Mr. Dickens and His Carol

by Samantha Silva

Vigorous night walks of some twenty miles were his own regular fix for a disordered mind that no amount of fighting with the bedsheets could defeat,

But it was his face, with its kind, searching eyes, variously reported in the press as chestnut brown, clear blue, not blue at all, glowing gray, gray-green, and glittering black, that drew people to him, and a smile that threw light in all directions.

sanguine

salubriousness,

“A tree?” demanded Dickens. “Inside the house?” “A Christmas tree. From Germany.” “Have we no trees in England?” “The Queen and Prince Albert insist on it. It’s a new tradition.”

Of course he would live with the tree inside the house, and admire whatever wall covering she chose, even if it created a dizzying concurrence of circles and stripes or fought with the pattern in the carpet. He vowed to speak not a word of the foyer’s bold green.

foolscap

cabriolets

“Flee all you like,” she said, turning to face him. “Your past is quicker than you are and will catch you soon enough.”

postprandial

antimacassar,

“But it’s a card, Charley. A holiday card. To send only at Christmastime!”

He had never seen it quite this way before, the bald excess, the bold overembellishment, but it was clear to him now—the nothingness of all things.

He wanted exile, and sleep, perhaps, but not to dream.

Dickens knew the deception well, but he smiled nonetheless, not for the brilliance of its execution—it was on the sloppy end of magic tricks—but for the truth at the bottom of every illusion, every fiction, every lie: our own great desire to believe.

But I knew somewhere deep inside … that he had broken my heart forever.”

“For the second saddest thing in the world after a child who’s been abandoned,” said Eleanor, “is the parent who abandons him.”

But he knew, too, for the first time, what had always been true—that he wanted them to love him. In some shadow-corner of his being, he was the eleven-year-old at Warren’s Blacking even now, a boy all alone in the world, who wanted only to be seen and cared for. If they might only treasure the part of him that Eleanor had reawakened.