The diary shows that there were two cricket matches at Gad’s Hill in August. The Forsters were there for the first on the 13th and the 14th, and there was another on the 29th. Dickens also began work with Collins on the Christmas number of All the Year Round. On 2 September, hearing that there were rumours of his being unwell, he wrote to The Times asserting, ‘I was never better in my life,’ and repeating it in a second letter to the Sunday Gazette.27 He knew that reports of ill health might jeopardize the American tour. Meanwhile Dolby was on his way back to England, and at the end of the month there was a tripartite meeting – Dolby, Forster and Dickens – to decide on whether to go ahead with the American plan. Forster, like Wills, was strongly opposed to his going, Dolby was in favour. Dickens made up his mind to go and sent a telegram on 30 September to say he would go. It was followed by a letter to his friend and publisher in Boston, James Fields, telling him that Dolby, who was returning to America almost at once, was ‘charged with a certain delicate mission from me, which he will explain to you by word of mouth’, and on the same day he wrote to Mrs Fields declining her invitation to stay with them in Boston. Although James Fields was informed of Nelly’s existence, and at some stage passed on what he was told to his wife, it would have been out of the question for Dickens to take Nelly into their respectable household.28 Dolby sailed again on 12 October, charged with talking further with Fields as to whether he thought it possible for Nelly to travel with Dickens in America.
George Dolby and ‘The Chief ’ – Dolby cheered and cared for Dickens, and managed his later reading tours, with love and loyalty.
Nelly let her sister Fanny know that she planned to come to Florence with their mother at the end of the month.29 She told Dickens she was going to Italy, but both of them still hoped she might yet follow him to America. His diary entries for October show him at Peckham from the 1st to the 3rd, dining in London at Verrey’s on the 2nd with Nelly and Dolby. He was at Peckham again from the 7th to the 10th, and from the 15th to the 17th. On the 16th he wrote to Dolby, ‘It may be a relief to you when you get this, to know that I am quite prepared for your great Atlantic-cable message being adverse … I think it so likely that Fields may see shadows of danger which we in our hopeful encouragement of one another may have made light of, that I think the message far more likely to be No than Yes. I shall try to make up my mind to it, and to be myself when we meet.’ The ‘to be myself’ suggests how sharp the disappointment would be, even though he was prepared for it. On the 18th N and M were at his office. He was at Peckham again from the 20th to the 25th, with a farewell dinner at Verrey’s on the 25th (the diary entry, which read ‘Dine Verreys N’, was enclosed in a double-lined box). After this Nelly set off for Florence with her mother, arriving there at the end of the month.
Dickens arranged for Forster to have ‘a general and ample Power of Attorney to act for me in all things’ during his absence.30 He gave dinner to Forster and Macready at Wellington Street on the 28th, dined with Percy Fitzgerald on the 29th and Wilkie Collins on the 30th, and went to Drury Lane on 1 November. A committee that included Fechter, Wilkie Collins, Charles Kent, the editor of the Daily Telegraph and Bulwer had been busy setting up a public farewell banquet for him before he set off for America. It was fixed for 2 November, with sponsors sought and tickets sold to the general public, making it a curious mixture of grandees, friends and fans to be gathered together in the London Freemasons’ Hall. The venue was decorated for the occasion with laurel leaves and the titles of Dickens’s books in gilded lettering, and music was provided by the band of the Grenadier Guards. About 450 men attended, and a hundred ladies were allowed to watch from the gallery, Georgina, Mamie and Katey among them. They did not miss much, because according to one report the waiters were drunk, the soup cold, the ice cream warm; and there were scrambles for greasy fragments of tepid dishes.31 Among the notables present were the Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Mayor of London and the President of the Royal Academy. Gladstone expressed doubts as to whether dining was the best way to show admiration for Dickens and both he and Disraeli declined invitations; other friends confined themselves to messages of support, among them Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Ruskin, Frith, Arnold, Lord Shaftesbury and Lord John Russell. Forster disapproved of the way the dinner was organized, and was prevented from attending by an attack of bronchitis.32 Dickens, almost overcome with emotion, and obliged to deal with a newly wired dental plate, spoke well as he always did, and was repeatedly cheered; and there were many more speeches and toasts, so that it was nearly midnight when he emerged into Great Queen Street, where a further crowd had gathered to cheer him yet again.
Among the letters wishing him well for the journey was one from Catherine, to which he replied, thanking her with something approaching warmth: ‘I am glad to receive your letter, and to accept and reciprocate your good wishes. Severe hard work lies before me; but that is not a new thing in my life, and I am content to go my way and do it. Affectionately yours –’33
A week later he was seen off aboard the Cuba in Liverpool by Georgina, Mamie, Katey, Charley, Wills, Wilkie and Charles Collins, Charles Kent, Arthur Chappell and Edmund Yates. He travelled with his valet Scott and his reading equipment, and took most of his meals in his cabin during the ten-day Atlantic crossing, nursing the painful foot. He had left Wills with instructions for communicating with Nelly. ‘If she needs any help will come to you, or if she changes her address, you will immediately let me know if she changes. Until then it will be Villa Trollope, a Ricorboli, Firenze, Italy … On the day after my arrival out I will send you a short Telegram at the office. Please copy its exact words, (as they will have a special meaning for her), and post them to her as above by the very next post after receiving my telegram. And also let Gad’s Hill know – and let Forster know – what the telegram is.’ A further note says that Forster ‘knows Nelly as you do, and will do anything for her if you want anything done’. Nelly would understand that if the telegram read ‘all well’ it meant she was to set off for America, but if ‘safe and well’ she was not to come. He knew she was in Florence and they must have discussed how she might travel to America, but on 21 November, two days after reaching Boston, he wrote to Wills ‘After this present mail, I shall address Nelly’s letters to your care, for I do not quite know where she will be. But she will write to you, and instruct you where to forward them. In any interval between your receipt of one or more, and my Dear Girl’s so writing to you, keep them by you.’34
The next day he sent a coded telegram to Wills: ‘Safe and well expect good letter full of hope’. Fields, sympathetic as he was to Dickens’s difficulties in his private life, had made it clear there could be no Madame on the tour. Nelly remained at the Villa Ricorboli throughout the winter, sewing shirts for Garibaldi’s soldiers, turning down an invitation to spend Christmas in Rome, and another to join her sisters and brother-in-law Tom Trollope on a trip to Vesuvius. She was still there in March on her twenty-ninth birthday.
Boston was Dickens’s favourite American city, and he made a good start in a comfortable hotel with a large suite adorned with flowers by Mrs Fields herself. His foot improved and the clear, frosty weather allowed him to take eight-mile walks with her husband. Both were flattered by the intimacy he offered, and he confided in James Fields his unhappiness in having so many children by an uncongenial wife. He enjoyed a few quiet dinners with old friends, Longfellow, Charles Norton, Emerson, but it was understood that he needed time alone. He was impatient for the first reading on 2 December, knowing how much lay ahead and how high expectations were. On 22 November the young Henry James wrote to his brother, ‘Dickens has arrived for his readings. It is impossible to get tickets. At 7 o’clock A.M. on the first day of the sale there were two or three hundred at the office, and at 9, when I strolled up, nearly a thousand. So I don’t expect to hear him.’35 James did in fact hear what he later described as the ‘hard charmless readings’, but his verdict was not the public’s, and from the first Dickens almost always co
mmanded full houses and ecstatic applause.36 People knew that this was the event that must be caught now or never, and they were ready to come for miles and through all weather to hear the great man. Sometimes he was showered with bouquets and buttonholes, and always cheered. Dolby had to battle with speculators who bought blocks of tickets, and he was regularly and unfairly blamed in the press for the problems produced. He kept his head and acted as firmly as he could, and the sales were spectacular. In the first few days they made a profit of £1,000 and at the end of the tour the final sum was a dizzying £20,000.37
The first New York readings coincided with heavy snow storms. The audiences turned up just the same, but Dickens was struck down with one of his terrible colds in the head. He tried ‘allopathy, homeopathy, cold things, warm things, sweet things, bitter things, stimulants, narcotics, all with the same result. Nothing will touch it.’38 It turned into what he described as ‘American catarrh’ and kept its hold on him for the rest of the tour, made worse by the constant travelling in overheated and unventilated trains. In January he told Forster he had ‘no chance of being rid of the American catarrh until I embark for England. It is very distressing. It likewise happens, not seldom, that I am so dead beat when I come off that they lay me down on a sofa after I have been washed and dressed, and I lie there, extremely faint, for quarter of an hour. In that time I rally and come right.’39 The decision was made to cut down the ambitious original plan, which was to take the tour as far as Chicago and the west as well as to Canada and Nova Scotia, and to remain in the east throughout. He found it increasingly hard to sleep. Dolby describes going anxiously into his room during the night and each time finding him awake, although protesting he was perfectly cheerful; but Dickens told Georgy, ‘I can scarcely exaggerate what I sometimes undergo from sleeplessness.’40 He could not get up in the mornings, and presently had to be prescribed sedatives.
At the end of March he told Forster, ‘I am nearly used up … if I had engaged to go on into May, I think I must have broken down.’41 During the later stages of the tour his lameness was so bad that Dolby had to help him across the platform to his reading desk and off at the end. His appetite diminished until he was eating almost nothing. He described his regime himself: ‘I cannot eat (to anything like the necessary extent) and have established this system. At 7 in the morning, in bed, a tumbler of new cream and two tablespoonsful of rum. At 12, a sherry cobbler and a biscuit. At 3 (dinner time) a pint of champagne. At five minutes to 8, an egg beaten up with a glass of sherry. Between the parts [of the reading], the strongest beef tea that can be made, drunk hot. At a quarter past 10, soup, and any little thing to drink that I can fancy. I do not eat more than half a pound of solid food in the whole four-and-twenty hours, if so much.’42 In spite of this, no reading once announced was cancelled. In all he delivered seventy-six.
There was very little sightseeing. On his birthday in February he met the President, Andrew Johnson, and commented on his look of courage, watchfulness and strength of purpose, but gave no account of their conversation; and when Johnson was impeached shortly afterwards, Dickens was chiefly concerned that it might damage the receipts for the readings. It didn’t, and Johnson was acquitted. In Baltimore he visited a model prison, where he was delighted to see prisoners working at their trades in communal workshops, paid for their work and altogether humanely treated, better than in any English prison he knew. In March he took Dolby and the rest of his team to Niagara for a two days’ break: the sun came out to cheer them all, making rainbows in the falling water, the spray and over the landscape – an effect that was better than Turner’s finest watercolours, he told Forster.43 Dolby’s efficiency and companionship pleased him so much that, when a telegram came announcing the birth of a son to Mrs Dolby at home in Herefordshire, Dickens arranged through Wills for a pony, together with all its trappings and panniers, to be delivered to the Dolby household, and for a photograph of it to be sent to Dolby; and Dickens agreed to stand as godfather to the boy.44
The day after his reading in Portland, a twelve-year-old girl who had not been able to attend, and who happened to be travelling on the same train, contrived to slip into an empty seat next to him. She was a spirited child and soon engaged him in conversation. She told him she had read almost all his books, some of them six times, adding, ‘Of course I do skip some of the very dull parts once in a while; not the short dull parts but the long ones.’ Dickens found her irresistible, pressed her on which were the dull bits and made notes of what she said, laughing all the time. They held hands, he put his arm round her waist, and she gazed at his face, ‘deeply lined, with sparkling eyes and an amused, waggish smile that curled the corners of his mouth under his grizzled moustache’. She told him that David Copperfield was her favourite, and he said it was his too. He asked her if she had minded missing his reading very much and, in telling him how much she had, tears came into her eyes, and to her astonishment she saw tears in his eyes too. Her flattery enchanted him and they talked all the way to Boston, where she remembered her mother was somewhere on the train and Dickens went with her to find her and introduce himself. The child’s name was Kate Douglas Wiggin. Dickens and Kate Wiggin walked hand in hand along the platform as far as the carriage sent to meet him before saying goodbye. This was the year Louisa May Alcott published Little Women, the novel that established New England girls as modern heroines, and Kate Wiggin was in the same mould. She grew up to become a successful writer herself, produced her own bestseller, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and in 1912 published her account of the meeting with Dickens.45
With Wills he exchanged letters every few days about the business of the magazine, and in each of his went one for Nelly, to be forwarded. The letters have disappeared, but the few words to Wills that went with them are eloquent: ‘Enclosed is another letter for my dear girl’; ‘My spirits flutter woefully towards a certain place at which you dined one day not long before I left, with the present writer and a third (most drearily missed) person’; ‘I would give £3,000 down (and think it cheap) if you could forward me, for four and twenty hours only, instead of the letter’; ‘Another letter for my Darling, enclosed’; ‘You will have seen too (I hope) my dear Patient, and will have achieved in so doing what I would joyfully give a Thousand Guineas to achieve myself at this present moment!’; ‘Toujours from the same to the same’; ‘One last letter enclosed.’46 Wills also received a small box from Niagara, addressed by Dickens to himself, which he was told to put in his bedroom at Wellington Street – a present for someone unnamed, no doubt Nelly. It was probably Wills who paid the rates on Windsor Lodge in January 1868, on behalf of Charles Tringham. Wills was also asked to handle cheques, one for £250 in November, another for £1,000 on 10 January, and a third on 2 March for £1,100, in all likelihood to be passed on to Nelly, a generous amount to cover her travel and living expenses.47
The tour ended with more readings in Boston and New York. In April, Boston was almost blotted out in ‘a ceaseless whirl of snow and wind’, and Annie Fields found Dickens’s Copperfield reading ‘a tragedy last night – less vigor but great tragic power came out of it … I should hardly have known it for the same reading and reader.’ A week later she was in New York to hear him again, and this time he called for punch ingredients afterwards, his spirits rising rapidly, and the rest of the evening was given to drinking, laughing and singing comic songs. ‘We did not separate until 12, and felt the next morning (as he said) as if we had had a regular orgy.’48 This was on 15 April, and on the 18th he was due to address the New York press at a banquet given in his honour. As he dressed for it his foot was so swollen and sore that he and Dolby agreed there was no question of getting a boot on. Dolby went out to find a gout-stocking to put over the bandages and finally managed to borrow one from an obliging English gentleman. Arriving an hour late, and in great pain, Dickens had to be helped up the stairs of Delmonico’s, but by nine o’clock he was able to rise and deliver a speech that gave the assembly everything they wanted. He reminded th
em that he had started as a newspaper reporter himself, and praised the changes he had seen in America since his first visit. He spoke of the politeness and the sweet-tempered reception he had received this time, and promised to have his present praise printed as an appendix in every reprint of his two books about America (meaning American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit).49 In a rousing finish he told them that the people of England and America were essentially one, that it rested with them to uphold the great Anglo-Saxon race and all its achievements, that both had striven for freedom and that it was inconceivable that they should ever go to war against one another – a cue for rapturous cheers and applause as he hobbled off.
Charles Dickens: A Life Page 45
