Dickens took a "vacation" trip to France at the end of May 1865. Before leaving he told Forester: "Work and worry...would soon make an end of me. If I were not going away now, I should break down. No one knows as I know to-day how near to it I have been..." But rest was not the only reason for Dickens's departure. He was also going to France to visit Ellen Ternan.

As was usually the case, Dickens continued to write, even while on vacation. While in France he worked on the second chapter of the sixteenth number of Our Mutual Friend (drawing towards the close), and brought the manuscript back to England with him in the pocket of his overcoat. With Ellen Ternan and her mother, he boarded the ferry and travelled from Boulogne to Folkestone. On this occasion a fellow-passenger noticed him and recorded the following observation: "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, the only Charles Dickens; whatever I may choose to do is justified by that fact.'" Dickens, Ternan, and Mrs. Ternan were booked into a first-class carriage and they took the 2:38 tidal train from Folkestone to London. Passing the town of Headcorn thirty-three minutes later they approached the viaduct over the river Beult just before Staplehurst where the accident would take place. They were travelling at a speed of fifty miles an hour on a downward gradient. At that moment repair work was being conducted on the viaduct itself (which was in fact little more than a bridge) and two of the rails had been lifted from the railbed and placed at the side of the track. The foreman in charge of the construction site had consulted the wrong time-table, and he did not expect Dickens's train for another two hours. Furthermore, and, against regulations, the flagman who was supposed to give warning to oncoming trains of any obstruction was only 550 yards from the construction site. The train conductor saw the red flag and applied his brakes, but it was too late. The train approached the broken line in the rail at a speed of between twenty and thirty miles per hour. It jumped a gap of forty-two feet, and swerved onto the bed of the river below. All of the seven first-class carriages plummeted downwards -- except for one car. That car was the one occupied by Dickens and the Ternans, and it held by its couplings onto a second-class carriage. Dickens's car had come off the rail and was now hanging over the bridge at an angle.

With a makeshift arrangement of planks Dickens managed to extricate the Ternans from the suspended carriage, and as he was doing this, he saw the other first-class carriages lying at the bottom of the river bed. With his familiar aplomb he went returned to the teetering carriage, and took out a travelling flask of brandy as well as his top hat. He filled his hat with water, clambered down the bank, and then began his work among the injured and the dead. He found a man with a cracked skull; he gave the man some brandy, poured a bit of water on his face, and laid him on the grass beside the stream. The man said only "I am gone," and then died. A woman with a blood-covered face was propped against a tree; Dickens gave her a little brandy from his flask, but in a moment she too was dead. The scene was covered with corpses and injured bodies. One young passenger, Mr. Dickenson, later recalled how it was the urging and assistance of Charles Dickens that ultimately helped to free him from a pile of twisted wreckage. Another passenger would later recall how Dickens, with his hat full of water, was "running about with it and doing his best to revive and comfort every poor creature he met who had sustained serious injury."

And then, as he prepared to take leave of the death scene, Dickens did a remarkable thing. Remembering that his manuscript was still in the pocket of his overcoat, he clambered back into the swaying carriage and retrieved it. He then travelled back to London with the other survivors on an emergency train.

-Dickens by Peter Ackroyd