Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  But now there was something else in his mind. In October, an idea had come to him for a short book to be sold at Christmas. By 24 October he had John Leech, a fine artist first introduced to him by Cruikshank, working on illustrations, and on 10 November he was discussing the cover and advertising with Forster.15 He told his Boston friend Felton that he had composed it in his head, weeping and laughing and weeping again, as he walked about ‘the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles, many a night when all the sober folks had gone to bed’.16 Friedrich Engels, observing the slum housing, child labour, harsh employers, and overworked men and women in Manchester at this time, praised Carlyle as the only British writer who took account of the poor, and doubtless had not read anything by Dickens.17 A Christmas Carol was Dickens’s response to the condition of the working class in London, and his next Christmas book, The Chimes, followed up the subject. Carlyle, Engels and Dickens were all fired with anger and horror at the indifference of the rich to the fate of the poor, who had almost no access to education, no care in sickness, saw their young children set to work for ruthless factory-owners and could consider themselves lucky if they were only half starved. Dickens asked Chapman & Hall to publish his little book on commission, as a separate venture, and he insisted on fine, coloured binding and endpapers, and gold lettering on the front and spine; and that it should cost only five shillings.

  It was published on 19 December and sold 6,000 copies in the few days before Christmas. Dickens presented copies to Jeffrey, Elliotson, Felton, Sydney Smith and his sister Letitia; he assured Macready it was the greatest success he had yet achieved. It went on selling into the spring of 1844, with seven editions by May. He had put into it his memories of Camden Town and the walk, or run, to work that Bob Cratchit does; and his sister Fanny’s crippled son, now four, whom he had seen in Manchester in September, as Tiny Tim. From his own deep self he drew the understanding that a grown man may pity the child he had been, and learn from that pity, as Scrooge does. It was also his response to the Ragged School he had visited, and the Report of the Children’s Employment Commission he had read a little earlier, which showed that children under seven were put to work, unprotected by any legal constraints, sometimes for ten to twelve hours a day, inspiring the scene in which the Spirit of Christmas Present shows Scrooge two stunted and wolfish children, calling them Ignorance and Want. When Scrooge asks, ‘Have they no refuge or resource?’ the Spirit answers him with his own words, ‘Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?’ The book went straight to the heart of the public and has remained lodged there ever since, with its mixture of horror, despair, hope and warmth, its message – a Christian message – that even the worst of sinners may repent and become a good man; and its insistence that good cheer, food and drink shared, gifts and even dancing are not merely frivolous pleasures but basic expressions of love and mutual support among all human beings.

  Dickens was confident the book would bring him £1,000, allow him to pay off money he owed and leave him some in hand to take abroad. Again he was stunned with disappointment. The accounts for the Carol showed that almost all the profits were absorbed in the expenses of binding, special paper, coloured plates and advertising. At Christmas he was overdrawn on his Coutts account, something he desperately tried to avoid, given his personal friendship with Miss Coutts, and Mitton was asked for another loan. On the first 6,000 copies he made £137, and even at the end of 1844 the book had earned only £726. Worse, he took legal action against a pirated version of his story, sold for twopence on the day the second edition came out, and although he won the case the pirates, Messrs Lee and Haddock, declared themselves bankrupt, and Dickens had to pay £700 in costs and law charges. A third loan from Mitton was asked for, and received.

  Dickens kept quiet about the financial disaster in order not to tarnish the success of his Christmas book. On the bright side, Tauchnitz, the Leipzig publisher who had been pirating English books on the Continent, had begun to deal fairly and was offering money for Dickens’s work: his edition of the Carol was ‘sanctioned by the Author’. In America it became his biggest seller, clocking up two million copies in a hundred years.18 Dramatized versions were running in London in the new year; they have always been hugely successful, and many admirers of Dickens make a point of rereading it every year at Christmas.

  At Christmas 1843 Dickens, for all his pressing problems, managed to maintain a high level of seasonal jollity. Macready was away acting in America, and Dickens and Forster appointed themselves chief entertainers at the children’s party given by Mrs Macready on Boxing Day. Jane Carlyle described the occasion. ‘Only think of the excellent D playing the conjuror for one whole hour – the best conjuror I ever saw – (and I have paid money to see several) – and Forster acting as his servant. This part of the entertainment concluded with a plum pudding made out of raw flour, raw eggs – all the raw usual ingredients – boiled in a gentleman’s hat – and tumbled out reeking – all in one minute before the eyes of the astonished children and astonished grown people!’ A little later Dickens sank almost to his knees in an unsuccessful effort to persuade Mrs Carlyle to waltz. Supper, crackers and speeches were followed by a country dance into which everyone was whirled, and at midnight Dickens bore off Thackeray and Forster to ‘finish the night’ at Devonshire Terrace, and Mrs Carlyle reflected on how much more entertaining the ‘little knot of blackguardist literary people who felt ourselves above all rules, and independent of the universe’ were than those in aristocratic, conventional drawing rooms could possibly be.19

  There was another conjuring show at Twelfth Night, for Charley’s seventh birthday, for which Dickens and Forster both dressed themselves in magicians’ outfits, although by now Dickens was almost floored by a cold: ‘My chest is raw, my head dizzy, and my nose incomprehensible.’20 And there were always more family demands. His youngest brother, Augustus, had reached the age of seventeen, and Dickens busied himself trying to find him a job. His own new baby was due, and Catherine was no longer the ‘out and outer’ she had been in America: he complained of her being ‘nervous and dull. But her health is perfectly good, and I am sure she might rally, if she would.’21 Perhaps she was nervous of the coming ordeal, and not happy about his plan to leave the baby with her mother when they went abroad. On 15 January a third son, Francis, was born. She recovered quickly, but a month later Dickens wrote to his friend T. J. Thompson, ‘Kate is all right again; and so, they tell me, is the Baby. But I decline (on principle) to look at the latter object.’22

  At least he could get away from babies, nursemaids and wife, and take on a role he enjoyed better, as glamorous visiting speaker. He went north to address the Mechanics’ Institute in Liverpool and the Polytechnic in Birmingham. In Liverpool he saw his sister Fanny, revisited the Britannia in dock and drank champagne on board; then he got himself up in a ‘magpie waistcoat’ for his evening speech before an audience of 1,300. He scored a triumph, and fell in love, with Christiana Weller, a nineteen-year-old concert pianist who performed at the reception. He invited himself to lunch with the surprised Weller family the next day and sent her some verses, joking that she shared a name with his Sam Weller and suggesting what he felt for her: ‘I love her dear name which has won me some fame,/But Great Heaven how gladly I’d change it.’ He followed this up with a gift of two volumes of Tennyson – his own copies, given him by the poet – and told her father that ‘she started out alone from the whole crowd the instant I saw her, and will remain there always in my sight.’23 He also feared she would die young, her expression being so spiritual.

  Smitten as he was, he went to an evening party given by Mr Yates, who ran the Institute, and stayed dancing until three in the morning, joining with forty couples in Sir Roger de Coverley. The next morning he was on the train to Birmingham, where he found the Town Hall decorated with artificial flowers arranged to form the words ‘Welcome Dick’ in gigantic letters. He retired to the inn where he was putting up, dined alone, ‘took a pint of Champagne an
d a pint of Sherry … and was as hard as iron and as cool as a cucumber’.24 The hall was crammed to the roof for his speech, which he thought the best he had ever given. He was on a high, and later that night he wrote a long letter to Thompson, boasting about the speech and confiding in him about Christiana: ‘Good God what a madman I should seem, if the incredible feeling I have conceived for that girl could be made plain to anyone.’25 His enthusiasm affected Thompson so strongly that he too found himself in love with Christiana, and since he was a rich widower he proceeded to woo her, keeping Dickens informed and strongly encouraged by him, since it allowed him to remain intimate with her, if only by proxy. He proposed that they should all go to Italy together for a ‘gallant holiday’, with books, boats and mules, and imagined himself growing a moustache and wearing a red sash for good measure. Thompson’s courtship advancing only slowly, Dickens calmed down, and although he went to hear her play in London and spoke at her wedding the following year, once Christiana had become Mrs Thompson he turned against her and the whole Weller family.26

  Chuzzlewit continued its course, and the plan was to go to Italy as soon as the last number appeared, at the end of June. A house was hired for them in Genoa by their Scottish friend Angus Fletcher, who was already in Italy and intended to join them there and work at his sculpture. Fletcher was instructed to have a water closet installed in the house. Dickens and Catherine took Italian lessons. In April he needed another loan from Mitton, and Devonshire Terrace was let from the end of May, so the whole family moved into No. 9 Osnaburgh Terrace. And on 1 June, after many preliminary discussions with Forster and with William Bradbury and Frederick Evans, an agreement was signed whereby they paid £2,000 into his account and he assigned to them a quarter share in everything he would write over the next eight years, without being formally committed to write anything, although it was expected that there would be another Christmas book for 1844. Their security was his remaining life-insurance policies. The deal was generous, and sensible. Dickens at last felt free, and Bradbury & Evans were going to do very well out of it. The villains, Chapman & Hall, were out of the picture as publishers of his new works – at least for the next fifteen years.27

  11

  Travels, Dreams and Visions

  1844–1845

  The last weeks in England were spent in a round of dinners, celebratory and farewell. Dickens also escaped for a few days’ yachting with Fonblanque, editor of the Examiner, and visited Landor in Bath. For the long journey to Italy he had purchased a shabby old coach, ‘about the size of your library’, he told Forster. It needed to be at least that to hold the entire party, which included Georgina (‘my little pet’ to Dickens, and from now on indissolubly one of the family), the four children and baby Francis – reprieved from being left with Mrs Hogarth – their maid Anne, three junior nurses and maids, Roche, the French courier hired by Dickens, and a dog, the small white curly-haired Timber. Charley, who had been at day school in St John’s Wood for six months, said goodbye to his teachers for a year.1 On 30 June the last number of Chuzzlewit was out, and on 2 July they set off, taking their phaeton as far as Dover so that Forster and Fred could go with them for this first stage of the journey. Dickens disliked farewells, and his friends hated losing him and wanted to stay close for as long as possible.

  They had two days in Paris, installed in the Hôtel Meurice in the rue de Rivoli. This was Dickens’s first visit to the French capital, and he walked about the streets continuously, alone, and marvelling at everything: ‘It is the most extraordinary place in the World … almost every house, and every person I passed, seemed to be another leaf in the enormous book that stands wide open there.’2 It was the beginning of an interest in France and a readiness to be delighted by most things French. On through Sens and Avallon to Chalons-sur-Saône, a beautiful summer journey, even if not ideally enjoyed in a coach packed with children and a dog with disordered bowels (as Dickens reported). There was some respite at Chalons, when the coach was loaded on to a barge that carried them to Lyons, where the Saône joins the Rhone – another pause for sightseeing – and as far as Aix. Then by road to Marseilles and by sea to their destination, Genoa, on the Ligurian coast, which they reached in mid-July. From the boat, Genoa was a beautiful town, but, at close quarters, ‘of all the mouldy, dreary, sleepy, dirty, lagging, halting, God-forsaken towns in the wide world, it surely must be the very uttermost superlative. It seemed as if one had reached the end of all things.’3

  Like many English visitors, they were amazed to find that the sky above Italy could be grey and cloudy even in summer, and it remained so for some time. The house Fletcher had found for them was also a severe disappointment. Dickens said the Villa Bagnerello looked like a pink jail, it was not in Genoa but several miles outside, at Albaro, and it was infested with fleas. Little Katey fell ill and would be nursed by no one but her father. But living was cheap, with excellent white wine at a penny farthing the pint, and he was not obliged to work, could breakfast at 9.30 and make punch with green lemons: ‘I never knew what it was to be lazy before.’4 The declaration is true and touching: not much leisure had been allowed into his life since the age of twelve. He found that he enjoyed swimming in the sea. He grew a moustache. He rode in and out of Genoa, and walked by day, until in August the heat made night the only time for walking. He found that his immediate neighbour, Monsieur Allertz, was the French Consul at Genoa, a hospitable man of literary tastes, who gave splendid dinners, and introduced him to the French Romantic poet and diplomat Alphonse de Lamartine as he passed through Genoa on his way to Naples. Although at this date Dickens barely spoke French, Lamartine’s wife was English, and the two men were ardent reformers with shared views about prison reform and copyright; they would meet again in Paris in 1847, and a third time in 1855. Other entertainment offered itself at the Teatro Carlo Felice, where he took a private box; the season opened with a dramatization of Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, and continued with Bellini’s La Sonnambula and Verdi’s new opera I Lombardi. He read Tennyson (‘what a great creature he is!’).5 Yet he was restless, and when Fred came to spend his holidays with them, he travelled to Marseilles to meet him, and they visited Nice before taking the coastal road back into Italy together. Fred was also sporting a moustache, which may have decided Dickens to get rid of his; and, fond as he was of his brother, he was no substitute for his friends.6 He told Maclise that ‘Losing you and Forster is like losing my arms and legs; and dull and lame I am without you.’7

  Palazzo Peschiere in Genoa, where Dickens lived with his family in 1844.

  He set out to find somewhere better to live, and succeeded in renting the sixteenth-century Palazzo Peschiere, or ‘Palace of the Fishponds’, in the heart of Genoa but with spacious terraced gardens, and set on a height that gave it a view over the surrounding town, the harbour and the sea. They moved at the end of September. It was easily the most magnificent house he ever lived in, and he sent friends enthusiastic accounts of the fifty-foot-high ceiling to the great hall, the patterned stone floors, the frescoes, the bedrooms decorated with nymphs and satyrs, the balconies and terraces, the fountains and sculptures. Here he dreamt of a blue-robed, Madonna-like spirit whom he knew to be Mary Hogarth, and who, as he wept and stretched out his arms to her, asked him to form a wish and recommended the Roman Catholic faith to him. He woke with tears running down his face, roused Catherine to describe the dream and explained its causes to himself: he had been looking at an old altar in the bedroom and hearing convent bells. But in describing it to Forster he wondered whether he should regard it ‘as a dream, or an actual Vision!’8

  Dreams and visions are central in the Christmas book he started on now, The Chimes, in which a poor old man, Trotty Veck, is sent visions by the spirits of the bells in the church where he stands every day waiting for work, spirits described as goblins, phantoms or shadows. It is hardly read today, but it was written with red-hot feeling and meant to shame the cruel and canting rich of the 1840s. Like the Carol, it looked at the cond
ition of the poor in England, but with a directly political message, attacking the complacency of political economists with Malthusian ideas, magistrates who sentenced suicidal young women to prison or transportation, and landowners who enforced the Game Laws and toasted ‘The Health of the Labourer’ at their agricultural dinners while allowing the labourers to starve. He knew what he was talking about: the magistrate he satirized was an acquaintance, and a smart political economist had attacked him in the Westminster Review for failing to inform readers of A Christmas Carol as to ‘who went without turkey and punch in order that Bob Cratchit might get them’. In Trotty Veck’s visions he sees his daughter and another young woman driven to prostitution and suicide by poverty, and the young man his daughter loves unjustly sentenced turning to crime; and although Dickens supplied a conventionally happy ending in which Trotty Veck wakes up and finds it was all a dream, readers could see that the visions were showing much of the truth of life for the poor. Modern readers may feel that he was more successful in his mockery of the powerful than in his presentation of the oppressed, but many tears were shed over them at the time.