Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  The Emperor Napoleon III who now ruled over France might be a ‘cold-blooded scoundrel’, but the French people and their way of life remained intensely congenial.8 Dickens had after all first met Louis-Napoleon at the house of his dear friend D’Orsay, whom he admired so much that he made him godfather to his son Alfred.9 D’Orsay’s total disregard of convention, the fact that he was separated from his wife and seemingly the lover of his step-mother-in-law, his perpetually unpaid debts – all this had been brushed aside by Dickens, captivated by his chic, his brilliance as a portraitist, his wit and charm in society, his French savoir-vivre. D’Orsay and his fellow French looked at life differently from the English, and Dickens saw that there was something to be said for their point of view. And, although he detested the Emperor’s assumption of absolute power, the political situation in England struck him as almost equally dismal, and led him to believe that ‘Representative Institutions’ had failed there for lack of an educated people to support them.10

  In May 1856 he had a fierce disagreement with Miss Coutts’s companion, Mrs Brown, on the subject of the French. When she spoke against them, he praised their openness about social problems, telling her that a leading difference between them and the English was that ‘in England people dismiss the mention of social evils and vices which do nevertheless exist among them; and that in France people do not dismiss the mention of the same things but habitually recognise their existence.’ Mrs Brown cried out, ‘Don’t say that!’ and Dickens insisted, ‘Oh but I must say it, you know, when according to our national vanity and prejudice, you disparage an unquestionably great nation.’ At which Mrs Brown burst into tears.11 A few months later he wrote to Forster grumbling about the constraints placed on English novelists compared with the French – he named Balzac and Sand – who were able to write freely and realistically, while ‘the hero of an English book’ was ‘always uninteresting – too good’. Dickens went on to tell Forster that ‘this same unnatural young gentleman (if to be decent is to be necessarily unnatural), whom you meet in those others books and in mine, must be presented to you in that unnatural aspect by reason of your morality, and is not to have, I will not say any of the indecencies you like, but not even any of the experiences, trials, perplexities, and confusions inseparable from the making or unmaking of all men!’12 It was a comprehensive complaint about the circumstances in which he worked as a writer, and which he felt unable to challenge in his novels.13

  Congenial as he found life in Paris, he was obliged to make frequent trips to London. When Dr Brown, husband of Miss Coutts’s companion and a trustee of the Home, died at the end of October 1855, he went unhesitatingly to organize the funeral, putting aside his dislike of elaborate mourning ceremonies. He told Wills that his respect and admiration for Miss Coutts, ‘so isolated in the midst of her goodness and wealth’, made him determined to ease her distress at losing one of her few intimates, and he took the greatest pains to give help and comfort to her as well as to Mrs Brown.14 While in London he observed that Charley was well ‘but rather too spotty’, and that the Hogarths, installed in Tavistock House to care for their grandson, were not looking after the place as they should. He complained to them, and spent the last night of his visit in his bachelor rooms in Wellington Street, drinking with Wills, to whom he wrote afterwards, ‘I am impatient to know how the Gin Punch succeeded with you. It is the most wonderful beverage in the world, and I think ought to be laid on at high pressure by the Board of Health. After sleeping only two hours on the H[ousehold]W[ords] sofa, I arose yesterday morning like a dewy flower.’15

  He was in England again in December, visiting another widow, Lavinia Watson, at Rockingham, and giving readings in Peterborough, Sheffield and Manchester. Letters to ‘My Dearest Catherine’ described the freezing weather in England – he told her he saw people ‘actually sobbing and crying with the cold’ at Euston Station – and a cheerful dinner with Frederick Evans, his publisher, with Forster also of the party, to celebrate the appearance of the first number of Little Dorrit. Back in Paris just in time for Christmas, he found all seven of his sons gathered for the festivities, and informed Wills that he was ‘in one of his fits of depression – rather uncommon with him’.16 Walter had become deaf, and was sent to the Parisian Deaf and Dumb Institution, where they restored his hearing efficiently in three months. Friends came to stay from England: in March, Wilkie Collins dined with them every day and persuaded Dickens to try the student restaurants on the Left Bank; then Macready, the lonely widower. There were more trips to London for Dickens in February, March and May. He kept up the monthly instalments of Little Dorrit without strain, and was rewarded by sales even better than those of Bleak House, producing the best financial returns of his career. The first number in November 1855 sold 35,000 copies, after which sales rose to 40,000 and scarcely dipped below 30,000 through the twenty numbers, so that he made more from the serial sales than he had for any previous book, £600 a month.17

  There were two great events in March 1856. One was the finalization of the purchase of Gad’s Hill. The other was Forster’s announcement that, having taken a senior civil service appointment and resigned his editorial chair at the Examiner, he was getting married. His bride was to be Elizabeth Colburn, the 37-year-old widow of a rich publisher, and in possession of a considerable income – a most suitable wife. Dickens was thunderstruck by his 44-year-old bachelor friend’s decision, and there may have been a twinge of jealousy, a fear that he would lose his pre-eminent place with him, and also a sense of the irony of his embarking on matrimony even as Dickens was chafing against it. Forster had heard a good deal of his restlessness and dissatisfaction at home, and in April 1856 he had another letter from Dickens recalling ‘The old days – the old days! Shall I ever, I wonder, get the frame of mind back as it used to be then? Something of it, perhaps – but never quite as it used to be. I find that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one.’18 Both knew that the skeleton was his unhappiness with Catherine. The following week he described to Collins how he had taken her, with Georgina, Mamie and Katey, to dine at his favourite Paris restaurant, the Trois Frères in the Palais Royal, where, he reported, ‘Mrs Dickens nearly killed herself …’19 Catherine had grown fat, and no doubt ate more than she should, but the savagery of the remark must have shaken Collins, who was fond of her. In the same letter Dickens described his own visit to a Parisian ballroom where he looked over the prostitutes gathered there, all ‘wicked and coldly calculating, or haggard and wretched in their worn beauty’, one of whom, with ‘nobler qualities in her forehead’, took his eye. He said he intended to go out looking for her the following night: ‘I have a fancy that I should like to know more about her. Never shall, I suppose.’

  He left Paris at the end of April and chose to stay in Dover while Tavistock House was thoroughly cleaned after the departure of the Hogarths. ‘I cannot bear the contemplation of their imbecility any more. (I think my constitution is already undermined by the sight of Hogarth at breakfast.)’20 What’s more, they left his house dirty, he told other correspondents. He had turned against not only Catherine but the whole Hogarth clan, with the one exception of Georgina, whose character he had formed since she was fifteen, and who gave him her unconditional adoration. To her he could complain even of her parents, and pass on an unkind description of Catherine in a book by Harriet Beecher Stowe, who accorded her the single word ‘large’.21 His own family gave him trouble too, another begging letter coming from his brother Fred, to which he replied, ‘I have already done more for you than most dispassionate persons would consider right or reasonable in itself. But, considered with any fair reference to the great expenses I have sustained for other relations, it becomes little else than monstrous. The possibility of your having any further assistance from me, is absolutely and finally past.’22 A touch of unreformed Scrooge here. Fred’s behaviour was too strong a reminder of their father’s in his worst days, and called for severity. Dickens was earning well but his expenses were
somewhere between £8,000 and £9,000 a year.23

  May was spent in London. Dorrit continued to occupy him each month, and he made his regular visits to the Home in Shepherd’s Bush. He invited himself to the top of St Paul’s to see the firework display for the end of the Crimean War, taking with him just one friend, Mark Lemon. In June the whole family was back in France for the summer, Boulogne again. In 1856 more months were spent in France than in England, and Boulogne always pleased him, with its mix of town and country, its sea air, excellent hotels, food and drink, its industrious and honest people, the men sporting red nightcaps, the fishermen’s wives walking like so many goddesses on their bare feet, beautiful legs brown as mahogany showing below their short working skirts. Collins came to stay, and Mary Boyle, and Jerrold, and life passed as agreeably as usual until they were driven back to England by an epidemic of diphtheria at the end of August; the three schoolboys, Alfred, Francis and Sydney, had to leave too, and were kept in England until mid-September, when they travelled back on their own by boat from London.

  Forster’s wedding to his Elizabeth took place in the outer London suburb of Upper Norwood on 24 September. It seems extraordinary that Dickens was not present at the ceremony, and that there are no surviving letters from him on the subject; but if the friendship touched a low point here, or Forster kept some letters to himself, there are friendly fragments written up to early September, and he wrote a very happy letter to Dickens in mid-October, and heard back from him.24 The honeymoon was in the Lake District and lasted for two months, during which Forster continued to read the proofs of Dorrit; and as soon as they were back in London he showed Dickens over the house he had just taken in Montagu Square. The new Mrs Forster was childless, sweet-natured and intelligent, struck up a friendship with Jane Carlyle, and was perfectly prepared to allow Forster to make all the decisions about their life, the spending of what had been her money, where and how they lived and what company they kept. All was well on that front, and relations continued much as usual, with dinners together and Dickens consulting Forster as usual and even writing affectionate notes to Elizabeth.

  Apart from the progress of Little Dorrit, Dickens’s major preoccupation was now the preparations for a play to be performed at Tavistock House on Charley’s twentieth birthday, Twelfth Night, in January 1857. It was to be another melodrama written by Collins, who first mentioned it to him early in 1856, and they had resolved to put it on together. It was called The Frozen Deep, and the inspiration came from Sir John Franklin’s expedition of 1845 to find the North-West Passage, which had ended in tragedy and disputes about the final fates of the men, since there was some evidence that they had turned to cannibalism.25 The Frozen Deep kept away from such grisly questions, was entirely fictional and stuck to human emotions, and Dickens immediately saw himself in the role of the sacrificial hero Richard Wardour, one of a group of polar explorers that includes the man who has won the heart of Clara, the woman he loves, away from him. The first act shows the women in England worrying about the three-year absence of the men. Clara fears that her rejected lover Wardour, known for his temper, may attack the man she is now engaged to, and Clara’s old nurse, who has second sight, warns her that she sees blood on the snow – the second sight was Dickens’s suggestion. At the end of the play Wardour, who has struggled against jealousy and murderous impulses, sacrifices his life to rescue his rival, and his noble death is witnessed by the women who have travelled to Newfoundland to meet the explorers.

  From the first Dickens was intent on throwing himself into the part of a man who overcomes his own wickedness and ends by making the supreme sacrifice. As early as June 1856 he began to grow his beard in preparation for playing Wardour. He told Miss Coutts that the play was ‘extremely clever and interesting – very serious and very curious’ and became strongly emotionally involved in the whole process of putting it on.26 In truth the plot is preposterous and the writing hardly better, but Victorian taste was broad and Dickens’s performance, by all accounts outstanding – and perhaps simply his presence made up for its defects. When it was revived in the commercial theatre in 1866, it flopped. And, whatever the faults or merits of The Frozen Deep, its importance is that it precipitated a dramatic and irreversible change in Dickens’s life. A few friends may have seen this coming, but not one could have guessed how far it would take him.

  He was determined to make everything perfect. There was to be a chamber orchestra conducted by Francesco Berger, a young musician Charley had made friends with in Leipzig, now living in London, who composed incidental music for the play. For the scenery he co-opted and bullied his painter friends. There was casting to be done, there were revisions to be made, stage effects to be thought out. A farce to follow the main play must be chosen. In October he memorized all his lines for The Frozen Deep during one twenty-mile walk through Finchley, Neasden and Willesden. His beard had grown impressively, giving him a rakish look.27

  Catherine went to stay with the Macready family while Tavistock House was filled with joiners, Dickens became his own architect, and a wooden structure was put up behind the wall of the schoolroom that allowed a thirty-foot-long stage to be constructed. Stanfield, now reputed to be one of the finest marine painters in England, had been ill but could not refuse Dickens, and came up with a masterly arctic seascape. The device for producing snow throughout the second act needed much careful adjustment, and there was also a sunset effect, done with gas and red lights. There were formal rehearsals every Monday and Friday evening which gave the younger members of the cast – Mamie, Katey and Charley – a lesson in punctuality, order and perseverance, or so Dickens believed. The boys at school in Boulogne were not being brought home for Christmas this year.28

  Forster, returning from his honeymoon in the Lake District in November, asked to read the play and made some criticisms. He particularly disliked the business with second sight, but, although his advice was not taken, he agreed to speak the verse prologue in rhyming couplets written by Dickens. The demand for places in the audience was so great that, before the opening on 6 January, Dickens reported that they expected ninety-three ‘and at least ten will neither hear nor see’.29 Seating the audience was more of a problem than it had been because the new fashion for crinolines seriously increased the girth of every woman. An extra performance was agreed on, making four in all, still with audiences packed in tight as could be managed. On play days, Dickens dined at three with Mark Lemon, on steak and stout, at the Cock in Fleet Street; and he gave detailed instructions for the serving of refreshments and supper at home, gin punch to be kept on ice under the table all evening and ‘given only to myself, or Mr Lemon’, and a good supply of Champagne all over the table.30 He told a friend that he derived a strange feeling out of the play, ‘like writing a book in company. A satisfaction of a most singular kind, which has no exact parallel in my life.’31 Impersonating his own characters was something he had always done in the course of writing, but to do it in public was no doubt more demanding, and Wardour had to struggle between extremes of emotion, from the desire to murder to the resolve to save his enemy at the cost of his own life. After one performance he fainted as he sat by the kitchen fire.32

  Critics from several papers including The Times were invited to The Frozen Deep, came, and wrote glowing notices. Georgina was praised for her ‘refined vivacity’, Mamie for her ‘dramatic instinct’ and Katey for her ‘fascinating simplicity’, but Dickens was the star and was declared the equal of any professional actor. Thackeray, who was there, remarked, ‘If that man would go upon the stage he would make his £20,000 a year.’33 All too quickly the four performances were over. Dickens reported to his Swiss friend Cerjat, ‘It has been the talk of all London for these three weeks. And now it is a mere chaos of scaffolding, ladders, beams, canvass, paint pots, sawdust, artificial snow, gas pipes, and ghastliness. I have taken such pains with it for these ten weeks … that I feel, now, shipwrecked.’34 Breaking up the theatre was an agony. He sent Berger a set of diamond shir
t studs to thank him for his work. ‘O reaction, reaction!’ he groaned to Collins. Then in February he heard rumours that the Queen wished to see the play. Might it live again?

  There were other distractions. Dickens was still intent on reforming or breaking the Royal Literary Fund, but getting no further with doing so, while the plans he, Bulwer and Forster had made for the Guild of Literature and Art matured. His brother Fred wrote protesting at his refusal to spare £30 and his unfeeling treatment: ‘The World fancy from your writings that you are the most Tolerant of Men – let them individually come under your lash – (if one is to judge from your behaviour to your own flesh & blood) & God help them! –’ and so it went on, yet ended ‘Yrs affectionately … Many happy returns of the day’.35 Dickens’s forty-fifth birthday was celebrated with a dinner at home, and a few days later he went with Wills to his house at Gad’s Hill to take formal possession. The house, solidly built about 1780, consisted of two floors of four rooms each, an attic, and servants’ quarters and kitchen in the basement; there were gardens and a hayfield, and it stood on the hilltop associated with Falstaff, above Rochester and with fine views over the Kentish countryside. It needed a great deal of work to be made comfortable, but its value to him was in something greater than bricks, mortar and plumbing: it was the fulfilment of his childhood ambition, and another proof that the vulnerable small boy of 1820 could achieve whatever he set out to do.