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Ready for the world of weird. Buckle up for a wild ride as I Joshua P. Warren, the wizard of Weird, bring you the strangest of the strange. Each week I'll have a power packed show with mind blowing experiments. You can do breaking news from the field, ancient secrets and so much more. All truly amazing. I'll be your personal guide behind the scenes of the bazaar. So get ready. You want hear this special? Can't do it anywhere else.

[00:00:30]

Tune in each week to Strange Things with Joshua P. Warren heard on the I Heart media app Apple podcasts.

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And wherever you find your favorite shows and Laverne Cox, you may know me from Orange is the New Black or disclosure. My hope is that people listening to the Laverne Cox Show gain new perspectives that will inspire them to live differently there.

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All of these things that we just accept as natural, normal and inevitable. But they're not.

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Listen to the Laverne Cox Show and the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast, don't yuck somebody else's. Yum.

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Make sure you subscribe and share, Al. Welcome to criminalize a production of Shadowland Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. It was the best of times, it was the worst times. Hello and welcome to another episode of Criminality. This season, we're exploring the lives and motivations of some of the most notorious stalkers throughout history. I'm Maria Tomoaki. And I'm Holly Frye. So you probably recognize that quote that Maria kick things off with. And if it sounds familiar, but you can't quite place it, I will help you out.

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It's from A Tale of Two Cities, which was written by Charles Dickens. And of course, Dickens is considered one of the best known fiction writers ever, certainly in the Western world. And with each passing century, he continues to be regarded as perhaps the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, certainly probably the most famous, at least for school children here in the U.S. He is responsible for classic novels.

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You are going to know all these names, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, which everybody knows because it inundates us from November through December, maybe October, sometimes. David Copperfield, a tale of Two Cities, as we just mentioned, and great expectations among many other writings. And it's accurate to say that because of this high level of output and success over the years, Dickens attracted more than a superfan or two. So it actually wasn't uncommon during this time for writers to begin their careers as journalists.

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And that's what Dickens did. He worked at the Mirror of Parliament and the True Sun until 1833.

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And it was because of his experiences as a journalist and the number of influential people that he was able to meet through those journals, that Dickens was able to do something he really wanted to do as a writer, which was publish a book.

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He's climbing that ladder. Exactly. He did get to publish his book, which happened in 1833, that was titled Sketches by Boz, and it was published under the pseudonym because that was his childhood nickname. And we may know him best for his huge list of novels that he wrote. But Dickens did a lot of other work. He edited weekly periodicals, he wrote travel books, and he was very involved with charitable organizations just three years after the publication of Sketches by Bob.

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So this puts us in 1836, 24 year old Dickens married the 21 year old daughter of a man named George Hogarth, who was someone that Dickens had previous business dealings with. They had worked quite closely, and that woman was Catherine Hogarth. And she and Charles Dickens went on to have a 22 year marriage which produced 10 children.

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So the same month that he and Catherine married, the first instalment of the Pickwick Papers was published.

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Now, this is one of the most popular novels of all time in the Western world. This collection of loosely related adventures was published in serial format, so came out a little bit of a time between 1836 and 1837, and it was wildly successful.

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And from that point on, there was really no looking back for the famously private Dickens. Speaking of that marriage.

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Yes.

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So let's talk about those children for just a moment. It is pretty widely reported that Dickens really enjoyed being a father specifically to a young brood of children. And he wrote and produced plays and other fairly elaborate holiday productions at their home to entertain friends and guests such as the Tennyson's and the Thackeray's, also famous writers of the time. This, of course, involved all those kids. Right?

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We have a whole players group right now. I have I have a stock cast of that I can work with. But as his kids got a little bit older, though, it said that Dickens became much less interested in them. They kind of aged out of the magic window for his his fascination.

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Nobody wanted to do those little plays. The second they become rebellious, I picture him being like, you're out of the play. Exactly. They hit that age and he's like, out. You've got your voices changed. You cannot do this anymore.

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We're going to cast your younger sister. So I am going to actually keep talking about these kids for just another minute because there is something we should really address about their names and their nicknames that their father gave to them.

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And as you're about to hear, how could we not talk about this? So Dickens is known for his unique and often kind of hilarious character names in his novels. There's Paul Swedo Pipe, I believe Lord Lancaster still stalking and the pork kingdoms all a favourite, all come to mind.

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And things weren't really all that different with his kids. So some of the children were actually named for famous writers such as Alfred Tennyson, Dickens and Henry Fielding Dickens.

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But it wasn't. Just their real names, right? They had nicknames. They all had nicknames. And you can tell, like, as he really did love having a young group of children. Right. So there were nine living children because their daughter, Dora, had died in infancy. So we're going to talk about each of these children and their hilarious and adorable questionmark nicknames. It's going to take a minute, though, because it's nine children. So first of all, Charlie, who was the oldest son, was nicknamed The Snake during Billy.

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It just. Do you want your dad to call you for sure? You're like, dad, how could you not in front of my friend. His eldest daughter, Mary, was known mostly as Mamie, but she also had a nickname, the Mild Gloster.

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His son Henry was known as Harry or just H most of the time. But he also answered to a couple of other names, including the comic countrymen and sometimes the jolly post boy.

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There was also Francis Chickens, Dr. Dickens, and the name honors a character from a Dickens novel, which actually almost all of these nicknames do.

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Right. Then we have Walter Young Skulled Dickens. I would kind of love if that's what my family called me so we can start calling you. Young sandwiches are ready. Young skull, please come inside.

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So I'll introduce you from now on. This is a skull. People like that skull is not young. Let's move. Alfred Tennyson. He was known as Skittles and not the candy.

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I know I have questions.

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I'm like, is there a connection betwixt the two? Sidney Dickens had two nicknames. One was the Ocean Specter, which sounds sort of dramatic.

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And this I actually feel like that one somehow related to Skittles, because for me, Skittles makes me think of like a little crab, you know, sort of running around, huh?

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Well, the other nickname that Sidney had was also maritime in nature. It was the admiral. Oh, yes.

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And then there was Kate, who is one of the youngest children in the family, and Dickens gave her her specific nickname because of her hot temper.

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Kate was known as Lucifer Boss.

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Just that's just a moment to back away from that one.

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And then there was the baby, which is one of the nicknames I think most most large families will sometimes call the youngest child the baby.

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Yeah, right. Do you have the baby? Even as an adult? Human people would be like, oh, you're the baby. Sure. Right. Yeah, I'm a baby. That was his son, Edward. But Edward didn't continue to be called the baby throughout his life because he grew into a new nickname which stuck with him for the rest of his life. And that was porn, which actually began as Mr Planche, Maroon Tegner.

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These are like the things you would call a pet, right? I was just thinking they're great.

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Like cat names.

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Fu bless Edward for putting up with that and somehow negotiating it down to pawn.

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I know, right. He's like, drop the mister please. That's a long list of really great and funny nicknames. So I'm going to take us to Dickens's own childhood and life for a minute. And this is before he became famous. So he was born in 1812 and it was in kind of a lower middle class family neighborhood. His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, but ultimately he was sent to debtor's prison. And at age 12, Dickens supported his family by taking a factory job where he pasted labels on shoe Polish bottles.

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His novel, David Copperfield, is actually considered largely autobiographical, especially this time. And it is also believed the dickens likely lived with epilepsy, modern doctors have noted that the way that Dickens described what he called, quote, the falling sickness, as it was known in the Victorian era, bears striking medical accuracy when you compare it to descriptions of epilepsy. And throughout his works, several of Dickens fictional characters, including Monks in Oliver Twist, are described as also having symptoms of what we today would diagnosis epilepsy as an adult.

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Dickens really like being active.

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He was known to go horseback riding. He was known to go on a really long distance, like 20 mile hikes.

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He frequently entertained his friends and it turns out he really enjoyed playing practical jokes. He was a magician and he practised hypnotism. And it said that he would hypnotize Catherine to help alleviate her headaches.

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Although he regularly practised it on others, he always refused to be put into a trance himself.

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Dickens also loved and we got to repeat this.

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He loved all things paranormal. He was at least allegedly a member of London's famous Ghost Club. That's a group that investigates reported ghosts and hauntings. We're using present tense because that club is still around today, although if you look at its history, some indicate that like after Dickens died, it fell off for a while, but then was revived. But you can look it up today if you're just, you know, looking to join a paranormal investigation and research organisation and you happen to be in London.

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Absolutely. Maybe Dickens will haunt you. Fingers crossed, right? Yes. So let's take a break for a word from our sponsor right now.

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And when we return, we'll talk about Dickens mania. Ready for the world of weird. Buckle up for a wild ride as I Joshua P. Warren, the wizard of Weird, bring you the strangest of the strange. Each week I'll have a power packed show with mind blowing experiments. You can do breaking news from the field, ancient secrets and so much more. All truly amazing. I'll be your personal guide behind the scenes of the bazaar. So get ready.

[00:12:38]

You want hear this special, can't it? Anywhere else. Tune in each week to Strange Things with Joshua P. Warren heard on the I Heart media app Apple podcasts and wherever you find your favorite shows.

[00:12:57]

Hi, it's Laverne Cox and my new podcast, Laverne Cox Show, we're ripping the Band-Aid off trauma, resilient, dating, diet, culture, dating, white supremacy, dating, OK, I'm not going to get explicit, but just because you cute like I'm not going I'm not going to know.

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You're going to say yes, girl and honey, we have a lot of fun along the way.

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You have a lot of lesbian fans who love your femininity and glamour and they just really, really want you.

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And I want us to talk openly about the difficult things we all face as humans and as humans in America.

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Racist white people in the United States will sign their own death certificates. They will vote for policies that crush them. No safety nets, no health care, because they feel too much like entitlements. And those are folks of color. Right.

[00:13:47]

Listen to the Laverne Cox Show and the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast, make sure you subscribe and share.

[00:13:59]

Welcome back to Criminal. Dickens's career and life changed significantly when he went on tour.

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It was in 1867 that Dickens kicked off a 76 date tour across America, which has been described as the Victorian version of the British invasion, including the arrival of the Beatles at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City in the 1960s. Dickens had toured the U.S. once before in 1842, and his fans gave him a very warm welcome, literally trying to tear the shirt off his back to get himself a souvenir.

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I marvel at these things. I do.

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I marvel at these things. That's the kind of behavior I think people think of as very modern fan mania. But it was going on then between Dickens and Lizardo mania, like there was a lot in terms of being a fan of someone in the 19th century. Dickens, by the end of the tour, described his experience as primarily disenchanting. He complained, we quote, I can't drink a glass of water without having 100 people looking down my throat when I opened my mouth to swallow.

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So this type of celebrity or rock star status is pretty commonplace today. And that's certainly augmented by the connectivity that we've achieved. But in the middle hundreds, it most certainly was not. And he just was not prepared for this level of constant gaze upon him. Absolutely not.

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And as we can see, he had a really hard time adjusting to it, as most of us really honestly might.

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And his quote is how queer it is that I should be perpetually having things happen to me with regard to people that nobody else in the world can be made to believe. So between the first and second tours he made of North America and despite the 22 years and 10 children together, Charles and Catherine ended their relationship in 1858. Dickens is on record stating that he was, quote, totally incompatible with his wife. You would think he might have figured that out more than two decades later.

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But but he did. The pair separated, but they did not ever divorce because at that point in time in Victorian society, divorce would have been quite scandalous because of how famous Dickens had become. Like if TMZ had existed, then they would have been all over this. They would have been following him. There would have been paparazzi in the bushes outside of his hotel, cameras everywhere. But the thing was, he didn't really treat the situation with care.

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He slandered his wife's name publicly. After ten children and some postpartum issues that she had, he thought that she had grown fat, tired and dull. I carry with it a new use for the time travel machine and it might be delivered. I'm not a fan of violence, but I would want to perhaps just, you know, jab him with a sharp stick and be like, what is wrong with you?

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He also just just once.

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He also it does count. He also characterized his wife as weak minded and by and large, embarrassing to him.

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And he also said that she was an unloving mother. So clearly that divorce was all bad, but there was not much amicable about it. No, no.

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And it's also around this time that Dickens, who was then 45, began an affair with an 18 year old actress who is named Ellen or Nelly Ternan. It's it's really not known if that relationship began before or after he and Katherine separated, but it's known that he did do his best to hide his new relationship. He always maintained, though, that Nellie was not his mistress and they weren't having an affair. But everyone, modern day knows that that was just a lie.

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And because he feared the press would discover them, he he didn't really travel with her at all.

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And he did not allow her to accompany him on his second tour.

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And that second tour was very big news because while the first tour had been pretty intense, the second tour created one of the first modern mass media celebrities. He inspired what's often called Dickens mania.

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So there's this wonderful description of how Dickens looked while he was walking around Boston, which I believe his tour began in either New York or Boston. This is fairly early on. And if ever there was a great way to describe the style of what could be a Victorian rock star, this might be it.

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So Dickens, we quote, who had a gleefully gaudy fashion sense that attracted attention and some revulsion, was a particularly striking celebrity to encounter. He had fans who tore it his fur coat, and one took an impression of his money bootprint from the gravel. It was really quite a scene.

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It's funny because I didn't know until way late in life that dick. It's had been sort of this like crazy dandy, me, too, I think because I associate him with his works, which are by and large about, you know, like I think of Bob Cratchit is like. Right. His standing in that story of somebody who's very, you know, kind of clothed in, like these dark, tattered. No, that wasn't him at all.

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Not at all. And I had no idea. And I you know, when I when I was going through school, we certainly didn't learn anything otherwise.

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But that description of him. So I was telling Holly when I first read that description of him that he reminds me of a Victorian age, Keith Richards, because he's very flamboyant and he's got like what at the time was was considered this utterly cool sense of style.

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And yet you look at it and you're like, none of that works, but it totally all works. Yeah, yeah. They don't teach you that. It's no. You don't know nowhere nowhere in any of my my history are lit books. Was it like he was a fancy pants. Right.

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He had a lot of scarves hanging in his closet. Right. So that of course was reported in the press and so were a lot of other things because the American press fixated on reporting things like his personal habits. They printed that he did not use mustard at a particular restaurant in New York City as though that was newsworthy. We don't know which restaurant, but in case you're wondering, for our New Yorkers, Katz's Deli, which is famous for its handmade mustard, did not open its doors until 1888.

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So we know it was not that one. And he was not slighting cats. Right. He was about 20 years too early for that one.

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Maybe it's because of him that they were like, we got to make our own mustard. There you go. There's our. So this tour, this second tour to the U.S., Dickens was a hot ticket on the literary tour circuit here. And there was a time actually when Dickens considered a stage career rather than a writing career. And it really showed in his readings on tour and his readings anywhere, he was known as a gifted performer. And he did tours, he did public readings.

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And every time he would, he would act out passages from his books as if he was on stage. And as a writer, too, he would act out his characters before writing them into his novels.

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He wrote plays he performed for Queen Victoria and from time to time, he also accepted roles in amateur plays. Yeah. So those cute little place he was putting on with the kids back home for his friends were not his only theatrical moments. He wanted to do it for himself. Right. And here's the thing. He was a hot ticket, like people wanted to see him when he toured because he was excellent at it. He was the master of ceremonies that you would always hope to see.

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He has been described as dynamic, quick and observant and just having an amazing zest for life that kind of pulled his audience right along with him and maybe he just hypnotized them.

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So mainly what people saw was what Holly just described. But there was a flip to that, though, and he has also been described as being high strung, impatient and also prone to depression, commonly two sides of the same coin.

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Yeah, sure. So it was on this second American tour when Charles Dickens met the big Alos. He was staying at the Parker House Hotel in Boston. He usually dined there. He spent his evenings playing games like charades there with his manager and his publisher, as well as this couple, the Bigelow's who were visiting from New York City. And they were also staying at Parker House. So I'm actually going to interject something here right now. This is the same Parker House that is famous for Parker House Rolls.

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That's right.

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And they were invented in 1876, so he missed those as well.

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But this is also the part of the story where we don't talk about delicious baked goods, but instead we move on to the story portion of the story.

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So the big we have Jane and John. And when Jane toonies, Pulteney met the author and attorney, John Bigelow.

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They met in 1850 and he was immediately smitten by her.

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Four months later, they married and they went on to have nine children. John Bigalow edited and co-wrote the New York Evening Post from 1849 to 1861, that was before he became involved in a career of international diplomacy in 1861. So that is when his his New York Evening Post time ends. He was appointed by Abraham Lincoln to the American consul in Paris. And at this point, his career really took off because from there he became charge d'affaires before becoming envoy.

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Extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary. And in 1865, so just four years into this diplomatic career, he moved into the position of American ambassador to France. He became very influential in France, in Napoleon, the third court in particular.

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He was so influential that he is credited for helping the union win in the American Civil War by convincing France not to provide aid to the Confederate states. And then there's Jean Jane.

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Bigelow was known as Gennie to her close friends, and she seems to have had a profound impact on her distinguished husband. He wrote of her and we quote, She was a woman of notable beauty and social charm.

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Her family deemed our courtship rather brief, but there seemed to be no occasion on my part, at least for prolonging it.

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Years after her death, he wrote, quote, Without her, my career in the world would not only have been very different from what it was, but far less satisfactory to myself and to others. OK, so let's get real.

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John may have been a very influential diplomat and he may have credited Jenny with his success, but his wife was actually not exactly what most people would have expected of the spouse of someone in his position. There is a story at one point of her slapping the Prince of Wales on the back. I'm sure he was surprised by that, a silly gesture. But at the time that but I mean, even now, that would be horrifying. So subtract 160 years off of it.

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And it's really horrifying. There are a lot of other similar stories of poor or inappropriate behavior on her part. And it was actually rumoured that John's career was really stifled because of her behavior and that he lost out on the coveted position as American minister to London because not everyone adored her as he did.

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So, Jane, I'm going to call her Jane, not Jenny. We're not friends.

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Jane is a socialite in Baltimore, and she was about 40 years old at the time.

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She met Dickens, who was probably also in his maybe his late 40s at this point. She was well known in political circles because of what her husband did as his career and, yes, also because of that whole slap thing.

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So she was also really well known in both New York's social and literary circles. And that's because of her patronage to emerging writers and artists. She quite literally opened her home to important and influential writers when they were in New York City, for instance, several times she hosted Oscar Wilde. She also notably hosted Charles Dickens. And it's when she met Dickens that things really began to change for Jane. So we're going to take a quick break here, but when we return, we will talk about what came to be known as the Bigelow terror.

[00:27:00]

Hi, I'm Ali Wentworth. How do I grow a teenager in a pandemic? Well, that's exactly what I want to find out in my new podcast.

[00:27:09]

Go ask Ali. I'm asking experts to help me answer that question. For example, are quarantine teenage girls more apt to Instagram nude photos or are they somehow going to end up on the dark web? Are teenagers getting ripped off by their new virtual education? And how do we deal with their overwhelming anxiety and uncertainty? And are they losing empathy? I'll be talking to experts and friends like my friend Brooke Shields. She'll reveal how her complicated sexual upbringing has influenced how she is as a mother to teenage girls.

[00:27:41]

It's a new world and how we raise these young humans in it determine our future. So let's share some real experiences with all new episodes releasing every other Thursday. Listen to go ask Ali on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Criminalist. Let's talk about how someone might go from being very insufferable company to being a stalker.

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So much of what we know about Jane's obsession with Dickens actually comes from the diary of another woman. That is Amy Fields, who was a Boston society hostess, and she was the wife of Dickens's publisher. Amy was present for many of the games and dinners that were held while Dickens was in town. So she witnessed a lot of things. And her descriptions are a good peek into how Jane went from, quote, obnoxious to stalker behavior. It's interesting that she quotes that to she very specifically calls her behavior stalker stalker ish.

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So Annie also described Jane and her behavior as the Bigelow terror.

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I'm quoting because you could make that out. Things really began to sour when Jane began to regard Dickens as sort of her own personal property. She began to threaten any woman who even vaguely expressed interest in him, and that was whether they were flirtatious or not. And she harassed anyone who used their connections as a way to meet him. And for the cherry on top, yes, it keeps going.

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She verbally and physically attacked an elderly widow named Mrs. Herts, who had come to call on Dickens. She considered Dickens one of her favorite writers and after his reading at the Westminster Hotel in New York City, wanted to meet him.

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So while Charles Dickens seemed to get along just fine with John Bigelow, he didn't really seem to enjoy Jane's company, surprisingly enough, recorded by Annie in her diary, we quote, He has the deepest sympathy for men who are unfit, married, and has really taken a special fancy, I think, to John Bigelow because his wife is such an incubus. That's correct. She called Jane Bigelow an incubus. That probably should have been succubus. Right. Which is the female iteration of it.

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But we know what she meant. Right. But there's really no question about her intent in describing her this way. And it is certainly not exactly a favorable opinion of Mrs. B.

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Yeah, so. Based on his experiences during his first American tour, I was the one in the 1940s, Dickens had already installed security guards outside his door 24/7 to prevent fans from entering or just in general bothering him throughout his second tour and after the Herts situation didn't really change his security much, except for one key thing.

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The security guards were to keep Jane Bigelow away from his room at all times.

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Yes, it's anyone who might want to come see me away, but especially this person actually hurt.

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This image was like holding her picture up. He's like this, right? Yeah. They all have a sketch of her in there. Right.

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Despite this obstacle of constant security, trying to block the room from her, Jane continued to try to see Charles Dickens several times while he was in New York City. Each time she approached his room, she was, as requested, whisked away by security. So now banished from Dickens social circle, she started to hang around the hotel, just kind of hoping to bump into him or see him like to orchestrate an accidental. Oh, you're here. I'm also here.

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In response, Dickens started to ask his friends to kind of run defense for him and give him a warning if they saw her anyway so he could send security down to the lobby.

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Right. Boy, I know she's persistent. So with his return across the pond, actually, Dickens had little contact with Jane after the tour, but they found in her papers after she had passed away some correspondence with several prominent people.

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Among them was the writer Wilkie Collins and the poet William Cohen. Bryant also long in that correspondence where political leaders, civil activists and her mother. It doesn't appear, though, that Jane corresponded or otherwise interfered at all with Dickens once the tour ended and he went back to London and we mentioned these papers because they contained within those letters is a twist, the kind of takes the story to another level.

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So William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist and a playwright. He was known for writing The Moonstone that is widely considered to be the first modern English detective novel. And Wilkie was obsessed with Jane.

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No way. Listen, clearly, she had something that certain people responded to positively because her husband loved her. Her husband and Wilkie both thought she was amazing.

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And Jane and Wilkie corresponded. And it was quite a flirtatious correspondence that actually went on for about two decades. Yeah. And we're not sure when it ended. It may have ended around the time of Dickens. It may have ended around the time that one of them just got older and sicker.

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But Jane did pass away in February of 1889 after she had a long illness in The New York Times.

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They ran her obituary and she was noted that even in her girlhood, I'm quoting for her bright and witty conversational powers and her charming manners.

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They didn't mention anything about the Prince of Wales, no. And some people could not stand there was not ever in the obituary. It never be. Dickens passed away nearly 20 years before Jane did. And despite the scandalous age difference and timing of their affair, Nellie Dickens is much younger. Parama, as you'll recall, she and Dickens remained together until he died of a stroke in 1870 at the age of 58. And when he died, the New York Times wrote, quote, Death of the great novelist mourned by the people of two continents.

[00:34:20]

So you may not recognize Dickens's influence in our contemporary lives unless you see a remake of, say, a Christmas Carol every year. But his stories aren't the only thing that we rehash. We we even get to see Dickens himself as a fictional character, haunt the things that we watch and the things that we play. And some of these examples, they may surprise you, right?

[00:34:44]

So Dickens shows up in the fictional worlds of our TV shows, movies and novels as everything from a memorised to a character who himself stalks women. And he's also alive in video games. The Assassin's Creed video games, for example, are influenced by him, including Charles Dickens's London Stories Missions. And it is not just his works that have lived on his celebrity. Has to certainly.

[00:35:11]

Yes. And his style. Oh, Charles Dickens. You Zazie Zazie thing. That's right. He knows how to work his security team.

[00:35:20]

Let me try and pick out a cravat. Apparently, yes.

[00:35:30]

So, you know, Dickens had a bit of a chaser. Do you have one for us today? Yes. So the chaser on this is actually because while we were prepping this episode, Maria actually texted me and said, hey, did you know that he liked sweet alcoholic punches?

[00:35:46]

And I did not. But I did some research on either one of the things that he was particularly fond of. And it actually shows up in a Christmas Carol. It's part of a passage near the end when Ebeneezer is a changed man and he mentions that they will discuss important matters over a smoking bishop. And that is a punch, a sweet alcoholic punch. That's a very wintertime treat. So, of course, I was like, how do you make a smoking bishop?

[00:36:13]

I don't want to make a smoking bishop. If it's just a prolonged if you're really into it, I could see where it might be fun. But it's one of those things like you got to plan a couple of days ahead. This is a mulled mulled wine. Right?

[00:36:26]

Right. You you have to roast oranges that are pierced with cloves and then you have to boil red wine and then soak the clove pierced roasted oranges in it. And then you add ruby port and I'm too lazy for all this.

[00:36:39]

This says the woman who made the mushroom. Right. But here's the thing. Right. Like, not only is it all of this effort, but then you have a tureen of like. Yes, a drink that you may or may not like. And keep in mind, I will confess upfront, I'm not a big wine drinker. I'm definitely a spirits lady. So I thought it might be fun to try to come up with a cocktail that kind of is inspired by and to a small extent mimics the smoking bishop, which I am calling the sloppy Bischof.

[00:37:15]

It's pretty easy and it surprised me in one of the aspects of it that I will tell you about. So the sloppy bishop is very easy. It's three ounces of Ruby Port, two ounces of cranberry juice. I use a low sugar cranberry juice because I don't like how sweet they can get one ounce of triple sec. So you get that orange flavor in there. One ounce of gin. Oh, a half ounce of black cherry puree. And then if you want just a dash of bitters, I like to use a bitters that has some cinnamon in it for something like this and just give it a little stir.

[00:37:54]

I also like most of these things to be chilled beforehand. So while the original one would be a warm punch, this is definitely not. I think we need to get you a T-shirt that says and if you want to add bitters, if you want to add bitters.

[00:38:08]

Well, you know, bitters changed the profile of your drink. So not everyone loves them. I didn't drink them for a long time. I mean, I've really only gotten into bitters in the last six months to a year. And even so, I'm like barely tiptoeing around them. But it didn't taste quite right to me without the bitters. It needed something to kind of like bring out some of the other flavors. Here was the part that surprised me.

[00:38:32]

I made this without the gin at first, and I was just like, something isn't right. It's missing something. And my first thought was to put vodka in it. But then for some reason, as I went to my stash and I was like, which vodka should I pick? I saw a bottle of gin. And I was like, maybe gin would actually work in this. And so I made one that was with gin and one that was with vodka.

[00:38:59]

And to my shock, I preferred the gin version because, you know, I'm a vodka girl. I know. I'm one not surprised that your first thought was vodka.

[00:39:08]

That's your go to but two.

[00:39:09]

I actually when you were reading off the ingredients, I was really surprised to hear gin. So I like the little story of how it came to be.

[00:39:17]

Yes, we love a little experiment. We love a little AB testing at our house where there also has to be like very careful selection of the barware so that you don't get confused, which has which it rang. True point. Yes. So I have some barware that has ghosts etched on it and ghosts are for because they both start with, gee, that's how I remember it that way, whatever works, I didn't want to become confused to give up the wrong recipe.

[00:39:42]

But that is the sloppy bishop, which to my surprise, I really, really enjoy it. It's another one too. I know I always say this, but for anybody who likes to play around with these, but maybe finds any cocktail a little too much or the the flavor too intense, you can always dilute that with your a sparkling water, a ginger ale, a lemon lime soda, like a soft lemon soda. Anything in that space great to mix in and just soften is still yummy.

[00:40:15]

It gets sometimes a little more crispy because of bubbles. You could throw some champagne in there and really do.

[00:40:22]

I could see what you're going to be doing this evening. You're like, I can throw in these five other ingredients.

[00:40:27]

Well, there were there were in researching the smoking bishop, I found out that there were other punches called like the smoking pope and other things. And I forget which one it was that did involve champagne in it. And I was like, I will have to pursue that later.

[00:40:42]

I feel like Jean might approve of that. She'd probably. Right. Champagne? Yeah, maybe. I bet she would. She would have had a sloppy bishop with me and started you know, she ran smack in high level royals on the back like they're old friends.

[00:40:57]

It's not how it works. How are you doing, Charlie? Well, I'd be terrified. I'm pretty brazen. Hm. I would be terrified to do that. So we hope you are not terrified and that this has been a fun little adventure and an eye opener regarding the nature of Charles Dickens. It is us jaws and we hope we will see you right back here next week with criminals. You we'll have more stalking and the more chasers. Criminality is a production of QandA Land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio for more podcasts from Shandley and Audio.

[00:41:33]

Please visit the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.