Deck: The Charles Dickens Tarot
Card: The Tower XVI - The Staplehurst Train Disaster
Answer: Yes.
In 1865, a train running from Folkstone to Charring Cross plummeted off a bridge into a gorge. Dickens was on this train, returning to London from France with his secret mistress of 13 years, Ellen Ternan. Dickens sustained minor injuries, but Ternan was more seriously hurt, both physically and emotionally. To her, the violent derailing was metaphorical, symbolizing how far her furtive life as Dickens' dirty little secret had gone off the tracks. In France, she had given birth to a son by Dickens, but the child was sickly and hadn't survived. Dickens had been separated from his wife for years but would not divorce her; nor would he jeopardize his literary fame and public adoration to openly take a mistress, the way some of his colleagues such as his friend Wilkie Collins had done. Dickens was as British as they come, but he had a deep reverence for the French, especially how they understood and managed affairs of the heart. Yet, regardless of his predisposition, his rationalizations, and his predicament, Dickens refused to come clean and instead lived a double life - a life he scripted like one of his novels, enlisting those around him to play along with his fiction. Ternan naturally viewed the disaster as comeuppance, her duplicity with Dickens leading inexorably to a psychological trainwreck. Dickens, typically, didn't talk of it. He suffered from what today we know as PTSD, and dealt with it - as he dealt with the recurring pain in his legs and most everything else - by denying its existence.
This denial of what is, mixed with Dickens' gift for fabricating, confabulating, and confounding, represents idealism's central modus: overlooking reality in favour of the subject's desire and intent, using all the devices and skills of the mind to control the subject's narrative, and so refashioning existence that often the subject is hoodwinked by his/her own falsehood. In essence, the idealist takes what is wild and unwieldy - the actual - and trains it. But of course it is not the actual which is trained, but the idealist - that is, his perception of the actual - along with whomever he can deceive with his misconceptions. For 5 years, Dickens soldiered on with his public charade, simultaneously attending in secret to Ternan and refusing to tend to his own diseased and suppurating legs. Instead, he undertook a nationwide reading tour where he stood for hours at a time only to collapse in total exhaustion afterwards. Indeed, Dickens' remarkable tenacity is what led to his early demise, 5 years to the day after the Staplehurst train crash.
Dickens' headstrong disposition is integral to his genius - he was, himself, a literary locomotive. Without idealism, Dickens would never have accomplished so much, and had he nevertheless written his novels, they would not have taken the same idealistic form (for better or for worse). Like Dickens, trains revolutionized society, bringing cultures together and unifying the nation; their steam, soot, and steal symbolized Victorian determination, superiority, and know-how. How we perceive things, and why, are as important - and, more importantly: are as real - as those things themselves. Sometimes, as with idealism, they become more important and more real. When this happens, the bridge which you firmly believe will transport you from one side of the divide to the other may or may not actually be there. The further thought diverges from matter, the more likely and violent will be the collision between matter and your train of thought.
* - by idealism is meant the garden variety, defined as 1) "the practice of forming or pursuing ideals, especially unrealistically" 2) "living under their influence" & 3) "that which is idealized".
** - by crime is meant the figurative, defined as 1) "a grave offense, especially against morality" & 2) "something reprehensible, foolish, or disgraceful".
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<----- you me------> 
