The Final Recollections of Charles Dickens

by Thomas Hauser

  I continued to advocate for causes that I believed in.

  Dombey and Son and The Personal History and Experience of David Copperfield flowed from my pen.

  As my fortune grew, my father was creative in finding ways to borrow against my credit. He had never become a responsible provider. At times, he went so far as to forge my name as the guarantor of his debts. He died in 1851, and I paid off what was still owed. Thus, even his dying caused me expense. When my father died, my mother was left to me. She was by then in a strange state of mind from senile decay, and I assumed full financial responsibility for her as well. That same year, I signed a lease on Tavistock House, an eighteen-room stone mansion in London.

  In 1853, I read publicly from my work before a large audience for the first time. It was a charitable undertaking to benefit the Industrial and Literary Institute in Birmingham. Three readings were scheduled. The first was on 27 December. Seventeen hundred people braved a snowstorm to attend. It is a good thing to have that many people together in the palm of one’s hand. The final reading in the series was on 30 December. The audience was comprised of working people, who had been asked to pay only six pence apiece. I read to them from A Christmas Carol, not just as an author but as a stage performer, employing a different voice for each of the twenty-three characters.

  Those in attendance listened closely with earnestness. Meeting with some of them after the reading, I saw a young woman with a cherubic face and golden hair and wondered if she might not be Florence Spriggs’s daughter. Ruby would have been eighteen years old by then, the same age as this woman looked to be. But the young woman before me was from the north of England, and her parents were with her. The resemblance between mother and daughter was unmistakable.

  Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit. My books grew in number.

  I added a moustache and beard to my appearance. Friends said that they approved because they now saw less of me.

  In 1858, I made the decision to read in public for my own financial profit. Some questioned the dignity of the undertaking and feared that it might damage my respectability. But there was no compromise of the literature.

  I rehearsed the selection for each reading as many as a hundred times. Performances were in the evening, starting at eight o’clock. After ninety minutes, I would go to my dressing room for a ten-minute intermission, during which I had a glass of brandy or champagne. Then I returned to the stage for a final selection of about thirty minutes.

  The readings were done from specially printed texts with large type and broad margins. In preparation, I deleted and reordered passages, marked each page with different coloured inks to denote stage instructions, and underlined phrases for emphasis.

  My first reading for profit was conducted on 29 April at Saint Martin’s Hall in London. I began by telling my audience, “I have long held the opinion that whatever brings a public man and his public face to face on terms of mutual confidence and respect is a good thing. Thus, it is that I come to be among you tonight, to hold with persons who would otherwise never hear my voice or see my face.”

  I read for three months in London and for three months more in other parts of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The crowds I saw every night welcomed me with affection and treated me as a friend.

  But the happiness I had anticipated when I was young was not the happiness that I enjoyed. A vague longing shadowed me like a cloud. Years of marriage had provided me with little in the way of romance or companionship. I was a mismarried man.

  Most men are disappointed in life somehow or another. But a sense often came upon me of the most important friend that I had never made. Catherine was a kindhearted woman. But we were ill suited for one another, and there was no help for it.

  There is no disparity in marriage more troublesome than unsuitability of mind. When I was young, I had made a terrible mistake. If Catherine had married another sort, she might have done better. As it was, we were poorly matched and bound together by a manacle forged of misfortune that joined our fettered hands so harshly that it chafed to the bone.

  My affections for Catherine diminished steadily over time. Her presence aggravated me. As I grew leaner, she grew larger so that she was unpleasantly heavy. Plump became obese. Her face was very round. She fell into or out of every carriage we entered, scraped the skin off her legs, brought great sores on her feet, and made herself blue with bruises.

  She was constantly pregnant, although I was as much to blame for that as she. Long after I lost feeling for her, we continued to have children. Catherine followed a pattern of pregnancy, birth, depression, and another pregnancy. As she aged, she suffered from violent headaches, melancholy, and nervous depression.

  I became unbearably selfish, though I did not know it or refused to acknowledge that condition in myself. There was fault on my side in the intensity of my nature and the difficulties of my disposition. But nothing I might have done to better the situation would have altered the fact that the marriage was a weight upon me to which an anvil was a feather.

  As Catherine and I grew more distant, I was given to infatuations toward other women. She accused me often of infidelity. The accusations were false and infuriated me. I was unfaithful only in my heart. Other women crossed my path, but I acted beyond flirtation with none of them.

  As the years passed, Amanda Wingate remained in my thoughts. She was a ghost that haunted me, an image of beauty stamped upon my heart, forever changeless and indelible. I preserved in my mind the image of her from each of the times we had met. The first day at her home; next, when I returned to interview Geoffrey Wingate for the second time; their dinner party; the ballet; and our assignation. The recollection of that late afternoon never dimmed in memory. There were periods in my life when I tried not to think of her. But always, she came back to me.

  I have thought at times that no one can see Amanda with my eyes or know her with my mind. But then I wonder how many of my dreams have been dreamed by others and how many of those other dreamers were with her, as I was on that late afternoon in the spring.

  I did not know what Amanda felt for me then nor what her remembrances were. Many times, I looked back upon that hour. Many times in the twilight of a summer evening or beside a flickering winter fire, my mind journeyed back to those moments. I dismissed Amanda from any association with my present or future as completely as if she were dead, which she might have been for all I knew. But she remained indelible in my thoughts like a great tower on a plain. In the innermost recesses of my mind, I cherished her against reason, against happiness, against peace.

  I was at a loss to penetrate the mystery of my own heart. I never spoke to a soul about her. Over time, she became for me like a character of my creation whom I had loved and parted from forever when the writing of a book was done. She stood midway between the world of real people who populated my daily life and the fantasies of my mind.

  My writing continued to be the only truly satisfying love of my life. I do not know why this was so. I know only that it was and remains true to this day.

  I live in my books. Things do not exist for me until I have written them. The children of my mind, created and shaped as I wish them to be, are as real and as important to me as my flesh and blood children. They are my true progeny. Each time I finish the writing of a book, I bid farewell to family and friends who are dear to my heart. I am melancholy to think that they are lost to me forever and I will never see them again. I am happy and content only when I am writing. My cares lift when I sit with paper before me and pen in hand. If I stop writing, I will die.

  It has been said often that I carry myself as though I am always on the stage. The passion that I had for theatre when I was young has been constant throughout my life. In the year after I was married, I wrote four plays. They were ordinary, and I acknowledged to myself that my literary gifts lay elsewhere. Thereafter, I acted in amateur theatrical productions and founded a theatrical company.

  In 1857, I produced a play called The Frozen Deep
at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Most of the actors and actresses in the cast were amateurs. But I engaged the services of three professionals: Frances Ternan and two of her daughters, Maria and Ellen.

  Queen Victoria had ascended to the throne twenty years before. The Victorian era was characterised by a new moral restraint. Ladies of the aristocracy did not work in any occupation or engage in any other activity for pay. It was understood that some women were forced by circumstances to work. But acting—the display of a woman’s body to men who paid for the pleasure of looking at her—was considered in some circles to be only one step removed from prostitution.

  Ellen Ternan was graceful, witty, and charming—the antithesis of Catherine. I was forty-five years old when we met. “Nelly” was eighteen.

  The passage of time had made it ever more difficult for Catherine and I to live together. My marriage had become a cold, bitter, taunting truth that bound me down as if with leaden chains. No two people were ever created with such an impossibility of interest, sympathy, or tenderness between them. Domestic unhappiness lay so heavily upon me that, for the first time in my life, it was difficult for me to write. Our marriage was no longer a matter of trial or will or sufferance or making the best of it. It was a blighted dismal failure that had to end.

  In October of 1857, I instructed that the master bedroom and adjacent dressing room at Tavistock House be divided by a partition into separate bedrooms for Catherine and myself. But there was need to put a wider distance between us than could be found under one roof.

  In May of 1858, negotiations for a marital separation began. In the end, an agreement was reached. Catherine left the marital residence and made a new home at 70 Gloucester Crescent. I agreed to pay the sum of six hundred pounds annually to her for the duration of her life. Our oldest son chose to live with his mother. The others, in accord with the deed of separation that Catherine and I signed, were given no choice and remained with me. Catherine’s sister, Georgina, took my side and stayed at Tavistock to help look after the children and the running of the house.

  I have been guilty on occasion of self-righteous behaviour. When things go wrong, I am inclined to portray myself as the sufferer and victim of others. I acknowledge that there were times when I conducted myself poorly during my marriage to Catherine. Too often, my passion was only for myself. I was cruel in ways that I should not have been. How much of my ungracious condition of mind was my own fault and how much of it was hers is of no moment now to me or to anyone else. Excusably or inexcusably, well or poorly done, the marriage was ended.

  After Catherine and I separated, I was a friend to Ellen Ternan, her mother, and her sisters. I also developed a more personal attachment to Nelly. She was both purity and forbidden fruit.

  A proper single woman did not have relations in bed with anyone, including the man she was engaged to marry. To do so would brand her as little more than a whore in the convention of the time. Nelly did not bend to my will as I had hoped she would. I kept after her and, by force of will, wore down her resistance. Finally, we had relations at my urging. But my attentions were a burden upon her. In the end, she told me, “It is over. It never should have begun.”

  Through it all, my fame continued to grow. The invention of the daguerreotype enabled the mass reproduction of images. By the late 1850s, the appearance of my photograph in newspapers and monthly publications was common, and my face was known throughout England. At times, I felt as though my visage had been sufficiently printed and distributed to haunt mankind forever.

  My public readings continued. I advanced in fame and fortune to the approving roar of the crowd. I was the only author that many among England’s deprived classes knew.

  I also became a property owner. When I was a boy, my father brought me often to look at a house called Gad’s Hill Place. “Do you see that house?” he told me. “If you grow up to be a wealthy man, perhaps you shall own that house or another like it.”

  The Gad’s Hill property was put up for sale. I paid the purchase price. The leasee’s term expired. In September of 1860, I moved in.

  My intense activity continued.

  A Tale of Two Cities . . . Great Expectations . . . Our Mutual Friend.

  I rarely relaxed. I was never fully at rest. I was always dissatisfied and trying after something that I was never able to find.

  The seasons passed. More years went by. A field of flowers bloomed by a river that flowed sparkling in the summer sun. Then snow covered the field and the river rolled to the sea, ruffled by the winter wind and thickened with drifting ice.

  I grew older. My health began to fail. I suffered at times from prolonged colds, sore throats, congestion of the chest, and weariness that lasted for weeks. There were days when my left foot was so swollen from gout that I could not put on my boot. On some nights, I relied upon opium to sleep.

  On the ninth day of November in 1867, I set sail from London for a second American tour. Twenty-five years earlier, I had visited America to see the country and its people and gather notes for a book. The motivation for this trip was profit alone. Eighty-four readings were planned for a guarantee of ten thousand pounds with the likelihood of earning twice as much.

  I arrived in Boston on the nineteenth of November. Within a day, every ticket for my readings there had been sold. I travelled next to New York, where it seemed as though my bust or portrait was in every shop I entered. In Washington, President Andrew Johnson reserved seats for each performance for his family and himself. A quarter century earlier, President Tyler had greeted me with the encomium, “I am astonished to see so young a man, sir.” Now there were whispers that I looked old.

  For much of the tour, I suffered from a cold. My gout flared, and my left foot was painfully swollen. Because of my condition, readings in Chicago and Canada were cancelled.

  The journey closed with a return to Boston followed by five farewell readings in New York. My last appearance was on the twentieth of April, 1868. I rose, as was my custom, at seven in the morning and had fresh cream with two tablespoons of rum. At noon, I partook of a sherry cobbler and a biscuit. Then I visited the hall to review the surroundings one last time.

  A maroon carpet had been placed on the stage with a large maroon screen as a backdrop. Gaslights were aligned in a manner that would present me in the most dramatic light possible while the rest of the stage receded into darkness. A reading desk stood at the center of the stage, covered by a crimson cloth. Late in the day, I put on my evening clothes, affixed a boutonniere to the satin lapel on my tailcoat, and ate an egg mixed into a glass of sherry.

  The reading began at eight o’clock. I was greeted by enthusiastic applause. I felt well. My energy was uncharacteristically strong. I read from The Pickwick Papers and A Christmas Carol, gesturing with both hands, grimacing, glaring, and rolling my eyes as I performed. At the end, I addressed the crowd.

  “In this brief life of ours, it is sad to do almost anything for the last time. It is a sad consideration with me that, in a very few moments, this brilliant hall and all that it contains will fade from my view for evermore. When I first entered on this interpretation of myself, I was sustained by the hope that I could drop into some hearts some new expression of the meaning of my books. To this hour, that purpose is strong. In all probability, I shall never see your faces again. But I can assure you that yours have yielded me as much pleasure as I have given to you.”

  There was thunderous applause. As a matter of course, I usually left the stage at that moment, went to my dressing room, and did not return. But on this, my last night in America, I lingered.

  The applause grew louder. I stepped down the stairs into the space between the stage and the front row to mingle with the crowd. People were pushing their way down the aisle, shouting my name, struggling to come close to me within the mob. There was chaos.

  Then I saw an apparition.

  I stood transfixed.

  My face grew flush.

  The apparition came closer.

&
nbsp; All time seemed suspended.

  And the apparition spoke.

  “You’ve done quite well for yourself, Mr. Dickens,” Amanda Wingate said.

  CHAPTER 11

  She was changed, of course. Time had set some marks upon her face. Her fine figure was a shade less upright than when I had known her, and her hair was gray. But the passing years had given her their blessing. If her beauty was no longer in the spring of life, it was certainly not in winter. There was a contentment in her eyes that I had not seen before.

  The woman I had longed for my entire life was standing in front of me. In that moment, I would have died for her.

  “You were always beautiful. But you are more beautiful now than ever.”

  “Father Time does his work honestly,” Amanda said with a smile. “I do not mind him.”

  The crowd was pushing in around us.

  “May I take you to dinner tonight?”

  “Thank you, but that is not possible.”

  “I must see you again.”

  “I simply wanted to tell you that I am happy for your success and wish you well.”

  A stout red-faced man inserted himself between us and clamped his hand on mine. The smell of onions was heavy on his breath. He resembled a slobbering, overfed cow.

  “Mr. Dickens. It is an honour and a pleasure—”

  I cut him off.

  “And I say to you, Mr. Dickens, to have you in our city and to shake your hand—”

  More people were closing in. I struggled to free myself from his grip.

  “The hand that has written so many fine books, the hand—”

  I broke free. Amanda was gone. I searched frantically for her with my eyes, but she had disappeared into the crowd. I tried to move to where she might be and was swallowed up by the mob.

  An hour later, I returned to the hotel. I was wet with sweat. My heart was pounding. My emotions were in turmoil. The concierge called my name.