“I shall, Charles. And I shall see you again soon.”

My last sight of Dickens from the back seemed to be of a much older man, not striding with his usual confident and extraordinary pace at all, but almost feeling his way along the side of the road, leaning heavily on his walking cane as he headed back towards Gad’s Hill.

Cannibalism.

As I rode the train to Charing Cross Station I thought about that odd, barbaric word and reality—cannibalism—and how it had already affected Charles Dickens’s life. (I had no idea at that time how terribly—and soon—it would affect mine.)

There had always been something in Charles Dickens’s make-up that reacted especially strongly to the idea of cannibalism and of being consumed in any manner. During the time of his public separation from Catherine and the scandal that he had done the most to publicise and bring about—although he would never recognise that fact—the writer had said to me more than once, “They’re eating me alive, Wilkie. My enemies, the Hogarths, and the misinformed public who wish to believe the worst are devouring me a limb at a time.”

Many had been the time in the past decade when Dickens would invite me to join him on a trip to London’s Zoological Gardens—a place in which he always took great delight—but as much as he loved the hippopotamus family and aviaries and lions’ den, it was the reptile house feeding time that was the central purpose and destination for his visit. Dickens would not miss it and hurried me so that we would never be late. They fed the reptiles, most specifically the snakes, a diet of mice and larger rats and the spectacle seemed to mesmerise Dickens (who, a mesmerist himself, absolutely refused to allow anyone to mesmerise him). He would stand transfixed. Several times—riding somewhere together, waiting for a play to begin, even when sitting in his parlour at home—Dickens would remind me of how, frequently, two snakes would begin devouring the same rat at exactly the same time until the head and tail and hindquarters of the rodent were invisible in the snakes’ gullets, while the struggling rat was still alive, hind and forelegs scrabbling in the air even as the powerful jaws advanced on them.

Only a few months before the Staplehurst accident, Dickens had confided in me that he was seeing the legs of furniture in his house—his bathtub, the serpentine table and chair legs in various rooms, even the heavy cords for the drapes—as snakes slowly consuming the tabletops and draperies and tub. “When I am not looking, the house is devouring itself, my dear Wilkie,” he’d said to me over rum punch. He also told me that often at a banquet—most frequently a banquet in his honour—he would look down the long table and see his peers and friends and colleagues filling their faces with veal or mutton or chicken, and for a moment, just for a single, terrible second, he would imagine that the utensils lifted to those mouths were wriggling appendages. But not of mice or rats, he said—of men. He said that he found the frequent illusion… unsettling.

But it was actual cannibalism—or at least the rumour of it—that had changed the course of Charles Dickens’s life eleven years ago.

In October of 1854, all of England was shocked to read Dr John Rae’s report on what he had discovered during his search for the missing Franklin Expedition.

If you have never heard of the Franklin Expedition, Dear Reader from my future century, I need to tell you only that it was an attempt by Sir John Franklin and 129 men in 1845 to explore the northern Arctic in two ships provided by the Royal Navy’s Discovery Service—HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. They set sail in May of 1845. Their primary orders were to force the North-West Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific north of our colony in Canada—England was always dreaming of new and shorter trade routes to the Far East—and Franklin, an older man, was a seasoned explorer. There was every possible expectation of success. The two ships were last seen in Baffin Bay in the late summer of 1845. After three or four years of no word from the expedition, even the Royal Navy became concerned and various rescue expeditions were organised. But the two ships, to this day, have not been found.

Both Parliament and Lady Franklin offered huge rewards. Search parties, not just British but from America and other nations, criss-crossed the Arctic searching for Franklin and his men. Or at the very least for some sign of their fate. Lady Franklin was outspoken in her belief that her husband and the crews were still alive, and few in government or in the Navy wished to contradict her, even when so many Englishmen had given up all hope.

Dr John Rae was an officer in the Hudson Bay Company who had gone north by land and spent several seasons exploring remote northern islands (consisting, it is said, of little more than frozen gravel and endless blowing snow) and the vast stretches of ocean ice into which Erebus and Terror had disappeared. Unlike the Royal Navy or the majority of searchers, Rae had lived with the various Esquimaux savages in the region, learned their crude languages, and—in his report—quoted testimony from many of them. He had also returned to England with various artefacts—brass buttons, caps, ships’ dishes bearing the crest of Sir John, writing instruments—that had belonged to Franklin or his men. Finally, Rae had discovered human remains, both in shallow graves and above ground, including two skeletons actually still seated in one of the ship’s boats tied to a sledge.

What shocked England, beyond this terrible proof of Franklin’s probable fate, was that according to the Esquimaux that Rae had interviewed, Franklin and his men had not only died but had resorted to cannibalism in their final days. The savages told Rae of coming across white men’s camps where there were chewed bones, stacks of hacked-off limbs, and even tall boots with feet and leg bones still within.

This horrified Lady Franklin, of course, and she rejected the report in its entirety (even going so far as to hire another ship, out of her own dwindling fortune, to resume the search for her husband). Dickens also was appalled—and fascinated—by the idea.

He began publishing articles on the reported tragedy then in his journal, Household Words, as well as in other magazines. At first he was simply doubtful, stating that the report was “hasty… in the statement that they had eaten the dead bodies of their companions.” Dickens told us that he had consulted “a wilderness of books”—although he cited no specific sources—to prove that “the probabilities are all against poor Franklin’s people having dreamed of eating the bodies of their companions.”

As the rest of the nation either began to believe in Rae’s report (he did claim the government’s reward for conclusive proof of Franklin’s fate) or to forget, Dickens’s denial turned to serious anger. In Household Words he launched a scathing attack on “the savage”—his phrase for all non-whites, but in this case the scheming, lying, untrustworthy Esquimaux whom John Rae had lived with and interviewed. Dickens in our time was, of course, considered a radical liberal, but those credentials were not impeached when he spoke for the majority of Englishmen and wrote—“… we believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel.” It was simply impossible, he argued, that any of Sir John Franklin’s men had “prolonged their existence by the dreadful expedient of eating the bodies of their dead companions.”

Then our friend did a very strange thing. From the “wilderness of books” he had consulted to support his opinion, he chose 1001Arabian Nights—one of the most important books from his childhood, as he had told me several times—to prove his point. He wrote in summary—“In the whole wide circle of the Arabian Nights, it is reserved for ghoules, gigantic blacks with one eye, monsters like towers of enormous bulk and dreadful aspect, and unclean animals lurking on the sea shore…” to resort to eating human flesh, or cannibalism.