Dickens
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Back in November 1851, a relieved Dickens had moved his pregnant wife, eight children, Georgina, and various servants into a new home, where he gratefully drank a glass of champagne to Tavistock House, “and [its] illustrious architect,” his brother-in-law Henry Austin. An engineer with great practical abilities, Austin had devoted hundreds of hours to drawing up plans, acting as his liaison with the contractor, and supervising daily progress. The cost for the purchase of the lease had been reasonable. The elaborate, personalized, and closely supervised renovations, though, had necessitated Dickens anticipating from Bradbury and Evans “the accounts of the last half year by … five or six hundred pounds.” A few weeks after moving in, awaiting the statement of the balance, the sight of a letter in Austin’s “hand threw [him] into a cold perspiration.” The “bill is too long to be added up, until Babbage’s calculating machine shall be improved and finished … there is not paper enough ready made, to carry it over and bring it forward again.” With his lease on Devonshire Terrace expiring in 1851, a new house had been determined on as early as 1847. It would have to be large, and consequently expensive.
Having begun to look for a new house early in 1851, in late January, with Austin’s approval, he bid “with fear and trembling” for one in Highgate. To his disappointment and self-criticism, he lost it, “outbidden” by another party of whom the agent had “mysteriously” hinted. “Nothing so good will ever turn up again, I believe, for the money.” After looking at a number of possibilities, he offered £2,700 for Balmoral House, overlooking Regent’s Park. The offer was declined, and he did not feel he could afford to offer more. Catherine was in Malvern, the children at Devonshire Terrace, which he had arranged to keep until the end of the year. And suddenly he had to face the absorbing anguish of his father’s and then Dora’s death, even while he continued to house-hunt. Soon the notion of sea breezes appealed to him, apprehensive that the influx of visitors for the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, with “a storm of letters of introduction rising from all quarters of the earth,” would make it impossible for him to get any work done or have any privacy. By the middle of April 1851, having rented Fort House in Broadstairs, he fixed bachelor rooms for himself over the Household Words office for his London visits. It was a satisfactory temporary solution. On April 20, he went to look at the large well-located house that Frank Stone was soon to vacate, Tavistock House, in Tavistock Square, just north of the British Museum. Stone could not afford to keep the house, half of which he rented out. By mid-July, the prospect had matured into the “great idea of buying (for five and forty years) Stone’s house.… It is in the dirtiest of all possible conditions.… It is decidedly cheap,” though, “most commodious—and might be made very handsome.” He agreed to pay £1,500 for the house and fixtures. “Even in the midst of dirt and desolation,” when he opened the blinds he saw sunlight.23
Leaning on Austin like “a very staff, in the invention and execution of the proposed tremendous renovations,” he had major structural changes made. Stone helped expedite the work by accepting the suggestion that he and his family stay at Devonshire Terrace for a few months to give the workmen early access. Though the costs soared, so did the satisfactions. To amuse himself, willing to pay for his enthusiasms, Dickens even went to the expense of having a carpenter create 113 fictitious book shells for whose false bindings he provided a list of mock titles, some of them silly, some comic, some satirical, including a “History of a Short Chancery Suit.” He paid more heavily and sensibly for what had become a daily necessity for him, a shower. No detail about it was too insignificant. “The bather would be happier and easier in mind, if the [toilet] did not demonstrate itself obtrusively. I fear that I could hardly bear the box in the corner—speaking as the taker of the Shower Bath every morning. I have not sufficient confidence in my strength of mind, to think that I could begin the business of every day, with the enforced contemplation of the outside of that box. I believe it would affect my bowels. It might relax, it might confine, but I must trust its having some influence on the happy mediocrity it is my ambition to preserve.” A curtain eventually was put around the toilet. After various trials of plumbing and rooftop water tanks, he finally had “a cold shower of the best quality, always charged to an unlimited extent.” Finally, “the agonies of getting into [the] new house” were over. He was “beginning to find [his] papers and to know where the pen and ink are.” Grateful to him for his efforts, his daughters burst into their new, brightly decorated bedroom, in which “not a single thing in it … had not been expressly chosen for them, or planned by him,” with a sense of how privileged they were to have such a father.24
Though Catherine was always getting better, she was rarely completely well. The persistent pregnancies probably baffled both of them. Perhaps she felt that they demonstrated her usefulness, her importance, her maternal capability, at least an achievement of sorts. Her awareness of her husband’s attitude, though, and her ill health suggest that she may have greeted them ambivalently, perhaps unhappily. The record is silent on her response. Plorn was to be their last child, though why Dickens seemed incapable of not impregnating Catherine prior to 1851 but able to avoid doing so thereafter is unclear. Perhaps physical and nervous illnesses now interfered with conception. Perhaps husband and wife discovered or now found palatable available methods to avoid conception, though abstinence is likely to have been the most useful of these. Her probable lack of interest in having more children may have contributed to her being less available. Her husband’s bemused disgust with their fecundity, his concern about expenses, his uneasiness about his assumption of middle age, and his growing ambivalence about his wife—her illnesses, her obesity, her clumsiness, her inability to fulfill his yearnings for an ideal other—may have made periods of abstinence attractive. Immediately before Plorn’s conception, Dickens made a list of his eight children, as if adding up the ledger of his domestic woes and his paternal self-definition. “Charley, about aged 14, at school at Eton. Mary 13. Kate 11. Walter Landor 10 (going to India bye and bye). Francis Jeffrey 7. Alfred Tennyson 5. Sydney Smith 4. Henry Fielding 2.” To these children, “he was a strict master in the way of insisting upon everything being done perfectly and exactly as he desired,” so his eldest daughter remembered. “But, on the other hand, [he] was most kind, just, and considerate.”25
After the birth of his last child, a few months past his fortieth birthday, he described himself as having grown “more robust—less interesting—shorter haired—a more solid-looking personage—and not younger.” Except for his susceptibility to pain related to his kidneys, he had no more than the usual number of attacks of flu, colds, and sore throats. He sometimes, though, awoke in the night with the sensation that he was choking, which he recognized to be the result of “disordered nerves,” and for which “oppressive and painful sensation” he took a pinch of snuff. In September 1851, he was fascinated by a large number of bloated, drowned farm animals that had washed onto shore at Margate from a shipwreck. “In every state and stage of decay,” they were being chopped open and plundered. He had moments of spontaneous recall of the feeling of being a child or at least young again. In responding to a letter from Maria Beadnell’s father, George, with whom he’d kept up a sporadic correspondence over the years, Dickens felt that he was exactly nineteen as he wrote the names of Maria and her sister and asked Beadnell to give them his love. He was still always looking, especially when starting to write, “for something I have not found in life, but may possibly come to a few thousand years hence, in some other part of some other system, God knows.…”26
IN APRIL 1849, LADY BLESSINGTON AND COUNT D’ORSAY’S ELEGANT house of cards had come tumbling down. With “a very doleful eye,” Dickens saw the auction notice pinned up to the gate of their residence, Gore House. The last splendor of Regency ostentation was dissolving into darkness. Having come to England to escape debts (on his arrival in London he had been jailed briefly for three hundred pounds owed to his boot maker in Paris), D’Or
say now fled so hastily that he had no time to say good-bye to his friends. He eluded his English creditors, who had been held at bay by the security of Lady Blessington’s putative wealth. The widow, though, had an income of two thousand pounds a year on which she maintained expenses of four thousand pounds. Her expectation that she might make up the difference by earnings as a writer (not even the Daily News could afford to pay her the eight hundred pounds she requested) proved emblematic of Regency self-indulgence attempting to extend itself into a world of Victorian realism. The pyramid of debts collapsed. Those who had previously only requested payment now put in executions against her property. “Bill discounters, money lenders, jewellers, lace vendors, tax collectors, gas company agents, all persons having claims to urge, pressed them … simultaneously.” The optimistic D’Orsay could not believe that this was the end. For almost two years, he had left Gore House only after sunset or on Sundays to avoid being served legal papers. A creditor, though, in a ludicrous disguise, got into the house. Within hours, Lady Blessington had persuaded D’Orsay that he must leave. That night he was on his way to Paris. The countess followed, neither of them ever to return to England again. Dickens went “to say good by’e … and found you gone. I cannot tell you what a blank it was to me to look at your empty house.” The extravagant contents were put up for public viewing. More than twenty thousand people came in five days. Realizing over twelve thousand pounds, the sale cleared all their debts. There were, though, various morals in the tale of “the most signal ruin of an establishment of a person of high rank … ever witnessed.”27
On one of the evenings preceding the auction, Dickens made his unhappy but curious way into the crowded house. So too did much of literary and social London, partly as mourners, partly as voyeurs, partly to congratulate themselves on their own good fortune. With his strong sense of class and manners, as well as of transience, Thackeray thought it “a dismal sight—Gore House full of Snobs looking at the furniture—foul Jews, odious bombazeen women.… Brutes keeping their hats on in the kind old drawing-rooms—I longed to knock some of them off: and say Sir be civil in a Lady’s room.… Ah it was a strange sad picture of Wanaty Fair.” Dickens never again saw the countess, who died in D’Orsay’s arms in Paris in June 1849. Gradually the count became “much improved in spirits and looks,” and set up an atelier, which Dickens visited with Maclise in June 1850, and again in February 1851. The count’s unexpected death in August 1852 was less of a personal loss than a reminder to the novelist of changes in himself and others. “Poor D’Orsay! It is a tremendous consideration that friends should fall around us in such awful numbers as we attain middle life.… But this is a Dream, may be, and death will wake us.…”28
There were other trepidations in the Dickens circle. Forster’s poor health, the aftermath of rheumatic fever, overweight, and gout, kept his friends worried. The hardworking bachelor, ambitious and financially anxious, still kept long night hours, writing, editing, socializing. The “Lincolnian mammoth” hosted regular dinner parties at his enlarged Lincoln’s Inn Fields apartment, and kept his friends tied closely to his exuberance and his supportiveness. “Anything like [a] reprimand” from Forster, Maclise confessed, “is death to me.” The early triangle of friendship still had its force, and Maclise still wanted to be “first in the list of your friendships.” An intimate of Carlyle, D’Orsay, Blessington, Bulwer-Lytton, and Macready, Forster fought tiredness, overwork, ill health, and occasional depression to keep his friendships strong, to have the pleasure of feeling useful to those he loved. Without any children of his own, he found paternal delight in spending time with Macready’s and Dickens’ children, and especially with Bulwer-Lytton’s son. Despite their occasional tiffs, Dickens invariably turned to him for help with proofs and business. At Household Words, Forster let Wills know that he expected to be consulted on everything, and bullied the susceptible assistant editor. In September 1851, “slowly recovering from the effects of a most severe and painful illness,” he stayed with the Dickenses for a few weeks. After another series of illnesses the next year, he was not in “a very healthy condition.” A demanding but welcome guest, Forster was for Dickens a long-standing habit, like a member of the family. Sublimely oblivious, he dispensed temporary headaches as if they were medicinal gifts. On one long walk, Forster “was in a tip top state of amiability, but I think I never heard him half so loud.”29 His friendship was deeply valued, perhaps even slightly more than his presence.
Dickens’ pleasures, though, were increasingly centered around Leech, Lemon, and the new friends he had made during the theatricals of the late 1840s. Of the friends of his youth, he saw less of Mitton, who had become cranky, eccentric, and even reclusive, eventually drifting away into a rural legal practice with an irregular domestic arrangement. He continued to cherish Beard; almost a member of the family, the journalist often dined informally with them and sometimes accepted Dickens’ reminder, especially on holidays, that there was always “a capital spare room” for him. Ainsworth had become almost a stranger. Cruikshank’s obsession with “total abstinence,” and soon with rewriting fairy tales with an eye toward that subject, gradually alienated Dickens, though he disingenuously assured Cruikshank “that I have never felt the slightest coolness towards you, or regarded you with any other than my old unvarying feeling of affectionate friendship.”30 Sensitive to the denigration of imagination, Dickens attacked Cruikshank’s exploitation of traditional fairy tales in an article, “Fraud on the Fairies,” published in October 1853 in Household Words. He felt strongly that the primacy of the imagination and its pleasures were being threatened by politics, by rational and irrational ideologies, by the dry-as-dust social scientists and utilitarians.
As an antidote to overwork, Dickens pursued holidays and friendships, often at the same time. London entertainments still had their attractions, especially the theatre. Though he increasingly thought London “a vile place” and felt despondent on returning to town, he threw down the urban-entertainment gauntlet frequently. “Maclise and I,” he told Lemon, “are going to the Panorama of the Nile, today at 3.… After that we are going anywhere. If you are disengaged, and a Man, join us at one or other of these places!” He took advantage of Charley’s being at Eton to take numbers of day excursions, with Beard and Leech, to Windsor. With hampers from Fortnum & Mason’s, he treated his son and his schoolmates to picnics on the river, even in the rain. Appreciative and slightly tipsy, Charley and his companions sang, “I don’t care a fig what the people may think,/ But what WILL the governor say?” Usually he went to Windsor by train, walking from the station at nearby Slough, a town and an area he got to know well. With Leech or Lemon or Egg, he still took long walks, especially on the Downs. With the Stones and the Willses (both wives, but especially Janet Wills, were favorites) he went to Richmond or Greenwich, sometimes with Catherine and Georgina also. With Maclise, Dickens went to Paris for a week in late June 1850. As usual, they visited the morgue, “where there was a body horribly mutilated with a musket ball in the head, and afterwards drowned.” Maclise became so sick that he ran outside and threw up on the pavement. Despite the heat, the holiday was a success, with visits to D’Orsay, conviviality with Normanby and his mistress, appreciation of the fact “that virgins were not usually to be found in French theatres,” and amusement at the bohemian Maclise’s being “extremely loose as to his waistcoat, and otherwise careless in regard of buttons.”31
Having acted Macbeth in his farewell as he “never, never before acted it,” the fifty-eight-year-old Macready retired from the stage in February 1851. He soon expanded the 17 miles between Elstree and central London to the 130 between his new home in Sherborne, Dorset, and his old haunts. For the actor, it was a liberation toward which all the energies of his life had been directed. He exchanged a lifetime of distaste for his profession and hatred of the tawdriness of early-Victorian theatrical life for the life of a dignified country gentleman. It is probably also likely that the corridors of his home in Elstree had echo
ed mournfully with memories of his dead children. One of the private dramas of the Dickens circle was the tubercular nemesis, the “fatal dowry” of Macready’s wife, Catherine Atkens, that killed five of the doting Macready’s children and then, one year after his retirement, their mother. At his last performance, he wore black for the recent death of his “beloved firstborn,” his daughter Nina. “God knows how my heart loves thee … my beloved child!”
For Dickens, Macready’s final performance was a milestone in his own life. “When I was a mere boy, I was one of your faithful and devoted adherents in the pit.… As I improved myself… in mind and fortune, I only became the more earnest … in my study of you.”32 From Dickens’ first awareness of the theatre, Macready had been an idolized presence, a model for the imaginative transformation of himself from a private personality into a major actor on the literary and social stage.
Over six hundred people crowded into the Hall of Commerce on March 1, 1851, for Macready’s farewell banquet, which Dickens and Forster had organized. More ascetic than his friends, grumbling that “Dickens gives orders and goes to Paris,” the actor was annoyed that they had initially chosen the smaller London Tavern because “they get a better dinner and plenty of champagne.” Dickens was back in ample time, though, to join the fervid applause for Macready’s tear-provoking farewell speech. “His resonant sonorous voice rang round the place like the shrill blast of a clarion,” reported one star-struck young actor, “and died away like the soft breathing of a lute.… Every word was clearly articulated and made its mark.” The same young actor reported that Dickens, who proposed the health of the chairman, Bulwer-Lytton (a choice that Macready was not particularly keen about), “was at his best.… His speech was as florid as his costume.… He wore a blue dress-coat, faced with silk and aflame with gorgeous brass buttons, a vest of black satin, with a white satin collar, and a wonderfully embroidered shirt.” The young actor “made some ingenuous remark upon the subject to Thackeray, who blandly rejoined, ‘Yes, the beggar is as beautiful as a butterfly, especially about the shirtfront.’” With ceaselessly beating wings, the bright butterfly took the opportunity to announce to his distinguished audience that he and the chairman had just undertaken a “design … to smooth the rugged way of young labourers, both in literature and the fine arts, and to soften … the declining years of meritorious age.” Macready, though, had provided for his own retirement. His last tour of the United States had been profitable though controversial. Twenty people had been killed in the Astor Place riots, provoked by Anglophobia and the American actor Edwin Forrest’s jealous hatred of his British rival. Nevertheless, the tour had added enough to his years of careful saving to leave him comfortable. Within six months of the dinner, he retired to Sherborne. When Forster visited him the next year, he had turned “old and grey.”33 Unexpectedly, he was to have another twenty years of rural solitude and to outlive by three of them his butterfly friend.