Ellen Ternan kept her secrets, too. It was only after her death that her son discovered that his mother had had a liaison with Dickens. According to Ellen Ternan's biographer, Claire Tomalin, the discovery was deeply disturbing to him -- he would allow no Dickens works in his house and would even turn off the radio if Dickens's name was mentioned. The only thing Ternan ever said of the relationship, which she confided to her vicar in the 1880's, was that she had been Dickens's mistress, that she regretted the liaison and that she ''loathed the very thought of this intimacy.''

In the last 10 years of his life, Charles Dickens seemed to age visibly. He and his friends attributed this to the effort of his public readings. In themselves they were physically demanding, and the travel involved was even more so, especially after the train wreck, when, according to his son, every jolt panicked him. But it was also certainly true that he spent a great deal of time traveling from his house at Gad's Hill in Kent to the various houses he supplied for Ternan, first in London, then in France, then in Slough, then in Peckham. He used up his great reserves of energy, energy everyone he knew had remarked on all his life, and died looking exhausted at 58. No one knows whether he found peace and intimacy with Ternan, as Charles Darnay does with Lucie Manette in ''A Tale of Two Cities, ''or whether he found frustration and cruelty, as Pip finds with Estella in ''Great Expectations.'' He succeeded in taking to the grave the answer to the central question of his life, which he lamented to John Forster in 1855, before the advent of Ternan. ''Why is it, that as with poor David,'' he wrote, referring to one of his most famous characters, ''a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, one friend and companion I have never made?'' For those of us who revere Dickens, it is as if the story were never finished and the contradictions in the character of the protagonist were never satisfactorily resolved.

Dickens knew, and had demonstrated, that the giving up of secrets could be freeing -- as a young man of 32, he met one Madame de la Rue, an Englishwoman married to a Frenchman, who was beset by what we would recognize as obsessive-compulsive fears and anxieties. During the winter of 1844-45, Dickens repeatedly hypnotized the woman and encouraged her to relate her secrets. This amateur ''treatment'' was a success -- not only did she begin to sleep more peacefully; the improvement lasted for years, and Dickens became obsessed by the efficacy of it.

And yet despite this knowledge, Dickens could not give up his secrets and reveal his relationships. His last novels show that he felt a moral danger in his hidden life. Nevertheless, he was unable to do what he required his characters to do: expose the mysteries of his own life.

Novels and other narratives always show the same thing about secrets -- more than anything, secrets are just missing links in a train of cause and effect that inevitably makes its pattern manifest. Revelatory astonishment always gives way to ''Of course!'' The paradox of personal secrets, like Dickens's, is that it is the secret-keeping itself, not the substance of the secret, that alienates a person from others. In his own lifetime, Dickens was considered quirky, unstable and even wicked because his friends and relatives were hard put to infer his motives or account for his behavior. Today, his secrets are hardly shocking; they reveal the struggles of a passionate man as well as the inner life of a fascinating writer. They are human, common. They link us to his work and experience, and they arouse our compassion. From our post-Freudian, Internet-happy perspective, we can't help feeling that his secrets caused more trouble than they were worth.