Charles Dickens was traveling home from France on June 10, 1865, when the train he was riding in went off the tracks while crossing a bridge. Seven first-class carriages dropped into the river below. The eighth, Dickens's own, dangled off the bridge, hanging from its coupling and throwing the Dickens party into the lower corner of the carriage. Dickens calmed his companions and then clambered onto the bridge. He found a conductor, obtained a key to the carriage and freed his friends. Then he filled his top hat with water, took out his brandy flask and went about succoring, and in at least one case, rescuing, those trapped in the wrecked cars below. Men and women died in front of him. He helped others find their own dead loved ones. He was, to use a possibly Dickensian word, indefatigable.
When all that could be done for the victims had been done, Dickens, 53 years old and not in very good health, climbed back into the dangling carriage and retrieved from the pocket of his coat the installment of ''Our Mutual Friend'' that he had just completed and was taking to his publishers.
The author, who in the course of his journalistic and novelistic career had never shrunk from describing the lurid and the terrible, made no effort to describe what he had seen. Three days after the accident, he wrote to a friend, ''I have a -- I don't know what to call it -- constitutional (I suppose) presence of mind, and was not in the least fluttered at the time. But in writing these scanty words of recollection I feel the shake and am obliged to stop.'' He also refused to appear at the subsequent inquest, or to advertise his presence on the ill-fated train in any way.
Why did Dickens hide his heroism? Because the author's traveling companions were his 25-year-old mistress, Ellen Ternan, and her mother. Charles Dickens, who wrote more than a dozen lengthy works of fiction and many shorter stories, thousands of letters, myriad essays, articles and speeches, several plays, an autobiographical fragment and God knows what else, was one of the great secret-keepers of his age. That Dickens -- a media star and the first real celebrity in the modern mold -- was able to survive unexposed should come as no surprise. The press had not, by 1860, perfected its machinery for exposing the lives of public people. What is really interesting is that a man whose volume of writings approach logorrhea could dissemble his most intimate concerns and feelings so consistently for so long.
Ellen Ternan was just one in a long line of Dickensian secrets. Although most people today, if they know one thing about Dickens, know that as a boy he was sent to work in a boot-blacking factory, and although as an adult, he could not pass the former site of the factory, in the Strand, without weeping, Dickens was so secretive about this that a year or so before his death, he mystified his grown children during a family game by using the clue ''Warrens' Blacking, 30, Strand.'' Even his daughters, with whom he was close, had no idea what he was talking about.
In fact, the man we know today, through biography, is entirely unlike the man known to his contemporaries, who inferred a certain ''ungentlemanliness'' (in the strict Victorian sense of not having the proper birth and educational credentials) from Dickens's often flashy mode of dress and taste for spectacle and theater. They never knew, though, that the author's father went to debtors' prison, that his grandparents were servants and that his maternal grandfather left England after embezzling money in 1810. Observers sometimes considered him odd, even mad, and almost everyone remarked upon his amazing vitality, penetrating gaze and enormous personal force, but Dickens prevented his contemporaries from filling in the narrative and accounting for his unusual qualities.
Though the novel is not by nature a confessional form of literature, it can encompass confession, and breaking the boundaries of Victorian propriety, some of which Dickens himself had helped to put in place, was the revolutionary intention of novelists of the modern period like D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. But Dickens's work has always seemed to have more access to the id than that of his contemporaries because of his natural and incandescent use of symbolism and analogy. Dickens's entire world seems to sit beside the real world of, say, Trollope or George Eliot like a vast analogue, where what seems to be ''objective'' and ''normal'' is strangely enlarged and reflected, given darker life and meaning by his unrestrained imaginative power.
Dickens wrote three novels and started a fourth after he began his relationship with Ellen Ternan. All explore secret-keeping. In ''A Tale of Two Cities,'' Dr. Manette's exposure of the Evremonde twins' rape and murder of Madame Defarge's secret sister and brother imperils his son-in-law, Charles Darnay, who is saved only by the secret substitution of Sydney Carton for himself at La Guillotine. Pip, in ''Great Expectations,'' is tormented by secret shames -- not only of his relations and antecedents, once he is made a gentleman, but also by his own nagging sense of inherent guilt. (In this he is much unlike an early Dickens character, David Copperfield, in whom the Murdstones are always trying to raise a sense of guilt and never succeeding.) Almost every character in ''Our Mutual Friend'' has a secret, from the most benign (Riah secretly tutoring Lizzie Hexam) to the most malevolent (Bradley Headstone's murderous stalking of Eugene Wrayburn). And of course, John Jasper, of ''The Mystery of Edwin Drood,'' is a secret opium-taker and possibly a murderer.
Dickens did not keep his secrets in order to write these novels, but there is little question that they inspired his later work. The moral progress of the secret-keeper -- from the relatively innocent Pip through the passionate, tormented, but all-too-human Headstone to the almost satanic Jasper is perhaps a map of Dickens's own feelings about his double life.
Ellen Ternan kept her secrets, too. It was only after her death that her son discovered that his mother had had a liaison with Dickens. According to Ellen Ternan's biographer, Claire Tomalin, the discovery was deeply disturbing to him -- he would allow no Dickens works in his house and would even turn off the radio if Dickens's name was mentioned. The only thing Ternan ever said of the relationship, which she confided to her vicar in the 1880's, was that she had been Dickens's mistress, that she regretted the liaison and that she ''loathed the very thought of this intimacy.''
In the last 10 years of his life, Charles Dickens seemed to age visibly. He and his friends attributed this to the effort of his public readings. In themselves they were physically demanding, and the travel involved was even more so, especially after the train wreck, when, according to his son, every jolt panicked him. But it was also certainly true that he spent a great deal of time traveling from his house at Gad's Hill in Kent to the various houses he supplied for Ternan, first in London, then in France, then in Slough, then in Peckham. He used up his great reserves of energy, energy everyone he knew had remarked on all his life, and died looking exhausted at 58. No one knows whether he found peace and intimacy with Ternan, as Charles Darnay does with Lucie Manette in ''A Tale of Two Cities, ''or whether he found frustration and cruelty, as Pip finds with Estella in ''Great Expectations.'' He succeeded in taking to the grave the answer to the central question of his life, which he lamented to John Forster in 1855, before the advent of Ternan. ''Why is it, that as with poor David,'' he wrote, referring to one of his most famous characters, ''a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, one friend and companion I have never made?'' For those of us who revere Dickens, it is as if the story were never finished and the contradictions in the character of the protagonist were never satisfactorily resolved.
Dickens knew, and had demonstrated, that the giving up of secrets could be freeing -- as a young man of 32, he met one Madame de la Rue, an Englishwoman married to a Frenchman, who was beset by what we would recognize as obsessive-compulsive fears and anxieties. During the winter of 1844-45, Dickens repeatedly hypnotized the woman and encouraged her to relate her secrets. This amateur ''treatment'' was a success -- not only did she begin to sleep more peacefully; the improvement lasted for years, and Dickens became obsessed by the efficacy of it.
And yet despite this knowledge, Dickens could not give up his secrets and reveal his relationships. His last novels show that he felt a moral danger in his hidden life. Nevertheless, he was unable to do what he required his characters to do: expose the mysteries of his own life.
Novels and other narratives always show the same thing about
secrets -- more than anything, secrets are just missing links in a
train of cause and effect that inevitably makes its pattern manifest.
Revelatory astonishment always gives way to ''Of course!'' The paradox
of personal secrets, like Dickens's, is that it is the secret-keeping
itself, not the substance of the secret, that alienates a person from
others. In his own lifetime, Dickens was considered quirky, unstable
and even wicked because his friends and relatives were hard put to
infer his motives or account for his behavior. Today, his secrets are
hardly shocking; they reveal the struggles of a passionate man as well
as the inner life of a fascinating writer. They are human, common. They
link us to his work and experience, and they arouse our compassion.
From our post-Freudian, Internet-happy perspective, we can't help
feeling that his secrets caused more trouble than they were worth.