A Dickens of a Day

8:47 a.m.

I open my eyes to a new morning. It might be a great morning. It might be a foul morning. It might be a morning of peace; it might be a morning of struggle; it might be a morning of high promise and rich fortune; it might be a morning of despair and disaster; it might be a morning of hope; it might be a morning of ill will; we could all be going directly to paradise; we could all be sinking into the bowels of Beelzebub's lair; we could all be—

"Stop it, Charles! You're being wordy again," my wife Catherine bellows over my shoulder. She watches me as I jot these words down in bed. "Put that d—n paper away and come get some breakfast." I hear all the children making a racket downstairs, as she waddles out of the bedroom. By G-d, the woman has gotten fat. She is no longer the pure, innocent beauty I courted and won in our youths, but now a sow of a matriarch. Even Mr. Bumble and his well-fed cohorts have nothing on her. The reader may wonder how England's most celebrated novelist might have found himself chained in matrimony to such an embarrassing old donkey. In all truth, dear reader, I often wonder of it myself.

As I sit in our miserable kitchen and dine on my wife's miserable breakfast and write these miserable words, she asks me what my plans are for today. I inform her truthfully that I have another appointment at the morgue. It is a habit and hobby of mine, the reader may recall, to study the expressions of corpses, and our local mortician, Mr. N———, is always willing to oblige me.

"What a piece of work you are, Charles!" my wife cries in frustration and rage, slamming her hand on the table. "You and your b——y corpses. Why can't you pay some attention to all the living people around you, for once?"

"Oh, hush up, woman," I murmur with disdain. "A man's interests are what they are, just as a woman's duties are what they are, and as our Lord in Heaven proclaimed when he sent his hirsute messenger down from the Mountain of Sinai, in that holiest of lands that lies among the deserts of—"

"You're being wordy again!" she shrieks at me. "Stop being wordy, you pompous g-t."

Driven to the limit of my impatience, I throw my utensils down on the floor and tell the silly woman to go choke on a parish beadle's glass eye. Then I march out of the house to tend to my own affairs, as she stares with a shocked expression. I must borrow that look for a character in the future.

11:15 a.m.

Mr. N——— has brought in a fresh batch of bodies, which has occupied my attention for some time this morning. All dead as doornails. Some are orphans that have starved to death in the city streets, for whom I always feel the greatest pity and for whose sake I never cease railing at the inequality of wealth in our system. A few more are petty thieves who were hung in the town square this morning, the thought of which fills me with rage at a society so sick as to indulge in the gruesome spectacle of capital punishment, while failing to see how it does not deter crime. One young woman was the victim of a carriage accident. I feel the highest sadness for all of these lost lives, and yet, for some unexplained reason, it does not in any way diminish my enthusiasm for looking at their corpses.

I cannot help it, dear reader. I just like dead people. An invisible force drags me here every time. I like to look at them, touch them, even smell them. I enjoy the blank, contorted looks on their faces as they stare emptily into nothingness. I try to explain this eccentric obsession of mine to my friends and loved ones, but they only think me mad. Once, I invited my artist friend, M——, to stare at the corpses with me, but he fled like a craven coward. It was just as well, as I prefer to be alone with them.

"Fine lot o' bodies wot we 'ave 'ere, eh, gav'nuh?" a worker says to me as I write these words, as he wheels in a cart with another corpse covered by a sheet, and I nod. "Right. This one 'ere was a rum 'un. Died o' the scurvy. Ain't been gettin' 'is vittles proper. It's a life lesson, that's wot it is." I make a quick mental note to use this amusing creature for a future character.