And now an eighteen-year-old actress to persuade to become his lover – or not. What about the core message in all his books? Protect the innocent. Think of Little Nell. (Although, why is he now calling this childlike actress ‘Nelly’ of all things? With her big blue eyes and flaxen hair.) But this is Dickens and it doesn’t matter how high he has flown, or how far he has come, he still wants MORE (please, sir) and he is straining and raging against the bounds, even though he knows that the spectacle of a middle-aged man losing his head over a teenage girl is a joke and the morality, with his power and fame, is unpleasant and undeniably wrong. Even in 1857. Thanks in part to his own campaigning efforts.

Predictably, as far as the actual racing was concerned, Dickens spent his week in Doncaster winning, and boasting about it. I am here, too. It is my first proper race outing, if I don’t count the handful of point-to-points I went to with my family in deepest, rural Sussex, all the way back in the sixties and seventies. The first I remember through the pursuing fog was when my father handed my brother and me 50p each or even (yes) ten shillings apiece, and told us to go and spend it on the horses, because ‘it would be a useful lesson in the futility of gambling’. We wandered about, entirely unsupervised (can this be true?), placing bets on random horses with red-faced tweedy men, who were happy to take money from a six- and an eight-year-old. I think we rather liked the Number Nine and a horse called Mossy Face, and we returned to my father with a great booty of winnings, the coins spilling from our clammy little hands, and were sent to spend it all on chocolate and sweets. It is a wonder I didn’t descend into a lifetime of gambling, but ever since I have always known, with unquenchable certainty, that when I do finally choose to resume my betting career, I cannot possibly lose.

If you filter your expectations through Dickens’s writings, then you are always going to be disappointed. Everything is slightly less exciting than it should be: tamed, and rinsed through with a light grey wash. Not by much, but no reality can compete with Sam Weller and Mr Pickwick and the technicolour spatter-bomb of Dickens’s London streets. It’s still a glorious day at Doncaster Racecourse. Ladies Day, no less (‘naturally there will be an abundance of the finest fillies out in force’, the website blethers), and it is hot in the stands and blue in the sky. There’s a large crowd hosing itself down with an unwavering flow of lager and white wine. Mostly lager, and mostly men, but there are still plenty of women who have heeded the call to come and compete for the ‘Best Dressed Lady’ crown. Many are wearing hats, huge, flyaway confections, and I haven’t seen this many trilbies and flat caps since the newsreel footage of 1958.

I am absolutely thrilled to be here. I am packed into the roiling stands, even though Dickens preferred the turn behind the brow of the hill, or sometimes the start, or the ‘coming-in’, where he can see the Grand Stand:

rising against the sky with its vast tiers of little white dots of faces, and its last high rows and corners of people, looking like pins stuck into an enormous pincushion … When the race is nearly run out, it is as good as the race … to see the flutter among the pins, and the change in them from dark to light, as hats are taken off and waved.

Dickens could get up close, and he could see the big picture, although here, at Doncaster Races, what he really longed to do was freeze time, at the exact point when the St Leger was about to run (but now never would), leaving him to stand for ever at the side of the girl in ‘little lilac gloves and a winning little bonnet’, a ‘dear unknown [ha!] wearer with golden hair’.

Just let me off this train, please, if only for a while.

The races do run, today and in 1857. Dickens collects his winnings and courts Ellen (Nelly) Ternan, taking her for rides in his carriage, but always we think under the watchful eye of her mother. And I lean forward from the stands and assess the horses with a lagerish eye and decide that Number Seven is the glossiest, most vibrant and tightly muscled horse I have ever seen, and anyway I always must back Number Seven if I can, because that’s the horse that’s winning the race on the cover of my copy of Totopoly (‘The Great Race Game by the Manufacturers of Monopoly’) so how can it possibly lose? Which of course it does, repeatedly (new Number Sevens, different races), until finally the message burrows through to the darkest, most stubborn recesses of my ancestral brain, that there is more to horse racing than a glossy coat and an old board game, but not before the red-faced tweedy men have recouped their losses, with enormous interest, from their disastrous day at the Sussex point-to-point so many years earlier.

I may be getting poorer, along with almost everyone else, but that has done nothing to dampen the rollicking atmosphere. There’s a large man stuffed into a pinstripe suit standing just in front of me, in amongst a posse of elaborately hatted, bare-backed young women, all of them waving racecards and lager, and he oozes confidence at the start of every new race. ‘I say it’s a kind race to me’, he confides to the woman on his left, just as the 3.35 begins, ‘and I can’t do wrong by it.’ And sure enough, as the horses gallop up the hill and around the final bend, and the crowd thickens and sways in the stands, and the row in front of me chants in rising ecstasy, ‘Come on son … come on son … come on son …’, the man’s horse pounds to the front, right at the end, ‘By half a length and seven hands,’ he exults, and the women yell, ‘Get the drinks in, Dad!’ and he drains his pint and barrels down the concrete steps, but not before he has turned to his daughters (and can they really all be his daughters, these women of many shapes and shades?) and he says, ‘Oh sure, he never whipped it, like, he just pushed it home, hands and heels.’

Dickens was never a great sportsman, despite the walking, but he did enjoy his cricket. Nelly, too – it is said she once played a vigorous game with a couple of Dickens’s young sons, although his daughter Katey thought it was improper for a lady to be rolling around on the grass with such abandon. Dickens used to organize games for his local team in the grounds of his home at Gad’s Hill and would spend a happy day scoring, sitting (or pacing) in the pavilion he had raised on the boundary for the occasion. He must have played sometimes when he was a younger man and I have read he turned out at least once in his later years, bowling with an underarm action, even though the rules had already changed to allow the ball to be released from above the shoulder. When Dickens cancelled a reading tour of Australia in 1861, the disappointed entrepreneurs, William Spiers and Christopher Pond, owners of the Café de Paris in Melbourne, booked an English cricket team as a substitute. It was the first time an English team had ever visited Australia, and so a long tradition was born out of Charles Dickens’s reluctance to travel so far (despite the very generous terms), perhaps because he could not bring himself to leave Nelly Ternan alone for too long.

Wilkie had no interest in playing games or sport of any kind. The way he tells it in The Lazy Tour, it was one of the great lessons of his life: attempts at active exertion only ever end in disaster and illness. He writes how ‘shortly after leaving school, he [Thomas Idle] accompanied a party of friends to a cricket-field, in his natural and appropriate character of spectator only’. But the team needed another player, Wilkie was enrolled, and the next thing he knew he was being ‘roused from peaceful slumber in a dry ditch, and placed before three wickets with a bat in his hand’. The bowler (usually the ‘meekest and mildest of human beings’) flung a ball straight at him and it was only through a supreme act of athleticism that Wilkie was able to save his shins and dive out of the way, leaving ‘the full force of the deadly missile to strike his wicket instead of his leg’. Wilkie then caught a chill while fielding, certainly not the ball, and had to take to his bed for several weeks with a nasty fever. I don’t suppose Dickens was impressed.

The love of cricket runs deep in this part of the world, here and on the other side of the Pennines. The Trinidadian writer, C. L. R. James, was living in the town of Nelson in 1932 (round about when Jack Priestley drifted by), not far north of Burnley, drawn by his friend Learie Constantine, who had been hired to play Lancashire League cricket for the local team. As James puts it in Beyond a Boundary, his beautiful book about cricket, socialism, West Indian culture and colonialism (and really, you don’t have to like cricket to love it): ‘I was singularly fortunate in that my first introduction to England was to the working people of the North, and not to the overheated atmosphere of London.’

Constantine had arrived in 1928 with his wife Norma, making them, James says, the only two black people in Nelson. When James became their lodger, that made it three, by which time ‘Constantine, by his cricket, by the demeanour of himself and his wife in what all could realise was no easy situation … had created an enormous interest in the West Indies and West Indians.’ He and Constantine went on to make dozens of speeches at countless halls, preaching West Indian self-government (the islands were still British colonies), and equal opportunity, and the absurdity of racial discrimination, all of it wrapped in the comforting blanket of cricket. ‘There might have been something of an edge to me’, James writes, possibly with understatement, ‘particularly at the beginning. As far as I could see no one ever resented it. If they did there was always Constantine’s reassuring presence and a few pleasant and graceful words at the end.’

The local people adored Learie Constantine. He was a brilliant cricketer, but there was so much more to it than that. When he and Norma finally decided to go back to Trinidad, the locals begged him to stay. ‘That story’, writes James, ‘is sufficiently known. What is not known is that the Nelson people conquered him.’ And so he lingered, through the war, right up to 1954, because, as he said, ‘he had earned his living in England and when the country was in trouble he was not going to run out.’ In the end, after a few years in Trinidad, he returned to Britain, by now a lawyer and a politician, and became the country’s first black peer: Baron Constantine of Maraval in Trinidad and Nelson in the County Palatine of Lancaster.

James loved the books of Charles Dickens. He adored all the nineteenth-century British writers. Growing up in Trinidad, in a poor, middle-class black family, living on the edge of the local cricket pitch, he devoured Keats and Shelley, Arnold and Austen, Collins, Dickens and Thackeray (especially him; Vanity Fair was his bible, he read it dozens of times, and he was still amazed, despite his underlying realism, to arrive in England for the first time in 1932 and find everything not quite as expected). ‘People educated as I had been’, he wrote, ‘could move rapidly from uncritical admiration of abstractions to an equally uncritical hostility to the complex reality.’

It was cricket that shaped his politics, although he didn’t realize it at the time. In the 1920s there was blatant racism at home in Trinidad, dictating who could play for which club, and this was what had driven Constantine, a dark-skinned man, away from the islands to play in the Lancashire League. James just wanted to watch him bat – or field in the covers, where he transformed our idea of what is possible. He was also a penetrating fast bowler, and was the first West Indian to take a wicket in a Test match against England.

And it was cricket, not politics, that got James his first job in Britain. He saw the incomparable Sydney Barnes playing in the League in 1932, already nearly sixty years old, and he interviewed him and sent the article to the Guardian. Their cricket correspondent, Neville Cardus, hired him on the spot. And so round it goes: my father, born in 1912, used to rave about Sydney Barnes’s off- and leg-cutters: ‘He tore them from the sky’, he would say to me, ‘he tore them down from the sky.’ And he would hold the cricket ball in his large hand, fingers either side of the seam, and demonstrate how Barnes had got the ball to fizz and spit from the pitch. Learie Constantine reckoned the finest innings of his career was played against the sixty-year-old Sydney Barnes. ‘To score’, wrote James, ‘he had to get the leg-break away through two short-legs and force the off-break through two gulleys. Against the break all the time. I did not see the innings, but I can visualise the billiard-like precision and concentration with which it was done.’ That was against overarm bowling, of course, something Dickens never mastered … and we do need to get back to him, tempting as it is to linger with James and Constantine in the long-ago summers of the Lancashire League.

What, I wonder, did Nelly Ternan make of Dickens’s attentions? She was only eighteen. She had two older sisters, whom Dickens was helping, and would continue to help, in their acting careers. Her mother was on hand and was not about to let her throw herself at a middle-aged married novelist, even though discrepancies in age were not so remarkable then; but the pre-existing marriage was rather more to the point. Dickens burned thousands of his letters in a huge fire one day in September 1860 at his home in Gad’s Hill. Nelly destroyed her letters from Dickens before she died. And ever since biographers have argued about Nelly and Dickens, and many refuse to believe that they ever had a sexual relationship, but the facts are these: she gave up acting, moved to France for a while (where he visited her frequently), was put up by Dickens in a country cottage near Slough (where he visited her frequently) and, according to Claire Tomalin in what feels like the definitive account, she probably had a baby in France, who died when he was only a few months old. She was on her way back to England when her train went off the rails at Staplehurst. Six years after Dickens died she married George Wharton Robinson, and had two children.

After ‘the Doncaster unhappiness’, as he called it to Wilkie, Dickens went back to London aflame with an unrequited obsession with Nelly – and set about tearing his own and other people’s lives apart. He treated Catherine viciously, forcing her to call on the Ternans, apparently to prove that his relationship with Nelly was innocent, and accusing her of ‘not understanding’ him (when Dickens had a mid-life crisis, he raced through all the clichés and then multiplied them by ten). He pressed for divorce and moved Catherine out of their home. He cut anyone dead who didn’t back him. He blocked Catherine from their daughter’s wedding. He gave up his charities, lost many friends, and left Household Words to set up a new weekly magazine, All the Year Round, because he’d fallen out with the publishers. He sold the house in London and launched his career of public readings, feasting on the rapturous crowds. He wrote some of his best books, even as the darkness spread. But we know all this. He was still incomparably the best.

‘A man writes much better than he lives’, wrote Samuel Johnson, one hundred years earlier, although we should not ‘wonder that most fail, amidst tumult, and snares, and danger’. And welcome back, Enid. But Dickens tried, hard, to live up to what he knew to be right and true, and his novels, it is good to remember, are full of moments of redemption and forgiveness.

Here’s a song he knew and loved and must have sung many times.

Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,

Which I gaze on so fondly to-day,

Were to change by to-morrow, and flee from my arms

Like fairy-gifts, fading away!

Thou wouldst still be ador’d as this moment thou art,

Let thy loveliness fade as it will …

And who was on his mind as he sang? Not Catherine, not by the time he left Doncaster. He couldn’t even bring himself to write to her. And Nelly? They must have stayed close, even if they never married nor acknowledged any kind of relationship. It was in truth Dickens who was fading, although that’s an absurd word to use about him. He fought every inch of the way and blazed through every minute of every hour of the thirteen years he had left. But even so, from our perspective, looking back at this moment from the improbable future, it is quite clear that it is Dickens who is faltering, who is no longer so easily, so abundantly certain about the best way forward.

We will see him in Kent. But now here is Sam Johnson, riding the coach north from London, heading for Scotland in the year 1773, passing by Doncaster, just three years before the first St Leger Stakes was run. And what larks it all is, Pip, what larks!