Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  The new Christmas story, The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home, was finished on 1 December, and Dickens went to see the Fleet Street offices on the same day. The Daily News was announced as being of ‘Liberal Politics and thorough Independence’ and promised City news, foreign coverage, scientific and business information on every topic connected with railways, and criticism of books and arts ‘by some of the most distinguished names of this time’. Dickens found himself a secretary and subeditor, William Wills, a Punch contributor who had worked for Chambers’s Journal in Edinburgh, a solid rather than a brilliant fellow, two years older than him, who would go on to become his indispensable right-hand man. And Dickens was off to Liverpool, looking for more support for the paper and appointing an agent there, leaving his father in charge of the office in his absence.

  The Christmas period passed in preparations, partly for the performance of a second play, The Elder Brother, early in January, partly for the first day of publication of the Daily News, set for 21 January.16 The Times, hostile to Dickens and seeing the Daily News as a rival, attacked his Christmas story as ‘a twaddling manifestation of silliness’, without damaging its sales. The first edition of The Cricket, 16,500 copies, sold out before the new year and it went on selling steadily through many reprints. The market for a Christmas book from Dickens had been created and the public now looked forward to getting one. If their quality declined, as it did – the review in The Times was not far from the mark – their sales increased, helped no doubt by the fact that no fewer than seventeen dramatizations of The Cricket on the Hearth were staged. Dickens threw an even larger than usual Twelfth Night party at Devonshire Terrace, with singing, dancing for the children, speeches, supper and a ball for the adults, who included Talfourd, Macready, Cruikshank, Landor, Forster, Stanfield, Marryat ‘and a hundred more’.17 They were celebrating Charley’s ninth birthday, and Charley, according to his father, was busy writing a play in four acts with a hero named ‘Boy’.18

  The Times had a circulation of 25,000 copies and sold for sevenpence. As editor of the Daily News, which offered eight pages for fivepence, Dickens would need to establish his paper against that pre-eminent position, and to take readers from other dailies. It was a gamble, but at least it started at a moment favourable to newspaper sales. The first issue was to appear at a time of intense political excitement as the long-running battle against the hated Corn Laws, which put duty on imported corn and so kept the price of bread high in England and Ireland, came to a climax. On 22 January, Robert Peel, the Conservative Prime Minister, told the House of Commons that he had changed his mind about the Corn Laws. Peel, a man of exceptional intelligence and courage, was a new convert to Free Trade. His conversion split the Conservative Party, since the great landowning MPs were also farmers who depended on selling their corn at good prices, but Peel was determined to get his bill through against his own party. Dickens, hostile to the Conservatives, did not trust him and thought he was ‘decidedly playing false’, suggesting as much to his own leader writer.19 But he saw the importance of what Peel was trying to do, and he prepared carefully for the Prime Minister’s second great speech on 27 January, determined that his paper should distribute detailed reports of it all over the country. The speech lasted for three and a half hours, and John Dickens entered into the spirit of the occasion, writing to Peel to ask if he would supply copies of the documents used in his speech, and taking personal charge of carrying the paper reporting it to the West Country, with Augustus to help him. The editor of the Western Times was so impressed that he wrote, ‘Mr Dickens is a gentleman of the most enviable stamina. Time seems to have made no impression on him whatever. He had left London in the morning, travelled here [to Exeter] by rail, thence to Plymouth by chaise, and back again, and favouring us with a call, announced his intention to go back to London that night – and kept his word. That is Boz’s father.’20

  If Boz’s father had found his niche at last, Boz had not. On 30 January, nine days after taking up his position as editor, Dickens wrote to Forster telling him he was ‘revolving plans in my mind for quitting the paper and going abroad again to write a new book in shilling numbers’.21 It was not easy for him to admit that he had been in the wrong, and he extricated himself awkwardly. On the same day as his letter to Forster he wrote to Bradbury & Evans about his anxiety that the paper could be seen as corrupt through its one-sided presentation of railway news, since so many of its backers had money in the railways. He also complained about their interference in the appointment of a subeditor and other staff matters. He was entitled to raise these points, but it would have been fairer to mention his intention of leaving his post as he did so. Although the paper had sold 10,000 copies on the day after Peel’s speech, sales fell sharply afterwards and settled at around 4,000. Macready noted in his diary his despair at how poorly the paper compared with The Times. Dickens contributed an article on Ragged Schools for the issue of 4 February, then dined out on that day and on the next, not quite the behaviour expected of the editor of a new paper with problems needing to be sorted out. After this he made a two-day birthday trip out of town, to his beloved Rochester, supported by Forster, Jerrold, Catherine and Georgina, staying at the Bull Inn and walking over Cobham Park, Chatham fortifications and Rochester Castle. While they were away he persuaded Forster to take over as editor, and when they got back to London he handed in his resignation.

  He told Forster he was ‘tired to death and quite worn out’, and there is no doubt that he had found the pressure of work as editor too much. But within a week he was putting a brave face on things, writing to De La Rue, ‘I am a gentleman again. I have handed over the Editing of the Paper (very laborious work indeed) to Forster; and am contemplating a New Book … The Daily News is a great success … but I am not quite trustful in … some of the people concerned in its mechanical and business management …’22 He wrote to Wills, saying he missed him ‘a great deal more than I miss the Paper’, and to Evans, with complaints against Bradbury, accusing him of discourtesy to his father and interference in his arrangements with the staff, but insisting that he had no quarrel with him outside the newspaper.23 He continued to supply copy for the paper, not only his Italian travel pieces but four long, well-argued articles on capital punishment, declaring his absolute opposition to it, which appeared during February.24 He had been paid £300 by Bradbury & Evans at the end of December, to cover January and February, but on 5 March he wrote to them complaining that they had not paid him anything ‘on account of the Newspaper’ and that his account with Coutts Bank was therefore overdrawn, which he found embarrassing, given his friendship with Miss Coutts. The following day they paid another £300 into his account, and a further sum on 29 April.25 But he had felt humiliated, although Miss Coutts is unlikely to have been aware of the details of his account. And he had also to face the knowledge that the editorship, which he had meant to relieve him of his fears of deteriorating health and fading popularity, had proved beyond his powers, and he was still floundering.

  Later, Miss Coutts was one of the people to whom he admitted he had been wrong in taking the editorship: ‘I have no doubt I made a mistake.’26 For now, with vague thoughts of a new book in his head, he began night-time roaming around London. He decided that his best plan, financially and professionally, would be to rent out Devonshire Terrace again for another year and take the family to Switzerland, which he had thought attractive when they travelled through it on their return from Italy, and where he could live cheaply and write in peace. Meanwhile he kept up his social round in London. The usual celebration of Forster’s birthday and the Dickenses’ wedding anniversary took place in April in Richmond, with his ‘two petticoats’, Forster, Maclise, Stanfield and Macready, the last finding the party ‘rather more tumultuous than I quite like’.27 This was followed by a dinner party for the christening of little Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens later in the month. Both godfathers were present, and Dickens took the opportunity to suggest to Tennyson, still a bache
lor, that he should join him in Switzerland and share a house there with the Dickens family. Tennyson might well have quailed at the thought of living with six young children, but the reason he gave the Brownings was not that: ‘If I went, I should be entreating him [Dickens] to dismiss his sentimentality, & so we should quarrel & part, & never see one another any more. It was better to decline – & I have declined.’28 Still, Tennyson remembered the invitation and later in the summer, touring with his publisher, he called on Dickens in Lausanne and was entertained with wine and many cigars.

  Dickens sent a long letter to Augusta De La Rue telling her he had walked out of the editorship because of his objections to the business management of the paper, which was only partly true, and that he had ceased all contributions, which was not true; and that he expected the paper to fail, which did not happen. His letter is slightly disingenuous throughout. He was writing to impress and please a woman he was fond of, and did not want to tell her that the load of work had been too great, and that he was bruised, and felt he must leave London because, as he told Forster, ‘I don’t think I could shut out the paper sufficiently, here, to write well.’29 He also assured her that he would like to go to Genoa again but that Catherine would not consider it – this was true – and that they would be going to Lausanne instead, which would allow him to ‘run over’ to Genoa; although in fact his intention was to move to Paris before Christmas. Meanwhile Charley’s planned admission to King’s College School had to be put off. Dickens told Miss Coutts he would have him taught in Lausanne and sent to school in England after Christmas, when he would be ten. Roche was hired again, and Devonshire Terrace let to Sir James Duke for a year from 1 June.30 John Dickens was happily employed at the Daily News, solvent at last and no trouble to anyone.

  Four days before leaving, Dickens took the first step in an enterprise that was to be a central part of his life for more than a decade, by sending Miss Coutts an outline of his idea for a charitable enterprise in which they might collaborate. Of the many striking letters Dickens wrote, this is one of the most astonishing, laying out over fourteen pages his plan for setting up an asylum for women and girls working the London streets as prostitutes. He avoided using the word ‘prostitute’ to spare Miss Coutts embarrassment, but it was of course what he meant, and she understood; and he launched into a preliminary consideration of the practical details of re-educating them into a different way of life. They were not drily listed, but set alongside a sympathetic consideration of the plight of the women. Reading the letter, you have the impression that he had been thinking through his ideas carefully for some time.31 He began by insisting that every young woman they might help would have been living a life ‘dreadful in its nature and consequences, and full of affliction, misery, and despair to herself. Never mind Society while she is at that pass. Society has used her ill and turned away from her, and she cannot be expected to take much heed of its rights or wrongs. It is destructive to herself.’ He went on to say that he hoped it could be explained to each woman who presented herself for their assistance ‘that she is degraded and fallen, but not lost, having this shelter; and that the means of Return to Happiness are now about to be put into her own hands …’ Women might come straight from prison, where prostitutes were commonly sent, but each one must choose for herself to come to the Asylum, and want to be helped.

  His idea was to begin with about thirty women, and he expected they might fail with as many as half of them. His hope was that those who stayed the course could be restored to society and even become ‘Virtuous Wives’. He was especially interested in the possibility of preparing them to emigrate to the colonies, Australia, South Africa and Canada, and thought the government might give recognition and aid to such a scheme. Failing government aid, he hoped that ‘good people’ might be found to take them into service. He invited Miss Coutts to entrust him with ‘any share in the supervision and direction of the Institution … I need not say that I should enter on such a task with my whole heart and soul.’32 And although he was not yet in a position to start on the scheme, he meant every word, and he continued to write to Miss Coutts with further ideas and suggestions from Switzerland.

  On 29 May, Dickens dined with Forster, who accompanied the whole family as far as Ramsgate the next day. This time the Dickens caravan consisted of six children, Anne and two nurses, Roche the courier, Dickens, Catherine and Georgina, and the same dog, Timber. At Ramsgate they took the steamer to Ostend, then a river steamboat up the Rhine, a voyage that must have taxed the vigilance of the nurses. They reached Strasbourg on 7 June, went on by train to Basle, and there fitted themselves into three coaches for the three-day drive to Lausanne. On 11 June they were at the Hotel Gibbon and after an intensive search for somewhere to live Dickens took Rosemont, a house small enough to fit into the great hall of the Peschiere in Genoa, he observed, but delightfully placed on the slopes above Lac Léman. There were enough bedrooms for all of them and guests, a small study for him, with a balcony overlooking mountains and lake, and the garden was full of ‘roses enough to smother the whole establishment of the Daily News in’, he assured Forster, pressing him to come out and join him in reading and smoking in the many bowers scattered about the grounds.33 No sooner had he arrived than he also began to plan to ‘run over to you in England for a few days’ in November, should his writing go well.34 But he could not get going with his writing because the box holding his proper writing materials and the small bronze figures he liked to keep on his desk had not yet turned up. He managed only letters, and eleven chapters of a ‘Life of Our Lord’ intended for the older children, and not for publication. He became anxious that Bradbury & Evans, unsettled by their newspaper enterprise, might not be the best publishers for his proposed new book, and asked Forster to consider whether Chapman & Hall should be asked to take over again; and Forster managed to dissuade him from this idea.

  Rosemont, the house above Lausanne taken by Dickens in 1846.

  On top of all this he wrote to Lord Morpeth, a Liberal peer whom he knew slightly, telling him he was ambitious for some public employment, and that he had hoped ‘for years’ to become a Police Magistrate, a position in which he might put his social knowledge – of the poor, of education and housing, of disease and vice, of prisons and criminals – to practical use. He believed Morpeth might be able to help him to such employment.35 Forster was not consulted about this surprising idea, no doubt another by-product of Dickens’s failure of confidence in his ability to return to novel writing, and nothing came of it.

  On 28 June, however, fortified by the arrival of his box of writing materials, and a copy of Tristram Shandy, which he opened by chance at the words ‘What a work it is likely to turn out! Let us begin it!’, he wrote the first pages of the book that would establish him in a secure financial position for the first time in his life: Dombey and Son.36 But he could not know this yet, and he remained nervous about whether he could write it, and jittery about being committed to produce his fourth annual Christmas story at the same time. The first instalment of Dombey was due to appear at the end of September. Unhappy letters went off to Forster. Beautiful as Switzerland was, it had a terrible drawback: he explained that he found himself afflicted by ‘an extraordinary nervousness it would be hardly possible to describe’ because there were no streets to walk through at the end of his day’s work, and he felt the want of them badly.37 Still, he wrote steadily to finish the first number in mid-July, putting off a trip to Chamonix to do so; he felt he had a strong and promising story in hand, and wrote at length to Forster about his ideas for its development. At the end of the month he sent him the first four chapters and outlined more of the plot, but added that he was suffering from ‘queer and trembling legs’ and could not sleep.38

  The opening chapters, with the birth of Paul Dombey, the death of his mother, the appointment of a wet nurse – something Dickens knew a great deal about – and the setting up of the unhappy relationship between little Florence Dombey and her father in the great, sombr
e house somewhere ‘between Portland Place and Bryanstone Square’, and the other cheerful household in the City where Dombey’s office boy Walter lives with his uncle Solomon Gills, maker of ships’ instruments – all this is done with vigour and assurance, and Forster praised it highly. Dickens replied that he had ‘not been quite myself … owing to the great heat’, that the weather made it almost impossible to work, and that he was thinking of turning to the Christmas book because it would be a relief to get it out of the way.39 Soon he was finding ‘extraordinary difficulty in getting on fast’, which he saw as the effect of his two years’ freedom from writing. The lack of crowded streets remained a real problem, and London seemed to him like a magic lantern in the distance, without which the labour of writing day after day grew ‘IMMENSE’ (written in capitals).40 His need to walk through streets at night was a tormenting ‘mental phenomenon’: ‘I want them beyond description. I don’t seem to be able to get rid of my spectres unless I can lose them in crowds.’41

  He does not explain what he meant by his spectres, but the word is a reminder of Augusta De La Rue’s ‘phantoms’, sometimes called ‘spectres’ by Dickens, the tormentors she saw in her fantasies.42 The De La Rues were in Switzerland in August and Dickens managed to spend a day with them at Vevey, and surely talked with her of her troubled mental state, and as surely did not mention his own. Forster tried to cheer him by pointing out that there would be busy streets in Paris, where Dickens was moving in November, and that once there he could easily get over to London. But he was not to be comforted, and he found letters a poor substitute for Forster’s presence. When he feared that he might not get the Christmas book written at all, he wrote, ‘I would give the world to be on the spot to tell you this,’ and added that he had thought of starting for London that very night.43