Charles Dickens: A Life (87 page)

27.
This is Dolby’s account,
Charles Dickens as I Knew Him
, pp. 421–9.

28.
Quoted by George Curry in
Charles Dickens and Annie Fields
(San Marino, Calif., 1988), reprinted from the
Huntington Library Quarterly
, 51 (Winter 1988), p. 48.

29.
Diary of Annie Fields, quoted on p. 42 of ibid.

30.
Katey told Gladys Storey about Nelly staying at Gad’s, reported in
Dickens and Daughter
(London, 1939), p. 127. For Nelly’s later friendship with Georgy and Mamie see
Chapter 27
below.

31.
D to Dolby, 11 Sept. 1869,
P
, XII, p. 408.

32.
D to Arthur Ryland, 6 Sept. 1869,
P
, XII, p. 407.

33.
D to Dolby, 27 Nov. 1869,
P
, XII, pp. 445–6.

34.
Dolby,
Charles Dickens as I Knew Him
, p. 338.

35.
Una Pope-Hennessy,
Charles Dickens
(London, 1945), p. 451, attributes this account to young Lord Ribblesdale, but Collins,
Interviews and Recollections
, II, p. 112, attributes it to Lord Russell’s granddaughter Baroness Deichmann,
Impressions and Memories
(London, 1926), pp. 101–3, which must be right.

36.
Dolby gives the story as Dickens told it to him on p. 432 of his
Charles Dickens as I Knew Him.

37.
D to GH, 12 Nov. 1869,
P
, XII, p. 439.

38.
Dolby,
Charles Dickens as I Knew Him
, pp. 440–41. One of the lectures was given at the Crystal Palace to the crews of the Harvard and Oxford boats who raced against one another, and allowed Dickens to express his warm feelings about America again; the second, already mentioned, was to the Birmingham and Midland Institute, with which he had been long connected, and to which he returned for the last time in Jan. 1870.

39.
D to Thomas Trollope, 4 Nov. 1869,
P
, XII, p. 434.

40.
As with
Our Mutual Friend
, there was a clause in the contract covering repayment of the advance should he die before the book was finished, to be arranged with Forster.

41.
D to John Murray, 19 Oct. 1869,
P
, XII, p. 426.

42.
Or Responsions, an exam taken in the second year, no longer in existence.

43.
D to Macready, 27 Dec. 1869,
P
, XII, p. 457.

44.
Dolby,
Charles Dickens as I Knew Him
, p. 441. Georgina also says he was unable to walk that day, in her edition of his letters.

  
1.
George Dolby,
Charles Dickens as I Knew Him
(London, 1885; my edition 1912), pp. 452–3.

  
2.
D to Wills, 23 Jan. 1870,
P
, XII, p. 470.

  
3.
D to C. E. Norton, 11 Mar. 1870,
P
, XII, p. 488.

  
4.
Mamie attended the Queen’s ball on 17 May, without her father, who was not well enough. Forster’s
The Life of Charles Dickens
, III (London, 1874),
Chapter 20
.

  
5.
Dickens had given his opinion of the book to Wills in a letter from America, 25 Feb. 1868,
P
, XII, pp. 59–60, in which he chided him for putting words of praise into
AYR
.

  
6.
On account of this he had to decline dinner with Sir Charles Dilke, grandson of the Charles Dilke who had given him half a crown when he was working at the blacking factory. D to Dilke, 27 Feb. 1870,
P
, XII, p. 483.

  
7.
Given in Malcolm Andrews,
Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves: Dickens and the Public Readings
(Oxford, 2006), pp. 264–5.

  
8.
Forster’s
Life
, III,
Chapter 20
, gives Dickens’s words and describes the scene. Others say he kissed his hand to the audience and had tears on his face.

  
9.
The codicil appears at the end of his will, dated 2 June and witnessed by two of his assistants at Wellington Street, Holsworth and Walker. Wills retained his one eighth share in
AYR
, which Charley bought out after his father’s death.

10.
D to Alfred Dickens, 20 May 1870,
P
, XII, pp. 529–30.

11.
D to George Clowes, 18 Feb. 1870,
P
, XII, p. 481. As far as I know this is the only time Dickens uses the formulation: compare Jane Austen with her ‘sucking child’ (
Sense and Sensibility
) and her ‘darling child’ (
Pride and Prejudice
).

12.
The Thuggee were an Indian secret society that came to the attention of the British in the early nineteenth century and were largely put down by them. The Thuggee specialized in murdering and robbing travellers, strangling them with a cloth noose and disposing of the bodies rapidly.

13.
D to S. Cartwright, 11 Apr. 1870,
P
, XII, p. 508; D to Charles Kent, 25 Apr. 1870,
P
, XII, p. 512; D to Arthur Helps, 26 Apr. 1870,
P
, XII, p. 513. When on 31 May he told Mrs Bancroft he had reached Gad’s ‘from town circuitously, to get a little change of air on the road’, it was perhaps via Peckham.
P
, XII, p. 541.

14.
D to Arthur Helps, 3 May 1870,
P
, XII, p. 519; D to Mrs Dallas, 2 May 1870,
P
, XII, p. 517.

15.
Forster,
Life
, III,
Chapter 20
.

16.
Lady Houghton was born in 1814 Annabella Hungerford Crewe, daughter of the second Baron Crewe and granddaughter of the first Baron and Lady (Frances) Crewe, the famous beauty and Whig hostess, who had employed Dickens’s grandmother as housekeeper.

      Dickens had described the Prince of Wales as ‘a poor dull idle fellow’ to Cerjat, 16 Mar. 1862,
P
, X, p. 55. He also complained to Macready, 31 Mar. 1863, at the time of the royal wedding, ‘We really have been be-princed to the last point of human endurance; haven’t we?’
P
, X, p. 227. Mamie insisted on her father taking her, with extreme reluctance, to the Prince’s ball in the City in May 1863.

      Leopold II of Belgium, Queen Victoria’s first cousin, was the monster who made himself a private colonial empire in the Congo, of land largely bought for him by Stanley, and was guilty of atrocities on a massive scale. He was responsible for the enslavement, mutilation and deaths of many thousands of people in Africa. He was also so disliked in Belgium that his funeral was booed. He was altogether a vile man, although Dickens is unlikely to have known this.

17.
The play was a translation of a French drama,
The Prima Donna
, suggested by Dickens after he had seen one of his daughters acting in a country-house production of another play, written by Herman Merivale, a lawyer with dramatic ambitions, and also a contributor to
AYR
. Merivale was also involved in the production at the Freake house in Cromwell Road, and said Dickens stage managed well and showed no sign of illness beyond wearing a slipper on his bad foot and using a stick. His account is hard to square with what we know of Dickens’s condition at this time, but Merivale insisted that he rose cheerfully to the dramatic occasion.

18.
Lady Dorothy Nevil in her
Reminiscences
talked of the bubbling: see Philip Collins (ed.),
Dickens: Interviews and Recollections
, II (London, 1981), p. 350. Lady Jeune, later Lady St Helier, published her
Memories of Fifty Years
in 1909, and gives her memory of Dickens on p. 78. Inevitably with someone as famous as Dickens there are conflicting accounts of him.

19.
D to Mrs Percy Fitzgerald, 26 May 1870,
P
, XII, pp. 534–5.

20.
Ibid., p. 534; D to Mrs Bancroft, 31 May 1870,
P
, XII, p. 541.

21.
D to Fechter, 27 May 1870,
P
, XII, p. 538.

22.
According to Percy Fitzgerald, Collins,
Interviews and Recollections
, II, p. 353.

23.
Pulvermacher (1815–84) was a Prussian who used Faraday’s 1831 invention of the induction coil to make his electrical chains. He patented them in the US, came to London in 1859 and was successful in selling them, claiming that they cured all kinds of rheumatic, neuralgic, epileptic, paralytic and nervous complaints, as well as indigestion and spasms, and that ‘Philosophers, divines, eminent physicians, in all parts of the world, recommend them.’ He had a shop in Oxford Street and ended his days living on the heights of Hampstead, in Windmill House.

24.
Katey wrote and spoke several accounts. See Collins,
Interviews and Recollections
, II, pp. 354–8, and Gladys Storey,
Dickens and Daughter
(London, 1939), pp. 133–4.

25.
This is one of Dickens’s last manuscripts, written in a small ruled book in blue printed wrappers, with the words ‘Gad’s Hill Cellar Casks’ in his hand with an oval on the front. At the end of page 1 he added ‘Besides which there are 5 Gallons in stone jars of the Whiskey to be used first – ’ Page 4 is blank. I am grateful to David Clegg for sending me in September 2002 the sale catalogue of Jarndyce, No. 46 Great Russell Street, which prints these details. It is headed: ‘Dickens’s Last Project: Stocktaking the Cellar at Gad’s Hill’.

26.
William Richard Hughes,
A Week’s Tramp in Dickens-Land
(London, 1891), p. 207: Hughes was told this by Trood himself, the landlord of the Falstaff Inn, who said he had been offered £24 for the cheque because of the signature, but turned it down.

27.
This was the version given by Sala in his account of Dickens’s death in the
Daily Telegraph
, reprinted in his short biography of 1870,
Charles Dickens.

28.
This is partly taken from Georgina’s account in her edition of Dickens’s letters, which gives a short narrative for each year and ends with her description of the last days. Also Arthur A. Adrian,
Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle
(Oxford, 1957), pp. 136–7, crediting the obituary in
The Times
– which of course relied on Georgina’s narrative – and Gladys Storey’s in
Dickens and Daughter
. Storey, whose information came through Katey, says Dickens also mentioned Forster among his incoherent words. Forster, in his final chapter, says dinner had been begun before Dickens showed signs of trouble and pain, and that the only coherent words he spoke were a wish for dinner to go on. Then he spoke incoherently and rose, and Georgina struggled to get him on to the sofa. There were clearly no servants in the room, and in any case the food was sent up in a dinner-lift.

29.
The dogs, if they were about, would have recognized Nelly: see Dolby on how they never forgot anyone they had been introduced to,
Charles Dickens as I Knew Him
, p. 57.

      After
The Invisible Woman
was published I was sent information which suggested this different narrative for 8 June. I worked out a possible sequence of events and gave the arguments for and against in an appendix to the paperback edition, to which I refer interested readers. No more information has come to light since then and I accept that it seems an unlikely story, although not an impossible one, given what we know of Dickens’s habits.

30.
Katey’s words to Gladys Storey,
Dickens and Daughter
, p. 136.

31.
Nelly’s daughter Gladys told Malcolm Morley that her mother told her she was present when Dickens died (
Dickensian
, 1960). Gladys Storey told Walter Dexter that Katey had told her Georgina sent for Nelly, Dexter to Le Comte de Suzannet, 22 Feb. 1939, letter in Charles Dickens Museum. Una Pope-Hennessy said that Gladys Storey told her that Katey said she fetched Nelly, and put this into her
Charles Dickens
(London, 1945), p. 464.

32.
She sent a piece of the hair to Norton, Dec. 1873. Adrian,
Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle
, p. 199.

33.
These are the splendid last words of Dolby’s
Charles Dickens as I Knew Him.

34.
Shorne Church was heavily restored a few years later and the village has expanded and changed.

35.
GH to Ouvry, 18 June 1870, says expenses were incurred ‘by the Cathedral people at Rochester in preparing the grave, tolling the bell, etc.’. Given by Arthur A. Adrian in ‘Charles Dickens and Dean Stanley’,
Dickensian
(1946), p. 156.

36.
Richard Cumberland, eighteenth-century playwright, is little remembered now except as Sheridan caricatured him as Sir Fretful Plagiary in
The Critic.

37.
Dean Stanley’s account is taken from Adrian, ‘Charles Dickens and Dean Stanley’, pp. 152–4.

38.
Wilkie Collins said Charles Reade was there and wept on his shoulder, although no one else lists him. The absence of Tom Beard, one of the oldest friends, is surprising.

39.
Sala’s account is given in the
Dickensian
(1950), p. 116. George Sala (1828–96), son of an actress, worked closely with Dickens on
HW
and
AYR
. He also had a connection with the
Daily Telegraph
, which suggests he may have had something to do with the knocking on the Dean’s door.