Tags: Charles Dickens, premonitory dream, the ‘Lady in the red shawl’, May 1863;  quoted by John Forster, his biographer friend; glimpse into the next day

Dickens’s lady in red

The paranormal researcher and novelist Colin Wilson mentions the palm-reading session my previous entry focused on (‘Soldiers broken lines’) at least twice in his works. The second reference he makes (but there could be more, as I have read only one of his works in full) appears in his book Supernatural: your guide through the unexplained, the unearthly and the unknown. Colin Wilson then uses a transition paragraph to bring up the next instance of the supernatural he discusses in Supernatural – a glimpse into Charles Dickens’s future which was provided to the famous English novelist in the form of a (day?) dream in which he saw a lady wearing a red shawl and whom he would meet for real already on the following evening.

As Colin Wilson’s description of this particularly uncanny event in the life of one of Britain’s best-known literary figures of the nineteenth century amounts to only 122 words (but contained in two paragraphs), I decided to find out more about this intriguing premonitory dream. As usual, I resorted to using several search engines as well as two online repositories of literary texts that are in the public domain. After two or three attempts, I discovered that this short but quite extraordinary episode had been recounted by Charles Dickens in a letter he had sent to his friend – and biographer – John Forster, who then made use of it in the third volume of his biography of the great novelist. Here is the letter as presented by Dickens’s biographer [please note that I have removed nearly all of the left inverted commas used before each line in the text to indicate that Forster is quoting Dickens]:

‘Here is a curious case at first-hand’ (30th of May 1863). ‘On Thursday night in last week, being at the office here, I dreamed that I saw a lady in a red shawl with her back towards me (whom I supposed to be E.). On her turning round I found that I didn’t know her, and she said “I am Miss Napier.” All the time I was dressing next morning, I thought — What a preposterous thing to have so very distinct a dream about nothing ! and why Miss Napier ? for I never heard of any Miss Napier. That same Friday night, I read. After the reading, came into my retiring-room, Mary Boyle and her brother, and the Lady in the red shawl whom they present as “Miss Napier !” These are all the circumstances, exactly told.’     https://archive.org/details/lifecharlesdick01unkngoog/page/n510/mode/2up

I was a little disappointed, I must say, given that I had read ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘The Signalman’, only to name these two works of Dickens’s I had enjoyed many years ago but which I still remember to be dealing with the supernatural, and as I was thus expecting more ‘flesh’ to Dickens’s own account of his dream and his subsequent meeting with the lady who had appeared in his dream. However, to me this suggests that the dream was genuine (as Charles Dickens would certainly have had either the imagination or the literary ability to expound upon this dream, or even to embellish it, had he wanted to do so).

Although his friend and biographer John Forster, just before his mention of the ‘Lady in the red shawl’ in his biography, provides two instances where Charles Dickens was able, even though inadvertently, to write down numbers which would come to be true in the future, Forster starts his section on Dickens and ghosts and the supernatural with the following sentences, the last fragment of which strikes me as a little ambiguous:

Among his good things should not be omitted his telling of a ghost story. He had something of a hankering after them, as the readers of his briefer pieces will know ; and such was his interest generally in things supernatural that, but for the strong restraining power of his common sense, he might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism. As it was, the fanciful side of his nature stopped short at such pardonable superstitions as those of dreams, and lucky days, or other marvels of natural coincidence ; and no man was readier to apply sharp tests to a ghost story or a haunted house, though there was just so much tendency to believe in any such, ‘well-authenticated,’ as made perfect his manner of telling one.

Now the temptation would be to approach the premonition episode of the ‘Lady in the red shawl’ with considerations such as those made by this Master’s degree student, who wrote that ‘Dickens’s dream of Miss Napier may have very well been an extraordinary instance of precognition. On the whole, however, most of his dream experiences seem to be subconscious efforts to cope with the trials of an often difficult life.’ And, two pages later on in her dissertation, that ‘[t]his very fusion of dreamlike fantasy and reality allowed Dickens to reveal his innate and very personal preoccupation with the darker side of existence, the supernatural. This fusion also allowed him to metaphorically deal with very personal aspects of his life, events in his life that plagued and tormented him as well as his concern with what he saw as the shortcomings of his society.’                                                   http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/2086/4/BAB_1.pdf

Given that I really do not know much about the life of Charles Dickens, I cannot provide an informed opinion on the above. Which is why I shall make two final comments on Dickens’s letter of 30^th May 1863 before concluding this entry – whose purpose was really to draw attention to the account of a premonitory dream by this giant of nineteenth century English literature, not least because in my teenage years I myself dreamed of an event that happened to me the next day. So my own personal experience leads me to say once more that I believe the letter to be genuine.

So to go back to the letter itself, I would like to point out that it was reprinted by Jenny Hartley in her The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens (click here to view the letter) and that she based her selection on the 12-volume British Academy/Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens. Apparently, the library of the university of Lausanne has a copy of volume ten (1862-1864), which, if I were to go and consult it on site, might allow me to find out where the manuscript is kept and why it was not destroyed by Forster given that the latter knew that his friend Charles Dickens was a little apprehensive about potential ‘misuse’ of his correspondence (Hartley: xix). Nevertheless, this letter is somehow in good company, as over 14,000 letters of this famous and celebrated Victorian novelist have survived, thereby offering insights not only into the man himself (personality, family relations, friendships, etc.), but also into Dickens the writer. Enough material to keep a Dickensian scholar busy for several months, if not years, I would assume.

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