Charles Dickens: A Life (25 page)

Eleanor Picken married her naval officer Edward Christian in 1842. She published two accounts of that September at Broadstairs, the first appearing a year after Dickens died, when she was fifty, and the second in the late 1880s, incorporating material about the Dickens parents that she had tactfully left out before. Evidently they had been in Broadstairs, and she described John Dickens as a good-looking man, ‘rather an “old buck”’ in his dress, and Elizabeth Dickens as agreeable and matter-of-fact, with no sign of Mrs Nickleby that she could see, in spite of Dickens’s claim that his mother was the model for her. But she did love dancing, and her son seemed to disapprove of this, and looked ‘as sulky as a bear’ when she took to the dance floor with one or the other of her polite sons-in-law, Henry Austin or Henry Burnett. Both parents, Eleanor noticed, were ill at ease with Charles, and seemed to be in fear of offending him; and with reason, since at this time his father was being particularly troublesome about money.

Back in London, Eleanor went to lunch at Devonshire Terrace with the Smithsons, and found Dickens distant in manner. She called later to show them a portrait drawing she had made of Catherine, and while Catherine received Eleanor with great friendliness, he refused to see her or even to look at the picture. She was so upset that she left the house and did not call again. When they met again by chance at a ball, he was coldly polite, and Fred explained to her that he was ‘odd sometimes’; this was in Broadstairs again, in 1842, after her marriage. Two things might help to explain why he turned against her. One was that she was ready to argue with him. Since his marriage he had been used to deference, while Eleanor describes herself defending Byron’s verses when he criticized them, and standing up for herself generally. The other was that he may have noticed her diary keeping and objected to it. Dickens was the observer, and had no wish to be the observed. Whatever the reason for his change of attitude, she did not forget him, and eighteen years later she made one more attempt to speak to him, after a reading, described in
Chapter 20
.

Dickens’s agonizing over the death of Little Nell did not hold him back from entertaining. There was an October feast, with many toasts, for all involved in the publication of
Master Humphrey’s Clock
, designers, printers, publishers and woodcutters. There was a small party with charades on Christmas Eve, and a great New Year’s Eve celebration, with dancing, more charades and ‘frolics’. On Christmas Day he walked round the park ‘at a posting rate’ with Forster and Macready, fallings-out forgotten. Forster wrote to Dickens assuring him that
The Old Curiosity Shop
was his literary masterpiece, and the later numbers sold 100,000 a week. All this was good, but Dickens knew he must keep the magazine going for another year at least, and
Barnaby Rudge
, planned and started in 1839, began to appear on 13 February 1841, to run to December.

It was the least popular of his books at the time, and has remained so. Trying his hand at a historical novel, where Scott had been supreme and his friend Ainsworth successful, he was not on his own territory. The two most striking and memorable features of the story are Barnaby himself, the simple-minded hero with a pet raven, who wanders innocently through the mysteries of the plot; and the description of the Gordon Riots of 1780, when the London mob opened prisons, set fire to many buildings and caused mayhem. But the book is far too long for what it does, the villains are cardboard, the young women insipid, the plotting absurd, and Lord George Gordon himself barely characterized. Dickens moves into crude melodrama, as when Barnaby’s father, the murderous Rudge, addresses himself with rhetorical questions, ‘Do I fancy that I killed him? … Did I go home when I had done? … Did I stand before my wife, and tell her? … Did she go down upon her knees, and call on Heaven to witness that she and her unborn child renounced me from that hour …?’
²⁰
Even Forster could not summon enthusiasm, and one reviewer wrote sadly of the ‘man of genius winding himself up like a three years’ clock’.
²¹

Dickens knew he had to keep winding himself up to meet his obligations to Chapman & Hall. He owed them money, and his family was growing – a second son, Walter, was born the day after his own twenty-ninth birthday, on 8 February 1841. His habits were expensive, and Lord Jeffrey, visiting him in London in April, remarked on his giving ‘rather too sumptuous a dinner for a man with a family, and only beginning to be rich’.
²²
His brother Alfred could not get work, and Dickens was trying to find him a position in New Zealand. Their father was behaving outrageously, forging his signature on bills, which sometimes turned up at Chapman & Hall’s offices as well as Devonshire Terrace. In March, enraged by this behaviour, Dickens put a notice in the London newspapers, disclaiming responsibility for promissory notes and saying he would not discharge any debts but his own and his wife’s. He also did his best to persuade his father to move abroad, offering him a pension for himself, school fees for Augustus and an extra £40 a year for his mother should she wish to remain in England; but John Dickens refused to go.

In May, Dickens was invited to stand for parliament as the second Liberal candidate for Reading, where Talfourd was already an MP. He would have to pay his own expenses, it was expected that the Conservatives would win, and Talfourd had already decided not to stand; not surprisingly Dickens, though flattered by being asked, turned down the request. Still more flattering was the invitation to travel to Scotland to receive the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh in June. He left an unseasonably cold London to travel north with Catherine, to a warm and enthusiastic welcome. Crowds gathered round their hotel, and over 250 gentlemen attended the public dinner in his honour; the ladies were allowed into a gallery for the speeches after the meal. John Wilson, Professor of Moral Philosophy and formidable chief critic of
Blackwood’s
under the name of Christopher North, praised his originality, compared him with Defoe and Fielding, and shrewdly pointed out as his one failure his inability to create women characters. Dickens replied gracefully, speaking of Little Nell – unmentioned by North – and saying that his intention had been to soften grief and ‘put a garland of fresh flowers’ on the subject of death. Speeches and toasts went on until midnight, Dickens speaking twice more. He kept Forster informed of the Edinburgh festivities and wished he were sharing in them; and he had to ask his publishers to send him a banknote for £50 to cover his expenses. Then, guided by their friend Angus Fletcher, the Scottish sculptor, he and Catherine set off on a short coach tour of the Highlands. The rain poured down, the winds blew, the cold was intense, the inns offered only beds of straw, and they narrowly missed being drowned fording a swollen river; and as they travelled, Dickens got on steadily with the next number of
Barnaby
Rudge.

Meanwhile in London an enterprising team had already dramatized
Barnaby
, although it was only half written, and put it on stage at the Lyceum, with the name part played by a young actress named Julia Fortescue. She was something of a hit. Maclise found her ‘transcendent’ and wrote to Dickens about her. Both had seen her in small parts in earlier adaptations of his novels, and Maclise teased him about his supposed interest in ‘the wild attractions of her legs’, her charm and beauty, her small waist, ‘woman bust’ and perfectly modulated voice. She played with such vivacity that Macready also went to see her, invited her to join his company at Drury Lane and rehearsed her in Shakespearean parts, including Juliet. He was disappointed in her progress, perhaps because she did not give her undivided attention to rehearsals. She had acquired a titled, and married, lover, Lord Gardner, Lord of the Bedchamber to the Queen and a favourite at court, and Julia was soon to bear him the first of five children. Macready did not allow her to play Juliet, and her professional career suffered from her personal situation, but several years later, in 1845 and again in 1848, she acted with Dickens’s amateurs. He knew her well and was aware of her equivocal position, and how she was obliged to be secretive about it.
²³

Dickens and Maclise joked about women, and Maclise as a bachelor got plenty of teasing for his susceptibility and love-affairs. That August, when Dickens was at Broadstairs and Maclise was unwell in London, he urged him to come down for the good of his health and enjoy six weeks of sea air and rest, telling him he could eat and drink as he liked, get up when he liked and go to bed when he liked, and that, ‘There are conveniences of all kinds at Margate (do you take me?) and I know where they live.’
²⁴
The conveniences are prostitutes, and Dickens is telling Maclise he has located them in nearby Margate. It doesn’t sound like a joke. Did Dickens go out and look for the Margate prostitutes simply to find out where they were for Maclise’s sake? Or because he took an interest in seeing them and talking to them, for whatever mixture of reasons? Was he thinking of using their services himself? He had a reason for not wanting Catherine to become pregnant, in that he was planning a trip to America and a new pregnancy might prevent her going with him. His letter to Maclise continues ‘in serious and sober earnestness’ to urge him to come to Broadstairs, but whether Maclise did, and whether they went to Margate together, naturally remains unknown.

Dickens was unwell. He had been suffering from bilious attacks lasting for several days, and severe indigestion. He was also worried about his professional future, fearing that he was burning himself out and making himself too cheap. He knew that he had to have a break, but how was it to be financed? In London in late August for a meeting with Chapman & Hall, he persuaded Forster, who was their literary adviser as well as his personal agent, to present a further plan to them, by which they would pay him to do nothing for a year and then he would start to write a long novel in November 1842. He would be paid for each monthly instalment, get three quarters of the profits and retain half the copyright.
Master Humphrey’s Clock
would be closed down when
Barnaby
came to an end. However taken aback the publishers were by this suggestion, they agreed to it. As Robert Patten puts it, the agreement made between Dickens and Forster and Chapman & Hall was ‘a bold bet on one man’s future creativity’.
²⁵
Dickens then raised the question of his wish to visit America, which they declared themselves happy about. He told Forster he had made up his mind to go. He persuaded Catherine to go with him and was persuaded by Macready not to think of taking the children; and the Macreadys offered to keep a close watch on them during their parents’ absence. Now Devonshire Terrace had to be let and a smaller house near the Macreadys found for the children, their nursemaids and Fred, who would stay with them; and passages must be booked for Dickens, Catherine and her maid Anne.

While all this was under way, Dickens became so ill that surgery became necessary and urgent. He was suffering from an anal fistula. The operation was carried out at home and, at that date, without anaesthetic.
²⁶
It was performed by a specialist surgeon, Frederick Salmon, on 8 October, with entire success. Macready called that evening and suffered sympathetic agonies with his friend. A few days later he brought Browning with him, and they found Dickens ‘going on very comfortably’. The next day he was dictating letters to Catherine.

He was well set on the road to recovery, and intending to go to Windsor to convalesce as soon as he was allowed to travel, when news came of the sudden death of Catherine’s brother George Hogarth. It happened as unexpectedly as Mary Hogarth’s, and upset Dickens as much as Catherine, not because he knew George well but because he had been expecting to be buried beside Mary, and now felt he must give up that place to her brother. He was intensely distressed, told Forster that his love for Mary would never diminish, and that it felt like losing her for a second time.

Still, he reached the last words of
Barnaby
on 5 November, standing up to write, and two days later he and Catherine were installed at the White Hart in Windsor. After an alarming day of pains and twitches in his back and calves and a visit to the surgeon, he was soon himself again, and they returned home. On 8 December he told Lord Jeffrey, ‘I am not at all tired with idleness … I have done nothing but walk, and lounge about, and read drowsily, all day long. – What do you think of my reading the Curiosity Shop,
all through
?’
²⁷
He was well enough to go and sit to the Count D’Orsay for a portrait drawing in the morning, but not to dine, ‘both because I want to hold on tight by my household Gods to the last, and on account of my health which I am afraid may suffer from too much dining’.
²⁸
Both
The Old Curiosity Shop
and
Barnaby Rudge
were published, each in one volume, on 15 December. There were clothes to be made for America, letters of credit to be obtained, maps to be studied, introductions to be provided, packing to be done. Then only Christmas to be got through before they said goodbye to children and friends and took the train for Liverpool, to embark on the thoroughly up-to-date
Britannia
, the first Cunard wooden paddle-steamer to be built.

Conquering America

Dickens was going to America to give himself a mental shake as well as a holiday from the pressure of constant writing. He knew he could be certain of a warm reception – enthusiasm for his work among American readers ran high – and he was confident that he would be able to gather enough material from his travels to make a book. He went also intending to raise the question of international copyright and the pirating of his books in America, which deprived him of the income on which he as a writer depended, with the idea that a change in the law might be brought about: hearing of his proposed visit, Lea & Blanchard reissued all his work in twenty parts and boldly invited him to visit them in Philadelphia.
¹
But he had a more profound reason for making the long journey, and this was his desire to test out the hope that a better society was being established there, free of monarchy, aristocracy and worn-out conventions – to see ‘the Republic of my imagination’.
²
The Americans, for their part, saw him specifically as ‘The Great Republican of the Literary World’, the English writer who was on their side, who believed in liberty and democracy, and who showed in his books that he cared about ordinary people and thought the poor more worthy of attention than the rich.
³
They prepared to give him an ecstatic welcome, and at the time of his arrival the
New York Herald
wrote: ‘His mind is American – his soul is republican – his heart is democratic.’
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