The Manuscript at Staplehurst: with Leon Litvack

Bonus Episode!

In which Dr. Leon Litvack recounts Dickens' dramatic retrieval of Part 16 of  the Manuscript of Our Mutual Friend from the swaying carriage at Staplehurst; and reveals, here for the first time, a key discovery he has made; plus the cut sections he has restored in his new Oxford University Press Edition of the novel ...

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:18

Hi everyone. Hot on the heels of the Our Mutual Friend episode with Dr. Leon Litvach, I'm now going to share some sections of our conversation that couldn't make it into our main episode, which include a discovery that Leon has made about the book that has never been revealed before. As some of you know, Dickens was nearly killed in the Staplehurst railway disaster, where he famously climbed back into his swaying carriage to retrieve the latest pages of our mutual friend. Here, Leon tells us about what happened on that day.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

In 1865, on the 9th of June, so that's precisely five years before Dickens' death, he experiences a railway crash in a place called Staplehurst in Kent. So the circumstances were Dickens was traveling home from Folkestone on the boat train. He was in France with his lover Ellen Ternan and her mother. Dickens had a kind of love nest in France near a place near it was in a place called Condette, near Boulogne. And Dickens found this very convenient for not only visits to Ellen where he could remain anonymous and where he could install Ellen so that she could enjoy time out of the public eye. Because you can imagine somebody who was the first superstar of his age would be recognized on the streets. There are 200 or so images of Dickens that circulated in his lifetime, whether that be paintings, engravings, photographs. And so people would know him and would be able to recognize him on the streets, much like you would uh modern celebrities. And so by by whisking himself away to France, he was able to spend private time with Ellen and enjoy her company. So they were traveling back on this boat train and it got to uh Staplehurst, and there were workmen who were working on the track, and they had got the times of the trains wrong so that they had lifted rails off of the track and um hadn't managed to replace them in time for the boat train to come speeding by. So the boat train jumped, the locomotive jumped over this gap in the tracks, went over uh a bridge into a stream at Staplehurst, and the first class carriage in which Dickens, Ellen, and her mother were traveling was suspended over top of the bridge. Um, there were other carriages that were smashed, and people were dead and were injured. So this incident was very shaking for Dickens. Not just the fact that there was this train crash that that might have taken his life, but also uh he talks about helping the dead and the wounded um afterwards. And he spent time to try to help as best he could. Now, he also managed to get Ellen and her mother away from the scene so that when help arrived, when the press inevitably arrived, uh Ellen and her mother would have not been present. And so there wouldn't have been a scandal about whom whom Dickens was with. Though interestingly, he also writes to the station master of Charing Cross to say uh a young lady um has lost a gold bracelet. Uh, the bracelet has uh uh the name Ellen on it. If you should come across it, please let me know. So it's interesting that that even though he wished to keep Ellen's identity secret, he wrote to the station master about this valuable gold bracelet that he was seeking um to return to Ellen. Anyway, so uh Dickens was working on our mutual friend at the time in France, and he was carrying a portion of the manuscript back with him to England. And he talks in letters about uh forgetting that he had the manuscript with him. And so he climbed back into this carriage that was suspended over a bridge, over a river, a ravine, in order to recover a portion of the manuscript. And he talks in what he called the postscript in lieu of preface about this particular incident. So the consequence for Dickens, and Dickens is being shaken not just by the impact, but also in his words, helping the wounded afterwards, um, it caused his writing to become shaky. And he couldn't sign his usual signature with a flourish underneath for some weeks afterwards. And in examining the manuscript, as I have done for the edition that I am publishing later this year with Oxford, it's evident in the manuscript how Dickens' hand was not as steady in writing um this particular portion of the manuscript.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

You've anticipated my question there. I was going to ask you about whether there was a change in the handwriting.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Yes, a slight change. So this is part 16. It's book four, chapters one to four. And you can see the unsteady handwriting. And you can also see it in letters because, of course, another thing that I do is I am the principal editor of the Charles Dickens Letters Project. And so I am very accustomed on a day-to-day basis of seeing Dickens' hand. And in those letters that he writes immediately after the Staplehurst uh railway crash, you can see how his handwriting has been uh affected. And I think um it gave him post-traumatic stress. So he was fearful of traveling by train ever after, and it stayed with him, this near-death experience. And so it affected him uh much more than I think we would imagine, because you know, he he was with the woman that that he he loved. Uh, she was injured in the crash, and Dickens talks about her in letters as the patient uh when he's writing to people who are uh looking after her or going to see her. Interestingly, there are no existing letters between Dickens and Ellen Turnan. So, in that sense, he was very careful and cautious about how he communicated with her. But certainly she was injured, and he talks, for example, to um his uh his servant uh about bringing her a basket of goodies, and he calls her the patient in these letters. So it's interesting how he kept her identity hidden, certainly as far as Staplehurst was concerned, and he cared for her in her illness afterwards as well.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

Leon now reveals why Dickens unexpectedly found himself having to make cuts to his manuscript to ready it for publication.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

When Dickens began to write Our Mutual Friend, he wrote it in the same way as he had written uh his other novels. And by that I mean that Dickens had a very clear idea about the number of pages and the number of words that constituted a monthly number, uh, one of these sections of the novel that were published serially. So he began writing Our Mutual Friend in the same way as he wrote, for example, Bleak House. And each of the numbers occupied approximately 21, 22 folios. But from the first number when he received the proofs of the novel, he discovered that he had produced more than he thought was possible to contain in a monthly number. And this went on for the first five parts. So for five months, Dickens was writing away in his usual fashion, putting into the novel as much as he did into previous novels in monthly numbers. But when the proofs came back, he discovered that he had overwritten. And he he he didn't know why this was the case. And it was thought that that he did this because he he wasn't in practice and that he hadn't written a serial of this length um since uh Little Dorrit in the in the mid-1850s, because um A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations were published uh in weekly format in his journal. So, how do you explain this overwriting and why didn't Dickens notice it? So I have the answer. I have the answer, and I'm revealing Dominic to you exclusively in advance, in advance of the publication of my edition, The Circumstances. So the truth was that Dickens had changed printers for his novel. He had gone over to Chapman and Hall, who were his publishers, and he switched to Chapman and Hall after a disagreement with Bradbury and Evans, his previous uh publishers, owing to their refusal to publish a personal statement that Dickens had written in 1858, giving his side of the story of the separation. So he broke with Bradbury and Evans, who had their own printing outfit as well, and he took up with Chapman and Hall. Now, Chapman and Hall contracted out the printing of Our Mutual Friend. And it turns out that the printers used a slightly different typeface and a slightly different spacing in the printed pages that they produced. And so while Dickens was happily writing away and thinking that everything was as it was before, that he would be able to produce the required 32 pages of printed text, the reason why he overwrote was because the printers were using a different font and a different spacing, slightly different. So it might have been uh we did a test comparing our mutual friend to Bleak House. And the reality was that Dickens had been writing the same, approximately the same length of monthly numbers as he had in Bleak House, but because the printers were unable to accommodate in the style that they had chosen for this novel and the spacing and the margins, because they were not able to replicate exactly what Dickens was used to, Dickens overwrote. So it puts to bed the claims by generations of critics who said he's not used to it, he had other things on his mind, he was getting back into the swing of things. None of that is true. The reality is that he was writing the requisite number of words, but he didn't know for months that a different printer was producing these 32 pages of text in a slightly different way. And so he then got back into the swing of things by about monthly number six, which he wrote in May to mid-June 1864. So he started writing the novel in about October 1863. So it took him October, November, December, January, February, March, April, until he realized that he was doing this overwriting, and then he had to cut back.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

And finally, Leon tells us about how these cuts impacted the detail of some of the key characters in the novel, and how his new Oxford edition, for the first time, puts them back in.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

So when Dickens received the proofs, and he he thought, oh my goodness, this is too long. What am I going to cut? Because by this stage, when he received the proofs, it was shortly before the monthly number had to go to print. So he had to make those cuts fairly quickly. And there are two particular ways in which he made cuts. And so Mrs. Boffin, who's a wonderful character and a very wise character and a very insightful character, she recognizes from fairly early on that there's something about John Rokesmith as he initially presents himself to them. There's something about John Rokesmith that is familiar to her, something that recalls her earlier experience of John Harmon as a boy, because John Harmon was sent away by his father as a boy, and there was a tragic parting between him and the Boffins. And so they haven't seen him for many years. But Mrs. Bothan insightfully recognizes that there is not only a physical resemblance, but also there's a certain kind of sympathy that she feels for John Rokesmith. And so Dickens cut back on that. And I think that it removes some of the quality from Mrs. Bothan in terms of her intuition and her insight. Probably not to the detriment of the novel's plot, though I think that in terms of her character, it does remove something of this insight that she has. And I mean, Mrs. Botham uh also is capable of producing great comedy. And so the kind of clothes that she wears in order to uh make herself seem uh uh wealthy and the feathers that she wears in her hat and this kind of thing, Dickens has great fun with that, and she can be perceived in certain ways as a comic character. But uh the more serious side of her, in which she offers this insight in the conversations that she has with John Rokesmith, she appears slightly less insightful and slightly less understanding in the novel as we have it compared to what Dickens originally wrote. So that's one thing. And there's a couple of the things that that he cuts. So in the character of Gaffer Hexham, so Gaffer dies fairly early on in the novel, but there is a scene involving him and Lizzie where uh he's in the the the house that that he shares with her. And he displays certain violent tendencies, particularly to do with a knife that he has. And Dickens cut that. And so as a result, uh we don't see as much of the potential for violence that is there in Gaffer Hexam. And that, of course, is interesting because we don't know initially how this mysterious corpse that is floating the river, how how this corpse came to his end. And Gaffer Hexam is suspected of murder. So if you have these violent tendencies left in the novel, you might think, well, it is possible that Gaffer is the culprit, and he acts in this way towards particularly his daughter Lizzie, whom he loves. So it presents Gaffer as a more complicated character, I think, in the way that Dickens initially wrote the novel, but he he deletes some of that because he had to subscribe to this format of 32 pages of text in the monthly format. The other noteworthy cuts that Dickens made had to do with Bradley Headstone. So when Bradley displays signs of nervousness or anger or of violence, there is more that Dickens writes of that than we have in the completed novel. And at one point he reacts violently when he finds out that he didn't kill uh Eugene Rayburn, but Eugene Rayburn is still alive and that the marriage with Lizzie Hickson is going to go ahead. And so he he throws up his hands in a violent manner, and it's a kind of precursor to an epileptic fit. And Dickens cuts that as well in order to dial back a little bit on what violence Bradley Headstone is capable of. So I think that those cuts were deleterious, and I think that they do affect the scheme of the novel and the intention of the novel as Dickens, as Dickens wrote it. We talk um in editorial circles about his extended creative impulse. So what I have done in this edition, and uh again, you're the first to hear this, Dominic, is I have restored all of the passages where we can demonstrate that Dickens had to cut them at proof stage. And so what you will read is a different novel, a slightly different novel, maybe a significantly different novel in terms of understanding more about these characters and understanding more about uh what Dickens originally intended as their completely fleshed-out personalities. But of course, for the exigencies of the monthly format, he had to cut back and had to reduce them to the required format because you couldn't have 33 pages, you couldn't have 34, you had to have 32 in terms of the way the larger sheets on which the novel was printed, the way that they went through the printer, the steam press, you had to have only the requisite number of pages. And so I I think that um this will be a slightly different novel and will hopefully inject a bit of freshness and will entice readers who have read the novel, like like you, into reading it again and seeing that there is more of Dickens that there is to uh to discover.