Travelling with him was a lady not his wife, nor his sister-in-law, yet he strutted about the deck with the air of a man bristling with self-importance, every line of his face and every gesture of his limbs seemed haughtily to say—“Look at me; make the most of your chance. I am the great, I am the only Charles Dickens; whatever I may choose to do is justified by that fact.”

I am told that Mrs Byrne is known primarily for a book she published some years ago titled Flemish Interiors. In my modest opinion, she should have reserved her vitriolic pen for scribbling about divans and wallpaper. Human beings are clearly beyond her narrow scope.

After disembarking at Folkestone, Dickens, Ellen, and Mrs Ternan took the 2.38 tidal train to London. As they approached Staplehurst, they were the only passengers in their coach, one of seven first-class carriages in the tidal train that day.

The engineer was going full speed—about fifty miles per hour—as they passed Headcorn at eleven minutes after three in the afternoon. They were now approaching the railroad viaduct near Staplehurst, although “viaduct”—the name given the structure in the official railways guide—may be too fancy a word for the web of girders supporting the heavy wood beams spanning the shallow river Beult.

Labourers were carrying out a routine replacement of old timbers on that span. Later investigation—and I have read the reports—showed that the foreman had consulted the wrong timetable and did not expect the tidal train for another two hours. (It seems that we travellers are not the only ones to be confounded by British railway timetables with their infinite holiday and weekend and high-tide-time asterisks and confounding parentheses.)

A flagman was required by railway policy and English law to be stationed 1,000 yards up the rails from such work—two of the rails had already been lifted off at the bridge and set alongside the track—but for some reason this man with his red flag was only 550 yards from the gap. This did not give a train travelling at the speed of the Folkestone—London tidal express any chance of stopping in time.