One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  Having turned against Mark Lemon, whom he apparently did not meet or speak to again until they coincided at a mutual friend’s funeral in 1867,56 Dickens reacted even more violently to Frederick Evans, his old friend and publisher, and father of Bessie, Charley’s fiancée. On 22 July he wrote from Gad’s Hill in frosty terms:

  Dear Sir,

  I have had stern occasion to impress upon my children that their father’s name is their best possession and that it would indeed be trifled with and wasted by him, if, either through himself or through them, he held any terms with those who have been false to it, in the only great need and under the only great wrong it has ever known. You know very well, why (with hard distress of mind and bitter disappointment), I have been forced to include you in this class. I have no more to say.57

  Probably Evans was suspected of speaking sympathetically of Catherine or passing on rumours unfavourable to Dickens; Dickens never spoke to him again, and did not attend Charley’s wedding to Bessie in November 1861. He soon broke off with the firm of Bradbury and Evans, moving to another publisher. Thursday, 22 July was also the last day of Dickens’s readings at St Martin’s Hall. Just over a week later he and his manager Arthur Smith were on their way to Bristol to start their gruelling tour of England, Ireland, and Scotland. He also took along a manservant, a special lighting assistant to set up his stages, and a general assistant.58 Having attracted huge crowds and general adulation in London, he now anticipated that his readings would be a tremendous success the length and breadth of the country.

  By the time Dickens left London Ellen had also left; she spent the six-week summer season of July and August in Manchester, acting with the Haymarket company managed by the comic actor John Buckstone. She played mainly minor roles in the comedies and farces in which Buckstone specialised. By the end of August the company, including Ellen, were back in London. Dickens installed her and her sister Maria, who was a member of the Strand Theatre Company, in lodgings in Berners Street, just north of Oxford Street. He also paid for the oldest Ternan sister, Fanny, to go to Florence with her mother to have specialist singing lessons.59 Dickens was extremely careful to keep his transactions with the Ternans as secret as possible. Only Forster and W.H. Wills, Dickens’s trusted assistant editor on Household Words and later All the Year Round, were informed of his dealings with them; in his business letters to Wills he often enclosed messages to ‘my Darling’. Ellen was ‘E.T.’ in his account at Coutts’s bank, and he adopted pseudonyms when taking accommodation for her and her family.60

  Ellen’s acting career, having begun in 1857, was over well before the end of 1859, when she was still only twenty. The Athenaeum named her in December 1858 as a member of Buckstone’s cast at the Haymarket, acting before a ‘fashionable audience’ in The Tide of Time, a ‘conversation-drama’ by Bayle Bernard.61 After that she acted only a few times more before disappearing from public view. The only substantial part she got was as Lady Castlecrag in The World and the Stage, performed on 12 March 1859 as a vehicle for one of the most famous actresses of the day, Amy Sedgwick. Ellen’s part was that of Lucy, the snobbish wife of an old aristocrat who has compromised herself by corresponding flirtatiously with a rake; her noble sister, played by Sedgwick, sacrifices her own reputation for Lucy’s sake. Ellen did not take the role when the play returned for a run on 25 April; though the critic in The Times had said of her single performance that the character’s ‘weak and impulsive nature’ was ‘very prettily assumed by Miss E. Ternan’, the reviewer in the Era wrote that, while she ‘did her best’, the part of Lady Castlecrag was ‘rather beyond her reach’.62 After acting maidservants and governesses intermittently during the spring and summer of 1859, Ellen seems to have made her last appearance in a farce entitled Out of Sight, Out of Mind, in which she apparently played a small part for a few nights from 4 August; by 11 August her sister Maria, now also acting in the Haymarket company, had taken over the part.63 Ellen may have given up the theatre because of her limited success as an actress, or because Dickens did not like her to continue in the public eye, or from a combination of the two.

  Off went Dickens on his reading tour with his energetic manager Arthur Smith and his helpers. In the week beginning 2 August 1858 he read in the West Country, beginning with Clifton, just outside Bristol, then on subsequent evenings at Exeter, Plymouth, and Clifton again. His second week was spent in the Midlands and the northwest, with Liverpool enjoying performances on three evenings and one Saturday afternoon. On that Saturday night, 21 August, he made a stormy crossing from Liverpool to Dublin, where he gave five performances, including two on Wednesday, 25 August. Then came Belfast, Cork, and Limerick, and in September northern English cities including Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and York, followed by five readings in Edinburgh. October saw him in Dundee, Aberdeen, Perth, and Glasgow (for four readings), then back to England with repeat performances in Liverpool and Manchester, followed by towns including Birmingham, Oxford, Southampton, and Portsmouth, finishing on 12 and 13 November in Brighton.64 Everywhere he went he reported huge success, as did all the local newspapers which reviewed his performances.

  He wrote regular accounts of his triumphs to Georgina Hogarth and Mamie Dickens at Gad’s Hill. The pieces he had chosen for his London readings were used on the tour, with some new additions. ‘The Story of Little Dombey’ was the great tear-jerker, while the Christmas stories were favourites too – A Christmas Carol, The Cricket on the Hearth, and The Chimes. He also used other stories from Household Words including ‘The Poor Traveller’ and ‘Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn’ (especially popular for his assumption of a Cockney accent for Boots), as well as extracting and editing ‘Mrs Gamp’, a portrait of the grotesque drunken midwife in Martin Chuzzlewit. These reading texts were published separately by Bradbury and Evans and taken round the country with him, with Smith selling them to audiences.65 The whole enterprise was highly professional, and Dickens was keen to keep count of audience numbers, cheers and applause, and guineas. The audience at Exeter, he told Georgina Hogarth on 5 August, was ‘the finest Audience I have ever read to’. It was clearly important to him that he had not lost the love and admiration of his readers as a result of the separation statement; ‘I never beheld anything like the personal affection which they poured out upon me at the end’, he added.66 If he read the notice in Chambers’s Exeter Journal on 7 August, he will have felt the glow of approval and adoration expressed there, though no doubt the reference to his marriage troubles will have irritated him: ‘We regret to hear that the vile poisonous calumny is continued to be whispered in reference to his domestic affairs, notwithstanding his own manly explanation … the reptiles who bite at his heel he can well despise. That he is the greatest author of modern time, all must admit.’67

  And so it went on. He told Mamie on 7 August about the evening performance the night before, revelling, not for the first or last time, in his manager’s manic energy and enthusiasm: ‘You will be glad to hear that at Clifton last night, a torrent of five hundred shillings bore Arthur away, pounded him against the wall, flowed on to the seats over his body, scratched him, and damaged his best dress suit. All to his unspeakable joy.’68

  He found time on 11 August to write to Edmund Yates – ‘My Dear Edmund’ – from the Swan Hotel at Worcester, arranging to meet him at the office of Household Words the following Tuesday, 17 August, when he intended to stop in London briefly to discuss the paper with Wills. He touched lightly, if sharply, on the hated subject of Helen Hogarth: ‘What a little serpent, that daughter of poor honest good [George Hogarth].’69 That same evening he wrote to Wilkie Collins, adopting the man-about-town innuendo he often used with his younger correspondent. Collins had obviously made some suggestive remark about Dickens’s freedom to misbehave in various hotels around the country; Dickens turned the joke back on his friend, alluding to the most notorious of all seducers and the naughty exploits of two characters in Arabian Nights:

  As to that furtive and Don Giovanni purpose at which y
ou hint – that may well be all very well for your violent vigor [sic], or that of the companions with whom you may have travelled continentally, or the Caliphs Haroon Alraschid [sic; Dickens means Haroon and his grand vizier] with whom you have unbent metropolitanly, but Anchorites who read themselves red hot every night are chaste as Diana (I suppose she was, by the bye, but I find I don’t quite believe it when I write her name.)70

  Dickens himself had ‘travelled continentally’ with Collins, having spent time in Paris with his friend in spring 1856, writing to him at that time with nudge-and-wink references to Collins’s mistress Caroline Graves.71 From his Worcester hotel room in August 1858 he goes on to describe for Collins how his audiences are always surprised to find what a show – with lights and mirrors and props – he puts on for them. ‘They don’t understand beforehand what it is, I think, and expect a man to be sitting down in some corner, droning away like a mild bagpipe.’72

  For the first few weeks he claimed not to feel exhausted by his exertions, though he confessed to getting into ‘the most violent heats’ every night as he performed.73 After taking a break of two days in London and Gad’s Hill, he fell ill with a bad cold, for which he applied mustard poultices to his throat and chest.74 By Wednesday, 18 August he was in Liverpool, from where he reported that he had enjoyed ‘the largest house I have ever had since I first began. 2,300 people. Over £200 in money.’ He was not the only one to get excited by this huge success. Georgina was treated on 20 August to a description of the antics of his crew: ‘What Arthur’s state has been tonight – he, John, Berry, and Boycett, all taking money and going mad together – you cannot imagine. They turned away hundreds, sold all the books, rolled on the ground of my room knee deep in checks [sic], and made a perfect Pantomime of the whole thing.’75

  Next came Dublin, where he arrived on Sunday, 22 August after a ‘very, very nasty’ passage. He told Angela Burdett-Coutts of his success and the handsome profits he was making. He also replied to some remark of hers, saying that he understood and appreciated her ‘feeling that there must be no reservation between us’ over his separation from Catherine, with whom Miss Coutts sympathised. Yet he felt compelled to correct her impression of the state of affairs, especially in regard to Catherine’s relations with her children. He repeated his unkind – and untrue – remarks of the terrible letter of 9 May to the same correspondent:

  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, because they know it is not the truth … As to Mrs Dickens’s ‘simplicity’ in speaking of me and my doings, O my dear 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.76

  How vehement is the apparently emollient phrase ‘I want to forgive’ when followed by the unforgiving ‘and forget her’. And once again, as with his insistence that the children have nothing to do with the Hogarths, the Lemons, or the Evanses, it is his own name and its honour with which he is most concerned.

  He was to learn some news in the next few days which would raise the whole question of his treatment of Catherine and give him a nasty shock about the way the honour of his name was now viewed in some circles, but meanwhile the readings in Ireland trumped anything that had gone before. Though he grumbled that one commentator in Cork had said that ‘although only forty-six I look like an old man’ (Herbert Watkins’s photograph of him, taken in that hot and difficult week in the middle of June, shows him looking certainly older than his years77), he was delighted with the reception.78 The crowds trying to get into his performances in Dublin were huge. ‘Ladies stood all night with their chins against my platform. Other ladies sat all night upon my steps. You never saw such a sight.’79

  A letter to Georgina from Morrison’s Hotel, Dublin, on 29 August hints at trouble on two fronts. He tells his sister-in-law that she should expect him back at Gad’s Hill the following Sunday, 5 September. He has just received ‘a very watchful and true and excellent letter from Forster, on a personal matter’, relating to his separation from Catherine. The second problem involves his wayward brother Frederick, cast off by Dickens many years earlier for his profligacy and tendency to use his famous brother’s name to get credit, just as Dickens’s incorrigible father John had done as soon as Pickwick Papers brought success. Dickens did not attend Fred’s wedding in December 1848, and complained in 1851 that he was ‘rasping my very heart just now’, though he did pay off Fred’s debts from time to time until in 1856 he finally refused to do any more.80 He was particularly angry that Fred had borrowed money from friends including Wills and Henry Austin, the sanitary engineer who was married to Dickens’s sister Letitia. ‘I cannot lend you the £30’, he told Fred in February 1857, ‘because I cannot trust you, and because your bad faith with Wills and Austin makes the word “lend” an absurdity’.81 Fred responded on 7 February – Dickens’s forty-fifth birthday – with some criticism of his own. His brother was, he said, ‘cold & unfeeling’:

  It is very easy to sit in Judgment on others – nothing more so – The world fancy from your writings that you are the most Tolerant of Men – let them individually come under your lash – (if one is to judge from your behaviour to your own flesh & blood) & God help them! For a quarter of a century you have had the world at your foot – such a blessing ought at any rate to make you charitable in respect to the shortcomings of others – instead of placing yourself on a Pinnacle upon the assumption that poor human nature is perfection – (or ought to be so -) & you her Judge when e’er she errs!

  Yrs affectionately

  FREDERICK DICKENS

  Many happy returns of the day.82

  There was truth in this accusation, but Dickens felt righteous, having worked his way to fame and success against the odds, after having been forced to leave school at twelve because of his father’s insolvency and made to work in a factory putting labels on bottles, an experience he transmuted into the sensitive narration of young David Copperfield’s dreadful childhood. Dickens famously could not bring himself to tell anyone except Catherine and his close friend Forster about his childhood feelings of shame at his lowly situation and burning resentment against his parents. He had hauled himself out of the gutter, and he did not see why others could not do so as well.

  Now, in August 1858, he tells Georgina, Fred has turned up in Dublin: ‘Fancy frederick presenting himself here, in this house, to me, last Thursday a few minutes before Dinner. I was dreadfully hard with him at first; but relented.’83 Frederick’s troubles were threatening to bring Dickens’s name into disrepute for reasons other than his debts. His wife Anna was about to appeal for a judicial separation under the new Divorce Act on the grounds of Frederick’s desertion of her and adultery with a woman in the Red Lion Hotel in Dorking in April 1857.84 On Frederick’s surprise visit to him in Dublin Dickens advised him ‘with the greatest emphasis’ to make his wife an allowance, but ‘my belief is, that I made no impression upon him whatever. He left me, declaring that I had made none; and I have not the faintest reason to suppose that he attached a feather’s weight to any thing I said.’85 Dickens’s gloomy prediction was correct. Though he attempted to negotiate with Anna Dickens’s relatives over the amount she would accept in the hope that a settlement of ‘this wretched business’ could be arranged quietly and without it going to court, Fred had other ideas, not least because he could not afford to support Anna.86 (The case was to come to court and be reported in various newspapers in the early months of 1859.)

  This trouble was nothing, however, to the sudden unwelcome appearance in an American newspaper of the letter Dickens had written to Arthur Smith on 25 May, at the time of the separation arrangements. Hot-headed and almost paranoid about the goss
ip at the Garrick, at Epsom races, and among the penny newspapers, Dickens had written down his side of the marriage story and given it to Smith, giving him ‘full permission’ to show it to anyone who ‘wishes to do me right’ or who ‘may have been misled into doing me wrong’.87 It is unclear how the letter came into the hands of the New York Daily Tribune, which published it on 16 August. Though Dickens did not blame Smith, he was wholly embarrassed by the publication of the letter, which brought the story of his separation back into the headlines just as he was feeling hopeful that he could suppress all such talk by dint of taking Britain’s towns by storm with his wonderful readings. He referred to it as the ‘Violated Letter’.88

  The text, which was soon taken up and reprinted by the British press, did not show Dickens at his best. As in his letter of 9 May to Miss Coutts, he declared that the marriage had been unhappy ‘for many years’, and that ‘no two people, not vicious in themselves, ever were joined together, who had a greater difficulty in understanding one another, or who had less in common’. He even suggested that Anne Cornelius, their long-serving female servant, could vouch for this. (She certainly knew about the increasing distance Dickens was putting between himself and Catherine. He had written to Anne from Gad’s Hill in October 1857, while still in a state of excitement about his time with Ellen in Doncaster, instructing her to close off the door connecting his dressing room and Catherine’s bedroom in Tavistock House. He wished Anne to be discreet about the arrangements, ‘as I would rather not have them talked about’.89) In the ‘Violated Letter’ Georgina Hogarth is praised for her devotion to the children and her excellence as a housekeeper. Dickens even hints at mental illness in Catherine: ‘For some years past Mrs Dickens has been in the habit of representing to me that it would be better for her to go away and live apart; 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.’90