CLAIRE TOMALIN
Charles Dickens
A Life
VIKING
an imprint of
PINGUIN BOOKS
Contents
List of Illustrations
Maps
Keys to Maps
Cast List
Prologue: The Inimitable
PART ONE
1 The Sins of the Fathers
2 A London Education
3 Becoming Boz
4 The Journalist
5 Four Publishers and a Wedding
6 ‘Till death do us part’
7 Blackguards and Brigands
PART TWO
8 Killing Nell
9 Conquering America
10 Setbacks
11 Travels, Dreams and Visions
12 Crisis
13 Dombey, with Interruptions
14 A Home
15 A Personal History
16 Fathers and Sons
17 Children at Work
18 Little Dorrit and Friends
19 Wayward and Unsettled
PART THREE
20 Stormy Weather
21 Secrets, Mysteries and Lies
22 The Bebelle Life
23 Wise Daughters
24 The Chief
25 ‘Things look like work again’
26 Pickswick, Pecknicks, Pickwicks
27 The Remembrance of My Friends
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
By the same author
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley and His World
Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life
The Invisible Woman:
The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens
The Winter Wife
Mrs Jordan’s Profession
Jane Austen: A Life
Several Strangers: Writing from Three Decades
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man
Poems of Thomas Hardy
(selected and introduced)
I dedicate this book to the memory of two remarkable women: my mother, the composer Muriel Emily Herbert, 1897–1984, who shared with me her enjoyment of Dickens when I was a child; and my French grandmother, a schoolteacher, Franceline Jennaton Delavenay, 1873–1963, who in about 1888, when she was at boarding school in Grenoble, read David Copperfield in its entirety in English, and loved Dickens ever afterwards.
My sister and I first realised Mr Dickens himself … as a sort of brilliance in the room, mysteriously dominant and formless. I remember how everybody lighted up when he entered.
– Annie Thackeray writing in 1913
I suppose that for at least five-and-twenty years of his life, there was not an English-speaking household in the world … where his name was not as familiar as that of any personal acquaintance, and where an allusion to characters of his creating could fail to be understood.
– George Gissing in 1898
The life of almost any man possessing great gifts, would be a sad book to himself.
– Charles Dickens in 1869
It will not do to draw round any part of such a man too hard a line.
– John Forster, friend of Dickens, in his biography
Illustrations
All illustrations are reproduced courtesy of the Charles Dickens Museum except where indicated.
FIRST INSET
p. 1
Crewe Hall, Cheshire, the country seat of the first Baron Crewe, where Dickens’s grandmother worked as a housekeeper (Alan Crosby, A History of Cheshire)
John Crewe, first Baron Crewe (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Frances, Lady Crewe (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Charles James Fox, statesman (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, statesman and playwright (Collection Michael Burden/The Bridgeman Art Library)
p. 2
No. 387 Mile End Terrace, Charles Dickens’s birthplace in Portsmouth (Mary Evans Picture Library)
No. 2 Ordnance Terrace, the Dickens family’s first house in Chatham
No. 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town, where the Dickens family lived 1822 (Bookman, 1914)
The Marshalsea prison yard, where John Dickens was briefly imprisoned (The Print Collector/Heritage Images)
p. 3
John Dickens, Charles’s father
Elizabeth Dickens, Charles’s mother
Hungerford Market, near Charing Cross (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Hungerford Steps, site of the first blacking factory where the young Charles Dickens worked (City of London/Heritage Images)
p. 4
The Polygon, Somers Town (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Fanny Dickens, Charles’s sister
Fred Dickens, Charles’s brother
Wellington Academy, Dickens’s school in Mornington Crescent (Bookman, 1914)
p. 5
Miniature of Dickens, aged eighteen, by his aunt Janet Barrow
The Adelphi Theatre, Strand (reproduced by permission of English Heritage NMR)
p. 6
Catherine Dickens (née Hogarth) in 1848 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
John Forster, Dickens’s closest friend and biographer (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Mary Hogarth, Catherine’s younger sister, from a painting by Hablot Browne
No. 48 Doughty Street, Dickens’s first house
p. 7
William Macready, leading tragic actor of his day (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Daniel Maclise, Irish artist. Self-portrait drawn for Fraser’s magazine (Mary Evans Picture Library)
John Pritt Hartley, renowned comic actor (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
George Cruikshank, Dickens’s first illustrator (Bookman, 1914)
Hablot Browne, ‘Phiz’, illustrator of most of Dickens’s novels (Bookman, 1914)
p. 8
Engraving from lost miniature of Dickens by Margaret Gillies, exhibited in 1844
SECOND INSET
p. 1
No. 1 Devonshire Terrace, York Gate, Regent’s Park, which Dickens leased from 1839 to 1851
Thomas Talfourd, lawyer, politician and playwright (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Count D’Orsay, artist and dandy (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Lady Blessington, writer, editor, companion of D’Orsay (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Samuel Rogers hosting a breakfast (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Miss Coutts, philanthropist (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
p. 2
The Britannia, Cunard’s first paddle-steamer (licensed by Open Agency Ltd – photograph from Liverpool University Archive)
The first four Dickens children, Charley, Mary, Katey and Walter, painted by Daniel Maclise
Dickens, wife Catherine and sister-in-law Georgina, drawing by Daniel Maclise
p. 3
The beach at Broadstairs, 1851 (Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans Picture Library)
Dickens reading The Chimes in 1844 (Mary Evans Picture Library)
p. 4
Paris, the rue de Rivoli, well known to Dickens (courtesy of antiqueprints.com)
Alphonse de Lamartine, poet and statesman (private collection/The Stapleton Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Victor Hugo, poet, novelist and dramatist (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Boulogne-sur-Mer, c.1850 (The Granger Collection/Topfoto)
p. 5
William Wills, Dickens’s assistant on Household Words
; Wilkie Collins, novelist, friend of Dickens from 1851 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Mesmerism, an illustration from Thérapeutique magnétique by Baron du Potet (Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Médecin, Paris/Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, photograph by James Mudd, 1857 (Mary Evans Picture Library)
p. 6
Female convicts at Tothill Fields Prison, 1862 (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Men’s dormitory at Coldbath Fields Prison, 1857 (Illustrated Times)
p. 7
Birmingham Town Hall, where Dickens appeared from the 1840s (Town Hall, Birmingham by L. Tallis/Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery)
Lord John Russell (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Frank Stone (Bookman, 1914, from a photograph by Herbert Watkins)
Clarkson Stanfield (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
John Leech (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
p. 8
Dickens, photographed by Henri Claudet in 1850 (from an original daguerreotype, 1853)
John, Dickens’s father, in later years
THIRD INSET
p. 1
Dickens with his theatre group on lawn of Tavistock House, 1857 (reproduced from Francesco Berger’s Reminiscences, Impressions and Anecdotes, courtesy of the British Library)
Portrait of Dickens by W. P. Frith, 1859, commissioned by John Forster
p. 2
Catherine Dickens in middle age
Georgina Hogarth, portrait by Augustus Egg, 1850
Mrs Ternan, drawn by her daughter Maria (courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Victoria & Albert Museum)
The Ternan sisters: Maria, Nelly, Fanny (courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Victoria & Albert Museum)
Nelly Ternan (courtesy of Mrs L. Fields)
p. 3
The Staplehurst train crash, June 1865 (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Front of Gad’s Hill House (Bookman, 1914, photograph by Mason & Co., 1866)
p. 4
Eugène Scribe, playwright and librettist (private collection/Ken Welsh/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Alexandre Dumas père, novelist (private collection/The Stapleton Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Céline Céleste, French dancer, actress and theatre manager (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Charles Fechter, French actor (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
p. 5
Dickens at the Paris morgue, drawing by G. J. Pinwell, from The Uncommercial Traveller, 1860
Dickens reading the murder of Nancy by Sikes
p. 6
Katey Dickens, ‘Lucifer Box’, as her father called her
Nelly Ternan, described by Dickens as his ‘magic circle of one’
Charley Dickens, the eldest son
Henry Dickens, the sixth and only successful son (© Lebrecht Authors)
p. 7
French cartoon of Dickens, by André Gill (Bookman, 1914)
American cartoon of Dickens, based on a photograph by Jeremiah Gurney, 1867
p. 8
Dickens at his desk, 1865 or later, photograph by Mason
TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS
p. 62 Sketch by Thackeray of Dickens, Thackeray himself and Francis Mahony (‘Father Prout’) with Macrone in his office
p. 68 Cover of monthly number of serialized The Pickwick Papers (Mary Evans Picture Library)
p. 77 Cruikshank drawing of Dickens in 1837
p. 105 Engraving of Dickens’s head from Maclise’s 1839 portrait of Dickens, the ‘Nickleby Portrait’ (Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I)
p. 156 Palazzo Peschiere, Genoa, engraving from drawing by Batson
p. 181 Rosemont, Lausanne, engraving from drawing by Mrs Watson (Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. II)
p. 228 The offices of Household Words in Wellington Street (Mary Evans Picture Library)
p. 236 Tavistock House, acquired by Dickens in July 1851 (Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. III)
p. 312 Dickens’s working notes in the Great Expectations manuscript (© Wisbech and Fenland Museum)
p. 338 The chalet at Gad’s Hill (Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. III)
p. 362 Caricature from an American paper showing Dickens and his tour manager, George Dolby, on the eve of their departure for England (Dolby’s Charles Dickens as I Knew Him)
p. 392 The back of Gad’s Hill, showing the conservatory (Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. III)
p. 400 Dickens’s grave in Westminster Abbey, engraved from a drawing by Luke Fildes (Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. III)
MAP 1
Gad’s Hill and Rochester
MAP 2
Dickens in Central London
MAP 3
Dickens in North London
Key to Maps
GAD’S HILL AND ROCHESTER
John Dickens and his young family lived in Rochester and Chatham from 1817 to 1822, first at No. 2 Ordnance Terrace above Rochester, then from 1821 at No. 18 St Mary’s Place, near the dockyards. Dickens was sometimes taken by his father up the Medway in the naval yacht. He went to school here from the age of nine.
Chalk village: Dickens spent his honeymoon here in 1836 in Mrs Nash’s cottage, working on The Pickwick Papers.
Gad’s Hill: Dickens saw the house as a child, purchased it in 1856, made it his country home thereafter and died there. He loved walking in Cobham Woods, showing friends the beauties of the Kentish countryside and Rochester, and taking a boat on the Medway. He wished to be buried in the country, and the family first chose Shorne Churchyard and then Rochester Cathedral, but were persuaded that Westminster Abbey was the appropriate place. His body was taken on a special train from Higham Station to Charing Cross early in the morning of 14 June, accompanied by the family mourners.
DICKENS IN CENTRAL LONDON
Adelphi Theatre, Strand: Dickens was inspired by the character acting of Charles Mathews, who was the star here in the 1820s and 1830s. Many dramatizations of Dickens’s early novels and Christmas stories were played here from 1834 on.
Buckingham Street: Dickens lodged here in 1834, and put David Copperfield into lodgings here.
No. 18 Bentinck Street: Dickens lodged here in 1833.
No. 31 Berners Street: Maria and Nelly Ternan lived in lodgings here autumn 1858 to spring 1859, when they moved to Houghton Place (see North London map).
Cecil Street: Dickens lodged here briefly in 1832. The street has disappeared under the Shell building.
No. 3 Chandos Street: Dickens was set to work in the window of the blacking warehouse here, where he was noticed by Charles Dilke, who gave him half-a-crown.
Coldbath Fields Prison: Dickens was an obsessive visitor of prisons and this was a favourite, the governor Augustus Tracey a close friend. It was built on Mount Pleasant, where the Post Office now has a sorting office.
No. 1 Devonshire Terrace: home of Dickens from December 1839 until December 1851, let out when he went abroad.
No. 48 Doughty Street: Dickens bought lease in 1837, lived here until December 1839. Now the Charles Dickens Museum.
No. 13 Fitzroy Street: Dickens lodged here occasionally with his parents in 1832.
Furnival’s Inn: Dickens moved to chambers here in 1834, and to better rooms on his marriage in 1836. His first child, Charley, was born here January 1837. They moved out March 1837.
Garrick Club: Dickens a member from 1837, resigning and rejoining frequently.
No. 4 Gower Street North: Dickens lived here with parents in 1823, his mother hoping to establish a school.
Hungerford Stairs, Warren’s blacking factory: the factory, set beside the river stairs before the Embankment was built, was reached through the old Hungerford Market, over which Charing Cross Station was built in 1864.
Charles Dickens: A Life Page 1
