Charles Dickens: A Life (52 page)

People who had known him earlier were curious to see him in his new incarnation as a reader. In November 1858, when he was reading in Southampton, Eleanor Christian, the young woman he had flirted with in Broadstairs in 1840, and long since married and middle aged, came to hear him read
A Christmas Carol
on his second night there. She fancied he had ‘withered and dwindled into a smaller man’, but he read admirably, and she was eager to speak to him after the event. She went round, only to be told he had already left, through a window. Evidently he was not always happy to meet his public.

Katey, looking back years later, remembered something that adds to the picture of this time: she said that her father would scarcely speak to her for nearly two years after the separation, his reason being that she made occasional visits to her mother. At the same time, she added, he sometimes asked her about her mother.
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Before setting out on his tour he had arranged for Fanny Ternan to travel to Florence to study opera singing. He wrote various letters of introduction for her: to the wife of the English Minister at Florence, Lady Normanby; to Mrs Thomas Trollope, also resident in Florence; to friends in Genoa, the Consul there and De La Rue. Mrs Ternan was to travel out with Fanny to act as her chaperone, even though this left Maria and Nelly on their own in London. Dickens insisted that Park Cottage, their modest rented home in Islington, was unhealthy, and accordingly they moved to rooms in the heart of town, in Berners Street, off Oxford Street. Two pretty actresses living unchaperoned attracted some attention, and Dickens was appalled to hear from them that they were being pestered by a policeman, whom he suspected of being ‘suborned to find out all about their domesticity by some “Swell”. If so, there can be no doubt that the man ought to be dismissed.’
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But, while he might instruct Wills to complain, and tell him there would be a ‘most prodigious uproar’ if the circumstances were stated in
The Times
, he knew very well that he depended on concealment, not publicity, in this case. So did Wills, and no more was heard of the policeman.

While this was going on his brother Fred was sued for divorce by his wife, who cited adultery, Fred responding that it was condoned. His youngest brother, Augustus, had meanwhile also deserted his wife and would soon leave for America with another woman. The Hogarth family observed these happenings with sardonic satisfaction. Forster was overseeing the ending of the partnership with Bradbury & Evans, which had become ‘as messy, and as decisive, a break as the one with Catherine’. Robert Patten, whose words these are, believes that Dickens construed their refusal to print his personal statement in
Punch
as a criticism of himself and of his image of the happy hearth, ‘which for Dickens and his public seemed almost to constitute a new myth of the Golden Age’.
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If this is right, Dickens was defending a myth which he knew very well had been desecrated by his own behaviour. The moral complications were such that, once again, he dealt with them through anger. Bradbury and Evans were both villains, to be cast out of his life for good.

Dickens’s account with Coutts for December shows that he gave Nelly a Christmas present, ‘C.D.E.T. £10’. The year ended, and 1859 began, with several readings in London of
A Christmas Carol
. After hearing him read this and the trial scene in
Pickwick
, Forster more than made up for his earlier disapproval with praise: ‘You read in a masterly way last night, indeed. I was immensely moved altogether by your execution of both pieces of reading.’
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Then he had to go into battle again on hearing that Dickens was thinking of letting Tavistock House to the Ternan family. Forster and his wife both felt that Dickens should remain there with his daughters ‘to give the girls some society’, and he wrote firmly advising him against the other plan: ‘I entertain no doubt whatever that such a step would
most decidedly be very damaging indeed.
With you I say, it is not a matter of reasoning so much as of feeling: and I would not have you at this moment do such a thing for 8,000, far less 800 pounds. Do not laugh at this. I feel it very strongly.’
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Wills too advised categorically against letting to the Ternans. Both men saw that such a move would give credence to the accusations of the Hogarth family and lead to more scandal, damaging to Dickens himself, to his family and to the Ternans. This time Dickens allowed himself to be persuaded. He had another argument with Forster over the naming of his new weekly magazine. Dickens wanted to call it ‘Household Harmony’. Either he believed he could still represent the myth of the happy hearth with the reading public, or he was in denial about his own recent behaviour. Forster suggested the words might raise a few eyebrows in view of the recent events in the Dickens household. Dickens accepted Forster’s judgement and gave in again. The magazine would be called
All the Year Round
, and Dickens would be its publisher, proprietor and editor.

Secrets, Mysteries and Lies

The portrait of Dickens painted by William Frith in January 1859 shows a man with angry eyes staring out as though to defy the world. It is not what you expect, knowing that artist and subject became friends, and reading Frith’s description of going to Dickens’s study, where he was starting work on
A Tale of Two Cities
, to watch him from a corner as he muttered, grimaced and walked about the room, pulling his beard. Neither was the beard what the commissioner of the portrait had wanted: Forster had been waiting since 1854 for his portrait of Dickens in hope of seeing a clean-shaven face again, but he had to give up after five years, and asked Frith to go ahead. And although there was affable conversation during the sittings, Frith saw something else in his face, and Dickens himself acknowledged ruefully that he had done well when he was presented with the finished portrait. It was hated by Georgina. When it was shown at the Royal Academy, Landseer observed, ‘I wish he looked less eager and busy, and not so much out of himself, or beyond himself. I should like to catch him asleep and quiet now and then.’
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He had survived the public part of his troubles and was taking up a new life – or, rather, several new lives. Dickens the public reader was preparing carefully adapted scripts from his novels and stories, with which he would soon travel all over the country, criss-crossing it by train; he was also already being urged to read in America, but as yet refused to commit himself, saying that a long absence would be ‘particularly painful to me’.
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Then there was Dickens the journalist, calling himself ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’, a first-rate reporter for his own magazine, travelling to places as far as Anglesey, Liverpool and Cornwall for stories. Dickens the country squire became a familiar figure in Kent as he walked his dogs and continued to improve the house at Gad’s Hill – extending the grounds, giving work to local people and well liked in the village as ‘a man as shifted a good deal of money in the place’; he was also known to be kindly and generous to the poor.
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For the winter of 1859 he let Gad’s to a tenant, but from then on kept it for himself throughout the year. Yet another Dickens, now magazine proprietor as well as editor, presided over No. 26 Wellington Street and surrounded himself with clever young men, aspiring writers who were eager to learn from him and ready to flatter: Edmund Yates, George Sala (both from theatrical families), Percy Fitzgerald, an Irish lawyer with a fluent pen, and John Hollingshead, a largely self-taught journalist who later became a theatre manager. Dickens gave them work, corrected and improved their copy, was a good friend to them and dined them well, making a great performance of the preparation of his gin punch, like ‘a comic conjuror, with a little of the pride of one who had made a great discovery for the benefit of humanity’.
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At home, he struggled to steer his sons into careers. The example of their uncle Fred was not encouraging: early in 1862 Fred was imprisoned in the Queen’s Bench Prison, having divorced, refused to pay alimony, fled abroad and returned bankrupt.
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Alfred was being prepared at Wimbledon to take Army exams, which he failed in 1862. Frank was found a job in the City in 1860 but performed poorly and was taken to work at
All the Year Round
instead: his father got him a reader’s ticket for the British Museum and sent him to lodge with the Stone family in London. Overcoming his objections to patronage, Dickens sought help from Lord John Russell and Lord Clarence Paget in getting a naval cadetship for Sydney in 1860. He also needed to give his daughters some social life, which was not always easy, given that there was a question mark over the respectability of their aunt Georgina; and that Wilkie Collins’s brother Charles wanted to marry Katey, while Wilkie himself was living with Caroline Graves, a woman who already had an illegitimate child, of whose existence Katey and Mamie were supposed to be unaware, and whom they were certainly not allowed to meet. Secrets and lies threaded through the family’s social arrangements.

Another of the secrets was of course that Dickens was the patron and protector of the Ternan girls and maintained his close interest in their careers and living conditions, as though they were a second set of daughters. In March 1859 their housing was sorted out when Fanny, back from Florence, and Maria, described as ‘spinsters of 31 Berners Street’, purchased the lease of No. 2 Houghton Place, Ampthill Square, a large house in the Mornington Crescent area. There is nothing in writing to prove that Dickens paid for it, but the circumstantial evidence is persuasive, and a year later, when Nelly reached the age of twenty-one and could own property, her sisters sold the house on to her. All three girls were working in the spring of 1859, Fanny singing in the popular French opera
Fra Diavolo
, Maria and Nelly both appearing in light plays and farces at the Haymarket; all the same, from May 1859 Dickens’s accounts at Coutts Bank show many payments to ‘HP Trust’, ‘HP’, ‘HPN’ – standing, no doubt, for Houghton Place Trust, Houghton Place and Houghton Place Nelly.
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And in August 1859 Nelly made her last appearance on stage, at the Haymarket, in a play by Charles Mathews the younger. She was cast as Mrs Gatherwool to Mathews’s Gatherwool, the play was appropriately named
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
, and with it she ended her career. Whether this was by choice, or because she was offered no more work, or because Dickens preferred her not to work, remains obscure.
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As for Dickens the novelist, he gave his imagination a shake, turned away from chastising London’s financiers, civil servants, politicians and lawyers and produced, at high speed and in weekly instalments, two novels in the two and a half years between 1859 and the summer of 1861. The first,
A Tale of Two Cities
, was an adventure story set in the second half of the eighteenth century.
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It was inspired by Carlyle’s study of the French Revolution and researched under Carlyle’s guidance, and the central character, Sydney Carton, was a new departure for Dickens, a hard-drinking lawyer who rises to heroism, giving his life to save that of his rival in love. His other inspiration came, as he admitted, from Wardour in
The Frozen Deep
, but Carton is given more panache, and goes to a more thrilling death. It was to be serialized in
All the Year Round
from the first number at the end of April 1859, to give his magazine a cracking start, while Bradbury & Evans continued
Household Words
without him.
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He had not taken on a weekly serial since
Hard Times
in 1854, and this one was to be almost twice as long. He found it hard to begin, and a strain to fit his material into short weekly episodes, but it did its job of launching
All the Year Round
as he had hoped. Wills reported a print run of 100,000 after the first week, and in six weeks they were in profit.
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There was no shortage of eager readers for
A Tale of Two Cities
, then or later: it is on record that in 1968 it far outsold all other Dickens novels in the US, and it remains a favourite with many English readers.
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But his move away from social commentary did not make him any more popular with English reviewers, and he was either ignored or attacked, for lack of humour and a plot hard to follow. Forster was almost alone in praising
A Tale of Two Cities
.

It is true that the plot is too long drawn out and elaborate, working through the histories of three French families from the 1750s to the 1790s, linked by crime and cruelty; and that the horrific depiction of the
ancien régime
is somewhat mechanical in its horrors, the characters like emblematic puppets representing good and evil – virtuous doctor, perfect daughter and wife, wicked marquis, vengeful woman of the people. One of the best scenes is a spy trial in London, with an English crowd demonstrating its eagerness for the accused to be hanged, drawn and quartered before their eyes. Dickens also rises with verve to Paris in the Terror, with its tides of violence, street dancing, denunciations and settling of scores at summary trials. The climax of the action is preposterous and deeply sentimental, but the tension is so built up that Carton’s famous last words before the guillotine – ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done …’ – make their effect on all but the most determinedly stony hearts. This is Dickens the showman, amusing his people and drawing their tears.

‘It has greatly moved and excited me in the doing,’ he told Collins, ‘and Heaven knows I have done my best and have believed in it.’
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It took John Sutherland to show the anachronism in allowing Carton to use chloroform in the prison rescue scene decades before its use was known. Sutherland’s clever essay should be reprinted with every new edition, because it adds to the entertainment, and
A Tale of Two Cities
was intended as entertainment.
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The horrors, thrills and gallant self-sacrifice all have something of the popular theatre about them, and indeed it was quickly staged at the Lyceum by its French manager, Madame Céleste, a dancer herself; and the Carmagnole danced by bloody-handed revolutionaries in Paris was danced again to the applause of the British bourgeoisie in the stalls. Dickens also put the book out in monthly parts, with illustrations, but it was the last of his novels to be illustrated by ‘Phiz’, i.e., Hablot Browne. Although Browne had worked with him since
The Pickwick Papers
, he is said not to have taken Dickens’s side over the domestic split, and there was no more work for him and not much further contact between the two men after 1859.
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