In his mid-40s, unhappy and restless despite his manifest renown and wealth, working unceasingly, realizing that his marriage is to all intents and purposes dead, Dickens embarks on a theatrical project with his friend Wilkie Collins.

Meanwhile, back in London in the 1850s, Dickens is undergoing what we would now recognize as a kind of neurotic midlife crisis. The other follows a young aboriginal girl named Mathinna, who survives the British genocide on Van Diemen’s Land and is adopted during Franklin’s tenure by the governor and Lady Jane.Ĭredit. One strand of the story follows Dickens’s life between 18. He attends to both through the old trick of a cross-cutting narrative. The meeting between Lady Jane and Dickens thus offers Flanagan a double opportunity: to investigate the brutal history of his homeland and to explore a turning point in the emotional life of one of history’s great novelists. But for the novelist Richard Flanagan, the brief contact between Dickens and Lady Jane has provided the catalyst for his fifth work of fiction, “Wanting” - a literary-historical game of six degrees of separation, exploring the shadowy affinities among the various parties involved and the ripple effects of the encounter through real lives and generations.įlanagan was born in Tasmania, where he still lives - and where, as it happens, Sir John Franklin served as governor from 1837 to 1843 (when it was still known as Van Diemen’s Land). Dickens - outraged at the slur on this hero of the British Empire - published a furious counterattack in his own magazine, Household Words, and it is possibly the strangest and most intemperate piece of journalism he ever wrote: a near-racist tract claiming that it was physically and morally impossible for stalwart, civilized white men to descend to the level of “savages.”įor Dickens biographers, this episode usually merits a paragraph or a page. Lady Jane wanted him to refute a recent article about her husband’s disappearance in the Arctic some nine years earlier, which implied that Franklin’s crew had resorted to cannibalism to survive. Dickens had just completed his novel “Hard Times” and was about to begin “Little Dorrit” he was the most celebrated writer in England, at the zenith of his fame and popularity. In 1854 Lady Jane Franklin, the widow of the polar explorer Sir John Franklin, visited Charles Dickens to ask for a favor.

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