James R. Zimmerman

Terror to the End: the Last Day in the Life of Charles Dickens in His Own Words (More or Less) James R. Zimmerman

Terror to the End is an imaginative re-creation of the last day in Charles Dickens' astonishing life. For the most part, it employs the great writer's own words, taken from his letters and readings. We meet him as he takes a break from his work on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which would remain only half-finished. Dickens was writing one of its most beautiful sections on this, his last working day. Terror to the End is dramatically punctuated by spine-tingling sections of "Sikes and Nancy" (sometimes called "The Murder of Nancy"), from Oliver Twist. The celebrated writer would die the next day, on the fifth anniversary of the catastrophic Staplehurst Railway Accident, which he and his alleged mistress survived, but which resulted in a permanent trauma that, try as he might, he could never fully escape. Terror to the End spirits the listener back in time to 8 June, 1870, on a lovely day in rural England, at a stately old Georgian mansion on the Gravesend Road, where a not-so-very old man spends a little time alone, remembering, reflecting, and regretting the incomprehensible life he had lived. Charles Dickens was fifty-eight when he died.