“A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second” (1840)

This very short story by Charles Dickens is also found under a shorter title—"The Mother’s Eyes”—but the long title works better, I think, because it’s less a story and more what the title tells us, a confession, written on the eve of an execution. It seems to be Dickens trying to imagine his way into the homicidal mindset, with a scene a bit like Edgar Allan Poe’s in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a story that came three years after this one. Not sure whether Poe knew this piece. This narrator is no raving lunatic, save perhaps when the bloodhounds show up and give his game away. But he is coldly fixated on his victim, his nephew, a young child. He does not get along with his brother, who has been more the fair-haired popular one in his family, but the two of them married sisters. He did not get along well with his sister-in-law either, who seemed to be deeply mistrustful of him. Both the brother and his wife die, however, and the surviving son comes to live with the narrator and his wife, at which point the narrator’s fixation worsens considerably. This is basically where the shorter title comes from, as reference is made to the resemblance between mother and son and the way the narrator may have caught either of them staring at him mistrustfully. Then he describes the murder, which is fully premeditated yet just as fully unexplained. I must say Dickens is quick and skillful injecting various horror elements and putting them to work. He has his part in inventing horror perhaps as much as anyone, as here we see a version of Jim Thompson’s Killer Inside Me. It’s even more believable because it’s not jokey. This killer also knows the difference between right and wrong. He’s just driven to do it. His explanations make no sense—some kind of past rift with the mother, the sister-in-law? What kind of rift? He has nothing to do with her death. But the lack of explanation only serves to make it more unsettling. Knowing when not to explain is no simple or easy skill. At the same time, in many ways in 1840 the short story itself was still being invented. So there’s also a sense that Dickens is just getting up a head of steam and trying stuff. I like the spirit of it. A confession found in a prison—it’s a great idea. I like the anonymity of the document too. The writer of this note knows he is going to his death the next day—knows it well. Accepts it. Doesn’t appear to have particular regrets, and still never explains why he did the crime. Very nice!

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