Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  Marriage was for him at least a solution to the problem of sex, and for the next twenty-two years they would share a large double bed. ‘A winter’s night has its delight,/Well warmed to bed we go,’ wrote Dickens in a song for his opera this year, only to be told that any mention of bed was objectionable to the public. ‘If the young ladies are especially horrified at the bare notion of anybody’s going to bed,’ he wrote, he would change it, but ‘I will see them d—d before I make any further alteration.’ He added, ‘I am sure … we ought not to emasculate the very spirit of a song to suit boarding-schools.’11 The bare notion of going to bed pleased him, as it should please a new husband. Catherine was pregnant in the first month of the marriage.

  They were soon back in their newly furnished suite of rooms at Furnival’s. She was young to be entering into the responsibilities of a wife in charge of her husband’s domestic life – that is, insofar as Dickens allowed anyone to take charge of any aspect of his life. Her sixteen-year-old younger sister, Mary, was often with them, a trim and cheerful visitor who described Catherine as ‘a most capital housekeeper … happy as the day is long’.12 Happy and also dealing with the physical changes of pregnancy, and when she felt sick or unsteady Mary gave Charles companionship. Pickwick was not selling as briskly as hoped, and the project was struck by disaster at the end of April when Seymour, suffering from depression, shot himself. This could have been enough to sink the whole thing, especially when the replacement artist lacked the right touch. William Makepeace Thackeray, who had skill and ambitions as an illustrator, came to see Dickens with his sketchbook and offered to take on the task, but he was turned down, and the commission went to Hablot K. Browne, a young artist and neighbour, with his studio in Furnival’s Inn. Browne caught the spirit of the work perfectly, called himself ‘Phiz’ to fit ‘Boz’, and made his reputation alongside Dickens.

  In May, Dickens agreed with Macrone that he would write a three-volume novel to be called ‘Gabriel Vardon’ – it became Barnaby Rudge – and delivered ‘next November’, for a payment of £200. The second volume of the Sketches was being prepared, and he still had his full-time job with the Chronicle. In June he was kept especially busy reporting a scandalous case in the law courts in which the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, was accused of adultery by the loutish jealous husband of Caroline Norton, the beautiful and gifted granddaughter of Sheridan. The public was of course eagerly interested in this washing of the dirty linen of the upper classes, but Mr Norton failed to produce any evidence and lost his case. Dickens had to move nimbly between the roles of reporter and novelist, and in the same month he was inspired to carry Pickwick from its shaky start to popular success as he introduced the character of Sam Weller, Pickwick’s cockney servant.

  From this moment sales of the monthly numbers in their pale green wrappers rose steadily and soon spectacularly, and the critics vied with one another to praise it. The appearance of a fresh number of Pickwick soon became news, an event, something much more than literature. ‘Boz has got the town by the ear,’ a critic said, and he spoke the truth.13 Each number sold for a shilling and they were passed from hand to hand, and butchers’ boys were seen reading them in the streets.14 Judges and politicians, the middle classes and the rich, bought them, read them and applauded; and the ordinary people saw that he was on their side, and they loved him for it. He did not ask them to think but showed them what he wanted them to see and hear. The names of his characters became common currency: Jingle, Sam Weller, Snodgrass and Winkle, Mrs Leo Hunter the cultural hostess with her ‘Ode on an expiring Frog’, the political journalists Slurk and Pott, the drunken medical student Bob Sawyer. It was as though he was able to feed his story directly into the bloodstream of the nation, giving injections of laughter, pathos and melodrama, and making his readers feel he was a personal friend to each of them. Dickens knew he had triumphed, and this sense of a personal link between himself and his public became the most essential element in his development as a writer.

  The Pickwick Papers as it first appeared, serialized in green-paper wrappers.

  He already had two publishers – Macrone for Sketches and Chapman & Hall for Pickwick – and in August 1836 he agreed to write a children’s book for a third, Thomas Tegg, for £100. A children’s book could be seen as a special case. Later in the same month, however, he entered into negotiations with a fourth, Richard Bentley, who had been pursuing him for some time. Bentley trumped Macrone with an offer of £400 for the copyright of his next novel. Dickens pushed him up to £500, and Bentley pushed Dickens up to promising two novels. Dickens then sold him the publishing rights in his opera, describing it as ‘Boz’s first play’, which Bentley did indeed publish as a pamphlet. Dickens also agreed to become editor of a monthly magazine for Bentley, what was eventually called Bentley’s Miscellany, to which he would contribute something of his own every month, for twenty guineas. This would bring him a further annual income of nearly £500.15

  He now had arrangements with four different publishers, with all of whom he was for the moment on good terms. Macrone was just bringing out the second printing of the Sketches. At this point Dickens sensibly asked for time off from the Chronicle and was granted five weeks, since things were idle during the summer heat in London. He left with the suggestion that the Chronicle should run extracts from Pickwick while he was away.

  He took Catherine to the village of Petersham in Surrey, between Richmond Park and the Thames, where they put up at the inn and enjoyed the quiet water meadows and leafy walks around Ham House. There they stayed into September, Catherine now halfway through her pregnancy. But even during this holiday he was often obliged to return to London, and rather than go to their empty rooms at Furnival’s he took himself to his parents, currently lodging in Islington.16 He was working on the opera with Hullah, and preparing for the opening of his farce, The Strange Gentleman, on 29 September at the St James’s Theatre, with his friend John Pritt Harley, a well-loved comic actor, playing the lead.17 It was a success, running for sixty nights, and boxes were offered to friends, family and publishers.

  In November, Dickens signed his second agreement with Bentley. He also wrote to John Easthope at the Chronicle to tender his resignation; and he informed Macrone he wanted to withdraw from the agreement they had made on 9 May. Easthope was displeased at losing his brilliant reporter, and acrimonious letters were exchanged. The friendship with Macrone was also put under strain. He published the second series of Sketches by Boz in December, but things were not the same between them. Dickens was now committed to the following projects: he had to continue Pickwick in monthly instalments for another year; he had to provide a few more pieces for the Sketches; both his farce and his opera were being published and needed seeing through the press; he had promised a children’s book, ‘Solomon Bell the Raree Showman’, by Christmas; he had to start preparing for his editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany, which began in January and for which he must commission articles and also contribute a sixteen-page piece of his own every month; Chapman & Hall were hoping for a sequel to Pickwick; Macrone still wanted ‘Gabriel Vardon’; and Bentley was expecting two novels.

  Clearly, this was not a possible programme for one man. For the publishers it was maddening to find him reneging on a promise, as he did to Macrone, to Tegg and then to Bentley. One of the problems for him was that, as his fame grew and he was ever more in demand, he resented having made agreements for lower sums than he could now command. If Dickens is to be believed, each publisher started well and then turned into a villain; but the truth is that, while they were businessmen and drove hard bargains, Dickens was often demonstrably in the wrong in his dealings with them. He realized that selling copyrights had been a mistake: he was understandably aggrieved to think that all his hard work was making them rich while he was sweating and struggling, and he began to think of publishers as men who made profits from his work and failed to reward him as they should. Chapman & Hall kept on good terms with him largely by topping up what they ha
d initially agreed with frequent extra payments. The book for children was quietly dropped. But by the middle of the following year, 1837, there were furious rows. His friend Macrone was now a ‘blackguard’ and a ‘Robber’. Bentley was the next, becoming in due course an ‘infernal, rich, plundering, thundering old Jew’ – a quotation from his own dialogue in Oliver Twist.18

  Meanwhile, Dickens sent Chapman & Hall an apology for late delivery of the monthly instalments of Pickwick, with a cry of joy over its ever growing success: ‘If I were to live a hundred years, and write three novels in each, I should never be so proud of any of them, as I am of Pickwick, feeling as I do, that it has made its own way.’19 He was beginning to plan the Miscellany for Bentley, and he had to tell Macrone he was withdrawing from writing ‘Gabriel Vardon’, and asked for his letter of agreement to be returned. He enforced his point by instructing his other publishers to refuse Macrone’s advertisements for ‘Gabriel Vardon’. Macrone gave way only when Dickens made over to him, for the low price of £100, the copyrights of both the first and second series of Sketches by Boz in December.20 For the second series Dickens wrote a final piece, ‘The Drunkard’s Death’, intended to finish the book ‘with eclat’. It must be the worst in the series, a melodramatic tale of a drunkard given to ‘wild debauch’, imbiber of ‘the slow, sure poison … that hurries its victims madly on to degradation and death’. When the drunkard’s wife lies dying of a broken heart, he ‘reeled from the tavern to her bedside in time to see her die’. His sons leave as soon as they can after this, but one night one returns home to the attic in an alley between Fleet Street and the Thames, pursued by the police for a capital crime, and – improbably, and unwisely – trusts his hated father to hide him. The drunkard betrays him and is cursed as the son goes to the gallows. Abandoned by his daughter, he takes himself to the Thames, plunges into the water, changes his mind, screams ‘in agonies of terror’, remembers the curse of his son and is carried away by the fierce tide to his death. Dickens in moralizing mood is not good company, and this is a feeble and overblown piece of prose, full of verbal and emotional clichés – a bit of early ham. But, as he told Bentley, he was ‘Nothing but head and ears in work, and really half dead with fatigue.’21

  The Village Coquettes opened on 6 December, with Hullah’s music, and there were cheers for Boz at the curtain. But a young critic named John Forster had something to say about the cheers and the piece: ‘the libretto was totally unworthy of Boz,’ he wrote, although ‘the audience screamed for Boz!’ He went on, ‘Now we have a great respect and liking for Boz; the Pickwick Papers have made him, as our readers are very well aware, an especial favourite with us … Bad as the opera is … we feel assured that if Mr Braham [the producer] will make arrangements to parade the real living Boz every night after that opera, he will insure for it a certain attraction.’22 Dickens wrote to Hullah about the review: ‘It is rather depreciatory of the Opera, but … so well done that I cannot help laughing at it, for the life and soul of me.’23 And it seems likely he thought Forster more right than wrong about The Village Coquettes because he later described it as the ‘most unfortunate of all unfortunate pieces’ and asked to have his name of Boz removed from the bills; and during the next year Forster became his best and most trusted friend.24

  The annus mirabilis was coming to an end, with a bad story and a feeble libretto, but with a huge triumph for Pickwick, and a new novel ready in his head to start writing in January in tandem with further instalments of Pickwick. He was married, and the first baby was due in the first week of the new year. Over Christmas he dined with Ainsworth, danced quadrilles with the nieces of his publisher Edward Chapman in their home off the Strand, and invited Tom Beard to share in the family turkey. He also confessed to Beard that, whatever his disapproval of drunkenness in print, ‘I arrived home at one oClock this morning dead drunk, & was put to bed by my loving missis.’25 Catherine rose to the occasion well, and may even have felt a certain pleasure that, just for once, her ever busy and omnicompetent husband had put himself into a condition in which she could help, and take charge of him.

  6

  ‘Till death do us part’

  1837–1839

  Sometime in the evening or night of Thursday, 5 January, Catherine went into labour. Dickens was at home, and by the next morning both his mother and Mrs Hogarth had arrived to help and advise out of their considerable experience of childbirth; and with Mrs Hogarth came Catherine’s sister Mary. In the morning Dickens found time to write to a colleague on the Chronicle to explain that he was ‘chained to Mr Pickwick just now, and cannot get away’, but hoped to be free on Tuesday.1 Then, leaving Catherine in the care of the two mothers and the monthly nurse, and with the family doctor present or on the way, he and Mary went out together. They spent much of the day wandering happily from one second-hand furniture shop to another in search of a small table for the bedroom as a present for Catherine. At last a table was bought and they arrived back at Furnival’s Inn, and soon after six in the evening Catherine gave birth to a son. The birth was a ‘dreadful trial’ to her, but the baby arrived safely, and the family could rejoice.2 What Dickens chose to remember, when he looked back a year later, was that, since there was no room for Mary to sleep at Furnival’s, he took her home to Brompton that night. It was too far for her to walk on a winter evening, which meant hiring a hackney cab, but he is likely to have walked back, taking the time to think about his work, and the happiness of the day which, being the festival of Twelfth Night, was a good birthday for his son. The following day Mary came to them again, and remained for most of the month, helping and cheering her sister and brother-in-law. A year later, when they no longer lived at Furnival’s, he recalled this as a time of supreme happiness: ‘I shall never be so happy again as in those Chambers … I would hire them to keep empty, if I could …’3

  The baby – ‘our boy’, or ‘the infant phenomenon’ in his father’s letters – was not christened for nearly a year, neither parent considering it a pressing matter or one of great religious significance, although Tom Beard was chosen to be godfather. For Dickens everything had to fall into place behind his work schedule, driven as he was to keep up the monthly instalments of Pickwick for Chapman & Hall, and preparing to embark on a new novel for Bentley, Oliver Twist, also scheduled to appear in monthly numbers starting in February in the Miscellany. The two serial stories would be running simultaneously for ten months, and Dickens would have to work like a juggler to keep both spinning. He said later that he was warned against serial publications – ‘My friends told me it was a low, cheap form of publication, by which I should ruin all my rising hopes’ – but whoever these friends were he triumphantly proved them wrong, and readers were as pleased with the pathos, horror and grand guignol of Oliver as with the comedy of Pickwick.4

  Managing this double feat was an unprecedented and amazing achievement. Everything had to be planned in his head in advance. Pickwick had started as a series of loosely rambling episodes, but he was now introducing plot, with Pickwick accused of breach of promise, the dealings with lawyers, the trial and his imprisonment, all of which demanded more care in setting up each number; and Oliver was tightly plotted and shaped from the start. There was no going back to change or adjust once a number was printed; everything had to be right first time. How different this is from the way most great novelists work, allowing themselves time to reconsider, to change their minds, to go back, to cancel and rewrite. Each number of Pickwick and Oliver consisted of about 7,500 words, and in theory he simply divided every month, allotting a fortnight to each new section of each book. In practice this did not always work out as he hoped, and although he sometimes got ahead, there were many months when he only just managed to get his copy to the printer in time. He wrote in a small hand, with a quill pen and black (iron gall) ink at this stage – later he favoured bright blue – on rough sheets of grey, white or bluish paper, measuring about 9 x 7½ inches, that he’d fold and then tear in half before starting to write;
he called these sheets ‘slips’.5 For Oliver he spaced the lines quite widely, fitting about twenty-five lines on each sheet where later he would cram forty-five. Something like ninety-five slips made up one monthly number. In the course of a day he might produce eleven or twelve slips, and if pushed up to twenty. He had also to arrange for the two illustrators – Browne for Pickwick, Cruikshank for Oliver – to see the copy to work from, more often than not deciding for them what would make the best picture. On top of this he was editing Bentley’s Miscellany, which meant commissioning and dealing with other writers, and with the printers. The pressure was intense, but the results were gratifying: in February Pickwick sold 14,000 copies, and after the opening instalment of Oliver was reviewed in four papers, 1,000 extra copies had to be printed of the next number.