by Fred Kaplan
Whatever Dickens knew about the Ternans, they knew more about him, though it was all information of the sort available about celebrities. Clearly, they would not damage their careers by participating in such a high-level amateur production, and an association with Dickens and his friends might prove useful. Probably they felt some titillation in coming so close to an international celebrity whose photograph appeared prominently all over England. Maria had already seen him act, having attended one of the performances of The Frozen Deep at the Gallery of Illustration. Frances was to appear as Nurse Esther, Maria as Clara Burnham, and Ellen as Lucy Crayford, formerly Georgina’s role. In the farce, Dickens was to play Uncle John to Ellen’s Eliza Comfort, a complacent young girl whom he rejects in favor of her mother when he discovers that she prefers her young drawing master. At an early rehearsal, Maria confessed, perhaps archly, that she might not be able to bear the pain of the death scene in The Frozen Deep, for “it affected me so much when I saw it, that … I am afraid of myself.” Dickens was deeply impressed, even astounded, at her infusion of personal feeling into her acting performance.
The company went up on August 20, accompanied by Catherine and the now retired amateur actresses. Dickens was slightly ill with facial neuralgia. In Manchester, on the twenty-first and twenty-second, the audiences applauded ecstatically. As he lay dying on the stage in the role of Richard Wardour, “excited by the crying of two thousand people,” he imagined “with surprising force and brilliancy … new ideas for a story” of noble self-sacrifice, the germ of A Tale of Two Cities. Maria leaned over him. “Tears streamed out of her eyes into his mouth, down his beard, all over his rags—down his arms as he held her by the hair.” Ellen and her mother stood to the side. Maria “sobbed as if she were breaking her heart, and was quite convulsed with grief.” He whispered to her not to be so distressed. There was nothing really the matter. “She could only sob out ‘O! It’s so sad, O it’s so sad.’… By the time the curtain fell, we were all crying together.”52
At Gad’s Hill a few days later, he could not find distraction enough to keep him from anger, depression, and restlessness. With the theatricals over, he felt “shipwrecked” again. Prompted by another visit to the zoo to see the snakes fed with live animals, he clung to the image of “two small serpents, one beginning on the tail of a white mouse, and one on the head, and each pulling his own way, and the mouse very much alive all the time, with the middle of him madly writhing.” He may have remembered the white mice that ran the machines the boys made at Wellington House Academy. The image of being trapped and devoured pursued him. He had been feeling dispirited in July. The water problem at Gad’s Hill, which had already cost him a great deal of money, had been feverishly comic. The well had become blocked, “forlornly, overblown with black and choked … garden chaotically dragged up by the roots—everybody tearing their own hair and mine too—what could I do! Hahaha! Yah-ho-ho! Manically.” Not even finally breaking through to a deep spring of water that would permit a steady flow was more than a temporary relief. At the end of August, it was blocked again, and the frustration “of looking at the dry bath, morning after morning—is gradually changing the undersigned honey-pot into a mad bull.”53
Nothing seemed to help. He felt “as if the scaling of all the mountains in Switzerland, or the doing of any wild thing until I dropped, would be but a slight relief.” Though he explained his feelings to Miss Coutts as the necessary penalty of “an imaginative life and constitution,” he expressed himself more personally about the sources of his unhappiness to Collins. “I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable—indescribable—my misery amazing.” What stared back at him in the mirror of self-scrutiny was the numbness that resulted from feeling that life with Catherine was insufferable, not because of her essence but because of his needs. He did not want to live without love, romance, idealization. The thinning hair, the graying beard, made him even the more emotionally keen for life.
He was also experiencing with great discomfort very strong feelings about Ellen Ternan. He could not get her out of his mind. He soon proposed to Collins a diversion, a trip that would both distract him and provide an opportunity for a jointly written “gossipy description” for Household Words “of all that we see and all that we don’t see.” At Gad’s Hill, at the beginning of September, the rain was falling, “very sadly—very steadily.” If he was not going off shortly, he would “slink into a corner and cry.” Having decided on “a foray into the bleak fells of Cumberland,” he felt, with the day of departure approaching, that he had “come out of the dark corner into the sun again.” After Cumberland, they were to go to Doncaster, ostensibly for the races. As a sport, racing hardly interested him. But Charles Keans’s company from the Princess’s Theatre, including Maria and Ellen, was to inaugurate on September 14 the opening of the Theatre Royal. Before leaving London, he made the hotel arrangements, reserving the apartment for the entire week, stipulating that he would pay for the full time even if he left sooner in order to make certain that they would have accommodations at such a busy season.54
Before leaving, he raised with Forster his thought that there might be some way to put an end to his marital misery. His friend was not encouraging. Dickens’ justification of his restlessness and willfulness as an inherent part of his life as an artist seemed, to Forster, a description, not a justification. He reminded Dickens that he had less reason to complain about his marriage than was often the case when the parties had married very young. Dickens was beyond argument, though, and had not raised the subject for the purpose of amelioration. “The years have not made it easier to bear for either of us; and, for her sake as well as mine, the wish will force itself upon me that something might be done. I know too well it is impossible. There is the fact, and that is all one can say.” He went on, though. “Nor are you to suppose that I disguise from myself what might be urged on the other side. I claim no immunity from blame. There is plenty of fault on my side … in the way of a thousand uncertainties, caprices, and difficulties of disposition; but only one thing will alter that, and that is, the end which alters everything.”55 But his assumption of his share of the blame at this time and in this context may have been part of his preparation for some change short of death. He was used to challenging the impossible.
Only with Forster could he confess such feelings. The subject exceeded the limits of his other friendships, intimate as numbers of them were. Also, despite his general impulsiveness, he was shy about personal matters, and there was an aspect of him that was more than private in the ordinary sense, that was indeed secretive, perhaps going back to the need to suppress some of the facts of early family life and his experience at the blacking factory. Since Forster knew so much, Dickens felt comfortable with his knowing even more, though such knowledge at times strained their relationship and made it more difficult for him to relax with Forster than with some other friends. Once he began confiding his thoughts about his marriage, however, he could hardly stop. It was a great relief to him, “and I can get this from you, because I can speak of it to no one else.” Catherine and he simply were “not made for each other.… She is … amiable and complying; but we are strangely ill-assorted for the bond there is between us.” They had done nothing but make one another unhappy, and each would have been much better off with someone else. The incompatibility was insurmountable. “Her temperament will not go with mine.” And something had changed. “It mattered not so much when we had only ourselves to consider, but reasons have been growing since which make it all but hopeless that we should ever try to struggle on.” Perhaps he was alluding to his feelings for Ellen. He now read the past as an inevitable pattern that had been in progress since Mary Hogarth’s death, though he preferred to make the explicit reference to her namesake’s birth. “What has now befallen me I have seen steadily coming, ever since the days you remember when Mary was born; and I know too well that y
ou cannot, and no one can, help me.”
Perhaps, though, Forster could help with something else. Immediately before leaving for Cumberland, as if future alternatives were very much on his mind, Dickens raised the idea of paying for Gad’s Hill “by reviving that old idea of some Readings from my books. I am very strongly tempted. Think of it.…” Gad’s Hill Place, though, had already been paid for. His accounts with Bradbury and Evans were superlative: £2,317 of Little Dorrit proceeds to be paid shortly, his regular income from Household Words, and the plan to work his copyrights more effectively by creating a deluxe edition of his complete works “for the better class of readers,” which “would keep me well before the public without wasting me.”56 The advance he had gotten against future royalties could be retired easily and comfortably from his ongoing income. In raising the prospect of readings at this time, Dickens may have had in mind the likelihood that an alteration in his marital arrangement would add expense to his existing obligations.
With Collins, in misty, rainy Cumberland, he felt energetic, temporarily relieved of the emotional drain of family and wife. Whatever plans were on his mind, he found relief in action. “Too late,” he told Forster the next month, “to say, put the curb on, and don’t rush at hills—the wrong man to say it to. I have now no relief but in action. I am becoming incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing.” In Cumberland, there were literal hills to rush at. In a heavy rain, they climbed Carrick Fell. They went up in the afternoon. It became dark more quickly than they had expected, “rain terrific, black mists, darkness of night.” Their guide turned out to be incompetent. Dickens triumphantly pulled a compass out of his pocket as they began the descent. In a short while, the compass broke. “Darker and darker,” they went “round and round the mountain.” When they came to a roaring stream, they followed it, on his suggestion, down toward the river. “Leaps, splashes, and tumbles, for two hours. C. lost. C.D. whoops. Cries for assistance from behind. C.D. returns. C with horribly sprained ankle, lying in a rivulet.… C.D. carrying C. melodramatically (Wardour to the life!) everywhere.” In Wigton, in Lancaster, and then in Doncaster, Collins could hardly walk. He “never goes with me on any expedition,” Dickens sighed, “without receiving some damage or other.” The two traveling celebrities were constantly recognized and helped. Collins soon got around “with two thick sticks, like an admiral in a farce.” In the hotel suite they shared, where they began writing “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices,” which appeared in Household Words in five installments in October, Dickens was “perpetually tidying the rooms … and carrying all sorts of untidy things which belong to [Collins] into his bedroom, which is a picture of disorder.”57
In his self-portrait as Francis Goodchild in “The Lazy Tour,” Dickens provided himself with the titillation and the relief of admitting to the public what the public would not take as literally true, that he was experiencing the pangs of having fallen in love. He probably unselfconsciously rehearsed his anger at and rejection of Catherine in the painful, harsh story, inserted in “The Lazy Tour,” of a man who hates his wife so much that he is literally successful in willing her death. In Doncaster primarily to see Ellen, he felt a combination of secretiveness, playfulness, and pleasure. He teasingly confided to Wills that he wished he “was as good a boy in all things” as he was in not replying to “young Jerrold.” But “Lord bless you, the strongest parts of your present correspondent’s heart are made up of weaknesses. And he just come to be here at all (if he knew it) along of his Richard Wardour! Guess that riddle, Mr. Wills.”
At the Theatre Royal, he saw Maria and Ellen perform in one of Mark Lemon’s comedies. Both writers, instantly recognized when they entered the theatre, “at once became objects of the most marked attention and conversation.” Dickens “had been behaving excessively ill in the way of gasping and rubbing [his] head wearily … without the slightest idea that anybody knew” him when, “at the fall of the curtain … the pit suddenly got up without the slightest warning, and cried out ‘Three cheers for Charles Dickens Esquire!’ Thereupon all the house took it up” and “the actors came back and joined in the demonstration.” With Frances Ternan and her eldest daughter also in Doncaster, the Ternan presence was larger, though not more prominent, than his. The attention he attracted must have given him increased warning of how public a man he was, though private meetings with the Ternans and even a public outing to the race course could not have been damaging. To Wills, he riddled again, “so let the riddle and the riddler go their own wild way, and no harm come of it.”58
At Tavistock House, harm did come of it. Catherine’s anger, depression, and self-disparagement exploded into one of her periodic outbursts of jealousy. Whether or not she had any specific target in mind in addition to her husband is unclear. He told Emile de la Rue, from whom he expected knowledgeable sympathy, that she “has obtained positive proof of my being on the most confidential terms with, at least fifteen thousand women of various conditions in life … since we left Genoa. Please to respect me for this vast experience.… We put the skeleton away in the cupboard, and very few people, comparatively, know of its existence.” The image of the skeleton and the closet was not entirely accidental, and was unintentionally ironic. In his feelings, the weighty Catherine had become reduced to flesh without bones, a person without inner substance, someone to be locked away. With casual hostility, he disparaged her as mother, wife, and human being, and praised Georgina. Just before the middle of October, he ordered two separate rooms to be created out of what had been before one bedroom, a bathroom, and a large dressing room. “The sooner it is done, the better.”59 As far as he was concerned, the marriage was over.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My Own Wild Way
(1857–1859)
“A MISPLACED AND MISMARRIED MAN,” DICKENS WROTE ABOUT himself in his notebook. “Always, as it were, playing hide and seek with the world and never finding what Fortune seems to have hidden when he was born.” The prison of his childhood had closed more tightly around him now, and he had difficulty in distinguishing between formative feelings that derived from those early days and the adult realities of his present life. In being fettered to Catherine, he was still being victimized by his mother. “Only last night, in my sleep,” he would tell Macready in late winter 1858, “I was bent upon getting over a perspective of barriers, with my hands and feet bound. Pretty much what we are all about, waking, I think?” He believed that he faced a life-and-death struggle for survival, that his sanity and creativity depended on his becoming happy again. He defined happiness as both the absence of someone whose very presence depressed him and as the opportunity to express his ability to recapture from hostile forces “the Princess whom I adore—you have no idea how intensely I love her!… Nothing would suit me half so well … as climbing after her sword in hand, and either winning her or being killed.”1
That the princess was Ellen Ternan mattered less than that he needed a princess. The prospect of being killed in those fantasy terms had a romantic fascination. The struggle would be revitalizing, the threat of literally dying hardly serious. The threat of madness or extinction seemed greater in remaining with his marital obligations than in making the long-anticipated, deeply feared change. Better to die feeling alive in the struggle than to continue an unsatisfactory half-life half-death, without love, romance, or idealization. Forty-five years old in 1857, he had no reason to believe that he would live to a contented old age. Having been discontented all his life, he accepted that now as his natural state. But much more of life was behind him than ahead, even without taking into account the dismal family figures on longevity. Only Elizabeth Dickens seemed to be defying them, and, given the Hogarths’ demonstrated longevity, he had the frightening prospect of a premature old age with an undesired wife who would probably outlive him. The primary issue was not Ellen Ternan but his own future. Only his will could save him from an intolerable marriage.
His
willfulness, though, flared and faded, and then flared again. He needed reasons to be angry enough to act. In October 1857 it was far from clear what more he could do other than what he had just done. Probably it had taken an exacerbating incident for him no longer to share a bedroom with Catherine. Perhaps she had become aware, through a jeweler’s error, of a bracelet he may have sent to Ellen. The story, and its date, have a fragile source. Certainly Catherine knew about his preoccupation with the actress, probably because he told her, attempting to disguise his romantic feelings as paternal concern. She felt bewildered, tearful, and angry at his moodiness, his flirtations, his impatience, repeatedly accusing him of adultery. Ellen seemed only the latest in a long history of unfaithfulness. Dickens’ elaborations on his mismarriage became obsessive. He thought Catherine insensitive, even in public, to his achievements. Just her presence had become an unconscious reminder of irresponsible mothering and obese insensitivity. Toward the middle of the month, after one turbulent argument, he performed his “celebrated feat of getting out of bed at 2 in the morning and walking” to Gad’s Hill “from Tavistock House—over 30 miles—through the dead night. I had been very much put-out; and I thought, ‘After all, it would be better to be up and doing something, than lying here.’ So I got up and did that.”2 It may have been after this desperate hike or after another of the bitter arguments that the family had been used to for years that he wrote from Gad’s Hill to change their sleeping arrangement. Because her accusations of infidelity were not literally true, they had an additional power to infuriate him. They provoked and intensified his defensiveness, his sense of moral grievance, his self-righteousness. Their emotional accuracy increased his guilt and strengthened his will to free himself from such painful truth telling.
