TO BE READ AT DUSK 📚: with Emily Middleton

The ghostly episodes continue as Dominic welcomes back the inimitable Dr. Emily Middleton who helps piece together the scattered psychological fragments that create Dickens' To Be Read at Dusk ...  

Five couriers sit high up watching the sun set over snowy peaks of the St Bernard's Pass, their minds flitting from one strange unsettling anecdote to another. Ideas of premonition, mesmerism, and the powerful telepathy that can exist between twins, abound in this story ...

Additional sound effects of the ghostly mountain have been used, with permission, from Epidemic Sound

Original cover headshot of Dominic Gerrard © Jane Lloyd  / Original cover headshot of Emily Middleton © Dustin Smith, Skywall Photography / Background detail of Gornergrat Railway and Matterhorn, Valais, Alps of, Switzerland (1890-1900) Photochrom Print Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:16

Hi everyone, our ghostly episodes continue. And to set the scene today for our discussion on Dickens' to be read at dusk, I've turned to Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolfo, where Emily and her father are travelling through the mountains. The road had constantly ascended, conducting the travelers into the higher regions of the air, where immense glaciers exhibited their frozen horrors, and eternal snow whitened the summits of the mountains. They often paused to contemplate these stupendous scenes. I think that quote best summarizes where we are as readers at the start of this story. Figures, sitting high up, watching the sunset over snowy peaks, with our minds flitting from one strange, unsettling anecdote to another, until we retreat indoors to the warmth and comfort of loud, cheerful company. Guiding us through this mysterious title, I'm thrilled to welcome back the inimitable Dr. Emily Middleton to help piece together the scattered psychological fragments that make up this account of premonition, mesmerism, and the powerful telepathy that can exist between twin brothers. Emily, hello. Happy Halloween.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Happy Halloween. Thank you. It's great to be here. This is a perfect story for it.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

How do you describe the opening of this?

SPEAKER_00 1:45

It's very gothic, is the word that comes to mind for me. And it's interesting because in the the original manuscript, it wasn't set where it is set. It was set outside of a hotel in probably Chamonix. So he chooses to set it at the Great St. Bernard Pass, where we have this building that contains the frozen bodies of people that have died on the mountain. And these characters are having this conversation just in the shadow of the mountain, essentially, as the sun goes down, describes it as like blood on the mountain. So it's very gothic and it's very uh ghost story structure of being narrated by your rational characters telling these sort of ghost stories, but not quite.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Yeah, what I find really interesting, it came to me on the sort of second read, really, is that those first two sentences, which are incredibly short, sound like you're going through a moment of hypnosis. It's like one, two, three, four, five. There were five of them. Five couriers, sitting on a bench outside the convent on the summit of Great St. Bernard in Switzerland, looking at the remote heights, stained by the setting sun, as if a mighty quantity of red wine had been broached upon the mountaintop, and had not yet had time to sink into the snow. The narrator is kind of pushed back. He's on a bench, listening to these five couriers on a bench near him, just observing, and he copies them. They d they button up their coats because it's getting cold outside, and he does the same. So Dickens here isn't seizing the pen and saying, ha, like he does in others. Um I find that very interesting.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

I think that's really interesting. Yeah, the idea that it's something like hypnosis. I hadn't thought of that, but I like that a lot, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Do you think these couriers are real?

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Well, I think there's a good case that they're not, given that at the end of the story they've completely disappeared. He he waits for them to react to the story that one of them has told, and they've silently disappeared. And it's a snowy mountain, maybe they've padded off quietly into the snow, but it makes me think a little bit of something like Henry James's The Turn of the Screw that would come later on, where you have this story framework of people telling a story or finding a story at Christmas to tell, and then you don't really return to that framework at the end. The turn of the screw never comes back to it, but to be read at dusk we do, but we've we've lost our grip a little bit on rationality in that these noisy figures have just suddenly disappeared.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

The silence was unbroken. I looked round, and the five couriers were gone, so noiselessly that the ghostly mountain might have absorbed them into its eternal snows.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

So it's really a story about ghost stories and about what they are and what they mean, when the character of the German courier specifically says, There's no ghosts here, what do you mean? There's no ghosts here, there's no ghosts in this one, there's no ghosts in that one.

SPEAKER_01 4:59

If you talk of ghosts But I don't talk of ghosts, said the German. Of what then? asked the Swiss. If I knew of what then, said the German, I should probably know a great deal more. It was a good answer, I thought, and it made me curious. So I moved my position to that corner of my bench which was nearest to them, and leaning my back against the convent wall, heard perfectly, without appearing to attend.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

And Dickens has such a complicated relationship to ghosts in that one of his friends once said he didn't really like to talk about fiction or anything very highbrow. He liked to talk about the latest murder and the newest thing in ghosts. But he didn't believe in them, and he would go to seances to disprove them. There's a great article called Unauthenticated Wrappings, um, and he's very sceptical of ghosts. But he does believe in mesmeric hypnotic powers and spirits that might oppress you, and this idea of mesmerism and his actual history with mesmerism is so important to understanding, especially the first story here.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

Yeah. I love the German courier. I think he says something like, very strange things happen without ghosts. And if he himself is a ghost declaring that, I think that's really, really something. Thunder and lightning, said the German, warming. When you walk along a crowded street in Frankfurt, Milan, London, Paris, and think that a passing stranger is like your friend Heinrich, and then another passing stranger is like your friend Heinrich, and so begin to have a strange foreknowledge that presently you'll meet your friend Heinrich, which you do, though you believed him at Trieste. What do you call that? There are two main stories, aren't there?

SPEAKER_00 6:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

The English bride one and then the two brothers. But there are little glimmers of stories before then, aren't there? Little passing references to where you see uh in a crowd you of strangers you keep seeing a recurring impression of a face of a friend of yours. Moments before you then meet your friend.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

Yeah, and Dickens had an incident like this happen to him that uh John Forster describes, where he had a dream of seeing a woman dressed in a very particular way that he'd never seen before, whose name was Miss Napier, and then the next evening he gave a reading and somebody came in and introduced her to him, and he'd never seen her before in his life. So it's clearly this kind of weird deja vu thing, but it's something that Dickens, who did not believe in ghosts, clearly did believe in. That you could have those kinds of sort of premonitions of somebody or a psychic connection to somebody, even if you don't have them in front of you. So there's a weird sense of belief and not belief and ghosts, but also something more psychologically interesting to Dickens than a literal ghost at work in these stories.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

So is it the German courier that then tells the main story? If I remembered that right.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

The the first the German courier tells the second story. The first one is the Swiss courier, I believe.

SPEAKER_01 8:12

Do you know before we go into that? There was other another observation I had about that. You've got all these different nationalities. And there's an American traveller there as well that the narrator is actually trying to escape from at the start of the story, but then he gets spooked at the end and wants to go and find this American to sort of talk about normal stuff, which I think was a nice touch. But no fuss is made about the different nationalities, these European nationalities, which I find very interesting. Because Dickens is very happy to go into kind of slight jolly, silly stereotyping, really, isn't he? In other examples.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

That's true.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

But here they're quite interchangeable.

SPEAKER_00 8:46

I think that's true, and that sense of the mountain pass as a place where people meet, and that you know, Switzerland being where it is, that you can have Swiss-German and you can have these different nationalities passing through somewhere like this. And that, yeah, he's not really stereotyping them in relation to their nationality, but it gives a sense that these kinds of stories happen everywhere, that everybody in all these different countries have the same kinds of stories and the same kinds of unexplained experiences.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Yeah. Are you ready to take us into the first story of the English bride?

SPEAKER_00 9:19

Yes, absolutely. So this story, which by the way, Dickens stole from Elizabeth Gaskell, but he had to apologize for it.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

He had to apologise there for it.

SPEAKER_00 9:29

What's the story then? So essentially, Elizabeth Gaskell told this story at parties, a story very much like this. Um, and when Dickens published this story, she uh her first reaction to it was just essentially, now I don't have anything to tell people at parties. She kind of blew it off. But later in her life, she did say that she'd wished it had been in the hands of somebody who could have told it properly. And there are letters between her and Dickens where he essentially says, you know, nobody's got um ownership of these ghost stories. There's so many of them. No one's got ownership of them. The only thing you have ownership of really is the telling of them.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

He says, Crows have plucked at the fleeces of other ghost stories of mine before now, but I have borne it meekly. Ghost stories, illustrating particular states of mind and processes of the imagination, are common property, I always think, except in the manner of relating them. And who can rob some people of that?

SPEAKER_00 10:28

So he's very dismissive with the idea that the stories themselves are so, I guess, universal that he didn't really steal it from her, and the telling of it is all. So um he he didn't really um apologize very deeply for that, but Gaskell kind of blew it off at the time, but it clearly did bother her later on.

SPEAKER_01 10:48

That would not have cut the other way, would it? If if Gaskell had written The Signalman or something, he would not have been quite so-yeah, I don't I don't buy that argument for one second. I mean, I'm glad he wrote it. I think he writes it very well.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

So in the story itself, then we have this English woman who keeps seeing in her dreams this figure who is staring fixedly at her. He's both old and young, he's got um a moustache and hair where he's grey and black, he's both old and young, and he's not somebody she's ever seen. And then they travel to this villa, and she's afraid that she's gonna see in all of the um paintings on the walls this face.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

Mistress is haunted. How haunted? By a dream. What dream? By a dream of a face. For three nights before her marriage, she saw a face in a dream. Always the same face, and only one. A terrible face? No. The face of a dark, remarkable looking man in black, with black hair and a grey moustache, a handsome man except for a reserved and secret air. Not a face she ever saw, or at all like a face she ever saw. Doing nothing in the dream, but looking at her fixedly out of darkness. Does the dream come back? Never. The recollection of it is all her trouble.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

Then she's introduced to this man, and it is the man, and his name is Del Ombre. And in the manuscript it was just Lombre, and that's Shadow, so Del Ombre be of the shadow, and Lombre is just shadow in Italian. Um, and her husband is very dismissive and has been this whole time, and he insists that she's kind of nice to this guest, and they get on, and that will help dispel this mesmeric influence or whatever it is. And then the last that this woman is seen is crouching in the corner of a man's carriage as they disappear forever.

SPEAKER_01 12:50

Yeah. It's deeply disturbing, isn't it? Because he comes to the house and he's he's very courteous when he comes to the house, and the husband, the stupid husband keeps inviting him back every kind of you know. The woman asks I think her name's Clara. Clara asks her husband quite nervously, uh, how many times is you know Monsieur de l'Ombre going to come? Well lots of times, I think. You know, you think, what are you doing? What are you doing? The Signor Delombre became a constant guest. He was accomplished in pictures, books, and music, and his society in any grim palazzo would have been welcome. I used to notice many times that Mistress was not quite recovered. She would cast down her eyes and drop her head before the Signor de Lombre, or would look at him with a terrified and fascinated glance, as if his presence had some evil influence or power upon her. Turning from her to him, I used to see him in the shaded gardens or the large half-lighted sala, looking, as I might say, fixedly upon her out of darkness. This shadow figure is sort of welcomed and into the house, and yeah. And um I think the husband goes away to Rome, doesn't he? And Clara's left by herself.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

The going to Rome part is very interesting because Dickens' own experience that underpins this is um Madame de la Rue and her husband, Emile Delarue, um, where Dickens in the 1840s was essentially in a battle with a spirit that he sometimes called the phantom, sometimes called the shadow. So we've got a literal reference here of Lombre to the shadow that was meant to be plaguing Madame de la Rue, and that Dickens would exert mesmeric force. And it kind of seems like um she wanted it to stop at one point because he was trying to do it from a distance at one time, and they'd set up an appointment and she stayed out late to miss the appointment where she was meant to stay at home and be from a distance mesmerized by Dickens. But he kept saying in letters to her husband, bring her to Rome if you've got any concerns, like no matter what she says, if she says she's able to fight it, don't necessarily believe her. It's so dangerous that you must get her to me if you if you can, um, because she could be taken over by this force. And there's a brilliant bit of ego in Dickens, I think, thinking that he's the one person that can battle this and take this on. Um, but that idea of leaving the woman who's having this experience alone, and then that's when the crisis comes to pass, was something that that Dickens had felt in his real life in trying to deal with this mesmeric force.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

Was he kind of attracted to her? Was he what was he doing? Because he was giving a lot of access, sort of one-to-one, wasn't he, as well, I think.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

Yeah, well, I mean, people who criticized mesmerism in the 19th century did focus on the fact that it tended to be men doing this to younger women and that there seemed to be something sexual about it. And the story obviously explores that because the idea that he's run off with her and taken her away seems to be about sexual threat. It seems to be um something that is sexualized in it. For Dickens, I mean, he started doing it to his wife in the first place when he first learned how to do it. It was with Catherine that he practiced. Um, but with Madame de la Rue, it I think it it was a friend. It was something that he felt like he could do. And again, that sort of ego of Dickens, I think this really fed into because, you know, lots of people were very skeptical of this. And Dickens could be so skeptical of certain things like the actual existence of ghosts, but he became friends with Dr. Elliotson, who re-popularized mesmerism in the 1830s. He learnt it from him, he practiced it on his wife, and then he has this very kind of serious episode in the mid-1840s. So, in terms of what he got out of it, I think he had this true belief that there was something that he could do, that the force of his will could overcome some kind of evil. And that must be very tempting. If you're someone who wants to battle all these kinds of social problems and evils, to think that you actually can help somebody through sheer force of will must be very appealing. Um, but it it certainly had troubling dynamics in terms of kind of sex and implications and power and control.

SPEAKER_01 17:22

And how do you feel about the story, The English Bride, then? Was it like to you, just you personally, really reading it? Is it uh one that you rate a lot?

SPEAKER_00 17:31

I think what I find really interesting in this story and in both of them is the pivot from the ghost story to the psychology of it. So I do think this story is telling us something about Dickens' interest in mesmerism and about those fears of something that you can't know, in that the Victorian period is trying to become increasingly rational. You know, we haven't yet had Darwin's Origin of Species, but we have religious doubt and we have technology and we have medical enhancements and developments that mean things should be more knowable. And this is Dickens trying to grapple with something that he does believe that's not really knowable. And I think it's very revealing about him, and it's a it stands as a really odd little story, but we also know that Dickens believed this kind of thing could happen. So I think that element of it I find absolutely fascinating, and especially because it contrasts so much to his other stories, I think, that I can't think of anything very similar elsewhere that we have lots of different kinds of ghost stories, but we don't have this not ghost story in anywhere else in quite this way.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

There's another story, isn't there, after the English bride. And this this is the German courier speaking.

SPEAKER_00 18:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

Not all five of them speak, do they? That's the other thing.

SPEAKER_00 18:48

Um, no.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

And it is interesting, isn't it? And you know, you remind me about this the part of the Alps where bodies are found frozen. It's so subtly mentioned that you don't connect it necessarily to the appearance of the couriers, but it it could be that they have obviously frozen on the mountains. Yeah, yeah, it could be. I wondered that. I wonder that. I don't know. But there's the the next story then of of uh Mr. James and Mr. John.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

Yes, and it's a very short one, really. Yeah. Um, which is interesting how little space these are given. Again, it's almost like these are just stories that you would tell somebody, right? If you were sharing weird things that happened to you or that you generally, and ghost stories not happen to you, but happen to a friend of a friend. Um, and it's got some things in common with a Daniel Defoe story in History and Reality of Apparitions, which might have influenced Dickens.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

Oh dear. So it's Defoe and Andy's bit as well, then Elizabeth Gaskell, sorry. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

So yeah, in that one we have a murdered man appearing to his brother in bed, but it has a different ending on because obviously this is not about a man who's been murdered, but also in Dickens's, the important thing, the the mic drop moment, is his brother saying, You have seen me before tonight. So both brothers kind of knew this psychic connection was happening. So we have this brother who sees his brother at the end of his bed and thinks it's a portent for himself. He thinks there's something wrong with himself. But yeah, that that moment that is meant to really cap off the story and is clearly meant to be the kind of big reveal, the horrifying moment, is not just the thought that you might see somebody, but that they are sort of astral projecting or something, that they are aware that they have sort of travelled to you. And so that that's different from Daniel Defoe, and again speaks to Dickens's idea that there is some kind of psychic ability to work across distances.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

It's really interesting, isn't it? Because Mr. James sees the ghost essentially of his brother, Mr. John, coming into his room, passing around. Have you quite flick through some papers on the desk, which I love that detail. I think that's so funny, and then sort of drifting off. While Mr. John is actually still alive. I have just seen. Mr. James repeated, looking full at me that I might see how collected he was. The phantom of my brother John. I was sitting up in bed, unable to sleep, when it came into my room in a white dress, and regarding me earnestly past up to the end of the room, glanced at some papers on my writing desk, turned, and still looking earnestly at me as it passed the bed, went out at the door. Now, I am not in the least mad, and am not in the least disposed to invest that phantom with any external existence out of myself. I think it is a warning to me that I am ill, and I think I had better be bled. So in both these stories with the English Bride as well, it's all premonition.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Yeah, there's nobody dead. There's no ghost here yet. Yeah. So yeah, that sense that it's something more unknowable, but also, as far as Dickens is concerned, more possible than a ghost after death. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

And the connection, that sort of psychic, I suppose, connection between the two brothers, it does make me think of actually twins. You know, I know a couple of twins that have a real close. Bond that's quite uncanny sometimes where they feel like if one of them if they're away from each other and one of them's not very well, they have a sort of sense of it somehow. I'm sure it can't necessarily be proven in any way, but it does seem to happen quite a lot as a coincidence, at least.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Yeah, and I I think that the Victorians are very interested in this because if we think about the modern idea of what a ghost is, we think about something kind of transparent and floaty, and that generally comes from photography, because to make something look like a ghost on film, you would underdevelop and overlay one picture over another. So for Victorians, ghosts were not kind of translucent and see-through and untouchable, they would just look like a person. So concerns with doppelgangers and seeing people that are not there feels quite different for the Victorians. Like it might look like the person is actually there rather than some kind of ghost. And I think about Tennyson and his family, who claimed to have seen just before Hallam, you know, the man he loved that he dedicated in Memoriam to died, that his sister, who was meant to marry him, and Tennyson himself claimed to have seen him in their garden. And I think this was before he died, or certainly before they knew that he died. So this idea that you get those kinds of premonitions before death is clearly a cultural one, but also what these ghosts are and what these figures look like is quite different to how we might imagine it now. So it's something more corporeal, more present, and less kind of translucently ghosty than we might think.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

It's interesting, isn't it? Yeah. I'm wondering, you know, you think about how little space, in a way, all of these stories take up in the overall book. I get a sense of these late Dickens stories and that he's kind of getting a bit impatient, that he's not you know, he we talked about George Silverman, you know, even the mystery of Edwin Drude, where he's not doing as many numbers for it. That he's kind of impatient with spending too long on an idea and he's kind of just rattling through them. So in this little book, there are several potential ghost stories. He picks out two of them to tell. One of them more fully than the other, because the the two brothers is sort of two pages or something, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Is there anything in that? Is there some some sense of not f maybe not frustration, but a sense of kind of like I just want to get through things now. I want to don't want to sit back and I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 24:43

I definitely think this story has that, but maybe for a slightly different reason, which is that it was for an annual publication called The Keepsake, which was essentially a Christmas anthology that was published by the niece of Lady Blessington. So I get the feeling that's partly why it might feel a bit dashed off in places, or that it it's not a fully developed idea, because this is not for one of his own journals, this is not for household words, this is not embedded in one of his novels, this is not a Christmas book, it's something that's being contributed to a publication that he's not in control of and doesn't care as much about, essentially. So I think um he probably got lots of invitations like this, but because of Lady Blessington's status and everything is probably the reason that he actually chose to contribute this. Um, but I I wonder if that's part of it, that if it was going to go into household words, he might have expanded it a bit, but he wanted to give something evocative and interesting enough, but not give too much of himself.

SPEAKER_01 25:47

So, Emily, what what do you know about the manuscript then of this story?

SPEAKER_00 25:51

So it's really interesting that this manuscript is where it is. So we know that when Dickens died, he left his manuscripts to John Forster, his friend and biographer, and so they generally made their way to the VA because they got um donated to what was Kensington Library, and now they're in the art library in the VA. So some manuscripts are scattered around the world in different places because they were given as gifts at different points. But to be read at dusk is at Windsor, and it was deposited there in 1903 by Queen Mary, who was then uh Princess of Wales, to be preserved in the Royal Library till further command. And we don't exactly know um where she got it from or how it ended up there. But um Michael Slayther, who I've been working with on this edition of these stories, um, had heard that perhaps Queen Mary liked to go to um aristocrats' houses and they would show her things, right? So they'd say, Look, we've got these wonderful acquisitions and things like that. And apparently she had a bit of a reputation for saying, You may make a gift of that to us. So there's a question as to whether or not um this manuscript was sort of acquired in that way. But we don't know, we don't know where it was before that. Um, so it it's been there since 1903. You have to walk up the very long driveway at Windsor to go and see it. But it is really fascinating the kinds of changes that have been made. Like um Lombre, the Shadow was the name of the man, and he's altered it a little bit, but not very much. Um, and he also altered the settings so they're not just outside of a hotel in a Swiss or French town, um, they're in that specific gothic, moody, melodramatic location. And even some phrases that Dickens used in his own letters when he talked about mesmerism, where he said to Mr. De La Rue that when he's there dealing with Madame de la Rue's shadow, he says, I can shiver it like glass. And in the short story, he changes a phrase that then includes that her apprehension is broken like glass. So it feels like his understanding and his thinking about mesmerism was actively in his mind, and the things that he'd wrote and the things that he'd, you know, thought in about the five to ten years beforehand, were in his mind as he was editing this manuscript. We have that change of setting so that we can have that slightly horrific backdrop and that connotation of those bodies being there, which is quite different if we imagine it just in you know in a street in Switzerland outside of a hotel.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

Yeah. By this time I was by no means in a mood to sit alone in that awful scene, with the chill air coming solemnly upon me, or, if I may tell the truth, to sit alone anywhere. So I went back into the convent parlour, and finding the American gentleman still disposed to relate the biography of the honorable Aeneas Dodger, heard it all out.