Terry Coverley: Sapsea Fragment
The puzzle of the so-called Sapsea Fragment, found by John Forster ‘within the leaves of one of Dickens’s other manuscripts’, is easily solved.
John Forster didn’t find it ...
He wrote it.
The idea of composing his own little sketch about Mr Sapsea, then passing it off as one of Dickens’s last — and supposedly best! — pieces of writing, must have been irresistible once it occurred to him. Few people were more familiar with Dickens’s handwriting, and to forge his tiny, cramped, almost illegible hand would have been simple enough.
But emulating the prose of the world’s greatest novelist proved rather more difficult. In fact, to put it bluntly, the fragment is crap.
“It would supply an answer”, wrote the vain joker, “to those who have asserted that the hopeless decadence of Dickens as a writer had set in before his death. Among the lines last written by him, these are the very last we can ever hope to receive; and they seem to me a delightful specimen of the power possessed by him in his prime, and the rarest which any novelist can have, of revealing a character by a touch. Here are a couple of people, Kimber and Peartree, not known to us before, whom we read off thoroughly in a dozen words [Kimber and Peartree are lifeless nonentities] and as to Sapsea himself, auctioneer and mayor of Cloisterham, we are face to face with what before we only dimly realised ...” Fiddlesticks!
“The fragment ends there”, concludes the shameless impostor, “and the hand that could alone have completed it is at rest for ever”. Ho, ho, ho.
The piece, suggests Forster, was to have been slotted in later in the novel. But a chapter of first-person prose, narrated by a minor character, wouldn’t slot anywhere into a third-person novel. If Dickens wrote the fragment, its existence is baffling and bizarre. If Forster was its author — as he was — there’s no mystery at all.
To make it look like part of a larger whole, the sketch was written on slips of paper numbered six to ten. But ‘How Mr. Sapsea Ceased To Be A Member Of The Eight Club’ — Forster couldn’t resist giving it a title — doesn’t begin awkwardly in the middle of a sentence. Oh no! It commences as a fresh new paragraph with Mr Sapsea entering his club. The ending, too, peters out nicely, having reached its natural conclusion.
The sketch was written ‘on paper only half the size of that used for’ Edwin Drood. Why? Because Forster’s sketch was of a strictly limited length. He didn’t want it concluding eight lines or so into a full-sized sheet. Significantly, the five-page fragment would have filled about two and a half sheets of ordinary paper. Even as it was, Forster struggled to pad out the final page: “Where are you going to, Poker, and where do you come from?” “Ah Mr. Sapsea! Disguise from you is impossible. You know already that I come from somewhere, and am going somewhere else. If I was to deny it, what would it avail me? ... Or,” pursued Poker, “or if I was to deny that I came to this town to see and hear you, sir, what would it avail me? Or if I was to deny — ”
Poker is certainly very forgetful. Meeting Mr Sapsea outside the Club: “Is it Mr. Sapsea,” he said doubtfully, “or is it — ”
But Mr Sapsea has already introduced himself!
Kimber: “He had been speaking to you just before, it seemed, by the churchyard; and though you had told him who you were ...” Poor Poker has evidently forgotten this recent conversation! (We’re surely not supposed to believe that Poker thought Mr Sapsea was lying about his identity?) And if he “came to this town to see and hear” Mr Sapsea, why didn’t he say so before?
In short, the prose is clunky and the dialogue lame and unreal. The only reason John Forster raved about the piece is because it was him who wrote the damn thing!