Charles Dickens: A Life (51 page)

The paid readings began on 29 April, at St Martin’s Hall, with
The Cricket on the Hearth
, and Dickens was greeted ‘with a roar of cheering which might have been heard at Charing Cross’.
¹⁷
He began by saying he saw readings as a way of strengthening what he felt to be almost a personal friendship with his readers, and with that he was cheered again, and so it went on; and it was reported that hundreds had been turned away from the box office. He was after all the nation’s entertainer and known as the friend of the people. On 1 May he spoke briefly at the Royal Academy banquet, on 6 May he gave a second reading, and on 8 May he spoke for the Artists’ Benevolent Fund. On 9 May he wrote to Miss Coutts to tell her that he and Catherine were virtually separated, that the marriage had been ‘for years and years as miserable a one as ever was made’, and that he had moved out of Tavistock House into his office rooms ‘to leave her Mother free to do what she can at home, towards the getting of her away to some happier mode of existence if possible’. He said the children did not love her, and that her sister Georgina had observed this estrangement, as had her dead sister Mary, so many years ago. The letter ends with further accusations against Catherine of ‘weaknesses and jealousies’, adding that ‘her mind has, at times, been certainly confused besides.’
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On Monday, 10 May, Dickens talked to Charley about the impending separation. Charley was taken by surprise and, not wanting to argue face to face – he must have remembered the arguments about his own future at Eton – he chose to write from his office at Barings to say that he had decided, clearly against his father’s wishes, to live with his mother. He explained that it was not that he did not love his father but that he felt it his duty to be with her. Dickens later told others that he had suggested this plan, but Charley’s letter makes it plain that it was not so. It was Charley’s own idea, and his finest hour, making him a credit to Eton and to Miss Coutts. Later in the year, when his father suggested they might take a holiday in Ireland together, Charley did not take up the offer.

On this same 10 May, Georgina left for Gad’s Hill, having made clear to her sister that she did not intend to support her in any way. She would have taken Plorn with her, and it is likely that Mamie and Katey went too. Georgy was prudently removing herself from the field of battle, and from the rest of her own family, who could be expected to be shocked by her preference for staying with her sister’s unkind husband. They were indeed so outraged that they accused her of sexually supplanting Catherine, which was not the case.
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She loved Dickens, whose petted companion she had been for half her life, and was also shrewd enough to see that she would be better off staying with him than leaving for a dull and impecunious life as an unmarried daughter living with her parents. For his part, he loved her for her devotion to him, and was intensely grateful to her for taking his side and continuing to act as housekeeper. Dickens announced that his eldest daughter, Mary, would be in charge of his domestic arrangements, but it was Georgy – Miss Hogarth – who ran things.

On 19 May, Catherine wrote to Miss Coutts as she prepared to leave Tavistock House, empty of all her children but Charley, and to go with her mother: ‘I have now – God help me – only one course to pursue. One day though not now I may be able to tell you how hardly I have been used.’
²⁰
Hers was a very quiet statement. Miss Coutts sent a message to Dickens asking him to call. Instead he wrote by return, ‘How far I love and honour you, you know in part, though you can never fully know. But nothing on earth – no, not even you, can move me from the resolution I have taken.’ He added, ‘If you have seen Mrs Dickens in company with her wicked mother, I cannot enter – no, not even with you – upon any question that was discussed in that woman’s presence.’
²¹
The wickedness of Mrs Hogarth lay in her alleging that the reason for the separation was Dickens’s involvement with Nelly Ternan, and in casting doubt on Georgy’s virtue for good measure.

Mark Lemon, as a close family friend, had agreed to act for Catherine, and, after another reading by Dickens on 20 May, negotiations began. Forster, Dickens and his lawyer Frederic Ouvry, who had taken over most of his legal business in 1856, reached a preliminary agreement with Lemon that Catherine should have £400 a year and a carriage.
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Dickens moved back into Tavistock House, where he composed a letter about the separation – it is discussed below – which he sent to his manager Arthur Smith, authorizing him to show it ‘to anyone who wishes to do me right’. Smith and his brother Albert were both at the heart of the theatrical world, good friends who could be relied on to support and if necessary protect Dickens. After another reading Dickens wrote to Ouvry about his mother-in-law and sister-in-law Helen, accusing them of ‘smashing slanders’ against him, but exonerating Catherine herself: ‘She has a great tenderness for me, and I sincerely believe would be glad to show it. I would not therefore add to her pain by a hair’s breadth.’
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On 27 May his Coutts account shows a payment of four guineas to ‘N’. By now gossip was circulating round London. Annie Thackeray wrote to a friend, ‘Papa says the story is that Charley met his Father & Miss whatever the actress’ name out walking on Hampstead Heath. But I dont believe a word of the scandal.’
²⁴
And when Thackeray heard talk at the Garrick that Dickens was having an affair with Georgina he contradicted it, saying it was with an actress. Dickens wrote to him to deny everything. The two men fell out further over another dispute at the Garrick Club, where Dickens’s brash young friend Edmund Yates had insulted Thackeray, and the friendship between the two great novelists came to an end. The news of Dickens’s separation reached as far as Germany, where Marian Evans (George Eliot) and George Henry Lewes heard it, and perhaps disapproved less than others, being themselves an adulterous couple.

More readings – with packed audiences – and on 1 June Dickens spoke for the Playground and General Recreation Society. After this he decided to publish a ‘Personal’ statement in the press. Forster did his best to get him to give up such a bad idea, but he was stubborn, even sending a copy of the statement to Catherine with a note saying he hoped all unkindness was over between them. The statement was cloudy, alluding to domestic troubles of long standing and now dealt with by an amicable arrangement, and to the wicked spreading of abominably false rumours involving ‘innocent persons dear to my heart’. It must have been incomprehensible to the public in general, and although
The Times
printed it, and Dickens himself put it into
Household Words
,
Punch
refused it. This was enough to make Dickens break furiously with the proprietors of
Punch
, who were also his publishers, Bradbury and Evans, and to quarrel with its editor, his old and dear friend and fellow actor in so many theatricals, Mark Lemon.
²⁵

The quarrel was so fierce on his side that he insisted on his older children breaking off their long-established friendships with the Lemon and Evans children. Mamie’s and Katey’s friendships with Annie and Minnie Thackeray also became difficult, and even after Dickens had forced Mrs Hogarth and her daughter Helen to sign reluctant retractions of what they had said about his relations with Ternan – and with Georgina – he decreed that the children should not speak to their grandmother or aunt again. A letter to Charley warned him that he forbade them ‘to utter one word to their grandmother or to Helen Hogarth. If they are ever brought into the presence of either of these two, I charge them immediately to leave their mother’s house and come back to me.’
²⁶

On 8 June he wrote to Yates, from Gad’s, where he had retreated: ‘If you could know how much I have felt within this last month, and what a sense of Wrong has been upon me, and what a strain and struggle I have lived under, you would see that my heart is so jagged and rent and out of shape, that it does not this day leave me hand enough to shape these words.’
²⁷
On 9 June the statement appeared in
Household Words
, on 10 June he read ‘Little Dombey’, his tightly condensed version of the life of Paul Dombey, to a weeping and cheering audience. On 12 July he resigned from the committee of the Garrick Club, and at the beginning of August set off on a provincial tour. Meanwhile Arthur Smith had given a copy of the letter Dickens had entrusted him with to the London correspondent of the New York
Tribune
, and on 16 August it appeared in print in New York, and was soon copied in the English papers. Harsher than the letter published in
The Times
, it presented the marriage as having been unhappy for many years, and Georgina Hogarth as responsible for long preventing a separation by her care for the children and her goodness. ‘She has remonstrated, reasoned, suffered and toiled, again and again to prevent a separation between Mrs Dickens and me.’ It went on to say Mrs Dickens herself had often suggested a separation, ‘that her always increasing estrangement made a mental disorder under which she sometimes labours – more, that she felt herself unfit for the life she had to lead as my wife and that she would be better far away.’ These remarks sound like ones made during a quarrel, when Catherine can well be imagined saying something along the lines of ‘If things are so bad …’ or ‘If you dislike me so much – it might be better if we were to separate.’ They are the sort of words a miserable wife might use, hoping to bring her husband to treat her more kindly. The letter goes on to boast of Dickens’s generosity in making the terms of the separation and adds a further testimony to Georgina, named as having ‘a higher claim on his affection, respect and gratitude than anybody in the world’. Then it speaks of how ‘Two wicked persons who should have spoken very differently of me … have … coupled with this separation the name of a young lady for whom I have a great attachment and regard. I will not repeat her name – I honour it too much. Upon my soul and honour, there is not on this earth a more virtuous and spotless creature than this young lady. I know her to be as innocent and pure, and as good as my own dear daughters.’ This was of course Nelly. Finally, he says his children ‘are perfectly certain that I would not deceive them, and the confidence among us is without fear’.
²⁸

Dickens said he had not authorized the publication of this shameful document but, given his instructions to Arthur Smith, it was a feeble defence. Ouvry told him it was ‘unfortunate’. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, appalled, wrote, ‘what a crime, for a man to use his genius as a cudgel against his near kin, even against the woman he promised to protect tenderly with life and heart – taking advantage of his hold with the public to turn public opinion against her. I call it dreadful.’
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Thackeray and Mrs Gaskell were among those who felt that publicizing his domestic problems was about as bad as the separation itself. Nelly, working in Manchester at this time, was given a review so disapproving that it suggests her part in the scandal was known and had made her unwelcome to the theatre critic there.

Dickens began his first provincial tour of eighty-five readings at the beginning of August, taking in Scotland and Ireland (and leaving Georgina to make arrangements for the boys to visit their mother, who found them ‘good and affectionate’ but was saddened by their not being allowed to remain with her as long as she wished).
³⁰
In Ireland he was amused to read that he had ‘a bright blue eye’, and less pleased with the comment that ‘although only forty-six I look like an old man’.
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And when Miss Coutts sent him a letter saying she had been visited by Catherine with some of the children, home for their summer holidays, he replied with another attack on Catherine, saying,

… since we spoke of her before, she has caused me unspeakable agony of mind; and I must plainly put before you what I know to be true … She does not – and she never did – care for the children: and the children do not – and they never did – care for her. The little play that is acted in your Drawing-room is not the truth, and the less the children play it, the better for themselves … O Miss Coutts do I not know that the weak hand that never could help or serve my name in the least, has struck at it – in conjunction with the wickedest people, whom I have loaded with benefits! I want to communicate with her no more. I want to forgive and forget her … From Walter away in India, to little Plornish at Gad’s Hill there is a grim knowledge among them … that what I now write, is the plain bare fact. She has always disconcerted them; they have always disconcerted her; and she is glad to be rid of them, and they are glad to be rid of her.
³²

Catherine must have said something indiscreet, and Dickens, like a furious child, picked up the sharpest weapon to hand to discredit her with Miss Coutts: his claim that she was play-acting her love for her children, and that they did not love her. It was a ludicrous charge, belied by enough evidence to make his assertion unlikely to impress Miss Coutts.

The world was now divided for Dickens between those who supported him through the separation, or at least said nothing, and his enemies, who had failed him. In this situation the applause and praise received at readings became increasingly important as balm to his wounds, allowing him to believe in his own goodness. Having specialized in being a good man for so long and been known as such to the public, he was intent on keeping his good reputation: hence the public statements putting others in the wrong. But he could not entirely hide the truth from others or from himself. A villain does well to have a certain blitheness, which Dickens depicted in his early novels, where Squeers, Fagin, Mantalini and Quilp all make you laugh; but from
Dombey
on bad behaviour becomes serious and heavy-handed, as in Carker, Murdstone, Tulkinghorn, Rigaud, Fledgeby and Headstone. Even Steerforth is not funny, and Dickens was naturally quite unable to make jokes about his own situation as a man who puts away his wife and then finds the girl he loves unwilling to accommodate him. To Mary Boyle, whose affection he cherished, and who wrote to him in September with delicate inquiries, he justified his behaviour by saying he had made his public statements only to protect the innocent. Writing to her again in December, he added this: ‘Constituted to do the work that is in me, I am a man full of passion and energy, and my own wild way that I must go, is often – at the best – wild enough. But vengeance and hatred have never had a place in my breast.’
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You can feel sorry for him as he struggles, but it is impossible to like what he did, or on occasion to believe what he said.