Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  Some relief from his wretchedness came when he made up his mind to read the first number of Dombey to the new friends he had made in Lausanne, mostly among English residents. They included the Hon. Richard Watson, a landowner of liberal views who ran his estate of Rockingham Castle in Northamptonshire on enlightened lines with his cultivated wife Lavinia; also William de Cerjat, a Swiss gentleman who became a lifelong friend and correspondent, and Cerjat’s brother-in-law William Haldimand, a rich and philanthropic expatriate. They were invited to a soirée in mid-September for a formal prepublication reading from the proofs, where he read for over an hour and delighted everyone present. His spirits lifted and he felt himself, briefly, inimitable again. In England, Bradbury & Evans were showing their mettle as publishers by preparing for publication of the first number with bill-stickers posting announcements of ‘Mr Dickens’s new work’ in Exeter, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Coventry, Bath and London, salesmen distributing cards announcing terms for advertising in the forthcoming numbers, and a distribution of 3,000 red-and-black advertising show cards.44 Dickens took himself to Geneva, hoping to throw off attacks of sickness, giddiness and a bloodshot eye, but still thinking of giving up the Christmas book, and telling Forster again, ‘I would give any money that it were possible to consult with you.’ The giddiness and headache continued, and Geneva’s staid townscapes were useless. He continued to complain of ‘the absence of streets’.45 Catherine, who was again pregnant, went with him, and Georgina was soon summoned to join them: he was there for a week at the end of September and for another in late October. Afterwards, Forster concluded his friend had been ‘gravely ill’, and Dickens himself felt he had been ‘in serious danger’ when his spirits sank so low.46

  Yet in Lausanne he did a second reading for local friends, which caused ‘uproarious delight. I never saw or heard people laugh so,’ he told Forster, and he was inspired with a new idea. He went on, ‘ I was thinking the other day that in these days of lecturings and readings, a great deal of money might possibly be made (if it were not infra dig) by one’s having Readings of one’s own books. It would be an odd thing. I think it would take immensely. What do you say?’47 Forster did think it infra dig for a writer to become a paid performer, but once the idea had come to Dickens it never left him, and twelve years later he put it to the test and found it deeply satisfying. Not only did it ‘take immensely’, it gave him intense pleasure to stand up before an audience to act out his own imagined characters, and to find he could hold the house enthralled, laughing and crying by turns. And it did more than this, offering him the best proof of the admiration and love in which he was held by the public, nourishing his belief in himself, and helping to carry him through the pain and unhappiness that was by that time inescapable.

  Another earlier plan he mentioned to Forster again was his ambition to found a periodical, a weekly, to be sold cheaply, with something of the Spectator’s current radicalism and something of the Athenaeum’s cultural distinction, as it was edited by Dilke, with Carlyle, Landor and Browning as contributors. Here again was an idea he would carry out later; for the moment Forster knew that the most important thing was to keep him on track with his writing, and he did his best from a distance to be adviser, encourager and nurse. When Dickens found his prose running into lines of blank verse as he struggled with his Christmas book, he told Forster, ‘I cannot help it when I am much in earnest,’ and asked him to ‘knock out a word’s brains here and there’, which Forster duly did.48

  Still more important than any of these exchanges was Dickens’s confession to Forster that little Paul Dombey and Mrs Pipchin’s establishment, where the children were underfed and unhappy, were based on his own experience: ‘It is from life, and I was there – I don’t suppose I was eight years old; but I remember it all as well, and certainly understood it as well, as I do now. We should be devilish sharp in what we do to children. I thought of that passage in my small life, at Geneva. Shall I leave you my life in MS when I die? There are some things in it that would touch you very much …’49 Whether the spectres haunting Dickens were connected with the stirring up of unhappy childhood memories or not, his unburdening of himself to Forster helped and led on to his bringing the memories out, in the autobiographical narrative he wrote to show him and also in his next novel, David Copperfield. Paul Dombey, the sick child who has to endure whatever is imposed on him by his unfeeling father in the way of care and education – losing his nurse, lodged with the unkind Mrs Pipchin, sent to a school with lessons far beyond his capacity – is the immediate forerunner of little David, who also loses nurse and mother, is cruelly used by his stepfather, and is sent to a bad school and then out to work unsuited to his age or abilities.

  Forster’s unfailing sympathy and responsiveness was especially admirable since he was himself dealing with problems at the Daily News. He felt increasingly out of step with the proprietors, objected to the raising of the price in October and resigned the editorship in November. Dickens would leave for Paris with his family in mid-November, settle them in a rented house there and travel alone to London, staying at the Piazza Coffee House again, in mid-December; and Forster agreed to go to Paris in January for two weeks so that he and Dickens could explore the city together.

  Dickens sent an affectionate letter to Macready from Geneva in mid-October, telling him he was escaping there from a bad headache, thanking him for his kind words about the first two numbers of Dombey, which he had sent him in proof, and teasing him about his large family of eight children, with a rueful acknowledgement that he was as bad, since his seventh was expected in the spring. Macready was in the middle of a season at the Surrey Theatre in Blackfriars, playing in the great Shakespeare tragedies, Hamlet, Lear, Othello and Macbeth. His Lady Macbeth was Mrs Ternan, a hard-working and reliable middle-aged actress, once the beautiful Frances Jarman, and at present living in lodgings over a fire-engine manufactory in the Blackfriars Road with her old mother and her children. After playing with her one night he heard of the death of her husband, who had long been confined to a lunatic asylum in Bethnal Green. Macready thought of how he might help her and sent round a note offering to let her have ten pounds. Two days later she answered, ‘accepting with much feeling my offer … and wishing it to be considered as a loan. I wrote to her, enclosing a cheque for the amount; but unwilling to hamper her with the sense of a debt, requested, if the surplus of her labours offered it, to transfer it as a gift from me to her little girl. Poor thing!’ And the diary went on, ‘Forster came into my room; all is not going well with him and the Daily News.’50 Had Dickens been in England, Macready might well have applied to him for further help for the Ternans, knowing how generous he was in assisting families in distress; but he was altogether too far away, and too preoccupied. On 4 November Mrs Ternan visited Macready, bringing not the one little girl he expected but her three daughters, Fanny aged eleven, Maria nine, and seven-year-old Nelly. All had worked in the theatre from the age of two. In the course of the visit their mother gracefully recited Portia’s speech on mercy – ‘it blesseth him that gives and him that takes’ – as an expression of gratitude to Macready for his goodness, and brought tears to his eyes. Then the family set off to do the best they could, and for the next five years they toured in Ireland and the north of England, living in lodgings on cold meat, bread and beer, making their own costumes, taking any parts they were offered and ready to learn four parts in a week if they had to. They were professionals but the mother insisted that her daughters should never forget that they were also ladies. They were clever and tough, and knew that you had sometimes to play trashy parts, and do your best to redeem them; and the theatre in which they worked, although it often fell short of what they hoped it might be, represented an ideal of culture and beauty to which they subscribed. They were modern young women, hard up and ambitious, and in another ten years they would become part of Dickens’s world.

  Meanwhile, Dickens, having tried and failed to put his ideas and energies into a newspaper intend
ed to promote liberal ideas and serve the community in England, found his escape to Switzerland unhelpful as he returned to his real vocation as a novelist. The physical and mental crisis he went through, charted in his letters to Forster, was the most severe he had undergone, bringing him to the edge of a breakdown. He pulled himself through, helped and comforted by Forster’s responses, and he began to open up memories he had so far kept hidden. Both the ordeal and the process of remembering would strengthen him and enrich his work over the next years.

  13

  Dombey, with Interruptions

  1846–1848

  Three carriages carried the family from Lausanne to Paris, children and nurses (and dog, no doubt) in one, adults in another. They left on 16 November, passed through the Jura in frost and fog, rose at five each morning and were on the road for nearly twelve hours each day, putting up at inns and reaching Paris four days later. They all piled into the Hôtel Brighton, Dickens immediately set about finding a house to rent, and within a week they were installed at No. 49 rue de Courcelles, close to the Champs Elysées and the rue du Faubourg St Honoré. It belonged to a French marquis, and Dickens complained that the doors and windows failed to close properly against the freezing weather, the bedrooms were as small as opera boxes, the drapery on the walls ‘inscrutable’, and the dining room absurdly painted to look like a grove of trees. He had already embarked on exploratory walks through the streets of Paris, and caught a glimpse of the King, Louis-Philippe, sitting far back in his carriage and protected by a throng of mounted guards and police who scanned the avenues suspiciously as they went forward. The King made a poor impression on him, and he decided that Paris was ‘a wicked and detestable place, though wonderfully attractive’.1 Soon he was planning dinner with Charles Sheridan, attaché to the Ambassador, at a famous restaurant in the Palais Royal, Les Trois Frères de Provence, and Forster agreed to come over for two weeks in January so that they could discover Paris together.2 In a letter to Lord Jeffrey, Dickens told him that Forster was ‘my right hand and cool shrewd head too’, and he confessed to Forster just how close he had been to a breakdown in Switzerland.3

  Dombey needed his attention, but as soon as he was installed in the rue de Courcelles a letter came from his father, giving him grim news of his sister Fanny’s health. She had consumption – tuberculosis of the lung – and the doctor advised that neither she nor her husband should be told the truth, which suggested he did not expect her to recover. That evening Dickens was too upset to go with Catherine and Georgy to the theatre. A week later he was still unable to settle to work, disliking his study, unable to find a corner anywhere else in which to write, moving the furniture about, distracting himself by writing letters, grumbling about the French as lazy, unreliable and fit for nothing but soldiering, and taking Georgy out to see Paris by night.4 But when he did get down to writing, he told Forster coolly, with none of the agonizing he had shown over the end of Little Nell, ‘Paul, I shall slaughter at the end of number five,’ and as soon as number four was done he took himself to London, the Piazza Coffee House in Covent Garden and Lincoln’s Inn Fields again, for a week just before Christmas.5

  He needed to be in London with Forster for the good of his soul as well as having many practical reasons for going. There were arrangements to be made for Fanny’s care in her illness, making sure she was seen by the best doctors, and considering whether the Burnetts should be persuaded to move to London to be close to them. There was the publication of his new Christmas book, The Battle of Life, on 19 December, the story of a girl who gives up her lover to her sister, feebly sentimental, but it sold out its first printing of 24,000 copies before Christmas Day and made him £1,300 by the end of the year. The Keeleys were putting on a dramatized version at the Lyceum which Dickens had offered to supervise, and he gave a reading to the actors for which Forster lent his rooms; Dickens mocked his friend for his pains, and especially for providing seventy-six thick ham sandwiches for the company. Dickens found the Keeleys’ production poor and did his best to liven it up. He also had business with publishers, consulting with Chapman & Hall about a cheap edition of his works, and this now went ahead.6 Hurrying from one appointment to another he caught cold, so that ‘I can hardly hold up my hand, and fight through from hour to hour’, as he wrote to ‘My dearest Kate’, telling her he was impatient for a letter from her.7

  Back in Paris just in time for Christmas, a letter went off to ‘My Very Dear Forster’, wishing him ‘Many merry Christmases, many happy new years, unbroken friendship, great accumulation of cheerful recollections, affection on earth, and heaven at last, for all of us’. Forster had to hear about his cold too: ‘I am going to take a jorum of hot rum and egg in bed immediately, and to cover myself up with all the blankets in the house. I have a sensation in my head as if it were “on edge”.’8 On the last day of 1846 he visited the morgue to look at the unidentified bodies laid out there. He went alone at dusk and saw an old man with a grey head in the otherwise empty place.9

  The Battle of Life sold because there was a market for any Christmas book from Dickens, but the critics were merciless. When the reviews reached Dickens in January, he winced and told Forster he felt disposed to go to New Zealand, but at the same time he was on to the fifth number of Dombey: ‘I am slaughtering a young and innocent victim – ’ The deed done, he walked the streets of Paris all through the night before going to meet Forster in the morning.10 The two friends packed their fortnight together with pleasures. They went to Versailles, St Cloud, the Louvre, the Conservatoire, to hear a lesson given, and the Bibliothèque Royale, where they saw Gutenberg’s type and Racine’s notes in his copy of Sophocles. They dined at the British Embassy, surveyed hospitals, prisons, the morgue again irresistible to Dickens, and went to every possible theatrical performance. They conversed with the playwright Scribe and took supper with Dumas. They talked with Gautier, with an ailing Chateaubriand, and with Lamartine, whom Dickens had met briefly in Genoa, and whose liberal politics he admired; and called on Victor Hugo in his apartment in the Place Royale. Hugo made a profound impression on both of them with his eloquence, and Forster observed that he addressed ‘very charming flattery, in the best taste’ to Dickens. Dickens thought he ‘looked like the Genius he was’, while his wife looked as if she might poison his breakfast any morning; and the daughter who appeared ‘with hardly any drapery above the waist … I should suspect of carrying a sharp poignard in her stays, but for her not appearing to wear any’.11 Having made his joke, he decided that ‘Of all the literary men I saw, I liked Victor Hugo best.’12

  The time he and Forster spent together in Paris developed his view of the people, and he began to see the virtues of the French, to forget his earlier outburst about their unreliability, and to be charmed by the people and the place. ‘The general appreciation of, and respect for, Art, in its broadest and most universal sense, in Paris, is one of the finest national signs I know. They are ’specially intelligent people: and though there still lingers among them an odd mixture of refinement and coarseness, I believe them to be, in many high and great respects, the first people in the universe.’13 This was the beginning of a real love for France, and the French reciprocated, with translations and imitations of his work, culminating ten years later in the publishers Hachette commissioning new translations of all the novels and stories, approved by Dickens.14 Already in the 1840s his work was being translated into many other European languages, German, Italian, Dutch and even Russian, but with none did he have so close a relationship as with the French, whose language he learnt.15 Forster said he had a poor accent but good written French. He signed off a letter to Forster ‘Charles Dickens, Français naturalisé, et Citoyen de Paris’, and in 1847 he began to write to D’Orsay in French, bold if simple and inaccurate: ‘Ah Mon Dieu! Que les mois s’ecoulent avec une terrible rapidité! L’instant que je me trouve libre, je me trouve encore un forçat lié a la rame. N’importe! Courage Inimitable Boz! Vous l’aimiez assez-bien mon Brave, après tout!’ Within
two years he had mastered the language well enough for serious correspondence.16

  Meanwhile he had his novel to write. It sold unexpectedly well from the opening number in October 1846, keeping Bradbury & Evans busy with reprints, and for the January number they began with 32,000 copies. The success was well deserved, because the book makes a tremendous start with the death of Mrs Dombey in childbed in the great sombre London house near Portland Place, her husband caring only for the newborn son, the fashionable doctors powerless, and her little daughter, Florence, weeping and holding on to her as ‘clinging fast to that slight spar within her arms, the mother drifted out upon the dark and unknown sea that rolls round all the world’. The second chapter builds strongly on this with the hiring of a wet nurse to feed and care for baby Paul: Mr Dombey, jealous of the presence of an outsider and unhappy about handing his son to Polly Toodle, a motherly young woman with a husband working on the railways and many children of her own, insists that she give up her own name and be known as ‘Richards’ in his household, and does his best to remove any human feeling from the arrangement, telling her she need not become attached to the child, or the child to her. Reading this chapter makes you wonder about the wet nurses who came to work for the Dickens family year after year, and what sort of conversations Dickens may have held with them. And did his own small sons, passed from wet nurse to dry nurse to Georgina, sometimes seem uncertain whom they should attach themselves to?