“To Be Read at Dusk” is a ghost story by Charles Dickens. Or rather, it is emphatically not a ghost story at all – “I don’t talk of ghosts” one of the characters declares. Instead, it is a collection of different encounters with what we might term the inexplicable. We can just leave it there, but as with many other similar tales, we may find something beneath the surface that the characters have missed.
The story begins with our narrator, sitting out in the Swiss Alps, and eavesdropping on the conversation of five nearby couriers, men who have worked in private houses as personal servants. They are discussing their experiences of the supernatural. One, a German, tells three stories and a Genoese man tells another, the longest.
The German’s Stories
At least one of these encounters will be familiar to us. The German tells of an old Marchesa who during a dinner party declared in shock that her sister, far away in Spain, had died. And so it was. My grandmother likes to tell stories about her own talents for detecting the deaths of her relatives. And my own father, the night before he died, visited me in a dream. It is a mystery how such a thing can happen, but since I do not as a rule dream, it feels wrong to call such a thing a mere coincidence. I imagine you, too, reader, can find examples of this mysterious sense.
The German also mentions the time when his mind was suddenly filled with thoughts of an old friend of his, with everyone reminding him of him on the street, and then to his surprise actually meeting the man that day, though he had believed him elsewhere. It is a more innocent version of the story above, for death sits outside of this arrangement. Yet there is something here that does not quite add up – “what do you call that?” he asks.
At the end of “To Be Read at Dusk” the German tells a final story, this time from when he was in the service of an Englishman. Just before he departed on a long journey the man’s twin brother seemed to send him a message in a dream. Sure enough, word soon arrives that the twin is near death from illness. When the first brother arrives his dying twin only has time to declare before expiring: “James, you have seen me before, to-night – and you know it!”
These stories all focus on what we cannot seem to explain. After relating the experience of seeing his friend, another courier, a Neapolitan, compares such things to the blood of San Gennaro liquifying back in Naples. That is a miracle, but to the others it is inappropriate – one gets the impression they are talking about something more serious. “That!” Cried the German. “Well! I think I know a name for that.” Bollocks, in short.
But as with a lot of stories set in the 19th century, we have here a certain uneasy relation to the supernatural. We may disbelieve miracles, but not quite the everyday inexplicable. Though we may try. The Englishman, on receiving his twin’s message, goes to the German with the hope of putting his mind to rest through the latter’s more scientific vision:
“You come from a sensible country, where mysterious things are inquired into, and are not settled to have been weighed and measured – or to have been unweighable and unmeasurable – or in either case to have been completely disposed of, for all time – ever so many years ago. I have just now seen the phantom of my brother.”
But nothing can be done, and nothing can be explained. Each of these stories tells us precisely nothing, except that such things do happen. They remind us that our world is filled with things that cannot be explained, and that mystery is better accepted than denied. For a 19th-century reader perhaps these tales were enough to make one lose sleep, but they did nothing for me. Our eavesdropping narrator, however, feels a chill, because after hearing the stories he goes back to talking to the very American he had avoided by listening in to the couriers in the first place. This man, from his new and naïve country, tells a more prosaic tale about “one of the largest acquisitions of dollars ever made”. The narrator, clearly, prefers a world that can be explained, even if, by comparison with the previous stories, it is hardly an exciting one.
The Genoese’s Tale: The Obvious Reading
The three previous encounters with the supernatural take up about a third of the length of “To Be Read at Dusk”. They set us up to approach the central tale, told by the Genoese courier and sandwiched between the German’s stories, as being another example of things that cannot be explained. Yet somehow, this does not quite add up. Here the mystery seems, if anything, more complex and more worthy of our attention too.
The Genoese courier tells of his hiring by a young English gentleman to accompany him, and his soon-to-be wife, on a trip to a slightly forlorn palace on the coast between Genoa and Nice for a few months of rest and relaxation. “All we had was complete; we wanted for nothing. The marriage took place. They were happy. I was happy, seeing all so bright.” The newlywed couple, the courier, and another servant, the wife’s maid, head to the palace. On the way, however, the courier notices something amiss about his mistress. He sees her “sometimes brooding in a manner very strange; in a frightened manner; in an unhappy manner”. He is perplexed, but eventually manages to get from her maid the information that she “is haunted”.
A dream before her marriage, of a man wearing black, with black hair and a grey moustache. This is the image that haunts her. The characters fear that they might find such an image at the palace when they arrive, but there is no such likeness anywhere, even among the many paintings. At the same time, our narrator’s description of the palazzo makes us think of gothic tales, and we are on the lookout for any indication of our man, knowing that his presence in the story will probably be fatal.
It does not take long for such a man to arrive, in the form of one Signor Dellombra, whom the Genoese describes as possibly an Austrian noble travelling incognito. When he is shown in for dinner the woman faints, but after her husband talks with her, she agrees to see him again. The couple have had no other guests in all the time they have been there. The husband insists he keep coming, so that his wife might master her fear of him, and this works, albeit incompletely. Eventually, the group go to Rome, where one day the wife disappears. Attempting to find her, the courier and her husband discover that she fled in the carriage of a man they recognise as Dellombra, but as he sent the horses of the station all in different directions, they are unable to give chase, and they never see the woman again.
On the face of it, this is another story about the presence of the supernatural. Like the Englishman in the German’s final story, the young husband here has a largely rationalist viewpoint, and sees himself as needing to go about “curing mistress of her fanciful terror.” Unfortunately, he was wrong in thinking he could fight fate in this manner. Signor Dellombra is a more mythic force, and he achieves what he must have been set on earth to do – to steal away the man’s wife from the bliss of their honeymoon. In this reading, the supernatural seems more hostile than it does in the other stories, but there does not appear to be a greater message here.
The Genoese’s Tale: Alternative Reading
Yet that is far from the case. There are clues in the text that support an alternative reading, things which our Genoese narrator may have missed but which, most likely, will not pass us by entirely unnoticed. We must, for this, consider not the grieving husband, nor the attentive but limited narrator, but rather the wife herself.
What do we learn of her? That she is “a fair young English lady, with a sufficient fortune.” Interestingly, immediately, we might notice that “He was enamoured of [her]”, not that the feeling was mutual. Our only indication, possibly, of that is that “they were going to be married.” As noted, they are married, and the narrator declares that “they were happy.” Perhaps they were, but then why is the woman immediately afterwards gloomy?
This gloom comes upon her when she is alone and appears to be dispelled when he comes and shows her affection. “By and by, she laughed, and then all went well again.” The dream, perhaps, is real, but there are other things that might make any of us unhappy. This is her life: “[she] would sing, and play the harp, and copy the old pictures, and stroll with master under the green trees and vines, all day.” That is her life. And she is happy – isn’t she? For master says so: ““Now Clara,” Master said, in a low voice, “you see that it is nothing? You are happy.”” The narrator says so too. “She was beautiful. He was happy.” But wait, have I not forgotten the “s” on the second sentence? No, we know that the woman is beautiful, but never that she is happy. Indeed, we read this exact sentence twice, with the second time near the end of the story, as if to nudge us towards questioning the sentiments the story contains.
The woman’s life is boring. When Dellombra appears, she is shocked to see the figure in her dream. Her husband, “almost angry”, at this, “and yet full of solicitude” – as I write this, I wonder whether the latter part of the sentence is the Genoese narrator quietly, like Stevens in The Remains of the Day, trying to excuse his master from something that is not quite right. Master forces mistress to see Dellombra again, though she says that the man terrifies her.
““Again? Why, surely, over and over again! Are you cold?” (She shivered)” In a single short speech the master has revealed a certain disregard for his wife and her feelings, which are indicated subtly by Dickens showing us her hidden reaction of horror at his words.
So, then, the woman may not be happy at all in her new relationship. She may need the affection of her husband to remind kindle in her any kind of joy. She has a mysterious dream, a horrific one shortly before her marriage which seems to presage not its end, but rather its lifelessness. When she actually sees Dellombra (and it is she who identifies him as the figure of her dream, while nobody else notices, suggesting that her description of the dream’s contents was perhaps even deliberately vague) and is forced to spend time with him, we read that “she would cast down her eyes and droop her head, before the Signor Dellombra, or would look at him with a terrified and fascinated glance, as if his presence had some evil influence or power upon her.” That rather sounds like a woman who is, at least partly, in love.
Her fainting and illness, her clinging to her husband’s influence, all read now like attempts to ward off this pernicious spirit which she feels as much within herself as within Dellombra – she knows that it will destroy the sacred bonds of her marriage. Yet it does not work. Somehow, in Rome, Dellombra finally gets to her, and they flee together. According to reports in the posthouse, Dellombra passed with “a frightened English lady crouching in one corner.” Yet are we to read her fear simply as that of a person trapped or may there also be a kind of liberated fear here too, which the Genoese narrator is unwilling to pass on to us as his listeners? It is impossible to say.
Conclusion
Sandwiched between tales of funny coincidences, this tale could just be another mysterious inexplicable tale, albeit one with added horror elements. Ironically, however, this tale embodies that classic fantastical trope – that there is always more to things than we may think. Instead of being merely a story about a fatal encounter, we can read this tale as telling us, unwillingly perhaps, about a relationship that merely appears to be perfect, and then only to one member of it. Through the two narrative layers – the Genoese, and the narrator himself – we are limited in what we can glean. But that just leaves an enduring mystery, albeit a much more prosaic one. How can a situation like this arise? How is it that in such a story its main victim is so deprived of her own voice? What was she really thinking?
Alas, we cannot know. But it makes “To Be Read at Dusk” a much more curious little collection of stories than it first appears. Some mysteries, certainly, cannot be explained. Yet some tragedies, equally certainly, can be avoided. Could this one have?