Chapter 43

An afternoon when a damp fog crept up from the Thames, blurring the street gas lamps.

Charles Dickens was walking through that fog with a furrowed brow.

Barely twenty-seven years old.

Though the consecutive successes of The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist had crowned him the darling of the literary world, a crown only burdened the head of the wearer without lifting an ounce of the world’s heavy load.

The London reflected in his eyes remained gloomy and wretched.

Or perhaps, it looked even more wretched than before he started writing.

Writing meant learning how to see, and to one who had learned how to see, the world was no longer a blurry fog, but a stark, vivid wound.

“Paper! Today’s Northern Star is out!”

The shout of a boy near the newsstand cut through the fog.

Perhaps twelve or thirteen years old. Red, frozen ears peeked out beneath a ragged cap, and ink-stained fingertips trembled in the cold.

When Dickens tossed him a coin out of habit, the boy’s eyes lit up.

The small joy dwelling in a single coin pierced a corner of Dickens’s heart, but he picked up the paper without showing any emotion.

The smell of ink stung his nose.

The raw scent unique to freshly printed newspapers.

It could be the scent of truth, or it could be the scent of falsehood.

For Dickens believed that ink was a substance whose character changed depending on where it was printed.

“Let’s see what nonsense is printed today.”

His gaze scanned the lower part of the front page and then halted.
His eyebrows twitched.

[An Uncomfortable, Astounding Story About the Bread, Milk, and Candy That Grace Your Tables - An In-depth Diagnosis of How the Corn Laws Threaten London’s Bakeries and Ovens, Accompanied by Detailed Illustrations and Explanations to Discuss the Rationale for Enacting a Food Safety Act]

“Ha….”

Dickens let out a dry laugh.

“Such a grandiose title. Does one catch a fatal disease if they don’t write titles like this these days?”

The pen name of the contributor was Astraea.

This arrogant author, borrowing the name of the goddess of justice, had undoubtedly plastered the pages with words like ‘shocking’ and ‘astounding’ to drive up sales, as was the usual custom.

Indeed, upon opening the newspaper, it did not differ much from his expectations.

Bone dust goes into bread?

Brain matter goes into milk?

Everyone knew that London’s food was like garbage.

Yet this was a severe exaggeration.

Wasn’t this person writing more fiction than he, a novelist, did?

He snorted.

A world where sensationalism earns more ink money than truth, and stimulation earns more than accuracy.

As a writer, he knew better than anyone else how sweet a temptation walking the tightrope between fact and fiction could be.

Yet, precisely because he knew that temptation, he despised writing that surrendered to it.

With people holding pens acting like this….

It wasn’t a recent phenomenon that newspapers were obsessed with making money by stimulating public curiosity rather than verifying facts.

“Just another run-of-the-mill conspiracy theory. A waste of paper.”

Dickens folded the newspaper roughly, intending to shove it into his coat pocket.
At that moment, an illustration exposed between the folded pages caught his wrist.

“Wait…?”

He stopped walking and unfolded the newspaper again.

The illustration depicted the scenery of a flour mill.

A massive millstone was turning, and beside it, sweat-drenched workers were dumping the contents of sacks. Except for the fact that what poured from the sacks was not flour, but whitish bone fragments, the illustration was as plain as any other.

Except for the placement of sweat beads on the worker’s forehead, the texture of dust caught in the millstone’s axis, and the fatigue lingering in every knuckle of the hands gripping the sacks. It was not a drawing made from mere imagination.

Turning the page, an even more shocking drawing awaited him.

A workshop where green pigment was poured into a large cauldron.

Amidst the rising steam of boiling copper rust, children were depicted stirring candy with indifferent expressions.

Children.

Dickens’s gaze locked onto the eyes of those children.

Hollow pupils. Though they were merely ink printed on black-and-white paper, those pupils pierced through the page and glared at Dickens.

No, they weren’t glaring. They weren’t seeing anything at all.

There was no anger, no sorrow, no resentment in those eyes.

Only empty resignation pooled at the bottom of their pupils.

For the scariest eyes in the world were not those filled with rancor, but those devoid of any remaining expectation.

“This is….”

At that moment, a memory Dickens wished to forget surged up.

---

Age twelve.

Young Charles, who had been raised in a middle-class family, was forced to quit school overnight due to his father’s debts and was sent to Warren’s Blacking Warehouse.

The boy, who had been memorizing Latin grammar until the night before, had to kneel on the rat-infested factory floor from dawn the next day to paste labels onto bottles of shoe polish.

Ten hours a day. He had to endure the chill rising from the floor, the foul stench of shoe polish, and the sound of rat claws scratching against the tiles.

Children his age were busy mocking him, saying that the young master from a well-to-do family had personally come to where shoe polish was made. And the mocking hurt more than fists. Fists struck flesh, but mocking struck existence.

Within the bustling factory, the boy realized there was not a single inch of space where he belonged.

And that realization embedded itself deep within his bones for life, throbbing faintly every time he wrote.

Shame?

Anger?

Loneliness?

All emotions became luxuries in the face of hunger.

Before the desperate urgency of survival, social standing became something as easily stuck on and peeled off as a label on a shoe polish bottle.

Dickens looked at the illustration again.

He could not deny that the gazes of the children in the candy factory matched the gaze of twelve-year-old Charles Dickens. The children in the illustration stood amidst steam boiling with copper rust, while he had sat on a floor reeking of shoe polish.

The era, place, and substance differed, but the color of those empty pupils was the same.

…Damn it.

He shuddered with disgust. He had seen what he wanted to forget. What he had buried was dug up.

Yet, at the same time, his eyes as a novelist could not help but admit that the illustration itself was depicted with remarkable detail.

Drawings made from imagination carry no scent. Yet this drawing smelled.

The sickening mold, the sour sweat, and the lung-piercing metallic fishiness he had smelled at the shoe polish factory revived and lingered at the tip of his nose.

The bolt positions of the machinery in the illustration, the creases of the tattered clothes worn by the workers, down to the filthy floor tiles of the workplace.

Regardless of who the artists named Isidore and Daguerre were, the two of them had undoubtedly seen the hell unfolded across London, just as he had.

He sighed.

Well, even if the title is flamboyant, the article itself is worth a read.

Dickens walked into a nearby tea house and sat in a corner seat.

Straightening his posture, pipe lit, he began to read the article from start to finish with the momentum of not missing a single letter.

The steam from his teacup rose and vanished, rose again and vanished once more.

Pipe smoke curled slowly toward the ceiling.

Dickens’s eyes raced over the type, his brow alternately smoothing out and furrowing.

After reading the final sentence, he let out a long sigh and set his pipe down.

“At least the author isn’t someone stricken with a fatal disease.”

Though he had furrowed his brow initially just looking at the title, the more he read what this person called Astraea had written, the more he found himself nodding.

Instead of cursing the merchants who committed wrongdoings, as society commonly did, the article accurately pinpointed the structural causes—why merchants had no choice but to mix bone dust into bread, and why they had to water down milk to turn a profit.

[The Corn Laws, which impose murderous tariffs, have caused the price of flour to skyrocket, and merchants unable to bear the burden of production costs turn to impurities. Ultimately, unless tariffs are lowered, your dining table and ours in London can never be safe.]

It was logical.

The cause-and-effect relationship was irrefutably flawless.

The person called Astraea who wrote this seemed like someone who should be sitting in an Oxford lecture hall rather than wandering the slums of London.

The cause-and-effect relationship between the Corn Laws and food hygiene. Those noble lords sitting in Parliament couldn’t think of this even if they died and came back to life.

Dickens conceded. The logic of the writing was impeccably sophisticated.

However.

Dickens turned his head to look out the window.

Beyond the tearoom glass, a cargo wagon passed by, and a peddler was shouting.

Would the people of this street, those scraping by day-to-day, really read this article and nod along?

“No.”

Dickens shook his head.

The writing was brilliant, but it was brilliant to a fault.

Tariffs.

Rising costs.

Cause and effect.

Legal rationale.

Words like these were the language of the educated.

To people who cleaned chimneys all day, spun yarn in factories, and sold fish at the market stalls, this article would undoubtedly be more boring than a sermon delivered by a pastor in church.

People would curse, shouting, “Damn those vicious merchants!”

Yet what about the Corn Laws, the true mastermind behind all this tragedy?

They would undoubtedly react with, “What does that have to do with me? Just lower the price of bread.”

Dickens knew the language of the streets, and the grammar of the streets was simple.
Throw stones at visible enemies, and treat invisible structures as if they don’t exist.

“Astraea, you are looking at the problem from too high up, like a star in the night sky.”

A navigator plots direction by the positions of stars, and an astronomer reads the seasons by the movement of stars.

Yet starlight is too far away to warm the ground.

Dickens knew that this logic could not change the world.

To change the world, he needed the logic he had learned on the factory floor around age twelve.

People do not move by what they understand with their heads.

They move when their hearts pound.

He knew well that people only clenched their fists when they grew angry, grieved, and felt wronged.

“It’s all well and good, but… if it were me, I wouldn’t have written it this way.”

People should be made to weep while reading the article.

They should be made to choke on their bread while chewing it, unable to swallow.

Looking at a single slice of bread on their own dining table, the fear that someone’s bones might be mixed inside should reach all the way to their fingertips.

Facts are mere pebbles, but stories are bombs.

And Dickens prided himself on being the best technician in London at crafting this kind of bomb.

“Phew….”

Dickens closed his eyes.

A familiar face floated up in the darkness.

A skinny body, hollow eyes, a boy holding out his bowl and saying, Please, sir, I want some more.

Oliver Twist.

His breakout work and alter ego of a character.

The hungriest, purest boy in this world, forged by Dickens with ink and paper.

Oliver in the story was supposed to find happiness after all sorts of hardships.

He would meet the kind Mr. Brownlow, eat warm soup, and sleep in a cozy bed.

He was a small ray of hope in a hellish world, like a candle lit in the dark.

Yet right now, after reading Astraea’s article, that candle was flickering for Charles Dickens.

What if Oliver were living not in a story, but in the reality of London?

London in March 1839.

In this city where bread was mixed with bone dust, milk with calf brains, and candy painted with arsenic, what if Oliver had failed to meet Mr. Brownlow? No, since someone like Mr. Brownlow only existed in stories, what would the real-life Oliver have become?

I’m sorry, Oliver.

Dickens opened his eyes. And with a remorseful expression, he repeated to himself.

With the pen I used to save you in fiction, this time I must kill you most miserably. I must drive a stake through the hearts of readers who wished for your happiness. That way, those lords in Parliament and the general public will finally realize what is actually happening.

Dickens sprang to his feet.

He had to go home.

He had to pick up his pen immediately.

He wanted to pour out this overflowing inspiration as fast as humanly possible, down to the very last second.

---

When he returned home, some sort of mail bundle was waiting for him.

“Letters sent by dear readers, no doubt.”

Having received countless letters from many people while serializing Oliver Twist, he was just about to brush it off, thinking this was the same, when the handwriting on the outer envelope caught his eye.

[Astraea]

His heart stopped. No, it didn’t stop—it skipped a beat.

Could it be?

He anxiously looked around his surroundings. There was no one there. Only the shadows of the corridor crouched in silence. How on earth did they know to send a letter here? Yet, after a moment’s thought, a wry smile escaped him.

Well, since that person is an Englishman too, they could very well be a reader who read Oliver. Why make such a fuss over it now, Mr. Boz?

Boz.

Calling himself by the pen name he had used when he first started writing, he tried to calm himself, but his heart refused to settle easily.

The fact that on the very day he read the article, a letter bearing that author’s name arrived as if by appointment. It felt as though the clocks of this world meshed together far too precisely to call it a coincidence.

On any other day, he would have dismissed it as the prank of a reader with a bizarre hobby.

Today was different, however. A fire was already burning within his chest, and a letter from the very person who had kindled that fire lay right before his eyes.

He grew curious about what they wanted from him, and why on earth they had sent a letter.

With trembling hands, Charles Dickens opened the envelope.

And he was taken aback.

Inside the envelope was not some heartfelt cheer from an ardent fan addressed to Charles Dickens, but a thick stack of notes that could well be called a research notebook.

Was it a malicious prank?

As he picked up and opened the first page of the notebook, however, his jaw dropped.

The full text of the Corn Laws, charts neatly outlining how domestic wheat prices fluctuated according to tariff schedules, and records tracking the yearly price volatility of flour across various districts of London were written in a beautiful hand.

All the materials Astraea had gathered to publish the article lay right there on his palm, in their entirety.

So this was it…. Using these materials… is how they wrote that rational, impeccably logical piece.

And in that instant, Charles Dickens understood why Astraea had sent these materials to him.

Astraea knew that their own writing was as high and cold as starlight.

They knew that while the logic was flawless, that logic failed to reach the people on the ground.

And so, they were searching for someone to translate the language of the heavens into the language of the streets.

Charles Dickens.

He had been chosen.

As the technician who would turn Astraea’s pebble into a bomb.

---

That night, the candle in Charles Dickens’s study did not go out until late.

London outside the window was fast asleep, but someone inside the study remained awake.

Only the scratch of a pen nib filled the quiet.

The sound grew regular, then irregular, stopped, and started over again.

He wept.

He grew angry.

And he felt compassion.

Some sentences were written as eulogies.

Other sentences were set down as indictments.

Only after a droplet—whether melted candle wax or a tear—fell upon the manuscript paper did Charles Dickens finally lay down his pen. Black ink stained his fingers.

And melted within that ink were Oliver’s death, Tomkins’s desperate cry, Madison’s excuse, the London fog, and the stench of the shoe-polish factory.

You can look forward to it, Astraea.

---

To put it briefly, the article published under the pen name Astraea faded away without gaining much public attention.

Inside Parliament, the Conservatives and Whigs were still engaged in tedious verbal sparring, and not a single problem was solved. The merchants were quietly spending time in prison, and the bread in London still reeked of bone dust.

A week later, on an afternoon in April when a slight sense of helplessness had set in.

“Your Majesty, the newly arrived magazines have been delivered.”

Perhaps owing to our conversation about novels earlier, Baroness Lehzen brought over a silver tray holding several magazines. I nodded offhandedly.

In truth, my mind was entirely occupied with ways to break through the deadlocked political situation, leaving me no leisure to spare for novels. Still, unable to ignore the thoughtfulness behind the delivery, I casually picked up one of the magazines.

“Bentley’s Miscellany, is it…?”

“The final installment of Oliver Twist should be serialized inside. It’s the climax where the villain Fagin’s end and Oliver’s fate are decided, so it was quite difficult to get ahold of, you know?”

The final chapter of Oliver Twist, eh…….

I flipped through the magazine without much thought.

Then, my gaze halted on a page.

It was an article with a somewhat unfamiliar title, formatted as a special contribution.

[In Memoriam: The Death of Oliver Twist]

Huh? What is the meaning of this?

Oliver Twist dies?

Driven by curiosity, I began reading the first paragraph.

[Dear readers.
Until last month, through these pages every month, we watched the adventures of the pitiful boy Oliver.
He fled the workhouse, exhausted by hunger, was dragged into a den of pickpockets, and suffered all manner of trials. And in this month’s final chapter, the fates of the villain Fagin and Oliver were scheduled to be written.

Yet, my dear readers, I am sorry to say, let us set that story aside for a moment and imagine.
What if this novel were not a romantic fiction, but the cold reality of London itself—how would Oliver have met his end?]

The writing continued in a calm yet powerful tone.

[Let us suppose that Oliver succeeded in stealing Mr. Brownlow’s wallet.

Thrilled at the prospect of eating a full meal for the first time in ages, Oliver would have rushed straight to a bakery.
And from the display shelf, he would have bought the whitest, softest-looking bread.

That bread would have entered Oliver’s heart as white as snow.
Yet the bread Oliver clutched was hardly fit to be called food.
It was an industrial product mixed with bone dust and alum, forged by the merchants’ greed and heavy tariffs.

Lacking any way to distinguish such things, however, Oliver would have wolfed down that bread in haste.
Since he was putting a non-food industrial product into his mouth, his throat would have felt parched, so he probably bought a bottle of milk as well.
That milk would have looked thick and savory.

Yet what touched Oliver’s tongue was not cow’s milk.
It was poison, laced with a cow’s smashed brain and filthy water.

Lastly, the boy might have popped something called candy into his mouth for the very first time in his life.
A sparkling, jewel-like candy shimmering with green.
Though it was poison tinted with copper rust and arsenic.]

Holding my breath, I read down through the writing.

Every single letter seemed to come alive and pierce my chest.

[For the first time in a long while, Oliver would have eaten his fill.
And that night, he would have died beneath a cold bridge, clutching his stomach and coughing up blood. For what he bought with stolen money was not food, but death.]

The edge of the magazine trembled faintly within my hand.

[If so, would Oliver have survived if he had not turned to thievery and remained in the workhouse? No, that too would have been impossible.

The towering barrier of the Corn Laws drove the price of bread sky-high. With insufficient funds, the workhouse would inevitably cut the quantity of gruel in half. Eating gruel bulked out with sawdust and potato peels instead of flour, Oliver would have slowly wasted away and died.

Go outside as a thief and die eating poison; stay inside while keeping your conscience and starve to death. This is the sole choice permitted to our children today.]

My hands shook so badly that I had to put the magazine down.

Yes… this is it.

The link between tariffs and hygiene that I had struggled so hard to explain was perfectly melted into this short piece. The cause-and-effect relationship expressed through numbers and charts in Astraea’s article was translated here into the final meal of a single child.

I picked up the magazine again and let my gaze rest upon the final paragraph.

[Oliver Twist in the story will likely meet a happy ending after all. Because I, as his author, can pick up my pen and save him.

Yet there is no author in the real-life London to write a happy ending.
Even at this very moment, countless Olivers on the streets are chewing bread laced with bone dust and sucking on arsenic candy as they perish.

Who can save them?
Who will pick up the pen of reality and write that the end of their story is happiness?

Dear readers, this is not the author’s duty.
Is it not rather the duty of you gentlemen seated within Parliament?

Therefore, unless the problems facing our Olivers are resolved, the final story of Oliver Twist shall be postponed indefinitely.]

No, postponing the final story?!

What a mad author!

And with trembling hands, I checked the very last line.

There, a familiar pen name was inscribed.

-Dedicated to the conscience of the age, Astraea.-

My jaw dropped open instantly.

Charles Dickens…!

This person wrote a piece for me???

No. Wait. That’s not what’s important right now.

Quickly shaking my head, I considered the shockwaves this writing would bring.

Oliver Twist.

If the death of this boy, beloved by all of London, became known, and if the final story was postponed, how would his hundreds of thousands of avid readers react?

The cruel presumption that Oliver was already dead had this been reality, coupled with the news that the serialization of the final chapter was suspended indefinitely.

Whom would the anger of those who read it target—the merchants, Parliament, or the Corn Laws?

I slowly picked up the magazine that had slipped onto my lap.

I flipped back open to the page carrying Dickens’s writing.

And looking at that page, for the very first time, I felt that I was not alone in this fight.

A star cannot illuminate the world all by itself.

Yet when starlight falls upon dry firewood, it becomes a fire.

Astraea’s starlight had fallen upon the firewood known as Dickens, and now that fire was illuminating all of London.