The Snake-Oil Dickens Man
A fast, witty and evocative first novel about the allure of the con man, the journey of a young man in search of his father, the loss of innocence and the works of Charles Dickens. Full of adventure, tricks, imagination and originality, The Snake-oil Dickens Man is the assured debut from an exciting writer.It is 1867 and Charles Dickens has arrived in Boston on his second reading tour of America. Meanwhile in Hayes, Missouri, Billy Talbot leaves town in search of his father after he has been told that he is the illegitimate son of the author of Great Expectations. Billy’s journey is rich with tricks, disguises and chance meetings that lead him to Hope Scattergood, a consumptive charlatan with his own interest in the great writer. Together Scattergood and Billy devise the ‘Dickens Lay’, a con that may lead Billy to a meeting with his father, the real Charles Dickens.The Snake-oil Dickens Man, tells a story that stretches from the clamour of Barnum’s circus rushing through the grassy plains of Missouri to the packed and riotous theatres of New York, and resonates with the writings of Charles Dickens. The Snake-oil Dickens Man is a funny and unforgettable tale of adventure, confidence tricks and the loss of innocence.
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Fourth Estate
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in 1998
Copyright © Ross Gilfillan 1998
Ross Gilfillan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9781857028140
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007485062
Version: 2017-02-03
‘A quality romp set in the America of the late 1860s … Robustly written, and with plenty of Dickensian resonances, Gilfillan’s first novel is an ingenious and entertaining read.’ Mail on Sunday
‘Weaves a fascinating tale … The atmosphere of 1867 is brilliantly captured.’ Oxford Mail
‘Compulsive, quirky, beautifully constructed, a read that has you wondering why no one has ever tried it before.’ Birmingham Post
To my wife Lisaand Fae, Tom and Alice
Contents
Ces Américains qui aiment tant à être dupés Baudelaire
NO ONE DOES something for nothing any more.
So the smart money says, anyway. If this is true then I suppose there is no reason why I should not be well recompensed for the hours I will sit at this desk, removed from spheres of more certainly remunerative activity. There are infinite ways in which wealth can be acquired with much less expenditure of effort than by the writing of a memoir. No, the profit I hope for here will be of another kind. I relate what follows not for pecuniary gain but rather that I might by the process of autobiography come to understand more of myself and see the beginning of the thread that has woven the thing that now I am.
Let me begin as I mean to continue – honestly – and say right out that I am not as I seem. No doubt you know me by my reputation and my office but even were we strangers, you might observe my English-cut suit and my fancy waistcoat and hear my knowing tones and mistake me for a man of consequence. And if I’m offering you some deal that’s going to make you rich quick and won’t jeopardise your capital one little bit then that’s exactly how you would have me. For all the world, I am prosperous, refined and respected. I am solid and that is all you need to know.
But perhaps what you now see really is me. Perhaps money has made me one of you: just as prosperous and as solid as any of the speculators, private investors and city tycoons I have lately lived off so well. All I know for certain is that once I thought I was different and that this journal shall be my testimony.
At this distance it is hard for me to credit that I was once a veritable slave to a low hotelier; that I was employed by Elijah Putnam as an agent of his own ambition and that I let my mother be abominably abused. Harder still to acknowledge that I owe my present eminence to an individual whose philosophy was markedly at odds with those who hold propriety and the law in reverence.
But now I have arrived at a time in my life when I would leave off pretence and apply myself to the task of understanding of what I am made. I shall begin today while my wife is in Mississippi, opening up the house in Natchez. She hardly needs two whole months to ready the place for Christmas – only an excuse to decamp from Washington DC. (She has never enjoyed playing the part of the politician’s wife.) However, her absence affords me ideal opportunity to begin my work. To this end I am seated at my great oaken desk, my inkpot brim-full and my nib poised above half a ream of white paper, fully resolved that I will not be distracted by my present great responsibilities or by the formless stain of black ink which despoils the oak and has proven the match of brush and polish alike.
But where to begin? A natural place might be with my mother and father but if I had known their histories in the first place this one would not be worth the candle. Nor was sense made of my childhood until its term had expired. Rather, I must overleap my dim origins and begin at a place which now seems pregnant with some significance, although I can offer no more apt beginning than this, with which you will surely be familiar:
