204 KNOWING DICKENS
if it does me half the good of a dozen miles in the snow. So, if this mode of
treatment fails today, I shall try that tomorrow” (10.469). Some weeks later,
in February 1865, he reported being laid up with a wounded foot that he
explained to friends as “a frost-bitten foot, from much walking in deep Kent-
ish snow” (11.21). Forster got a full-blown explanation: he had perpetually
wet feet in boots that swelled and shrank; he had repeatedly forced his boot
onto a swollen left foot, and continued his rituals of work and walking, until
he found himself lame in the snow, three miles from home. The dogs, he
reported, were terrified (11.23). The pain, causing “sleepless agony” (11.29),
went on for two months. Then he returned to his ten miles a day, but he could
not wear shoes or boots in the evenings, and he ordered the first of several
extra-large boots for his left foot. “Work and worry, without exercise, would
soon make an end of me,” he exclaimed to Forster (11.48).
The condition recurred periodically, worsening until his death. He defied
the possibility that it was gout; perhaps no one knew enough to tell him that
it was probably a symptom of vascular disease, or perhaps he could not hear
that explanation. The fancy doctor he consulted in 1867, Sir Henry Thomp-
son, told him that he had erypsipelas caused by the rubbing of his boot while
walking, or, as Dickens put it, the “action of the boot on an undefended part
of a bone, in constant walking” (11.409). Whatever Thompson had actually
said, Dickens read according to his myth of walking: he had to walk; therefore
he had to suffer. It cheered him up; soon afterwards he was writing letter
after letter to deny a “preposterous paragraph” in the newspapers about his
bad health, declaring himself to be “in sporting training” (11.417–18). He
was on his way to America again; in Boston during November, he wrote
to Georgina, “I every day take from seven to ten miles in peace” (11.489).
By the end of the American reading tour, he was limping up to the podium
leaning heavily on his manager George Dolby, and collapsing into Dolby’s
arms at the end of each performance.
May 1870 was the last month of Dickens’s life. On the 26th he told a
friend he had been “dead-lame” for three weeks. His correspondents all
received the same story: “I have been subject for a few years past to a Neural-
gic attack in the foot, originating in over walking in deep snow and revived
by a hard winter in America.... Deprivation of my usual walks is a very
serious matter to me, as I cannot work unless I have my constant exercise”
(12.534–35). The myth was still intact. Three days later he wrote his last let-
ter to John Forster, including a brief health bulletin: “Foot no worse. But no
better” (12.540). On the ninth of June he was dead of a stroke. Somewhere
in Dickens’s inner world Lady Dedlock had triumphed, walking to her death
through the snow.