Dickens and Poe

The 1976 BBC Masterpiece Theatre production Dickens of London, was on while I was still a small child, and I was unaware of it until as a young adult, I came across overage of it in a book chronicling the Masterpiece Theatre productions. It wasn't until the early 2000s that I actually got a copy, after it had been re-released in the US on DVD.

 
 
      As I anticipated, it is an excellent production, with separate actors protraying the author as a boy, a young man, and (both) a middle-aged man, and an old man. The film faithfully follows the life of Dickens from his boyhood to his deathbed. There was another biographical portrait of Dickens broadcast sometime this new century on PBS, which I taped. There were actors portraying Dickens parents and contemporaries in that as well (including Timothy West as Dickens father), but that was not a straightforward dramatazation of the author's life. This version is. The life of Dickens dramatized, making the film seem like the life of one of Dickens characters, and could stand alongside the adventures of David Copperfield, Oliver Twist or Phillip Pirrip. Only this boy really lived and some of what he endured was the equal of the hadships his fictional characters went through. There seem to be less evil adults here than in his novels (though I suspect that there were in young Charles' life), but young bullies are well represented. The actor who protrays the elder Dickens makes him a jovial, flamboyant merry-maker, and relentless optimist. That's probaly fairly close to reality, as Dickens claims to have based David Coppperfield's Mr. Mcawber on his father. The incidents of Charles' family ending up in depter's prison, and the Blacking Factory are well-presented. There's plenty of darkness in this, including a harrowing scene in which two accost young Charles in Warren's Blacking Factory and pour boiling shoe polish on him. The later incidents of Charles' affair with a young actress, and the accident on the train are not included here, BTW.

The episodes flash back and forward from the author's boyhood and youth to his elder years. There are some disconcerting incodents, including one with a man who is made up to resemble Mr. Pickwick, barges in to Dickens' sickbed to have word with the auhtor, and the doctor throughs him out. The elderly author reflects, "Am I dreaming of him, or is he dreaming of me?"

    This scene and others beg the question as to how much of all this is faithful to the author's life and how much is fictionalized. And this brings me to the point of this essay, which happens to be Dickens and Poe, what I set to write out in the first place. Later in the serial, there is an episode titled "Nightmare," which is clearly based on the real-life incident in which Dickens met with Edgar Allen Poe in America.
    
 

    This occurred during Dickens first tour of the continental US, which would shrotly inspire him to write Martin Cuzzlewit(not his most popular work, particularly not with Americans). Both authors knew and  admired one another's work by this time. Poe reportedly urged Dickens to find a Birtish publisher for his Tales of Grotesque and Arabesque. Dickens promised he would, but was apparently unable to do so. Did Dickens fudge on his promise? Probably he did his best to find a publisher, but one wonders if the outcome of his meeting with Poe could have been influenced by the bizarre incident in "Nightmare"--if it occurred at all, that is.

   In the film, Poe lets Dickens in on a secret of his: he had discovered a way to find out what lies beyond the grave. Poe tells Dickens that he has been experimenting with hynosis, and has managed to drug a man into a hypnotic state at the moment of his death, so that his consciousness (spirit), is in a suspended state, caught between the world of the living and the dead. Naturally, Dickens is intrigued by this (remember, Dickens was an amateur magician himself, and also experimented with hypnosis--not to mention he was reputed to have been a member of London's "Ghost Club"), and he accompanies Poe to the house where the man in question is sprawled out on a bed in a darkned room. Poe demands that the man tell them what lies beyond this world, whereupon he pulls back the linen covers. The body, which has been in suspended "life for 7 months, collapses into a dired skeleton. Horrified, Dickens flees, with Poe's vampirish laughter ringing in his ears.

     Any truth to this? And if so, is it a trick devised by Poe or a real-life paranormal incident?