One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  The cheap papers took up the dispute with glee. On the same Saturday the Critic enjoyed combining the Garrick row with Dickens’s personal statement, deciding that both he and Thackeray had fallen into the trap of believing that their private concerns were of interest to the public at large. (Of course, the papers were banking on the existence of just such an interest when they brought these matters to the attention of their readers.) ‘Your literary man gets his head above the soil’, wrote the Critic’s hack, ‘and imagines that the business of mankind mainly consists in looking at him.’ Dickens had merely managed to set ‘all the old women in the land inquiring what dreadful things the amiable author of “Pickwick” has been doing’.19

  As the meeting of 10 July loomed, Dickens advised Yates not to attend; he was sure Thackeray would not.20 On 7 July he filled in his friend in India, W.H. Russell of The Times, with the news of recent events, including the unfortunate breaking of the Atlantic telegraph cable, his own public readings from his books, and the latest news of trouble at the Garrick:

  The Garrick is in convulsions. The attack is consequent on Thackeray’s having complained to the Committee (with an amazing want of discretion, as I think), of an article about him by Edmund Yates, in a thing called Town Talk. The article is in bad taste, no doubt, and would have been infinitely better left alone. But I conceive that the Committee can have nothing earthly, celestial, or infernal, to do with it. Committee thinks otherwise, and calls on E.Y. to apologize or retire. E.Y. can’t apologize (Thackeray having written him a letter that really renders it impossible), and won’t retire. Committee thereupon call General Meeting, yet pending. Thackeray thereupon, by way of shewing what an ill thing it is for writers to attack one another in print, denounces E.Y. (in Virginians) as ‘Young Grub Street’. Frightful mess, muddle, complication, and botheration, ensue. Which Witch’s broth is now in full boil.21

  This amused and apparently disinterested account did not stop Dickens from stiffening Yates’s elbow in his determination not to give way. The two men met for dinner on 8 July, and Yates wrote to apologise to the Garrick committee on the day of its meeting, but reiterated his decision not to apologise to Thackeray.22

  The great meeting on Saturday, 10 July was attended by 127 members, among them Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Forster. Yates’s letter was read out, as was one from Thackeray regretting the fact that ‘our little Society has been plunged for weeks past in a turmoil’ in which he unfortunately had played a part, but still maintaining that Yates’s conduct was detrimental to ‘our or any Society’.23 Thackeray, like Yates, had taken soundings among his friends. The Edinburgh publisher John Blackwood, who was bringing out Bulwer Lytton’s latest novel What Will He Do with It? in the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine, advised Thackeray to drop the matter.24 But Thackeray was stubborn. He well knew that he had a propensity to get into petty arguments with friends and acquaintances, most of which he resolved in the end with comic expressions made up of equal amounts of penitence and pride. One such example is his youthful journalism attacking Bulwer Lytton and his letter of apology in June 1853. Another is a spat he had with John Forster in 1847, when he refused to shake hands with him after hearing that Forster had spoken of him being ‘as false as hell’. On that occasion Dickens acted as peacemaker, and Thackeray accepted that while ‘Forster ought not to have used the words’, he himself ‘ought not to have taken them up’.25

  In the Yates affair Thackeray was unable to see the funny side or accept that the offence was trivial. Two of his Punch friends later told him he could have been more magnanimous towards a young penny-a-liner. Shirley Brooks thought he should have sent Yates a note saying, ‘Dear Yates next time you want a guinea write to me and not of me. Yours etc.’26 And according to Silver’s diary, Horace Mayhew, after drinking a lot at a Punch dinner in August 1863, found the courage to remonstrate with Thackeray, saying, ‘With your strength you might have been more generous.’ At this, according to Silver, Thackeray ‘blazes up – and finally bolts’.27

  At the meeting Dickens, Collins, and Forster spoke up for Yates, but lost the vote by seventy to forty-six in favour of requiring Yates to apologise or be removed from the club.28 Dickens, in the midst of arranging with his son Charley what should happen about Catherine and her contact with the children, wrote to the Garrick committee on Monday, 12 July, resigning from it (though not from membership of the club) on the grounds that he differed from the majority ‘on the whole principle of last Saturday’s discussion’.29 As no apology came from Yates, his name was erased from the club’s list of members on Tuesday, 20 July.30 Thackeray had won the day, but he was unwell and uneasy. His diary in late June records early-morning ‘spasms’ and ‘cold sweats’. By 12 July, with the Garrick meeting – which he had not attended – over, he escaped to the continent, travelling in Germany and Switzerland until 17 August, when he returned home, still suffering from frequent bouts of sickness.31 His friend and fellow member of the Garrick Frank Fladgate informed him while he was in Lucerne that ‘the matter has long since ceased as between you and the ex-member’. ‘It became a question between him and the Club only – and it is settled.’ Fladgate added a pun at Yates’s expense: ‘Some one wrote to me the other day “Y’s conduct has been very un Y’s [sic]”. I can add nothing to all this.’32

  The matter might have rested there, though Yates was sore at losing his place in a club which he was proud to have joined at an unusually early age, and Dickens was furious at both Thackeray’s snobbery and the subservience of the club to Thackeray’s pique. He also had to read in the minutes of the meeting of 20 July which decided to expel Yates that the latter ‘had been unfortunate in those whom he had selected as his advisers’.33 Dickens fanned the flames rather than damping the embers. On 23 July he wrote to a club member who had supported Yates at the meeting, thanking him for his ‘generous feeling’ and assuring him that he, Dickens, intended to ‘render steady, unflinching, and enduring support’ of Yates’s cause. The committee had ‘gone perfectly mad’, he said; moreover, he believed that in expelling Yates they had acted illegally. He had recommended Yates ‘to ascertain, from good sound legal authority, the exact state of the legality of the question’. ‘This he is now doing.’34 According to Yates, in the self-excusing pamphlet he wrote for private circulation in March 1859, Mr Thackeray, Mr Yates, and the Garrick Club: The Correspondence and the Facts, he was told by a legal expert that the committee had no right to eject him and that he should try to gain entry to the Garrick in order to get himself forcibly removed, which he duly did. The secretary, Alexander Doland, refused him entry, which allowed Yates to name him as the defendant in the case he was preparing to bring.35

  From 28 July to 1 August Dickens was at his house, Gad’s Hill, in Kent, getting ready for his three-and-a-half-month reading tour of the country, beginning in Bristol on 2 August.36 He gave no more thought to Yates’s position, except to advise him from his stopover in Liverpool on 21 August that his own solicitor Frederic Ouvry believed it would be best to wait until the end of the long legal vacation before taking the next step of serving a writ on the secretary of the Garrick Club.37 In the meantime the penny papers had their say. Reynolds’s Newspaper, having dug the dirt on Dickens after the separation statement, now turned its fire on the Garrick Club and Thackeray’s vanity and snobbery. In ‘The Garrick Club – Thackeray and Yates – A Tempest in a Teapot’ on Sunday, 1 August it described the members of the club as an eclectic mixture of comic authors, Whig journalists, ‘fourth-rate artists’, ‘fast barristers’, ‘faded dandies’, ‘unspeakable’ MPs, and ‘impudent showmen’, together with ‘a small, miscellaneous shoal of insignificant individuals whose sole title to distinction is that they are inveterate and intense tufthunters’. The story of Yates’s article is told, with much quoting of its criticism of Thackeray, with which Reynolds’s tends to agree; Thackeray, ‘this great god of the Garrick’, is condemned for his sensitivity and also for hypocrisy, since ‘there is no writer living who has indulge
d more extensively in the practice of giving sketches and caricatures of his friends and acquaintances than Mr Thackeray’. The committee has acted in a ‘servile’ manner and its rules are silly and snobbish.38

  Sala, too, in his ongoing column ‘Twice Round the Clock’ in the Welcome Guest, touches on the Garrick affair and the cruel ejection of his friend Yates. Reaching 5 p.m. in his hourly round in the weeks immediately following Yates’s expulsion, Sala describes ‘The Fashionable Club’. A man, he writes, ‘if he be so minded’, can ‘make his club his home’. But he, Sala, will not give away any secrets: ‘Men have been expelled from clubs ere now for talking or writing about another member’s whiskers, about the cut of his coat, and the manner in which he eats asparagus. I have no desire for such club-ostracism … I fear the awful committee that, with a dread complacency, can unclub a man for a few idle words inadvertently spoken, and blast his social position for an act of harmless indiscretion.’39

  A storm in a teacup it certainly was, but as it concerned Thackeray and – indirectly – Dickens, it attracted much notice in the newspapers. Ruskin even read about it in Turin.40 Thackeray, half sensitive, half blasé, part amused and part ashamed, wrote to some American friends on 25 August, after his return from Switzerland, telling them that he ‘went away having got into trouble with a young fellow who told lies of me in a newspaper, wh[ich] I was obliged to notice as we are acquaintances, and meet together at a little Club’. He went on, quirkily, to refer to the Yates fiasco and the ongoing misery of writing The Virginians: ‘The little papers are still going on abusing me about it I hear – and don’t care as I never read one. The public does not care about the story nor about the Virginians nor I about either.’41

  Reynolds’s Newspaper was not finished with Thackeray. It returned to the Garrick Club affair twice more in August. On the 22nd it became downright abusive. ‘We do not believe in the divinity of this bloodless-visaged and broken-nosed god of the Garrick’, this ‘hideous sycophant of wealth and fashion’, and ‘Mephistophelian libeller of mankind’. ‘We shall next week revert to the subject, as law proceedings have already commenced.’ ‘The club is in a fix’, and has appointed a solicitor, while ‘Mr Yates is advised by Messrs Farrer, of Lincoln’s-Inn-fields’.42 Farrer, Ouvry, and Farrer were Dickens’s solicitors, though the newspaper does not point this out. It does print on the same day a letter dated 3 August from Farrer, Ouvry, and Farrer to the secretary of the Garrick Club, declaring that by the action taken against Yates by the committee, ‘the powers of the society have been exceeded’, and calling on the club to ‘rescind their resolution of expulsion’. If they decline to do so, ‘Mr Yates is determined to try the question in a court of law’. Doland’s reply of 7 August is also printed; he has read the solicitors’ letter to the committee, which has in turn put the matter in the hands of its own solicitor.43 Presumably Yates was the newspaper’s source for this correspondence. Reynolds’s had another go at the subject the following week, telling its readership on 29 August that in its view the club has no case and that its legal advisers will advise them to reinstate Yates, since he breached no rules. It talks of various ‘toadies’ supporting Thackeray, and finishes with a quote from Dickens – who probably did not appreciate being given prominence by his old adversary Reynolds – to the effect that ‘out of the club there is but one opinion’ on the matter, ‘and that is not on the side of the snobs’.44

  Though things went quiet for a time, this was not the end. Before the year was out Yates, egged on by Dickens, had hired the flamboyant Edwin James to prosecute his suit against the Garrick in court, and Dickens and Thackeray had comprehensively fallen out. Though both novelists were away from London for most of the summer, Dickens reported to Yates in August that he and Thackeray had met one day ‘on the steps of the Reform Club’ on Pall Mall. At that point relations between the two men were merely strained; according to Dickens, ‘we spoke as if nothing had happened’, though Thackeray’s companion Fladgate had shown his surprise at the encounter – his ‘eyebrows went up into the crown of his head, and he twisted himself into extraordinary forms’.45

  Dickens on tour

  On 7 July 1858 Dickens wrote to his old friend William de Cerjat in Lausanne, bringing him up to date with events personal and public. He wrote from Gad’s Hill, near Rochester, describing his ‘little Kentish freehold’ as

  a grave red brick house (Time of George the First, I suppose) which I have added to, and stuck bits upon, in all manner of ways; so that it is pleasantly irregular, and as violently opposed to all architectural ideas, as the most hopeful man could possibly desire. It is on the summit of Gad’s Hill. The Robbery [as told in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One] was committed before the door, on the men with the Treasure, and Falstaff ran away from the identical spot of ground now covered by the room in which I write.46

  Though he knows that he can ‘never hope that anyone out of my house can ever comprehend my domestic story’, he ‘will not complain’. ‘I have been heavily wounded, but I have covered the wound up, and left it to heal.’ ‘The children are all as happy as children can be’, and the girls, Mamie and Katey, ‘are happier than they ever were’; they keep house for Dickens at Gad’s Hill, helped by their aunt Georgina, ‘who is, and always has been, like another sister’. As for other news, ‘you will have read in the papers that the Thames at London is most horrible. I have to cross Waterloo or London Bridge to get to the Railroad when I come down’ to Gad’s Hill, ‘and I can certify that the offensive smells, even in that short whiff, have been of a most head-and-stomach distracting nature’. Nobody knows what to do, he adds; ‘at least, everybody knows a plan, and everybody else knows it won’t do’. He notes that the Atlantic Cable has broken again, ‘at which most men are sorry, but very few surprised’.47

  While he was advising Yates about the Garrick affair at this time, Dickens was also taking further steps about his wife’s future. When he had got her to sign the deed of separation on 4 June, it had been, though in effect forced on Catherine, a generous document in financial terms. He had settled on £600 a year, to be paid in quarterly instalments. Dickens also promised Catherine ‘free access to all or any of her children at all places’ and ‘at all times’.48 He persuaded two reluctant friends, Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch, and Frederick Evans, his own and Punch’s publisher, to act as Catherine’s trustees.

  The arrangements about the children were that the two oldest girls, Mamie and Katey, would keep house for him, while the eldest, Charley, moved to the house near Regent’s Park with his mother; all the younger boys were to be based in Tavistock House and Gad’s Hill with Dickens, though they were often abroad or away at school. Dickens was keen to assure correspondents that the children were not ‘divided’ in the sense of taking sides with one parent or the other. As for his relations with Catherine, ‘there is no anger or ill-will between us’, he told the novelist Catherine Gore.49 To John Leech, Punch’s main artist, he insisted that ‘Charley’s living with his mother to take care of her, is my idea – not his’, though the truth was that Charley, being of age, could decide for himself, and did make the choice to stay with his mother.50 He had written to Dickens on 10 May, after being told about the impending separation, which he said ‘completely took [him] by surprise’, declaring that ‘in making my choice I was [not] actuated by any feeling of preference for my mother to you’. Charley showed his awareness of his father’s raw sensitivities. ‘God knows I love you dearly’, he wrote, ‘and it will be a hard day for me when I have to part from you and the girls. But in doing as I have done, I hope I am doing my duty, and that you will understand it so.’51 Though Dickens was civil towards Catherine at the time of the deed, writing on 4 June that he hoped ‘all unkindness is over between you and me’, he announced in the same letter that there were those ‘among the living, whom I will never forgive alive or dead’, meaning her sister Helen and her mother.52

  By early July Dickens’s attitude had hardened. With the trouble at the Garrick,
the hostile chatter in the newspapers about the wisdom of the separation statement, and his suspicions that the Hogarths were talking about his relationship with Ellen Ternan, together with the reluctance shown by both Lemon and Evans to get involved in his marriage problems, he took against these two friends and became more ruthless towards Catherine too. Around 12 July he wrote to Charley to change the terms of Catherine’s contact with her children. She could still see them, but only under strict circumstances, which he outlined for Charley to relay to her. His words were characteristically vehement, and also cruelly inappropriate, considering that the youngest child, Edward, was just six years old: ‘I positively forbid the children ever 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 your mother’s house and come back to me … I positively forbid the children ever to see or speak to [Lemon], and for the same reason I absolutely prohibit their ever being taken to Mr Evans’s house.’53 Charley, whose engagement to Evans’s daughter made this difficult for him – though as an adult he could not be told by Dickens who to see and who to avoid – passed the message on to his mother on 13 July. He expressed his regret at ‘being the medium of the communication I have to make to you’, but reminded her on his father’s behalf that Dickens, as the children’s father, had ‘an absolute right to prevent their going into any society which may be distasteful to him’.54 A few days later Catherine, who had left Tavistock House some weeks earlier and spent two weeks in Brighton with her mother and sister, followed by some days with the Lemons, moved to Gloucester Crescent with Charley.55