Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  With only one serial in hand now, there was time to attend to other things. In March 1839 he travelled to Devon alone, having failed in an attempt to persuade Forster to make the trip with him (‘you know how much you would lighten its weariness’).24 His intention was to find a house in which to settle his parents and youngest brother, Augustus. He had made up his mind to spend several hundred pounds on providing them with somewhere comfortable, but far enough from London to keep his father out of mischief. With his usual quickness he lighted on a cottage at once, a mile out of Exeter, ‘a jewel of a place’, with a respectable landlady, excellent parlour, beautiful little drawing room, noble garden, view of Exeter Cathedral, a thatched roof, cellars, coal holes, two or three bedrooms, etc., etc., and all exquisitely clean.25 He took it immediately, stayed on to furnish it from local suppliers, and characteristically began to think how happily, if he were older, he himself might live there for many a year; only failing to consider that his parents were not choosing to live there but being told they must. Their opinion of the plan is not on record. He sent for his mother first, to deal with the curtains and prepare the house further, his father and brother to follow a few days later. His letters to Catherine were tender: ‘To say how much I miss you, would be ridiculous. I miss the children in the morning too and their dear little voices which have sounds for you and me that we shall never forget.’26 It looks as though their difficulties were no longer troubling him; and Catherine was pregnant again.

  Having set up his parents, in May he took his own family to Elm Cottage at Petersham, a quiet village set between Richmond Park and the water meadows bordering the Thames. They stayed for four months, inviting the usual troops of friends to share their pleasures, the large garden with a swing, flowers and green leaves everywhere, glow worms jewelling the roads after dusk, the great tidal river. Dickens went to the races at Hampton several times, set up bowling, quoits and Battledore27 to play with his friends, and caused amazement by getting up at six to plunge into the Thames and swim to Richmond Bridge before breakfast. He sometimes rode into town and back, even late in the evening, and now also had a carriage and groom to collect him when necessary. His fame can be judged by the fact that the local grandees wished to meet him, and on 1 July he dined at Little Strawberry Hill with the two ancient and learned Miss Berrys, Mary and Agnes, who had lived there since 1791, when their friend Horace Walpole had left them the house. They were historians and editors, they had known the salons of Paris before the Revolution and breathed another world; but what they made of Dickens, or he of them, is lost.

  As he got on towards the end of Nickleby he began to turn over an idea for a new project to be carried out with Chapman & Hall the following year, that of a threepenny weekly magazine of occasional pieces and stories, which would be made up into volumes. He convinced himself that this would be less demanding than writing another novel as a serial, and it seemed to promise an attractive financial return. There was naturally much discussion with Forster. In July he also found that sending his father to Devon had not solved his problems. A letter with bad news from his mother made him ‘sick at heart with both her and father too, and think this is too much’, though he doesn’t say what the trouble is. Then ‘Alfred is instructed by his Papa that it’s “all up”!!!’28 His confidant was Mitton, who seems to have dealt with the problems for the moment.

  Dickens was invited to speak at a celebratory dinner for Macready, after which Macready asked him to be godfather to his latest child. In agreeing, Dickens proposed that, in exchange, Macready should be godfather to the baby he and Catherine expected in the autumn, described as ‘that last and final branch of a genteel small family of three’.29 The letter makes clear that he wants to have no more than three children and sets up a mystery as to why, with his inquiring mind, and friends with medical knowledge, he appears to have done nothing to make sure that no more arrived.

  From Petersham they went on almost at once, on 3 September, to Broadstairs, beside the sea in Kent, where they took another house and were joined by brother Fred for his holiday. Now Dickens’s diary has the single word ‘Work’ every day until, on 20 September, he was able to write, ‘Work./Finished Nickleby this day at 2 o’clock, and went over to Ramsgate with Fred and Kate to send the last little chapter to Bradbury & Evans in a parcel. Thank God that I have lived to get through it happily.’30 Forster was due to come down, but Dickens decided to travel back to town himself to look over his proofs, so that they could dine together, go through the last number of Nickleby and take the boat in the morning, still together: ‘beautiful passage. Kate and the dear children waiting for us at the pier.’31 After that it was swimming and sunshine from breakfast to dinner every day.

  Nickleby was to be published in one volume in October. It was dedicated to Macready, and his favoured publishers, Chapman & Hall, were giving a celebratory dinner in the City on 5 October. Dickens said it was to be a quiet affair for one or two intimate friends, but in the event there were something like twenty guests and it turned into an occasion which Macready felt was ‘too splendid’. The climax of the evening was the presentation of Maclise’s portrait of Dickens, commissioned by Chapman & Hall and painted in the summer. The most attractive and the warmest of all the portraits, it shows him just turned away from the desk where he has been working, his eyes ‘wonderfully beaming with intellect and running over with humour and cheerfulness’, as Forster wrote later. He went on, ‘there was that in the face as I first recollect it which no time could change … the quickness, the keenness, and practical power, the eager, restless, energetic outlook … Light and motion flashed from every part of it.’32 This was Dickens as angel, with no sign of the blackguard.

  To Bentley, Dickens did not appear as an angel. Bentley was expecting to receive the completed text of Barnaby Rudge in January, and was preparing to advertise it as a three-volume novel for 1840. But although Dickens told Cruikshank to expect chapters of the manuscript for illustration in October, and said he was getting on well with it, he soon put it aside again. His head was full of ideas for the weekly magazine he was proposing to edit for Chapman & Hall, to be called Master Humphrey’s Clock. He was also, for good measure, scribbling some Sketches of Young Couples, also for Chapman & Hall; they would publish this anonymously, because he could not be seen to be breaking his agreement with Bentley to publish no other book.33 So the tangle of his dealings with the rival publishers grew worse.

  American publishers were adding to his distrust of the whole tribe. Across the Atlantic there was no legislation of any kind covering the rights of foreign authors, and publishers simply took what they wanted and did what they liked with it: for example, the Philadelphia firm of Carey, Lea & Blanchard had put out Sketches by Boz under several different titles in 1837, and incorporated part of Oliver Twist into one of the volumes, without asking permission or offering any payment to the author. In June 1837 they made their first contact with ‘Mr Saml Dickens’, as they called him, offering him a one-off payment of £25 for the parts of Pickwick they had been selling to the public since 1836 at large profit to themselves. In 1838 they sent Bentley £60 and Dickens £50 for advance proofs of Oliver, and tried to get proofs of Nickleby, because the acquisition of advance proofs put an American publisher into a stronger position against his rivals. Later they offered Dickens down payments of a little over £100 for advance proofs of Master Humphrey’s Clock and Barnaby Rudge.34 Dickens answered their letters politely, and for the moment accepted the situation he was helpless to change, but would challenge once he arrived in America.35

  Engraving made from Maclise’s portrait of 1839. When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840, Thackeray wrote in Fraser’s Magazine: ‘a looking-glass could not render a better facsimile. Here we have the real identical Dickens: the artist must have understood the inward Boz as well as the outward before he made this admirable representation of him … I think we may promise ourselves a brilliant future from this [countenance].’

  In the even
ing of 29 October 1839 a second Dickens daughter was born, named Kate for her mother, always known as Katey, and quite unlike her mother in her fiery disposition. Catherine was in labour for twelve hours, attended by a monthly nurse, by Dr Pickthorn and by her mother-in-law, who had come up from Devon, and to whom Dickens was paying five pounds for her services. He himself was suffering from one of his peculiarly lowering colds, declaring himself to be ‘in such a sneezing, winking, weeping, watery state as to be quite unfit for public inspection’. But he was well enough to go house-hunting.36 He had made up his mind that the house in Doughty Street was no longer big enough for the family’s needs, and started looking at larger places around the southern end of Regent’s Park; he also sent his mother to give her opinion of some of them. Speedy as ever, he found a suitable house within a week. It was No. 1 Devonshire Terrace, and he agreed to pay £800 for a twelve-year lease, with an annual rent of £160. Catherine’s opinion does not seem to have been asked, and perhaps she hardly expected it to be, since six weeks’ rest was usual for ladies after giving birth. In any case, her husband had chosen a very good house, large, light, airy and beautifully placed. Built in the 1770s, its main rooms were elegantly laid out on two floors, there were tall bow windows on the garden side, and the big walled garden was not overlooked by any other building. The park was across the road, and Portland Place and the West End a step away.37

  Dickens was so eager to move that he offered many of the fittings he had put into Doughty Street to his landlord there, paid the rent to March when his lease expired and determined to be gone before Christmas. The new decade would be started in Devonshire Terrace, and he at once set about improving the house: installing mahogany doors, bookshelves, mantelpieces, great mirrors on the walls, thick carpets, white spring roller-blinds at every window, and the best available bathroom fittings. A dining table with five additional leaves was specially made for the columned dining room, and twelve leather chairs. The library became his study, its French windows opening on to a flight of steps down to the garden. There were nurseries in the attics, kitchens in the basement, cellars, a butler’s pantry and a coach house in the mews at the end of the garden, in which Dickens presently installed a red-headed coachman called Topping.

  The move was made in mid-December, when Catherine was back on her feet and Katey settled with her wet nurse. On the 16th Dickens told Bentley, who had indeed advertised Barnaby Rudge, thinking he was about to receive the completed manuscript, that he could not deliver it, and confessed that he had written only two chapters. The next day he described Bentley to Beard as ‘the Burlington Street Brigand’, promising ‘war to the knife with no quarter on either side’. Beard was also asked to order cigars for him, ‘a pound box of the unrivalled Cubas’.38 The Dickens parents – ‘relations from the country’ as their son coolly described them – were at Devonshire Terrace for Christmas.39 Chapman & Hall’s printers, the businesslike William Bradbury and his partner Frederick Evans, a man as plump, cheerful and bespectacled as Mr Pickwick, sent round a gigantic turkey. On 2 January, Dickens wrote to them, ‘The blessed bird made its appearance at breakfast yesterday, the other portions having furnished forth seven grills, one boil, and a cold lunch or two.’

  Lucky not to have poisoned themselves, they embarked on the new decade. During the 1840s Dickens would be plagued with money problems and leave England to travel and live abroad for three long periods: to America, to Italy, and to Switzerland and Paris. He would father five more unwanted sons. He would undergo surgery for a fistula in 1841, before chloroform was available, and insist on chloroform for Catherine in 1849 as she gave birth to their eighth child, Henry. He would see his sister Fanny die of tuberculosis and welcome his young sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth as a permanent member of his household. He would briefly edit a newspaper, change his publishers again, and embark on a long sequence of amateur theatrical productions. With his friend Miss Coutts he would set up an ambitious enterprise to help young prostitutes to start on new and better lives, establishing and organizing a Home for them in Shepherd’s Bush. On top of this he would write two travel books; the first of his Christmas stories – the perennially popular A Christmas Carol – to be followed by more, all of which were dramatized; three full-scale novels, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son. With Dombey he would at last reach a secure and comfortable financial position, and discover how much he enjoyed reading his own work aloud to friends, planting the idea of his later public readings. He would embark on David Copperfield, his own favourite among his novels. And he would appoint Forster to be his biographer.

  PART TWO

  8

  Killing Nell

  1840–1841

  As he approached his twenty-eighth birthday in February, Dickens knew himself to be famous, successful and tired. He needed and desired a rest, and he had made up his mind to keep 1840 free of the pressure of producing monthly instalments of another long novel. Instead, he intended to enjoy himself in a more leisurely way by editing Master Humphrey’s Clock, the small miscellaneous weekly magazine. He planned to commission work from other writers and to contribute short stories and occasional essays himself; and to have pleasant dealings with his many artist friends about the fine illustrations that would adorn its pages. Chapman & Hall were to pay him £50 for each issue, plus half the profits, and he was confident that sales would be high. Copies would be distributed in Germany and America, and he expected to make something like £5,000 a year.

  Things did not turn out as he hoped. The magazine, after selling 70,000 copies of the first number in April, failed to appeal to readers. Sales crashed. He saw that he must do something drastic to win them back, gave up the idea of a miscellany and realized he would have to be the sole contributor. The first thing to be done was to expand one slight story into a full-length serial, which meant he had to improvise from week to week a novel he had not even thought of in January. Instead of being free from the tyranny of writing serial fiction he found himself tied even more tightly to deadlines. He wrote to a friend lamenting that ‘day and night the alarum is in my ears, warning me that I must not run down … I am more bound down by this Humphrey than I have ever been yet – Nickleby was nothing to it, nor Pickwick, nor Oliver – it demands my constant attention and obliges me to exert all the self-denial I possess.’1

  Under this new strain his health suffered, and he was advised by his doctor to change his diet and take more exercise. In June he rented a house in Broadstairs, found it a propitious place for work and returned for another five weeks in September. Yet in London he crammed in as much as ever. He gave his time to good works, helping the unfortunate (Eliza Burgess, mentioned in the Prologue, was one) and encouraging poor aspirant writers, a carpenter and a young clerk, both of whom he advised patiently. Meanwhile his fame still grew. Maclise’s portrait was shown at the Royal Academy, and engravings of it were in high demand. He made new friends, meeting at Lady Blessington’s the brilliant and unconventional poet and essayist Walter Savage Landor, with whom he formed an immediate bond amid much joking and mutual admiration; and he travelled to Bath with Forster to visit him. At dinner with the politician Edward Stanley he first met Carlyle, who immediately produced a fine and florid description of him: ‘clear blue intelligent eyes, eyebrows that he arches amazingly, large protrusive rather loose mouth – a face of the most extreme mobility, which he shuttles about, eyebrows, eyes, mouth and all, in a very singular manner while speaking, surmount this with a loose coil of common-coloured hair, and set it on a small compact figure, very small, and dressed rather à la D’Orsay than well’.2 Mr and Mrs Carlyle became his friends. As to the colour of Dickens’s eyes, they were reported variously as dark brown, dark glittering black, clear blue, ‘not blue’, distinct clear hazel, ‘large effeminate eyes’, clear grey, green-grey, dark slaty blue – with a little orange line surrounding the pupil – and even, by a cautious observer, as ‘nondescript’.3 Friends observed that he was short-sighted, but reluctant to be seen with spect
acles.4

  The aged Samuel Rogers, poet, art collector and retired banker, gave a dinner to introduce him to the three beautiful granddaughters of Sheridan: Lady Seymour and Lady Dufferin had succeeded in marrying into the aristocracy, while the third and cleverest, Caroline Norton, remained on the edge of society, estranged from her boorish husband, earning her living by writing, and touched with scandal, as Dickens knew from having reported the court case in which her name was linked with that of Lord Melbourne. Dickens was sympathetic, admiring and cautiously friendly.

  He enthusiastically attended rehearsals and the first night of Talfourd’s play Glencoe, with Macready in the leading role. In July he overcame his proclaimed disapproval of public executions to watch the hanging of Courvoisier, the valet who cut the throat of his master, the elderly Lord William Russell: Dickens had followed the trial closely and written two letters to the press objecting to the behaviour of the defending lawyer. He went with Catherine to Lichfield and Stratford early in the year, and in July took her with him to visit his parents in their Devon cottage, snatching a few days of holiday in Dawlish and Torquay. He gave a great celebration for the christening of their daughter Katey in August. ‘Rather a noisy and uproarious day … not so much comme il faut as I could have wished,’ observed Macready, who presented a gold watch and chain to his god-daughter, and a sovereign to her nurse. Between the ceremony and the dinner Dickens carried off as many of his friends as were willing for his idea of a treat, which was a tour of Coldbath Fields Prison. Catherine was now three months into another pregnancy.