Nodding and fetching my walking stick, I left young Edmond Dickenson and went out through the sitting room past the silent nurse.

ACT III OFTHE FROZEN DEEP opens with Clara Burnham travelling to Newfoundland to search for news (much as the real Lady Franklin had hired her own ships and gone to the Far North with her niece Sophia Cracroft in search of her husband, Sir John). Into a remote ice cavern along that coast staggers a starved, exhausted man just escaped from the frozen sea. Clara sees that it is Wardour, and there are hysterical accusations that he has murdered—and perhaps eaten? the audience wonders—her fiancé, Frank Aldersley. Wardour—Dickens—rushes out and returns with Aldersley—me, in ragged clothes that left me more naked than not—in his arms and alive. “Often,” gasps Wardour, “in supporting Aldersley through snow-drifts and ice-floes, have I been tempted to leave him sleeping.”

Delivering that line, Dickens… Richard Wardour… collapses, his exertions, starvation, and exhaustion from keeping his rival alive on the ice for so long finally catching up to him. Wardour manages to say, “My sister, Clara! — Kiss me, sister, kiss me before I die!” He then dies in Clara’s arms with Clara’s kiss upon his cheek and Clara’s tears streaming down his face.

At our dress rehearsal, I was tempted to vomit on stage. But during all four performances at Tavistock House, I found myself weeping and heard myself whispering, “This is an awful thing.” You may, Dear Reader, interpret that in any way you wish.

Dickens’s performances were powerful and… strange. William Makepeace Thackeray, one of our attendees the night of the first performance, later remarked of Dickens—“If that man would now go upon the stage, he would make his £20,000 a year.”

This was wild hyperbole in 1857, but by the time of the Staplehurst accident, Dickens was making almost that much through his “acting” in his reading tours in the United States and throughout England.

The audiences blubbered like children during the four performances of The Frozen Deep at Tavistock House. Professional reviewers whom Dickens had invited to the opening nights professed to be deeply impressed by Dickens’s performance and his strange immersion in the role of Richard Wardour. Indeed, it was the author’s terrible intensity—a sort of dark energy which filled the room and swept all viewers and listeners into its vortex—that everyone remarked upon.

Dickens was depressed after the last performance of The Frozen Deep. He wrote to me of the “sad sounds” of the workmen “battering and smashing down” his schoolroom theatre.

There was a clamour for Dickens to stage more performances of my play; many urged him to do so for profit. It was rumoured, correctly it turned out, that the Queen herself wanted to attend a performance. But Dickens resisted all such suggestions. None of us in the amateur production wished to be mere performers for money. But in June of that year, 1857, that fateful year in which Dickens’s domestic life would change forever, the writer was shocked to hear of the death of our mutual friend Douglas Jerrold.

Dickens told me that just a few nights before the other author’s death, the Inimitable had dreamt that Jerrold had given him copy to edit but Dickens could not make sense of the words. This is every writer’s nightmare—the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us—but Dickens found it interesting that he had dreamt it just as Jerrold was, unbeknownst to any of us, on his deathbed.

Knowing that Jerrold’s family would be left in dire financial circumstances (Douglas was much more the reformer radical than Dickens, despite his posturing, would ever be), Dickens came up with the idea for a series of benefit performances: T. P. Cooke in revivals of Jerrold’s two plays, Black Eyed Susan and Rent Day; Thackeray and the war correspondent William Howard Russell giving lectures; and Dickens himself doing afternoon and night readings.

And, of course, a return of The Frozen Deep.

Dickens’s goal was to raise £2,000 for Jerrold’s family.

The Gallery of Illustration on Regent Street was rented for the series of performances. The Queen—always careful not to appear at a benefit for a single charity—not only gave her name in support of this effort, but sent word that she was intensely eager to see The Frozen Deep and suggested that Mr Dickens select a room in Buckingham Palace in which he could provide a private performance for Her Majesty and her guests.

Dickens refused. His reasons were clear enough: his daughters, who appeared in the play, had never been introduced at Court and he did not want their first appearance before the Queen at the palace to be as actresses. He proposed that Her Majesty should come to a private performance at the Gallery of Illustration a week before subscription night and that she should bring her own gallery of guests. Faced with the iron will of the Indomitable, the Queen agreed.

We performed before her on 4 July, 1857. Her Majesty’s guests included Prince Albert, the king of Belgium, and the prince of Prussia. It was especially in honour of Prince Albert that Dickens had directed the entrance and stairs to be decked with flowers. Some of us, I confess, were apprehensive that such a royal audience might not react with the passions of those who had been our audience at Tavistock House the previous winter, but Dickens assured us that the Queen and her guests would laugh at the funny parts, weep at the sad parts, blow their noses exactly when our more common audiences had, and that—during the farce called Uncle John presented after The Frozen Deep— some of the royalty would bray like donkeys. He was, as usual, correct on all counts.

After our performance, the delighted Queen invited Dickens to come forth to accept her thanks.

He refused.

The reason he sent this time—“I could not appear before Her Majesty tired and hot, with the paint still upon my face.”

Actually, of course, it was more than the actors’ paint that kept Dickens from allowing himself to be presented to Her Majesty and her guests. You see, our romantic farce of Uncle John had left Dickens in his Uncle John costume of a floppy dressing gown, a silly wig, and a red nose. There was no way on earth that Charles Dickens, one of the proudest and most self-conscious men who ever lived, was going to allow himself to be introduced to Queen Victoria in that regalia.

Once again, the Queen politely gave way.

We offered two more performances of The Frozen Deep at the Gallery of Illustration, but though the play once again met with wild enthusiasm and ecstatic reviews from everyone who attended and its receipts accounted for the vast majority of the money raised for the Jerrold family fund, we still fell short of the £2,000 goal.

John Dean, manager of the Great Manchester Art Exhibition, had been pressing Dickens to perform The Frozen Deep at that city’s New Free Trade Hall, and—unwilling to end up with anything less than the full £2,000 he had promised the Jerrolds—Dickens immediately went up to Manchester to do a reading of A Christmas Carol there and to inspect the hall, which could easily hold two thousand people.

He decided at once that it would be a perfect venue for the play but that it was simply too large for the meagre acting skills of his daughters and sister-in-law Georgina, all of whom had central roles. (It never occurred to Charles Dickens that he might not be up to the professional requirements of such a huge hall and such large audiences. Dickens knew from experience that he could master crowds of three thousand and more with his magnetic influence.)

He would need to hire and rehearse some professional actresses. (Mark Lemon, Dickens’s son Charley, and I were allowed to stay in the troupe, but the Inimitable began rehearsing us all as if we had never performed the play before.)