Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  So far so good, but two weeks after giving birth Catherine was suffering from depression. She refused to eat, and only Dickens could persuade her to take anything. He himself had ‘a violent attack of God knows what, in the head’ and dosed himself with ‘as much medicine as would be given to an ordinary-sized horse’. He told Bentley that, although he considered Oliver to be the best subject he had ever thought of, ‘I really cannot write under these combined disadvantages’, but at least he had finished this month’s work.6 Catherine had difficulty feeding the baby and gave up trying. A wet nurse was easily found to take over but, according to her sister, ‘every time she sees her Baby she has a fit of crying and keeps constantly saying she is sure he will not care for her now she is not able to nurse him.’ Mary sounds sympathetic but brisk in her letter, saying Catherine should forget what she had been through and remember that she has everything in the world to make her happy, including a husband who is ‘kindness itself’. She goes on to talk proudly of his success: ‘his time is so completely taken up that it is quite a favour for the Literary Gentlemen to get him to write for them.’7

  Dickens wanted fresh air and exercise, and when the first number of Oliver was in print, with Cruikshank’s illustration showing the small, starved hero asking the workhouse master for more gruel, he took Catherine, Mary and the baby with nurse or nurses to their honeymoon lodgings in Chalk for five weeks. Here he was able to write without interruption, although he had to return to London each week, either by steamer from Gravesend or else on the Dover coach. February, being short of days, was always a challenge for a writer working for monthly publication, but this time he had Oliver finished by the 10th and Pickwick by the 22nd. Then he was able to take the ladies to see the fortifications at Chatham and enjoy a ‘snug little dinner at the Sun’. Catherine cheered up, and Tom Beard was invited to Chalk for the weekend, and to keep her and Mary company while Charles went out to dinner without them, invited by a contributor to the Miscellany, a literary lieutenant in the Marines living in the barracks in Chatham. Meanwhile he had made up his mind to leave Furnival’s and instituted a search for a London house; and as soon as a suitable one was found in Doughty Street, between Gray’s Inn and Mecklenburgh Square, he at once took a three-year lease at £80 a year. He asked Bentley for an advance of £100 to cover the cost of moving, and while the house was being prepared he and Catherine moved back to London, putting up for a few weeks in a rented house near Regent’s Park. On the last day of March they moved into No. 48 Doughty Street.

  The move was a mark of Dickens’s confidence in his ability to maintain himself, with wife and child, at a new social level. The Doughty Street house was finer and larger than any he or his parents had ever lived in. It had twelve good rooms on three storeys, a basement and attics, and a small garden at the back, and it stood among similar handsome, solid, brick houses, all built at the turn of the century, in a wide and salubrious Bloomsbury street, gated at each end to keep out undesirables. Here he could live like a gentleman and work comfortably.8

  At twenty-five he had achieved more than his father or any of his uncles, but he did not turn his back on his family. His parents were often at Doughty Street, and it became a second home for Frederick. Alfred, at fifteen, was being sent to learn engineering at Tamworth under the Stephensons, an apprenticeship certainly arranged by Henry Austin, who married Letitia this July. When Fanny also married a fellow musician, Henry Burnett, in September, the Dickens parents were left with only Augustus to look after. If Dickens had hopes their father would manage better with fewer responsibilities he was wrong, because John Dickens saw his son’s success as an encouragement to expect more handouts. It also offered him the possibility of trading on his name. These activities verged on the criminal, but he never doubted that Charles would bail him out and protect him, if only to keep his own name unsullied, and about this he was right.

  Dickens drawn by Cruickshank at home in Doughty Street, 1837.

  Just before the move to Doughty Street, Chapman & Hall sent Charles a cheque for £500, as a bonus above the usual payment for Pickwick, which had now been running for a year. Sales were still rising steadily – they reached 20,000 in May – and a week later they gave him a celebratory dinner. Bentley’s idea for pleasing Dickens was to make sure he was elected to the Garrick Club, of which Bentley was a founder, a place where writers and actors gathered for convivial meals. At Dickens’s request, Bentley also presented him with a complete set of his Standard Novels, bringing Jane Austen to the bookshelves of the study at Doughty Street, though not yet to the attention of their owner.9 At the end of April, Dickens invited Bentley to dine in his new home. His fellow guests included the two fathers, John Dickens and George Hogarth, and two sisters, Fanny Dickens and Mary Hogarth. Bentley remembered that there was music after dinner, not from Fanny with her fine voice and classical repertoire but from Dickens himself, who sang his favourite patter song, ‘The Dog’s Meat Man’, and gave his imitations of the best-known actors of the day. ‘Dickens was in force,’ wrote Bentley, and ‘it was a right merry entertainment.’ He said nothing about his hostess, but remembered that when he rose to leave at midnight his host pressed him to have another glass of brandy and water, which he was reluctant to take. Dickens then asked pretty Mary Hogarth to offer it to him, making it impossible for him to refuse.10

  Now life delivered one of its cruel and arbitrary strokes, cutting across the expectations of everyone in the house. The following Saturday evening, Dickens took Catherine and Mary to the theatre. They returned home in good spirits, enjoyed some supper and a drink together, and went up to bed at one in the morning. A few moments later Dickens heard a cry from Mary’s bedroom, and hurrying in found her still in her day clothes and visibly ill. Catherine came to see what was wrong. He said afterwards that they had no idea there was anything seriously the matter with her, but that they sent for medical assistance to be on the safe side. Whatever Dr Pickthorn said or did had no effect, yet still there seemed no cause for alarm. She was after all seventeen years old and until then had been in perfect health. Fourteen hours went by – bringing Mrs Hogarth, and possibly other doctors – before she ‘sank under the attack and died – died in such a calm and gentle sleep, that although I had held her in my arms for some time before, when she was certainly living (for she swallowed a little brandy from my hand) I continued to support her lifeless form, long after her soul had fled to Heaven. This was about 3 o’Clock on the Sunday afternoon.’11 ‘Thank God she died in my arms, and the very last words she whispered were of me,’ he told Beard.12 Nothing more precise is known, except that no one was expecting her to die until the very last moments, and that ‘the medical men imagine it was a disease of the heart.’13 Still, it is curious that during the fourteen hours between her collapse and death no doctor was able to make any diagnosis, or to provide or even to suggest any form of care or treatment beyond allowing Dickens to administer brandy and hold the sick girl in his arms.

  Before he laid her body down he was able to remove a ring from her finger and put it on one of his own, and there it stayed for the rest of his life.14 Mrs Hogarth remained for a week ‘in a state of total insensibility’, except when she had to be forcibly restrained from going into the room where her child lay in her coffin. Catherine looked after her mother while she grieved herself for her much loved sister, and rose to the occasion as ‘a fine-hearted and noble-minded girl’, becoming ‘so calm and cheerful that I wonder to see her’.15 Dickens was unusually warm in his praise, and she maintained her calm even through the miscarriage she suffered during the next week. Possibly it was not entirely unwelcome to her.

  Dickens himself was far from calm, and work was suddenly out of the question. In an unprecedented (and never repeated) action, he informed his two publishers that he was cancelling the Pickwick instalment for the end of May and Oliver for June. Rumours flew about that he had gone mad, or died, or been imprisoned for debt, and both publishers felt it necessary to put out notices explaining
that this was not so, but that he was mourning the sudden death of a ‘dear young relative to whom he was most affectionately attached and whose society has been for long the chief solace of his labours’. So went the notice in Bentley’s Miscellany, pardonably exaggerating Mary’s brief leading role in Dickens’s life. He was obliged to ask them for money on account, possibly to deal with medical and funeral expenses for the Hogarths. He wrote an inscription for Mary’s tombstone: ‘Young, beautiful and good/God in His Mercy/numbered her with his angels/at the early age of seventeen’. He told Beard, with the hyperbole of fresh grief, that this sweet-natured but quite ordinary girl had been a paragon: ‘so perfect a creature never breathed. I knew her inmost heart, and her real worth and values. She had not a fault.’16 Every night she appeared in his dreams. He was at her funeral at Kensal Green on 13 May, and declared his wish to be buried in the same grave. In the shock and sadness of Mary’s death, no one, not even Catherine, showed any surprise at his proposal.

  Then he took Catherine out of London again, this time to a picturesque weather-boarded house known as Collins’s Farm on the far side of Hampstead Heath.17 Ainsworth and Beard visited them there; so did a new friend, John Forster, who came and stayed for several nights. Forster found Dickens distressed, trying to deal with feelings he could hardly manage. He needed attention, sympathy, distraction, and all this Forster gave him. Here was someone Dickens could talk to on equal terms, solid, clever and strong-minded, eager to be serviceable, and possessed of a tender heart. They had known one another slightly for six months, since Forster’s put-down of The Village Coquettes, which had made Dickens laugh; but Forster dates their intimacy from these days in the spring of 1837 when Dickens, in the midst of his grief, opened his heart to him. On returning to London from Hampstead, Forster felt that ‘I left him as much his friend, and as entirely in his confidence, as if I had known him for years.’18

  Over their subsequent lifelong friendship Dickens sometimes mocked Forster and quarrelled furiously with him, but he was the only man to whom he confided his most private experiences and feelings, and he never ceased to trust him and rely on him. It was not a perfectly equal friendship, and Dickens sometimes took Forster for granted, and went through periods of coolness towards him, turning to another friend for a time; but when he was in real need of help it was always Forster to whom he went. And while Forster also had other friends to whom he was devoted – Macready, Bulwer, Browning, Carlyle – it was Dickens who became the sun and centre of his life, and on whom his happiness depended.

  They were always at ease with one another, with no need to pose or pretend, and much in common. Each knew that the other had started with few advantages, from poor and undistinguished family backgrounds, and had a struggle to establish himself in a society in which money, rank and patronage often seemed to count for more than talent. Both had shown early promise and put in long, hard hours of work in order to make their way in the world against the odds. As writers too they both felt themselves to be on the side of the poor and oppressed, and believed that art could be used to attack injustice and cruelty, to mock the great and to insist on the human value of the lowest members of society. Forster was particularly eager to lay claim to the essential dignity of the writer and artist, and Dickens seemed born to vindicate this claim.

  They were almost of an age, Forster born barely two months after Dickens, in April 1812. He was the son of a Newcastle butcher, his mother the daughter of ‘a Gallowgate cow-keeper’. The Forsters were Unitarians, subscribing to that admirable and bracing type of Nonconformity that encouraged rational thinking, held that social ills were not willed by God but created by human action, and believed in democratic government. Forster was given his chance in life by an uncle, who made money as a cattle-dealer and paid for him to attend Newcastle Grammar School, where he showed outstanding ability and became captain of the school. He grew broad-shouldered and intense, with a thatch of dark hair. He read Byron and Scott and, like Dickens, became a passionate theatre-goer. At fourteen he dramatized the story of Ali Baba, and at fifteen he wrote ‘A Few Thoughts in Vindication of the Stage’, expressing his view that it is ‘where the human heart, upon the rack of the passions, confesses its slightest movements; where all masks, all disguises disappear, and truth, pure and incorruptible, shines in open day’. As a description of the stage it was a startling defence from a young Unitarian, given the view generally held by Nonconformists, that the theatre was likely to corrupt. The next year he had his own play, on the subject of Charles I, put on at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle. It was given only one performance, but it was a coup for a mere lad.

  He had already been given a much better formal education than Dickens ever had, and his uncle then paid for him to go to Cambridge. After a month, finding that Unitarians could not get degrees, and that it was an expensive place, he turned his back on Cambridge and sensibly decided to go to London to read law at University College and the Inner Temple.19 He was liked and respected by his teachers, and made his mark as ‘a tall, ardent, noticeable young fellow’, ‘joyous, generous, sincere … the uncompromising advocate of all that was just, noble and good’. He dressed unfashionably but he was no puritan and had a taste for ‘oysters, fog and grog’, i.e., tobacco and alcohol.20 In the year of the Reform Act, 1832, when he was twenty, he abandoned his legal studies, to the displeasure of his professor, and took up the precarious life of a man of letters. He found work reviewing for left-wing journals and embarked on biographical studies of the great figures of the English revolution, Cromwell, Vane, Pym, Hampden, Strafford. History, poetry, painting and the theatre all interested him, and he had a gift for making friends: with the essayist Charles Lamb; with Leigh Hunt, founding editor of the radical weekly the Examiner; with its current editor, Albany Fonblanque; with the novelist Bulwer and the young poet Browning, whose early work he reviewed; with Thomas Talfourd, radical barrister, playwright and MP; with the Irish artist Daniel Maclise, and the leading actor of the day, Macready. Lamb died in 1834; but all the others were introduced to Dickens by Forster during the first year of their friendship.

  Forster had first noticed Dickens when he joined the True Sun in 1831 as drama critic, and saw one day, standing on the staircase at the office, ‘a young man of my own age whose keen animation of look would have arrested attention anywhere, and whose name, upon enquiry, I then heard for the first time’.21 No words were exchanged, but Forster kept this bright image in his mind. In 1834 he settled himself in a room in a lodging house at No. 58 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he remained for twenty years, during which he gradually expanded into more rooms on the same floor and above, filling each one with his growing collection of books. Here he entertained modestly, giving breakfast parties, but there was a loneliness at the heart of his life; he no longer had much in common with his own family, and Newcastle was far away. He fell in love with a remarkable woman of letters, the poet Letitia Landon. Beautiful, prolific and compared by her admirers to Byron, she earned her own living publishing novels and reviews as well as volumes of verse; and she was ten years older than Forster. He proposed to her and was accepted, only to learn that scandalous stories were circulating of her liaisons with various men, some of them his own friends. When he felt he must ask her about what he had heard, she broke off the engagement, declaring that his suspicions were ‘as dreadful as death’. Whether the stories were true or not, he was wounded and retreated into bachelor life.22 The ethos of the time, and his own ambivalence about women, made intimacy with men altogether easier.

  In 1835 he became the literary editor of the Examiner, and by the time he got to know Dickens he was a respected critic and becoming an influential figure in the London literary world. Dickens was a rising star whom Forster believed to be a genius, and was ready to serve that genius, while Dickens realized Forster could be an invaluable adviser and supporter. Each had something to gain from the friendship, but what counted still more was the strong spontaneous personal affection that rose up between them. The
y listened to one another, trusted one another and enjoyed one another’s company. Dickens loved to expand his domestic circle, and Forster became the essential bachelor friend of the family, more fun than Beard, although he also remained close. Forster was courteous and friendly to Catherine and she responded and approved of him. When they noticed that his birthday coincided with the Dickenses’ wedding anniversary, a ritual celebration was set up, involving a trip to Richmond for lunch at the Star and Garter on 2 April each year. And when the next Dickens child arrived, a little Mary, named inevitably for her dead aunt Mary Hogarth, Forster was invited to be her godfather.

  This was one of those life-changing friendships that arises when two young men – or women – meet and each suddenly realizes a perfect soulmate has been found. The world changes for both, they are amazed at their good fortune, greedy for one another’s company, delighted by the wit, generosity, perception and brilliance that flashes between them. It is like falling in love – it is in fact a form of falling in love, without the overt sexual element. Dickens and Forster both liked women well enough, but it was almost impossible for women to give them the sort of good companionship they craved. Some women were innocents, some predators, some disqualified in different ways. Young married women were likely to be perpetually pregnant, as Dickens was discovering. Catherine was pregnant again in the summer of 1837, and when he took her to Brighton he wrote complaining to Forster that ‘unless I am joined by some male companion’ he was ‘unlikely to see anything but the Pavilion, the chain Pier, and the Sea’.23 He was clearly hoping Forster would join them. The majority of women inevitably remained apart from the intellectual world in which men lived, and outside most of their activities and interests, and, since society was organized on this basis, men expected to spend a great deal of their leisure time with other men. Formal dinners and clubs excluded women, few women were brought up to ride or walk over long distances, and professional women were on the whole seen as a class apart from middle-class wives and mothers. Once Fanny Dickens married and became a mother, her career declined, gifted and musically educated as she was; and Forster’s Letitia Landon earned herself a reputation that made him withdraw from her. But Forster and Dickens together could do whatever they liked, and so they did: they walked, they rode for miles out of town, they took lunch, they dined, they attended established clubs and set up new private clubs, they attended rehearsals in the theatre as well as official performances, they visited places that interested them, they called on friends, discussed business and enjoyed innumerable evenings out at chop-houses and inns. Among Dickens’s surviving letters, there are a great many summoning Forster to ride with him or to come round and simply be with him: ‘My Missis is going out today, and I want you to take some cold lamb and a bit of fish with me, alone. We can walk out both before and afterwards but I must dine at home on account of the Pickwick proofs.’ ‘I ought to dine in Bloomsbury Square tomorrow, but as I would much rather go with you for a ride … that’s off … So engage the Osses.’ ‘As I have been sticking to it pretty hard all last week, I intend ordering a Oss to be at this door at 11 Oclock in the morning to convey me on a fifteen mile ride out, ditto in, and a Lunch on the Road. Can you spare the time to join me? We will return here to dinner at 5.’ ‘I could hug you and Talfourd too – I am so delighted to find that you are going to participate in my holiday. Come to me, and don’t be later than 11. I think Richmond and Twickenham through the Park, out at Knightsbridge, and over Barnes Common, would make a beautiful ride.’ ‘You don’t feel disposed, do you, to muffle yourself up, and start off with me for a good brisk walk over Hampstead Heath? I knows a good ’ous there where we can have a red hot chop for dinner, and a glass of good wine./All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. I am as dull as a Codfish.’24 And so on.