“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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"Nurse's Stories" (1860)

This piece by Charles Dickens has appeared under different names ("Captain Murderer," "Captain Murderer and the Devil's Bargain"). I found it in an anthology of stories and assumed that's what it was, a story—a rambling and strangely put together one. But it's actually closer to an essay or memoir, with Dickens (or the narrator) recalling in daylight the horrific stories a nurse used to tell him at bedtime. It appeared originally in The Uncommercial Traveller, a collection of pieces with a little theme of travel lightly thrown over to unite them. The first effect of "Nurse's Stories" is that it feels like someone crazy talking to themselves. There are elements that make the stories feel like fairy tales, unusually gruesome ones. Dickens—or his childhood nurse originally—is intent on getting under our skin, effectively doubling the impact with two stories related only by their intensity. The first is about Captain Murderer, a serial cannibal who marries and eats his brides ritualistically, three times: "he chopped her in pieces, and peppered her, and salted her, and put her in the pie, and sent it to the baker's, and ate it all, and picked the bones." The repetition along with the extraordinary scene described are part of what remind me of fairy tales. Captain Murderer comes to a bad end eventually and then it's off to a completely different story, this one about a family of shipbuilders named Chips. Each generation sells their soul to the devil for a specific list of products that are apparently irresistible to them: an iron pot, a bushel of tenpenny nails, a half-ton of copper (which they seem to be just toting around), and a rat that can speak. They're not as interested in the rat generally, but it comes with the deal. That story then goes off on a strange tangent about rats. This whole piece takes some getting used to—well, full disclosure, Dickens always takes some getting used to for me—but I like the rambling style here and when the narrator decides to be vivid he is quite vivid. It's obviously intended to scare with one overwhelming jolt after the next—that kind of horror, rushing you along, never letting you get your bearings. It's more effective than a lot of horror literature its age. In its antiquated way it's squarely in the mindfuck vein, which I can respect. I don't typically think of Dickens as a horror writer, but of course even the beloved A Christmas Carol is full of ghosts and creeps and let's not forget Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. I've been impressed with the other forays I've seen by Dickens into the genre too.

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