There is something in this argument, and it has never yet been fairly met, but I believe that I can show that the idea was probably suggested to Dickens by one figure in real life, and another figure in fiction. So far as I am aware these suggestions are made for the first time.

In the Bancroft Recollections, Lady Bancroft writes on page 31:

My first part at the Strand Theatre was Pippo, in his burlesque The Maid and the Magpie, which proved an immense success, and I established myself as a leading favourite. It was not until the Life of Charles Dickens was published that I knew his opinion of this performance. Dickens had written years before, in a letter to John Forster, these words:

‘I went to the Strand Theatre, having taken a stall beforehand, for it is always crammed. I really wish you would go to see The Maid and the Magpie burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in it that ever I have seen on the stage—the boy Pippo, by Miss Wilton. While it is astonishingly impudent (must be, or it couldn’t be done at all), it is so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is perfectly free from offence. I never have seen such a thing. She does an imitation of the dancing of the Christy Minstrels—wonderfully clever—which, in the audacity of its thorough-going, is surprising. A thing that you cannot imagine a woman’s doing at all; and yet the manner, the appearance, the levity, impulse, and spirits of it are so exactly like a boy, that you cannot think of anything like her sex in association with it. I never have seen such a curious thing, and the girl’s talent is unchallengeable. I call her the cleverest girl I have ever seen on the stage in my time, and the most singularly original.’

Lady Bancroft adds: ‘Charles Dickens’s being impressed with my likeness to a boy reminds me that on the first night I acted in The Middy Ashore, one of the staff came up to me at the wings and said: “Beg pardon, young sir, you must go back to your seat; no strangers are allowed behind the scenes.”’ From this it must be inferred that Dickens had there that evening a new idea as to the possibilities of disguise. Dickens’s letter was written in 1859.

I believe that Dickens in this Datchery assumption was mainly influenced by Wilkie Collins. Most writers on Dickens have observed his admiration for Collins, the way in which he co-operated with him, and the high value he placed on his work. The Moonstone has been referred to in this connection, but I venture to think that the novel which led Dickens to his idea was No Name. I have already printed (page 91) Dickens’s wildly enthusiastic testimony to its merits. He placed it far above The Woman in White, and far above The Moonstone. In particular, he admired the character of Magdalen Vanstone.

In No Name we are introduced to a charming family—husband, wife, and two daughters—the Vanstones. Then it turns out that the parents are unmarried. The husband made a great mistake in marrying a bad woman in his early youth, and is nearly ruined in consequence. He induces a good woman to live with him as his wife, and he has a fortune of £80,000. By a singular mischance both he and the mother die suddenly about the same time. Vanstone had made a will leaving his property to the daughters, but just before the death of his wife he discovers that his real wife is dead, and so they go out and get married. The law is that marriage abolishes all past wills. The consequence is that the will is not effective, and the two daughters are left without a penny, and without a name. What are the girls to do? The younger, Magdalen, has great force of character, and shows a talent for the stage. She resolves to revenge herself on her father’s brother who has taken all the money. Instead of going to work as an ordinary actress, she gives performances of her own. She is very clever at acting different parts. She disguises herself as an old woman, and in all sorts of disguises. She is nineteen, almost the age of Helena Landless. Here is a description of the way in which she disguises herself:

I found all the dresses in the box complete—with one remarkable exception. That exception was the dress of the old north-country lady; the character which I have already mentioned as the best of all my pupil’s disguises, and as modelled in voice and manner on her old governess, Miss Garth. The wig; the eyebrows; the bonnet and veil; the cloak, padded inside to disfigure her back and shoulders; the paints and cosmetics used to age her face and alter her complexion—were all gone. Nothing but the gown remained; a gaudily flowered silk, useful enough for dramatic purposes, but too extravagant in colour and pattern to bear inspection by daylight. The other parts of the dress are sufficiently quiet to pass muster; the bonnet and veil are only old-fashioned, and the cloak is of a sober grey colour. But one plain inference can be drawn from such a discovery as this. As certainly as I sit here, she is going to open the campaign against Noel Vanstone and Mrs. Lecount, in a character which neither of those two persons can have any possible reason for suspecting at the outset—the character of Miss Garth.

What course am I to take under these circumstances? Having got her secret, what am I to do with it? These are awkward considerations; I am rather puzzled how to deal with them.

It is something more than the mere fact of her choosing to disguise herself to forward her own private ends that causes my present perplexity. Hundreds of girls take fancies for disguising themselves; and hundreds of instances of it are related year after year, in the public journals. But my ex-pupil is not to be confounded, for one moment, with the average adventuress of the newspapers. She is capable of going a long way beyond the limit of dressing herself like a man, and imitating a man’s voice and manner. She has a natural gift for assuming characters, which I have never seen equalled by a woman; and she has performed in public until she has felt her own power, and trained her talent for disguising herself to the highest pitch. A girl who takes the sharpest people unawares by using such a capacity as this to help her own objects in private life; and who sharpens that capacity by a determination to fight her way to her own purpose which has beaten down everything before it, up to this time—is a girl who tries an experiment in deception, new enough and dangerous enough to lead one way or the other, to very serious results. This is my conviction founded on a large experience in the art of imposing on my fellow-creatures. I say of my fair relative’s enterprise what I never said or thought of it till I introduced myself to the inside of her box. The chances for and against her winning the fight for her lost fortune are now so evenly balanced that I cannot for the life of me see on which side the scale inclines. All I can discern is, that it will, to a dead certainty, turn one way or the other on the day when she passes Noel Vanstone’s doors in disguise.

I am not prepared to criticise Dickens’s plot as Mr. Lang has done. If Wilkie Collins made an admirable heroine of Magdalen Vanstone disguising herself variously, why should not Dickens succeed in making a character as wonderful and more attractive of Helena Landless? There is nothing to be condemned in the idea itself. It has been used by masters, and used successfully. There would have been nothing to condemn, I believe, in Dickens’s way of working it out if he had lived to complete his book. The comparison with Guy Boothby is singularly inept.

OBJECTIONS

The objections that have been made to the Datchery-Helena theory turn mainly on the supposed disgracefulness of Dickens deceiving his readers as he did, and working out a melodramatic idea. These objections might have been, and, I believe, would have been, scattered to the winds by the complete story.