Charles Dickens: A Life (74 page)

Nelly looks like a child in this photograph, with a ribbon in her tightly curled golden hair, short sleeves and an uncertain expression. She did not take to the stage as readily as her elder sisters, she was never much of a performer, and in August 1859 she gave up her career as an actress. In March 1860, when she was twenty-one, she became the owner of a large house in Mornington Crescent, No. 2 Houghton Place, Ampthill Square. Soon after this she disappears from the scene and Dickens begins to make many mysterious journeys to France.

The train crash at Staplehurst, where Dickens helped the injured while Nelly, who was hurt, was spirited away.

Dickens bought Gad’s Hill House in 1856 and made it into his country residence, extending and improving it, buying more land, acting the village squire, and entertaining friends.

Dickens loved France because literature was respected there, and he made many friends among French writers, often dining with Eugène Scribe, author of 300 comedies, and corresponding with Alexandre Dumas père in French, offering to be his ‘“guide à Londres” (faute de mieux)’ in 1851.

Céline Céleste, dancer, actress, born in Paris, made her name in US, in England from 1830. Theatre manager Benjamin Webster was her lover and business partner; both worked with the Ternans and with Dickens, who relished her production of
A Tale of Two Cities
.

Charles Fechter’s acting career was established in Paris, where Dickens first saw him. He gave a great Hamlet in London in 1860, and by 1865 Dickens described him as a very intimate friend, often at Gad’s Hill, ‘a capital fellow and Anti-Humbug’.

‘Whenever I am at Paris, I am dragged by invisible forces into their Morgue.’ It was an obsession he described without trying to explain. This illustration to an
Uncommercial Traveller
piece of 1860 catches the ‘neat and pleasant little woman’ with her child described by him, and charmingly suggests Dickens, middle aged, courteous. As he told it, he was taken faint, and went off to have a brandy and a dip in the floating swimming bath in the Seine.

Dickens reading the murder of Nancy by Sikes to an audience eager to be horrified. It excited and exhausted him, and he loved doing it. ‘I wanted to leave behind me the recollection of something very passionate and dramatic, done with simple means, if the art would justify the theme,’ he told Forster.

Katey Dickens, ‘Lucifer Box’ as her father called her for her fiery nature, was a loving daughter, but clear-sighted, and she determined to give posterity the truth about him as best she could.

Nelly, Dickens’s ‘magic circle of one’, was, he said, gentle, proud and self-reliant, had much to bear alone, and would be distressed if her history were known.

Charley Dickens never became the businessman his father tried to make him: well mannered and impractical, he left his family penniless.