BOOK REVIEW 
‘THE DICKENSIAN’

Summer 2004. No. 463 Vol 100 Part 2  ISSN 0012-2440

 

THELMA GROVE on Francis Jeffery Dickens p. 163/164.

“DAVID J. CARTER. INSPECTOR DICKENS OF THE NORTH WEST MOUNTED POLICE. Eagle Butte Press, 2003, pp.vi + 247. ISBN 0-968411-2-6. $36 Cdn (Incl P&P Surface) Special rate to Dickensian readers: $28 Cdn (Major credit cards accepted.) 
Email David Carter: d j c a r t e r @ m e m l a n e . c o m

            This account of Dickens’s third son, Francis Jeffrey, and his twelve years’ service in Canada as Inspector Dickens is based on many years’ research by David Carter, an ordained Anglican clergyman and a former Speaker of the Alberta Legislature. His interesting book contains photographs, illustrations and reproduced documents, some of which he repeats in full several times when a reference to its first entry would be sufficient. Chapter One, a biographical overview, reminds us of Francis’s deafness and stammer. Six years’ service in the Bengal Police was eventually followed in 1874 by a commission as Sub-Inspector in the newly-formed North West Mounted Police. Chapter Two, ‘A Dickens Christmas Journal’ consists of twelve fictional letters from Francis to the Dickens family in England , reporting postings and incidents officially recorded in the files of the NWMP. They vividly describe the hardships and dangers of life on the Canadian frontier and the tribal unrest following the massacre at Little Big Horn in 1876. I am surprised that when Francis supposedly first writes from Fort Pitt there is no reference to the Chatham Fort Pitt mentioned in The Pickwick Papers which he would have known.

            Chapter Three concentrates on Francis’s personnel file, which covers his service from 1874 (promoted to Inspector in 1880) to his death in Moline Illinois in 1886, shortly after his retirement due to increasing deafness. Many original letters, telegrams and other papers are reproduced, including correspondence with the Dickens Fellowship when the medal posthumously awarded to Inspector Dickens was discovered in storage at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Headquarters 40 years later!  In Chapter Four, David Carter champions Francis’s record and details the authenticated facts, as opposed to the unsubstantiated slurs on his reputation still current. As recently as 2003, Paul Dederick and Bill Waiser, not knowing the origin of Francis’s family nickname, The Chickenstalker, from The Chimes, commented, ‘His father had little use for him and called him ‘the chicken stalker’, implying that he was only capable of chasing chickens’[. It is sad that Charles, who would have been proud to change his earlier opinion of Francis’s fitness for frontier life – that he would be robbed of his money, fall from his horse and shoot his own head off – never knew of his son’s ‘great gallantry during the recent rebellion in the North West.’

            Chapter Five reprints Francis’s death certificate, which gives the cause of death as ‘Paralysis of heart caused by drinking ice water while suffering undue heat’ on 11 June 1886 . David Carter reprints interesting correspondence between Dr. Jamieson, Francis’s host in Moline , and Charley Dickens who eventually visited his brother’s grave in 1888. Subsequently a tombstone was placed there, with a text chosen by Bessie, Charley’s wife. This was refurbished and a bronze plaque added by the Moline Preservation Society in 1987.

            David Carter is to be congratulated on the success of his efforts to have an official Royal Canadian Mounted Police headstone placed there in 2002. He also succeeds in this fascinating book, in awakening our interest in, and sympathy for, Francis Jeffrey, ‘The Christmas Carol baby.’”