Transcript
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Narrator / Charles Dickens Storyteller (0:29)
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Narrator / Charles Dickens Storyteller (1:32)
It's September 1857, in the Lake District. About 10 miles northeast of Keswick, two men are descending the mountain known as Carrick Fell. And they're not just any old hikers. They're two of the greatest writers of their age, Charles Dickens and his good friend, Wilkie Collins. Dickens is already a literary celebrity with eight published novels to his name. Collins, a good decade his junior, has yet to make a name for himself. He's tagging along on this expedition to the Lake District in the hopes that it will generate some copy for Dickens magazine, Household Words, to which Collins is a regular contributor. The previous month, Dickens wrote to Collins begging him to join him on a trip. We want something for Household Words, he told him, and I want to escape from myself. Dickens had been feeling particularly restless of late. Now in his mid-40s, it's he who has dragged the 32 year old Collins on up this particular mountain. Collins, it seems, would have been quite happy spending the morning at their hotel in Heskett, Newmarket. And his reluctance has proven well founded. Already their compass has broken and they've spent a good few hours wandering around in thick fog, trying to find their way down the mountain again. Collins may well be regretting that he allowed Dickens to twist his arm this morning, but before long, it's not the only Part of his body that's been twisted. Collins has gone over on his ankle. It's a nasty sprain. He hobbles down the mountain, much relieved to finally return to civilization and the ministrations of a doctor in nearby Wigton. For Dickens, it's a disappointing start to the planned walking tour. The two authors aren't going to have much to write home about if one of them is spending the next few days with his feet up. But the magazine still needs copy. They might have to get a bit creative. And so, as he puts pen to paper, Dickens will stretch the bounds of this particular travelogue well beyond the usual artistic license, even so far as to include the paranormal. I'm David Suchet from the Noiser Podcast Network. This is Charles Dickens Ghost Stories. And this is the Ghost in the Bride's Chamber. In this episode, we pick up Dickens and Collins's story as originally featured in Household Words. In it, the two authors appear as likely fictionalized versions of themselves. Dickens as the hyperactive Mr. Goodchild, unable to relax even while on holiday. Collins as the laid back Mr. Idol, who, having sprained his ankle, is quite happy to spend the rest of the trip with his feet up. The two men divided up writing duties between them, but while Collins chapters stick fairly closely to the details of their actual trip, Dickens veers off in a much stranger and more sinister direction. We join the two of them as they lodge at a railway station on the Cumberland border, which provides an opportunity for some truly virtuoso writing by Dickens. But after three nights there, even Mr. Idol Collins is beginning to grow restless. He proposes a change of scene to an old Lancaster inn, where the guests are served wedding cake after dinner every night. And the story behind this strange custom, at least as Dickens tells it, is more horrifying than either of them can imagine. The Ghost in the Bride's Chamber Part 1. It entered Mr. Idle's head on the borders of Cumberland, that there could be no idler place to stay at, except by snatches of a few minutes each than a railway station, an intermediate station on a line, a junction, anything of that sort, Thomas suggested. Mr. Goodchild approved of the idea as eccentric, and they journeyed on and on until they came to such a station. Where there was an inn here, said Thomas, we may be luxuriously lazy. Other people will travel for us, as it were, and we shall laugh at their folly. It was a junction station where wooden razors shaved the air very often, and where the sharp electric telegraph bell was in a very restless condition. All manner of cross lines of rails came zigzagging into it like a congress of iron vipers. And a little way out of it, a pointsman in an elevated signal box was constantly going through the motions of drawing immediately immense quantities of beer at a public house bar. In one direction, confused perspectives of embankments and arches were to be seen from the platform in the other. The rails soon disentangled themselves into two tracks and shot away under a bridge and curved round a corner. Sidings were there in which empty luggage vans and cattle boxes often bump butted against each other as if they couldn't agree. And warehouses were there in which great quantities of goods seemed to have taken the veil of the consistency of tarpaulin and to have retired from the world without any hope of getting back to it. Refreshment rooms were there. One for the hungry and thirsty iron locomotives where their coke and water were ready and of good quality, for they were dangerous to play tricks with. The other for the hungry and thirsty human locomotives who might take what they could get and whose chief consolation was provided in the form of three terrific urns or vases of white metal containing nothing, each forming a breastwork for a defiant and apparently much injured woman Established at this station, Mr. Thomas Idle and Mr. Francis Goodchild resolved to enjoy it. But its contrasts were very violent, and there was also an infection in it first. As to its contrasts, there were only two, but they were lethargy and madness. The station was either totally unconscious or wildly raving by day. In its unconscious state it looked as if no life could come to it, as if it were all rust, dust and ashes, as if the last train forever had gone without issuing any return tickets, as if the last engine had uttered its last shriek and burst. One awkward shave of the air from the wooden razor and everything changed. Tight office doors flew open. Panels yielded books, newspapers, traveling caps and wrappers broke out of brick walls. Money chinked Conveyances, oppressed by nightmares of luggage, came careering into the yard. Porters started up from secret places, dittoed the much injured women. The shining bell, who lived in a little tray on stilts by himself, flew into a man's hand and clamoured violently. The pointsman, aloft in the signal box, made the motions of drawing with some difficulty hogsheads of beer. Down train, more beer. Up train, more beer. Cross junction train, more beer. Cattle train, more beer. Goods train simmering, whistling, trembling, rumbling, thundering trains on the whole confusion of intersecting rails crossing one another, bumping one another, hissing one another, backing to go forward, tearing into distance to come Close people, frantic exiles seeking restoration to their native carriages and banished to remoter climes. More beer and more bell. Then in a minute the station relapsed into stupor as the stoker of the cattle train, the last to depart when gliding out of it, wiping the long nose of his oil can with a dirty pocket handkerchief. By night, in its unconscious state, the station was not so much as visible. Something in the air, like an enterprising chemist's established in business on one of the bows of Jack's beanstalk, was all that could be discerned of it under the stars. In a moment it would break out a constellation of gas. In another moment, 20 rival chemists on 20 rival beanstalks came into existence. Then the furies would be seen waving their lurid torches up and down. The confused perspectives of embankments and arches would be heard, too, wailing and shrieking. Then the station would be full of palpitating trains as in the day, with the heightening difference that they were not so clearly seen as in the day, whereas the station walls, starting forward under the gas like a hippopotamus's eyes, dazzled the human locomotives with the sauce bottle, the cheap music, the bedstead, the distorted range of buildings where the patent safes are made, the gentleman in the rain with the registered umbrella, the lady returning from the ball with the registered respirator, and all their other embellishment. And now the human locomotives, creased as to their countenances and purblind as to their eyes, would swarm forth in a heap, addressing themselves to the mysterious urns and the much injured women, while the iron locomotives, dripping fire and water, shed their steam about plentifully, making the dullocks in their cages with heads depressed and foam hanging from their mouths, as their red looks glanced fearfully at the surrounding terrors, seem as though they had been drinking at half frozen waters and were hung with icicles. Through the same steam would be caught glimpses of their fellow travellers, the sheep getting their white kid faces together over away from the bars and stuffing the interstices with trembling wool. Also down among the wheels of the man with the sledgehammer ringing the axles of the fast night train, against whom the oxen have a misgiving that he is the man with the polax who is to come by and by, and so the nearest of them try to get back and get a purchase for a thrust at him through the bars. Suddenly the bell would ring, the steam would stop with one hiss and a yell. The chemists on the beanstalks would be busy. The avenging furies would bestir themselves. The first night train would melt from eye and ear. The other trains, going their ways more slowly, would be heard faintly rattling in the distance, like old fashioned watches running down the sauce bottle. And cheap music retired from view. Even the bedstead went to bed. And there was no such visible thing as the station to vex the cool wind in its blowing. Or perhaps the autumn lightning, as it found out the iron rails. The infection of the station was this when it was in its raving state. The apprentices found it impossible to be there without labouring under the delusion that they were in a hurry. To Mr. Goodchild, whose ideas of idleness were so imperfect, this was no unpleasant hallucination. And accordingly, that gentleman went through great exertions in yielding to it and running up and down the platform, jostling everybody under the impression that he had a highly important mission the somewhere and had not a moment to lose. But to Thomas Idle, this contagion was so very unacceptable an incident of the situation that he struck on the fourth day and requested to be moved. This place fills me with a dreadful sensation, said Thomas, of having something to do. Remove me, Frances. Where would you like to go next? Was the question of the ever engaging Goodchild. I've heard there's a good old inn at Lancaster established in a fine old house. An inn where they give you bride cake every day after dinner, said Thomas Idle. Let us eat bride cake without the trouble of being married or of knowing anybody in that ridiculous dilemma. Mr. Goodchild, with a lover's sigh, assented. They departed from the station in a violent hurry, for which it is unnecessary to observe there was not the least occasion and were delivered at the fine old house at Lancaster on the same night.