One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  One thing which rings true in this mean-spirited account is that Catherine, so much slower than her whirlwind husband, may have found it difficult to live in the public eye. A disinterested observer, the young Henry Morley, who arrived in London in 1851 to assist Dickens on Household Words, described an evening at Tavistock House at that time. He wrote innocently to his fiancée:

  Literary people do not marry learned ladies. Dickens has made evidently a comfortable choice. Mrs Dickens is stout, with a round, very round, rather pretty, very pleasant face, and ringlets on each side of it. One sees in five minutes that she loves her husband and her children, and has a warm heart for anybody who won’t be satirical, but meet her on her own good-natured footing.91

  If it was Dickens’s misfortune to have paired himself with an ordinary wife, it was surely Catherine’s to have married a manically energetic, quick-tempered, and above all ‘satirical’ husband.

  The embarrassing letter to Smith goes on with a remark which reveals Dickens’s anxiety about money and his desire to be seen as generous. (Thackeray and his friends would call this vulgar.) He proclaims ‘of the pecuniary part’ of the arrangements that ‘they are as generous as if Mrs Dickens were a lady of distinction and I a man of fortune’. He adds to the ill-advised hints in his personal statement in Household Words a reference to Ellen and an attack on his enemies Mrs Hogarth and Helen:

  Two wicked persons who should have spoken very differently of me, in consideration of earned respect and gratitude, have (as I am told, and indeed to my personal knowledge) coupled with this separation the name of a young lady for whom I have a great attachment and regard. I will not repeat her name – I honour it too much. Upon my soul and honour, there is not on this earth a more virtuous and spotless creature than this young lady. I know her to be innocent and pure, and as good as my own dear daughters.92

  The New York Daily Tribune could assume on the part of its American readership an intense interest in the doings of the great English novelist. It printed, in addition to the letter to Smith, the statement Dickens had required Mrs Hogarth and Helen to sign on 29 May, ‘solemnly’ declaring that ‘we now disbelieve’ certain accounts which had been circulating about the separation. Dickens’s voice can be clearly heard: ‘We know that they are not believed by Mrs Dickens, and we pledge ourselves on all occasions to contradict them, as entirely destitute of foundation.’93 The newspaper was not impressed by Dickens’s protestations. Of course rumour was busy with the story, it said; Dickens should have stopped after his denial in Household Words and left the subject alone. In these cases the public instinctively side with the wife ‘unless she insists on proving herself a vulgar shrew and virago like Lady Bulwer’. If the wife ‘maintains perfect silence and the husband issues bulletin after bulletin, he is sure to lose ground with each succeeding hour. One more uncalled-for letter from Mr D. will finish him.’94 In London the Morning Star reprinted the letter on Monday, 30 August, while the Morning Chronicle and Morning Herald carried it the following day, but luckily for Dickens they made no comment on it. The Times left it alone and the Daily Telegraph, while not printing it, regretted that the others had done so with the strong suggestion that Dickens had intended it to be circulated.95 Dickens was worried, though, asking his solicitor Frederic Ouvry to inform Catherine’s solicitor that he had no part in the publication of this letter, but was in fact very ‘shocked and distressed’ by it.96 To Wilkie Collins he wrote with righteous anger, conveniently forgetting that he had given Smith permission to show the letter to anyone he liked: ‘I have been greatly vexed by the wantonness of some of our English papers in printing what is evidently on the face of it a private document of mine, violated in America and sent home here. But it is one of the penalties and drawbacks of my position.’97

  Really he got off lightly, considering that he had brought this on himself. Inevitably the letter attracted some attention. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whom Dickens had met socially during his time in Paris in 1856, reacted critically. She had already commented sharply from her home in Florence on 11 July 1858 on Dickens’s separation statement:

  What is this sad story about Dickens and his wife? Incompatibility of temper after twenty-three years of married life? What a plea! – Worse than irregularity of the passions it seems to me. Thinking of my own peace & selfish pleasure, too, I would rather be beaten by my husband once a day than lose my child out of the house – yes, indeed. And the Dickenses have children younger than [her own son] Penini! – Poor woman! She must suffer bitterly – that is sure.98

  Now she expressed her indignation at the ‘Violated Letter’, believing, as many did, that Dickens had intended it to be published. In this ‘dreadful letter’, she said, Dickens was using his genius ‘as a cudgel’ against his wife, ‘taking advantage of his hold with the public to turn public opinion against her. I call it dreadful.’99

  One person who wrote extensively in response to the publication of the ‘Violated Letter’ was Catherine’s aunt, her mother’s sister Helen Thomson. On 30 August she wrote to a friend expressing her understandable anger at Dickens’s behaviour, and claiming that Dickens had attempted, like his embarrassing friend Bulwer Lytton, to prove his wife to be of unsound mind. According to her, Dickens ‘did indeed endeavour to get the physician who attended her in illness, to sanction such a report, when he sternly refused, saying he considered Mrs Dickens perfectly sound in mind’. It was hardly surprising that Catherine’s spirits were low ‘considering the manner in which she had been treated’. Helen Thomson assured her correspondent that her niece ‘had no desire to leave her home or children so long as that home was endurable to her’, and ‘not till matters had come to extremity did her father think it right to interfere, and then the affair was brought to a compromise, to avoid a public court’. Dickens had, she wrote, made the ‘absurd proposal’ that Catherine should either go abroad or ‘keep to her own apartment in his house in daily life, at the same time to appear at his parties still as mistress of the house’.100

  We cannot be sure how true these allegations are in detail, but we do know that Dickens mentioned Catherine’s mental state more than once and that he did get a fright at the thought of the Hogarth family taking the case to the Divorce Court.

  Helen Thomson comments on the ‘strange conduct’ of Georgina, who, ‘blinded by the sophistry of her brother-in-law takes his part, and by remaining against the wishes of her parents with him and his daughters, weakens the defence of her sister’. Dickens’s ‘exaggerated praises of her to the depreciation of his wife’ are ‘most heart-cruel and unjust’. It should be remembered, she writes, that Catherine had given birth to ten children, often recovering slowly from their births; it was therefore ‘natural that she should lean upon the assistance of a sister in the care of her children’; Catherine was nonetheless a loving mother and a good keeper of the household. As for the ‘platonic attachment’ that Dickens has had the ‘bad taste and boldness to profess to a young actress’ in his ‘foolish and egoistical statement’: what could the public have to do with his private life? Miss Coutts has been a staunch friend, says Helen Thomson, inviting Catherine to stay with her while matters were being settled. She then quotes from a letter written to her by Catherine herself, expressing her sorrow at parting from the younger children and – contradicting Dickens’s account – their sorrow at losing her. Eleven-year-old Sydney was worried that she would be ‘very dull and lonely without them’, and Charley was ‘kind and gentle’ towards her. ‘I trust by God’s assistance’, wrote Catherine, ‘to be able to resign myself to His will, and to lead a contented if not a happy life, but my position is a sad one.’ Finally Helen Thomson points out that though the public ‘have made an idol of him’, his ‘sentimentality and professed benevolence’ are mere ‘fairy tales’; moreover, she adds, not without schadenfreude, he is the ‘third Dickens brother who has deserted his wife’.101 This is a reference to the doings of the unrepentant Frederick and another brother, Augustus, with whom Dickens’s
relations were warmer, who had also recently abandoned his wife before emigrating to America with another woman.102

  Dickens survived the unwelcome resurrection of his marriage story. He carried on with his readings, revelling in his ongoing love affair with the public and in the money he earned by them – more than £1,000 a month (roughly £100,000 in today’s money) after all expenses and deductions, he reckoned. He recognised his debt to Arthur Smith for his ‘great zeal’ and ‘gentle way of dealing with crowds and putting people at their ease’.103 After the readings were over, in mid-November, he returned to London to begin severing his business contracts with Bradbury and Evans and to take an active part in Edmund Yates’s action against the Garrick Club.

  The exploits of Dickens’s Mr Stryver

  In A Tale of Two Cities, which Dickens at last began to write early in 1859, having spent 1858 in a constant state of restlessness, mental and physical, there is a minor character, Mr Stryver, who is drawn in remarkable detail. Dickens’s anti-hero turned hero, the drunken, cynical, briefless barrister Sydney Carton, ‘idlest and most unpromising of men’, but enabled by his physical resemblance to Charles Darnay to take the latter’s place at the guillotine, is the ‘jackal’ to his legal boss, the ‘lion’ Mr Stryver. They work on cases together in their chambers, drinking all night, with Carton doing the work while Stryver reaps the rewards with great success in the courtroom. Mr Stryver’s ‘florid countenance’ is to be seen there every day, ‘bursting out of the bed of wigs, like a great sunflower pushing its way at the sun from among a rank garden-full of flaring companions’. Stryver, ‘a glib man, and an unscrupulous, and a ready, and a bold’, is not gifted at ‘extracting the essence from a heap of statements’; this task he delegates to Carton, while his own talents lie in ‘shouldering himself (morally and physically) into companies and conversations’ with his ‘stout, red, bluff’ person, ‘free from any drawback of delicacy’. In the courtroom he bamboozles juries by ‘fitting’ his client’s case on them ‘like a compact suit of clothes’.104

  This figure is closely modelled on the busy barrister Edwin James. Dickens met him towards the end of the year, when he was employed to represent Yates in his intended suit against the Garrick. James’s name was constantly before the public; he was known for acting in court cases which attracted maximum press attention. In June 1858 he had raised a laugh in court while representing Lady Meux in the case brought by her husband’s sisters over whether he had been sane at the time of writing his will. He got involved in the Lytton affair in July and August, acting for Bulwer Lytton while appearing to have Rosina’s interests at heart. He popped up in Westminster Hall in a Court of the Exchequer case on Monday, 21 June, when, according to the Weekly Chronicle, the courtroom was ‘densely crowded, great interest being felt in the issue of an action for libel’, in which ‘Mr Gough, the well-known intemperance lecturer, sought to recover damages against Dr Lees, an advocate of the Maine Liquor Law, for a series of libels, charging the plaintiff with being narcotically and helplessly intoxicated, with getting drunk on drugs, eating opium, &c.’105 James acted for the plaintiff, Mr Gough, winning the case and ensuring that the jury awarded his client five guineas ‘as damages’.106

  Four days later James was in action once more in Westminster Hall, taking part in an equity case at the Exchequer of Pleas. He represented the plaintiff, a clerk to the Tottenham Local Board of Health, who was claiming breach of contract from a defendant for allegedly appropriating plans and drawings prepared by the plaintiff for supplying Tottenham with ‘water and efficient sewerage’. Dickens’s brother-in-law Henry Austin, of the Board of Health, was called to give evidence for the defendant, who claimed a right to the plans. This time James was on the losing side; the judge ‘showed unmistakably his opinion that such an action should not have been brought’, whereupon James promptly accepted the result on his client’s behalf, inducing him to relinquish his complaint and pay the defendant £100.107

  On 23 July James was in York, where, in the aftermath of the Rosina Bulwer Lytton scandal, an inquiry by the Lunacy Commission was getting under way. It concerned Mary Jane Turner, the wife of Charles Turner, who had consigned her to an asylum on Christmas Eve 1857, after an unhappy and turbulent marriage of fourteen years. Mary Jane had been jealous of her husband’s suspected affairs with other women, and had attacked him with a poker in 1850. She also claimed that he was poisoning her. On the face of it, this was a difficult case for her counsel to win, but the counsel was Edwin James, who played on the jury’s awareness of recent poisoning cases (especially the famous trial in 1856 of William Palmer, in which James had also played a part) and on the vulnerability of women to spousal abuse. Was a woman to be deemed insane because she was jealous? he asked the jury. Should she be locked up for months in a horrible institution? If the ‘fathers, husbands and brothers’ who constituted the jury could give their verdict in favour of Mary Jane, they would ‘go to their homes with satisfied conscience, and in quietness and peace would lay their heads upon the pillow’.108 James won the day for Mary Jane.

  The newspapers filled their pages with comments on this case and on the general demeanour of the Commissioners of Lunacy, who had won few admirers for their part in the Lytton story. The Morning Chronicle complained on 27 July that the Commissioners’ annual reports were complacent, always suggesting that everything was ‘couleur de rose’ in the nation’s asylums. Stung by this, the commission prosecuted the York asylum-keeper who had kept Mary Jane Turner locked up for so long.109 The next big lunacy case was that of one Laurence Ruck, held at St Clement Inn, Strand, from Monday to Friday, 23–27 August 1858. This time it was the husband who was declared insane by his wife. Once again Edwin James acted on behalf of the alleged lunatic. The jury declared Ruck to be sane, and John Conolly, who had certified him, was found to be in receipt of a retainer by Arthur Stillwell, the owner of the asylum to which Ruck was sent. Both were successfully sued by Ruck the following year.110

  James’s ubiquity in the summer of 1858 stemmed from his most important and most celebrated case of all, the trial in April of Dr Simon Bernard, accused of helping to plan the attempted assassination of Napoleon III. The chief plotter, Felice Orsini, and his co-conspirators were equipped with grenades manufactured in Birmingham, and were assisted by Dr Bernard, a French republican practising medicine in exile in London.111 The attempt on 14 January 1858 took place as the emperor and empress were going to the Paris opera. Disraeli, at this time in opposition, told his friend Sarah Brydges Willyams the following day that Napoleon III had had ‘a narrow escape’ from the ‘infernal machine’, which caused three explosions, killed eight people, and wounded over a hundred.112 The popular playwright Edward Blanchard noted in his diary on 15 January that he had gone, after work that night, to his club in Clerkenwell, where ‘the Emperor’s escape from assassination yesterday [was] the general theme of conversation’.113

  The times soon proved unexpectedly eventful for Disraeli and his Tory colleagues as a direct result of the assassination attempt. Palmerston’s Conspiracy to Murder Bill brought down on his head a storm of protest from Liberal politicians and a general public which was not inclined to welcome being told by the French how to run their affairs. The bill was opposed in parliament, lost a vote on 19 February, and three days later Palmerston had resigned and Derby and Disraeli were in power.114 Dickens was among many observers who were happy to see Palmerston fall for toadying to the French. He told his French friend François Régnier on 20 February that there was ‘great excitement here this morning, in consequence of the failure of the Ministry last night, to carry the bill they brought in, to please your Emperor and his troops. I, for one, am extremely glad of their defeat.’115 Even the queen was not displeased by the attitude of the British people, though she did not welcome another change of government at home as a consequence: ‘The Emperor has been so very unwise in all that he has done in France and the insulting language held in France towards this country has so irritated and exasper
ated the people here, that they would not hear of what they call acting from compulsion.’116

  In the meantime, however, Simon Bernard had been arrested in London and charged with being an accessory to the murder of the guards who had died in Paris. The Italian conspirators were tried in France; Orsini and one other, Giuseppe Pieri, were sent to the guillotine on 13 March. A very different fate awaited Bernard. His case was heard at the Old Bailey in the week beginning Monday, 12 April; a special commission was required, since the case concerned an act of murder outside Britain.117 The commission consisted of Lord Campbell, the lord chief justice, who presided, accompanied by a number of luminaries including the lord mayor, the lord chief baron, the recorder of the City of London, and some aldermen, among them David Salomons. M. Gautier of the French embassy was also in attendance, according to an account of the case published in support of Bernard.118 The attorney general, Sir Fitzroy Kelly, led the prosecution, while Edwin James was the senior member of the team defending Bernard. (By the end of the year Kelly and James were set to go head to head once more over the Garrick Club affair.) The correspondent for Reynolds’s Newspaper reported the following Sunday that the court was crowded with both spectators and barristers.119

  James was in his element when he rose to speak for the defence on Friday, 16 April, the fifth day of the trial. Taking his cue from the public distaste for French bullying and interference, he appealed to the jury to throw out a prosecution which was, he said, essentially a political one brought at the demand of a foreign despot. He began by praising England’s history of having ‘free shores’ and being ‘open to exiles from other lands’, while the English legal system encouraged the protection of ‘the weak against the strong’. The case for the prosecution, he declared, had been fallible; too many witnesses had been unclear or contradictory about matters such as the size of the grenades ordered from the Birmingham factory or the significance of a letter received by Bernard a year before the assassination attempt. His client, he said, did help the conspirators, but in the belief that they intended to ‘restore liberty in Italy’, not to kill the French emperor. The jury must be sure that Bernard ‘was cognisant of, or instigated’ the attack on the emperor ‘before you consign the prisoner to an English scaffold’. James drew to an elaborate and dramatic close: