Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  A fine photograph of Fields, his partner Ticknor, and Hawthorne shows them standing together sometime in the 1850s; though posed in a photographer’s studio, Hawthorne and Ticknor wear overcoats and Fields a long cape, and all three are topped by tall stovepipe hats. Fields is heavily bearded, as he was his entire adult life, and plump, the willing victim of many hearty meals.

  Fields and Dickens had first met in Boston twenty-five years earlier, during Dickens’s first visit to America. Now, in 1867, Fields was fifty. He was married to a much younger woman, Annie Adams Fields, who at thirty-three was only five years older than Ellen. The Fieldses’ age disparity may have attracted Dickens. Annie had been only twenty when she and Fields married; but she was attractive, intelligent, and vivacious, and held her own. The marriage was childless, and she threw herself into the social obligations and enjoyments of her husband’s business with writers. In their comfortable Boston home on Charles Street, backing on the Charles River, she received a stream of callers and gave frequent dinner parties to the Ticknor and Fields circle, “the Parnassus of New England.” She was a gracious and winning hostess:

  She dazzled no one by her wit, her conversation, or her brilliance. Always she stood in the background. She made her guests comfortable; she saw to it that she and her house provided the perfect setting for the army of egos that marched into it.… She gave these prima donnas the attention they craved and by honestly thinking they were as good as they thought themselves she created a salon famous wherever the literary gathered.

  Distinguished writers recalled her fondly. As a young man, Henry James was struck by Fields’s “singularly graceful young wife … her beautiful head and hair and smile and voice.” Years later, after Annie was widowed, Willa Cather visited her at 148 Charles Street and later testified to its “harmonious atmosphere … in which one seemed safe from everything ugly.”

  Annie Fields kept a diary for many years—sixty-one notebook journals survive—and from them her personality emerges distinctly. She was highly sociable, but she also enjoyed quiet and was widely read (she could read novels in French and German). An earnest New England moralist, she was not dogmatic. Visiting an Anglo-Catholic convent near Windsor Castle in 1869, she declared that “I believe in this thoroughly for some women and I am sure these particular women are doing a grand work and are very happy”—a more liberal-spirited sentiment than Dickens was likely to express. On Sundays, she walked three miles to the Unitarian church in Roxbury to arrange the flowers, but seldom stayed for the service. She was warmly appreciative of others’ merits; easily impressed, especially by talkers—too easily, one suspects; and lavish with superlatives. She wrote (like her husband) indifferent poetry, “yet I am too much a woman to be always a poet,” she regretted; “I cannot live for that—I cannot have ‘a woodland walk’ when I feel like it because somebody will lose their dinner.… Yet I know there is a heart of a singer hidden in me and I long sometimes to break loose—but on the whole I sincerely prefer to make others comfortable and happy as I can now do and fie! to my genius if he does not sing to me from the sauce-pan.” Living a leisured and comfortable life (with three servants and a washerwoman), she had a genteel spirit of noblesse oblige and a pious wish to be of service. During Dickens’s visit to America, she had “one deeply seated hope, that he will read for the Freed people before he leaves the country and I cannot help thinking he will” (he did not, however). Culturally and socially she was conservative. Looking into a suffragette convention in 1868, she recoiled from the “many hard faced unlovely women full of forthputting-ness.… My heart is wholly with the movement, but the movers alas! are often women who love to un-sex themselves and crave audience from the rostrum.”

  Dickens had met Annie Fields in 1859 when the Fieldses visited England. “Such kindliness as shines through that man’s clay,” she had rhapsodized after he paid them a call in London (a remark evincing Annie’s roseate turn of mind, in view of Dickens’s ruthlessness during his marital break the year before). He had recently completed his first English reading tour, and Fields encouraged him to give readings in America as well. Dickens considered the idea but decided against it for the time, and the War Between the States soon intervened. After the war, Fields renewed the invitation, and when Dickens landed in Boston in November 1867, Fields greeted him as business partner and host. Two days after landing, Dickens dined at the Fieldses’ Charles Street home, the first of many visits.

  His hostess that evening fell in love with him, and for the rest of his visit and beyond remained deeply enamored.

  Annie Fields’s diaries gush with adulation. After his first reading in Boston, she exclaimed: “How we all loved him! How we longed to tell him all kinds of confidences!”—but one wonders if the confiding “we” of this effusion was not mostly Annie herself. When he traveled to New York to give readings, she and Fields accompanied him. She was avid for Dickens’s company, and when she failed to see him one day in New York, she went to bed “smothering a disappointment I could not help feeling at not seeing him again today.” Dickens took long confidential walks with her husband, seven miles on average, and when Fields afterwards shared Dickens’s disclosures with Annie, her fascination grew. On Christmas eve, Dickens read A Christmas Carol in Boston. “Ah! How beautiful it was! How everybody felt it!” she exclaimed; but no one felt his magnetism more powerfully than she herself. “We cannot help loving him as all must do who have the privilege of coming near him and seeing him as he is.” He was in Washington, D.C., on his birthday, February 7. “The birthday of our friend! Dear Charles Dickens! What riches for one life to have such a friend,” she exclaimed. “I have sent to Washington to have flowers on his breakfast table this morning.… We think of him far away, in love, and find ourselves companioned.” The ambiguous “in love” may refer to Dickens, but certainly to Annie herself. When he thanked her for the flowers, she melted: “Nobody in Boston has as many blessings as I.”

  The Fieldses attended thirty of Dickens’s seventy-six readings in America. Eudora Welty recalled that her mother used to “read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him”; Annie Fields attended his readings with the same romantic eagerness. When not performing, Dickens spent many hours and even days with the Fieldses; with a single exception, theirs was the only private home at which he dined during his five months in America—and he dined with them often. After many of his readings, they attended supper parties he hosted at his hotel, convivial affairs enlivened by punch concocted by Dickens himself. When, after Christmas, he returned to Boston from New York with his miserable catarrh, he accepted the Fieldses’ invitation to stay at 148 Charles Street for a week. “What a pleasure this will be to us!” Annie exclaimed. “We anticipate his coming with continual delight! To have him as much as we can, at morning, noon & night.” His stay with the Fieldses was a unique compliment, the only time during a decade of reading tours that he violated his rule of always staying in hotels.

  The Fields home in wintry Boston was a tranquil refuge. Willa Cather recalled that “there was never an hour in the day when the order and calm of the drawing-room were not such that one might have sat down to write a sonnet or a sonata. The sweeping and dusting were done very early in the morning, the flowers arranged before the guests were awake” (Annie loved flowers, but they must have been a precious commodity in January, in New England). Her home was the closest thing in America to Gad’s Hill—or to Windsor Lodge, Peckham. Her doting attentiveness and worship supplied a warm feminine solicitude amidst a wilderness of bearded and self-complacent New England literati.

  Her husband was equally hospitable, and with some justice Fields’s biographer, Warren Tryon, ridicules both husband and wife for their worshipful cosseting of Dickens, “a cult of adoration by the Fieldses who were otherwise perfectly sober and sane people.” But “like most great and creative artists,” Tryon adds, Dickens “was filled with a sense of self-importance, of self-interest, and self-esteem. He took their attentions almost as his
due and basked in the all but suffocating excesses of the Fieldses’ love.” Yet this charge of toadying is perhaps too cynical, at least with respect to Annie. She was no doubt flattered by the great man’s notice, but her admiration went beyond vanity or celebrity-worship. She loved Dickens with a very personal, distinctly feminine warmth.

  At one point, her journal hints that her feelings were simply filial: “I feel somehow like one of his daughters and as if I could not take too good care of him.” More than twenty years her senior, Dickens was indeed old enough to be Annie’s father. He was in poor health, moreover, suffering from his catarrh and exhaustion; he developed severe gout in one foot and at a large public farewell dinner at Delmonico’s had to be helped into the banquet room, his swollen foot swaddled in black silk. Studio photographs taken in New York show him grizzled and aged—hardly a figure of Byronic allure. He looked so haggard on the platform that an upstate New York newspaper commented, bluntly, that he “cannot be expected to live very many years longer.” No young woman, one might think, could love such a graybeard with other than daughterly tenderness.

  Yet Annie’s affection often had a distinctly more amorous than daughterly flavor. On the day he sailed for England, she lamented: “Rose at six this morning sleep being out of the question. I must confess to sitting down in my night-dress in a flood of tears … it seems more than I can bear.” She loved Dickens, she felt, with such passion for a man as only a woman could feel. While her husband would regret Dickens’s departure, she observed, he “will always have perhaps a more repose-ful connection [with Dickens] than is possible on earth between men and women.” Her own feelings at Dickens’s departure were anything but reposeful. The day after he sailed, she was too sunk in grief to write in her journal, but on the following day she recalled their parting: “My memory goes back again and again to the last scene, the last embrace the look of pain; the bitter bitter sobs after he had fairly gone.” She often dreamed of him: “In the morning I awake dreaming that he has just come to say ‘goodbye’—I see that sharp painful look dart up his brow like a lightning of grief. I feel his parting kiss on my cheek and see my arms stretched out to hold him—vanished.” She mourned as if she had lost her lover to the grave: “He has gone home to his dear ones and to the splendor of England’s summer,” she consoled herself, but his happy return was a death to her: “It is the same when our dear ones go to Heaven—we know they are glad, but the darkness shuts down fearfully about ourselves.”

  For weeks after, her thoughts remained fixed on him. She followed him in fancy across the Atlantic, day by day, to his joyous arrival in England. She mused about his return to Gad’s Hill, wishfully imagining herself there, devoting herself to him as a loving slave: “He is swift, restless, impatient, with moods of fire, but he is also and above all, tender, loving, strong for right, charitable and patient by moral force. Happy those who live, and bear, and do and suffer, and above all love him to the end—who love and labor with and for him.” Annie Fields was not an excitable woman, ordinarily; she was, rather, a staunch New Englander, an Adams, a proper Bostonian; she never missed one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s many enlightening public lectures. Dickens awoke a sleeping ardor in her nature. Her love for him remained the emotional zenith, the great passion, of her life.

  Despite her infatuation, she remained a loyal, solicitous wife. The amorous confessions of her journals were no surreptitious record of a forbidden passion, for she shared both her feelings and her journals with her husband. Indeed, she kept a journal not only as a personal narrative, but as an historical document: “It is for his sake [her husband’s] as well as my own comfort that I make this little record that if we both live as years roll on … we may refer to points where memory fails us and make the links complete.” When after Dickens’s death Fields wrote a memoir, Yesterdays with Authors, a third of his long chapter on Dickens was borrowed (without attribution) from Annie’s journals. For her, worship of Dickens was a family cult; and attributing her own feelings to her husband, she often included him in her rhapsodic tributes to her idol—“Even now the spell of his presence is upon us, his voice is in our ears,” and so on. She and Fields together lamented that Dickens was not sufficiently idolized, wondering “that America does not rise to do him honor. It certainly shows a great lack of the noble spirit of worship that more feeling does not come out.” But as she recognized, her husband’s affectionate admiration for Dickens was only a candle to the blaze of her adoration.

  Dickens’s response to Annie Fields’s overflowing adoration was friendly—but little more. He repaid her hospitality and idolatry with gratitude, but despite her attractiveness and her obvious infatuation, there is no evidence that he took any particular fancy to her. She was “one of the dearest little women in the world” (he told Georgina)—a compliment with perhaps a hint of condescension. One night after a reading, she and Fields visited him, and she exclaimed in her journal: “I believe I lay awake from pure pleasure after such a treat—hearing Marigold and having supper afterward with the dear great man.… Mr. Dickens was gentle kind and affectionate—indeed something more—so much more that I have forgotten to be afraid of him.” The “something more” would seem to hint at a growing personal connection between them, but Annie seems never to have progressed much beyond this mark in his regard. The genteel Boston wife was no competition for the young actress, for whom he pined and to whom he remained faithful during his long chaste absence. He enjoyed Annie’s admiration and lavish attentions, but perhaps no more than he enjoyed the companionship of her hearty, chatty husband, with whom he took long walks and conversed freely. Though he could not have doubted that Fields relayed all his disclosures to Annie, she herself probably never became a direct confidante of Dickens himself.

  Even if she never heard a word about Ellen from him directly, however, an avid feminine curiosity gleaned details about his personal affairs, and she conjectured the rest.

  How much did she learn about Ellen? Even in her journal she was reticent and discreet, making few direct references to Ellen; but those she made reveal that she knew far more than she recorded. Her primary and probably sole source was her husband, who repeated confidences dropped by Dickens during their long walks together. Between themselves the Fieldses talked about Dickens frequently and fully; to others, they remained tight-lipped. A brief entry in Annie’s journal in August 1870, two months after Dickens’s death, shows their discretion. “Yesterday darling J and I passed the entire day together alone.… Dear Dickens is seldom out of our thoughts. I see his face near mine at unexpected seasons,” she wrote (whereas her husband simply thought about Dickens, Annie saw him in visions). Musing on Dickens, she went on to a more concrete item: “J told Longfellow, as was quite right, about E. L. T.” The brief summary phrase “about E. L. T.” betrays in a flash the Fieldses’ familiarity with the whole story of Dickens and Ellen—even her middle name, or at least initial. Had Annie known less, she would have said more. Even after Dickens’s death, Ellen’s identity remains masked by initials in Annie’s journal; and only then could the Fieldses’ conspiratorial knowledge be divulged to Fields’s closest friend, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had also been friendly with Dickens. Together Fields and Annie had just written and published in the Atlantic Monthly an adulatory eulogy of Dickens, with no hint of “E. L. T.” or his double life.

  Her journals reveal that Annie had a due regard for the proprieties and could judge severely. Nonetheless, she was willing to allow Dickens his mistress. In addition to being a charming friend and guest, he was “perhaps the greatest genius of our time”—and one had to make allowances for genius. Moreover, he evoked her pity. He was unhappy in his sons, she learned; he had been unhappily married. He seemed “often troubled by the lack of energy his children show and has even allowed J. to see how deep his unhappiness is in having had so many children by a wife who was totally uncongenial.” He hinted that his marriage had foundered because Catherine drank heavily: “He told J. yesterday in walking tha
t nine out of ten of the cases of disagreement in marriage came from drink he believed. He is a man who has suffered evidently.”

  On one occasion, he spoke to Annie herself about his marriage, obliquely. As she recounted the marital problems of a friend, Dickens remarked on “how much wrong on both sides there had been in that case as in many & most others—speaking somehow with a consciousness of his own position underlying the words yet with a firm & even eager manner.” Embarrassed by this plunge into personal matters, Annie looked down shyly; raising her eyes, “I saw a look of suffering about his face which showed as neither his voice nor words had done how painful the subject was upon which he had found himself launched.” One need not doubt Dickens’s sincerity even as one notes that the role of suffering victim was the perfect key to unlock Annie’s sympathies. She melted at the unhappiness of this great man; and his sorrows trumped any sisterly compassion she might have felt for the discarded “uncongenial” wife.

  Annie’s uneasiness with Dickens’s glancing allusion to his marriage may suggest why he avoided speaking with her on the delicate issue of Ellen. Nonetheless, with the information her husband shared with her she could form her own conclusions. She did not doubt Dickens’s transgressions. “May his mistakes be expiated,” she once pleaded, and after his death she confided to her journal that “I love to think of our beloved [Dickens] beyond the reach of life’s turmoil and folded in life’s rest … and forget his failures & the dark side of his strange experience.” Once she enigmatically petitioned, “May God keep him from temptations which are too great—and all of us.” Beyond Ellen, what temptations did she have in mind? And in the tacked-on “all of us,” was Annie glancing at her own susceptibilities? However chaste in fact, her passion for Dickens may have prompted vivid fancies.