Charles Dickens: A Life (47 page)

Just as he was involving himself in helping Caroline Maynard, he had a letter from another woman. It came out of the blue and with overpowering effect. This time it was Maria Beadnell, the beloved of his youth, now a married woman, who wrote to him. Almost certainly he had not seen her since she jilted him in 1833.
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He had kept in desultory contact with her father and knew of her marriage in 1845, when he was in Italy, and that she was now Mrs Winter, but the arrival of her letter, ‘so busy and pleasant’, with its news that she had two children, led him into a rhapsodic reply. ‘Believe me, you cannot more tenderly remember our old days and our old friends than I do … Your letter is more touching to me from its good and gentle association with the state of Spring in which I was either much more wise or much more foolish than I am now’ – and so on.
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He told her he was about to leave for Paris – this was the trip with Collins – and offered to bring back anything she wanted for her daughters; and he added that Mrs Dickens would call and arrange a meeting between the two couples. In fact he said nothing to Catherine. Five days later he wrote another long letter to Maria from Paris, telling her he ‘got the heartache again’ from seeing her handwriting, and recalling the blue gloves she had worn and he had matched for her. It begins to sound like a love letter. ‘Whatever of fancy, romance, energy, passion, aspiration and determination belong to me, I never have separated and never shall separate from the hard hearted little woman – you – whom it is nothing to say I would have died for … that I began to fight my way out of poverty and obscurity, with one perpetual idea of you … I have never been so good a man since, as I was when you made me wretchedly happy.’ He even suggests her reaction to reading about Dora in
David Copperfield
: ‘How dearly that boy must have loved me, and how vividly this man remembers it!’
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The excitement was rising in both of them. A third letter, written on his return home, assured her that ‘No one but myself has the slightest knowledge of my correspondence, I may add in this place. I could be nowhere addressed with stricter privacy or in more absolute confidence than at my own house.’ She had given him a version of the reasons for the end of their early love, no doubt obedience to her parents, and in return he told her that ‘the wasted tenderness of those hard years’ left him with a habit of suppression which made him chary of showing affection, even to his own children. He suggested they might once again enjoy a mutual confidence ‘in perfect innocence and good faith … between ourselves alone. All that you propose, I accept with my whole heart.’ She boldly suggested meeting in the streets, somewhere near St Paul’s. That might be dangerous, he replied, because he could be recognized, and he proposed instead that she should call at Devonshire Terrace between three and four on Sunday, asking for Catherine, who would infallibly be out. The stage was set for a secret romance and a revival of a love on which they both looked fondly back. She warned him she was ‘toothless, fat, old, and ugly’, to which he replied, ‘You are always the same in my remembrance.’
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The meeting took place. He saw an overweight woman, no longer pretty, who talked foolishly and too much. The edifice he had built up in his mind tumbled, and he beat an immediate retreat. There was, however, a dinner with their two spouses, which allowed him perhaps to compare the appetites and girths of Maria and Catherine and brood on their resemblances. Still, he showed himself at his best in writing a charming letter to Maria’s daughter Ella, telling her about his new pet raven (‘he will peck little holes in your legs if you like’) and his own three-year-old, ‘the Baby’, Plorn, who was in bed with the measles and a large cart and two horses, a Noah’s Ark with all the animals and people, a military camp with four cannons, a box of bricks, a clown and four crusts of buttered toast – a perfect letter for a child.
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A child was one thing, but from now on he made excuses not to meet Maria. He sent her theatre tickets and failed to turn up for the show himself. He explained that he must wander about ‘in my own wild way’, and that he held his inventive capacity ‘on the stern condition that it must master my whole life … and sometimes for months together, put everything else away from me’.
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He informed her he was going to be out of town for several Sundays in succession. When her baby died in June, he wrote to commiserate and added with dreadful firmness, ‘It is better that I should not come to see you. I feel quite sure of that, and will think of you instead.’
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Steely Dickens, armoured against his mistake.

Worse, as he thought of her in her latest incarnation, he created Flora Finching and gave her a leading part in
Little Dorrit
, overweight, greedy, a drinker and garrulous to match, absurd in her unstoppable and only half-comprehensible conversation, and given to arch reminders to her old lover of the distant past. Poor Mrs Winter was silly no doubt, but not so stupid as to fail to recognize herself when she read
Little Dorrit.
Although Flora was at any rate shown as a kind-hearted woman, this was a good deal crueller than what he did to Hunt with Skimpole. Writing to a reader who appreciated the character, he said, ‘It came into my head that we have all had our Floras (mine is living, and extremely fat), and that it was a half serious half ridiculous truth which has never been told.’
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While he was still writing
Little Dorrit
, he sent Maria copies of eleven of his books, each inscribed ‘In remembrance of old times’, and replied in a friendly way to her letter of thanks, explaining again how busy he was and how few letters he had time to write. She had paid for the double disillusionment she had inflicted on him, but she might have reflected that she had also been his muse and inspired two of his most memorable female characters.

Wayward and Unsettled

In October 1855 Dickens and Georgina travelled to Paris and found, with some difficulty, an apartment – ‘a Doll’s house’ – on two floors at No. 49 Champs Elysées, into which they moved. During their first night there ‘my little right hand’, as he put it, woke him with her restlessness, telling him the place was dirty and that she could not sleep for the smell of her room. Georgina was no longer a girl – she was twenty-eight – and effectively the woman in charge of the Dickens household, and he at once ordered a thorough cleaning. Once it was done, the place was ‘exquisitely cheerful and vivacious … and with a moving panorama outside, which is Paris in itself’.
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Paris delighted him. A bright, wicked and wanton place he had called it in the 1840s, not altogether disapprovingly, and since then he had come to admire the intelligence of its inhabitants, and their mixture of refinement and coarseness. Now he relished the many pleasures he found in the miles of streets to walk, the sophistication of the people, the theatres and the opera, the seductive restaurants with their mirrors, red-velvet upholstery and attentive waiters, the ‘tact and taste in trifles’ shown in the displays in the shops.
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He had told Miss Coutts that his intention was to give his daughters, Mamie now seventeen, and Katey just sixteen, some Parisian polish: they were to have dancing lessons, art classes, language coaching and wardrobes of French clothes. Catherine was coming on with the girls and the little ones from Boulogne, where she must have lingered to see her three boarding-school boys, and soon they were all settled in the Champs Elysées.

Dickens’s command of the language had improved so much that he could now understand everything said at the theatre ‘with perfect ease and satisfaction’, and he boasted to Georgy, during his February trip with Collins, of receiving ‘many compliments on my angelic manner of speaking the celestial language’.
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Better still,
Chuzzlewit
was currently being serialized in a Paris paper, and it was extremely agreeable to be well known and well liked, to be greeted in shops with ‘Ah! C’est l’ecrivain celebre! Monsieur porte une nomme [
sic
] très distinguée. Mais! Je suis honoré et interessé de voir Monsieur Dick-in’ (his version). Not only this, they knew and loved his characters, ‘Cette Madame Tojair (Todgers) Ah! Qu’elle est drole, et precisement comme une dame que je connais à Calais.’
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He worked hard in the flat on the Champs Elysées, and he walked, in a spell of frosty January weather, round the walls of Paris from the Barrière de l’Etoile to the river, and the next day along the river to the Bastille, under a sky of Italian blue.
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There was a great deal of celebratory marching with bands through the centre, because the war in the Crimea was coming to an end and a peace conference would begin in Paris in February. Henry, aged six, remembered being put in a képi – the French soldier’s hat – and held up to shout ‘
Vive l’Empereur!
’ at a regimental review. Dickens permitted Ary Scheffer, a well-known artist, to embark on painting his portrait, but found it unrecognizable. He was pleased to meet Lamartine again, who, despite his own reduced circumstances, had asked to see him and spoke warmly to him of his work and his excellent French; and to renew his acquaintance with the playwright Scribe, and marvel at Scribe’s wife, who, although mother of a grown-up son, was still a beauty and had kept ‘the figure of five-and-twenty’.
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The singer and friend of Turgenev, Pauline Viardot, invited him to dinner to meet George Sand, but since he hardly knew her work there was no meeting of minds. He summed her up as ‘Chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed’ and ‘with nothing of the blue-stocking about her, except a little final way of settling all your opinions with hers’, and he was not encouraged by the meeting to read her work.
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The great publishing firm of Hachette approached him with a proposal for a complete edition of his novels, with new translations, and this was happily negotiated over some excellent dinners with editors, translators and booksellers. Mamie and Katey enjoyed themselves, coached in Italian by Daniel Manin, the exiled Venetian patriot, and spending a good deal of time with Thackeray’s daughters, Annie and Minnie, who were in Paris with their grandparents while their father lectured in America.

The Emperor Napoleon III who now ruled over France might be a ‘cold-blooded scoundrel’, but the French people and their way of life remained intensely congenial.
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Dickens had after all first met Louis-Napoleon at the house of his dear friend D’Orsay, whom he admired so much that he made him godfather to his son Alfred.
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D’Orsay’s total disregard of convention, the fact that he was separated from his wife and seemingly the lover of his step-mother-in-law, his perpetually unpaid debts – all this had been brushed aside by Dickens, captivated by his chic, his brilliance as a portraitist, his wit and charm in society, his French
savoir-vivre
. D’Orsay and his fellow French looked at life differently from the English, and Dickens saw that there was something to be said for their point of view. And, although he detested the Emperor’s assumption of absolute power, the political situation in England struck him as almost equally dismal, and led him to believe that ‘Representative Institutions’ had failed there for lack of an educated people to support them.
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In May 1856 he had a fierce disagreement with Miss Coutts’s companion, Mrs Brown, on the subject of the French. When she spoke against them, he praised their openness about social problems, telling her that a leading difference between them and the English was that ‘in England people dismiss the mention of social evils and vices which do nevertheless exist among them; and that in France people do not dismiss the mention of the same things but habitually recognise their existence.’ Mrs Brown cried out, ‘Don’t say that!’ and Dickens insisted, ‘Oh but I must say it, you know, when according to our national vanity and prejudice, you disparage an unquestionably great nation.’ At which Mrs Brown burst into tears.
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A few months later he wrote to Forster grumbling about the constraints placed on English novelists compared with the French – he named Balzac and Sand – who were able to write freely and realistically, while ‘the hero of an English book’ was ‘always uninteresting – too good’. Dickens went on to tell Forster that ‘this same unnatural young gentleman (if to be decent is to be necessarily unnatural), whom you meet in those others books and in mine,
must
be presented to you in that unnatural aspect by reason of your morality, and is not to have, I will not say any of the indecencies you like, but not even any of the experiences, trials, perplexities, and confusions inseparable from the making or unmaking of all men!’
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It was a comprehensive complaint about the circumstances in which he worked as a writer, and which he felt unable to challenge in his novels.
¹³

Congenial as he found life in Paris, he was obliged to make frequent trips to London. When Dr Brown, husband of Miss Coutts’s companion and a trustee of the Home, died at the end of October 1855, he went unhesitatingly to organize the funeral, putting aside his dislike of elaborate mourning ceremonies. He told Wills that his respect and admiration for Miss Coutts, ‘so isolated in the midst of her goodness and wealth’, made him determined to ease her distress at losing one of her few intimates, and he took the greatest pains to give help and comfort to her as well as to Mrs Brown.
¹⁴
While in London he observed that Charley was well ‘but rather too spotty’, and that the Hogarths, installed in Tavistock House to care for their grandson, were not looking after the place as they should. He complained to them, and spent the last night of his visit in his bachelor rooms in Wellington Street, drinking with Wills, to whom he wrote afterwards, ‘I am impatient to know how the Gin Punch succeeded with you. It is the most wonderful beverage in the world, and I think ought to be laid on at high pressure by the Board of Health. After sleeping only two hours on the H[ousehold]W[ords] sofa, I arose yesterday morning like a dewy flower.’
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