Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  There was still the ordeal of the last reading, and there were farewells to make. Dolby narrowly escaped being arrested by the US tax men as they embarked on 23 April. During their last few moments in America, they had a glimpse of Anthony Trollope arriving in New York. Three days into the voyage the bad foot was much improved, Dickens was able to leave his cabin to exercise on the deck, and his appetite returned. On 1 May they were in Liverpool, the next morning on the train that arrived at 3 p.m. at Euston. Dolby ends his account of the great American tour by describing his Chief walking away alone with his small bag. He was making a magical disappearance, because he did not arrive at Gad’s Hill until 9 May. Since Nelly had left Florence for England on 24 April, it seems likely that Mr Tringham and Madame spent the week together at Windsor Lodge, entertaining one another with travellers’ tales, walking and perhaps riding together, and taking pleasure in the English spring.

  25

  ‘Things look like work again’

  1868–1869

  Returning to Gad’s Hill on 9 May, Dickens was greeted with flags and welcoming villagers. Almost at once he began to prepare for the ‘Farewell Tour’ he would be starting in October with Dolby. He also arranged a passage to Australia for sixteen-year-old Plorn. A shy boy with no idea of what he wanted to do in life, he had been taken out of school at fifteen and was currently at an agricultural college in Cirencester. Dickens wrote to Alfred, now farming in Australia, telling him to expect his younger brother at the end of the year, adding that Plorn could ride, do a little carpentering and make a horse shoe, but admitting it was not possible to know whether he would take to life in the bush.1 He gave Alfred other news of family and friends: that Katey’s husband Charles Collins was seriously ill with asthma and brain disease, that Wills had suffered a hunting accident that forced him to give up work, that Wilkie Collins and Fechter were both ill and even Henry, in his last year at school and due to go up to Cambridge in the autumn, had damaged his knee and was in bed – ‘all the rest of us being in a flourishing condition’ he added drily. Soon there was worse, as Charley’s paper business failed, leaving him bankrupt and with personal debts of £1,000 and five children to support.

  Charley was always given special treatment, and Dickens took him on to the staff of All the Year Round, contriving to convince himself that he was a good man of business and subeditor; and although the loss of Wills was serious, he sacked Henry Morley, who had been with him since joining the staff of Household Words in 1851, to make way for Charley. Dickens wrote Morley a friendly letter of explanation, saying he hoped he would continue to contribute, but Morley chose not to, and lost a small steady income. He went on to an academic career and later in life gave interestingly mixed testimonials to his onetime employer, describing him as a man possessed of ‘great genius, but not a trained and cultivated reason’, lacking in sound literary taste, but always remembered with affection as someone he had worked with happily through ‘nineteen years of goodwill’.2

  At the end of May, Dickens spent three days in Paris seeing Fechter and contributing to the preparations for the opening of L’Abîme, the French version of No Thoroughfare, in which Fechter was to star. The French critics had reservations about the play, ‘un mélodrame assez vulgaire’, but Paris was thrilled to welcome the great Dickens, audiences were pleased, and it gave Fechter a success. In July, Longfellow and his daughter arrived at Gad’s for a visit, and Dickens had two postilions dressed up in old-fashioned red jackets to go with the carriage along the Dover Road to see the sights of Kent: ‘it was like a holiday ride in England fifty years ago,’ Dickens said, much taken with his idea of a heritage tour.3 He put on the same show for other visitors, American and English, the Fieldses, Bulwer, Layard, the Tennents and Lady Molesworth.4 The Nortons came to Gad’s in August, Mrs Norton looking about with a sharp eye, declaring ‘the house itself not in any respect pretty’, and Dickens an excellent host, although he made it clear he must work in his study each morning. She got a glance at the study, which was also his bedroom, observed its perfect neatness and the ‘brilliant bit of Oriental covering’ on his bed, another present from Fechter. Gad’s was his delight, and during the summer he began negotiations to buy the freehold of the meadow and arable adjoining it, twenty-eight acres of land, for which he agreed to pay £2,500.

  In September, Plorn was taken to Portsmouth by Henry. ‘He went away, poor dear fellow, as well as could possibly be expected. He was pale, and had been crying, and (Harry said) had broken down in the railway carriage after leaving Higham station; but only for a short time.’5 Georgina gave him a parting present of cigars. Dickens also wept at parting but reminded him in a letter of how he himself had to ‘win my food’ at a younger age, recommended him to say his prayers and hoped that he would be able to say in after life ‘that you had a kind father’.6 To Dolby he wrote complaining of the costs and charges of ‘these boys’: ‘Why was I ever a father? Why was my father ever a father!’7 To others, he spoke of his grief at parting with Plorn, but it is hard not to see in this something of the ‘this hurts me more than it hurts you’ of a severe and unrelenting schoolmaster. Then, after taking advice, he allowed Henry £250 a year and ordered what he supposed to be necessary supplies for his room in Trinity Hall: three dozen sherry, two dozen port, three dozen light claret and six bottles of brandy.

  Ten days after Henry left for Cambridge on 10 October, news came of the death of Dickens’s brother Fred in County Durham. They had hardly been in touch since 1858, although Fred had turned up in Canterbury in the autumn of 1861 asking for a free pass for an acquaintance to one of Dickens’s events, and early in 1865 Dickens wrote to him to express his hope that he was doing well, while not offering any help.8 Fred had been in prison, and bankrupt; and he died in grim poverty, living on ‘a penny bun and a glass of ginger beer’ for his breakfast and otherwise mostly cold gin, according to George Sala, and not able even to afford to smoke. Fred had shared in much of Dickens’s early married life, looking after the children during the first American trip and joining them for holidays in Italy as well as in Broadstairs; but when Dickens cast someone off he did not relent. He asked Dolby to go to Darlington, where Fred had died, and then wrote to the doctor who had looked after him, saying he had been his favourite when he was a child; but he did not go to the funeral, sending Charley as his representative.9

  Katey’s situation troubled Dickens, because Charles Collins was an invalid and it was not much of a marriage; and Dickens showed his disappointment and disapproval of Charles, which led to strained relations with Wilkie, and the two men seeing less of one another. The only children officially at home now were Henry, during the Cambridge vacations, and Mamie, who was increasingly away visiting friends. Even before Plorn’s ship had put to sea – it was delayed by adverse weather – Dickens wrote buoyantly to Dolby, ‘Things in general look like work again,’ and fixed dinner with him at Verrey’s on 1 October. He wanted to look forward, to be making plans for the future, and to talk about the new reading he had prepared, taken from Oliver Twist, ‘Sikes and Nancy’, giving the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes – ‘very horrible, but very dramatic’.10 It was meant to be sensational, and he was pleased to have made something so powerful, as he told Forster when writing to him for advice on whether he should perform it in public or not.11 Forster was against, and so was Dolby, but Dickens was also consulting with Chappells, who were putting up the money, and they suggested a trial reading. This was arranged for November, when the new tour was already under way, to be given in London, with oysters and champagne served to the select audience afterwards. Dickens wrote to Fields boasting about how horrible it was, and, after hearing it, Forster was even more strongly against further public performances. One critic said he had felt an irresistible desire to scream, and a physician warned of the danger of contagious hysteria in the audience, but an actress encouraged Dickens by telling him the public had been ‘looking out for a sensation these last fifty years, and now they have got it’.12 Dickens had ev
ery intention of going ahead and told Forster, ‘I wanted to leave behind me the recollection of something very passionate and dramatic, done with simple means, if the art would justify the theme.’13

  He went on to give the murder reading twenty-eight times between January 1869 and March 1870, and the effect was just as he had hoped, exciting and horrifying his audiences. It had its effect on him too, raising his pulse and prostrating him for a while at the end of the reading. Yet he was determined to keep giving it. He wanted the excitement and the public wanted to be horrified; and it was an argument with Dolby, who tried to persuade him to cut down on ‘Sikes and Nancy’ in favour of quieter readings, that led him to shout angrily and then burst into tears. Philip Collins, who wrote so well about Dickens, tells us he himself tried reading ‘Sikes and Nancy’ to audiences and found it more than enjoyable: ‘anyone who has enough talent to perform this Reading at all competently, must find it exhilarating. The satisfaction must have been immensely stronger for Dickens than for me.’14 Collins also quotes Edmund Wilson’s remark that ‘Dickens had a strain of the ham in him, and, in the desperation of his later life, he gave in to the old ham and let him rip.’ He did not need the words written down even: the son of his old illustrator, Hablot Browne, described him throwing away his book for ‘Sikes and Nancy’.15

  The immediate effect of each reading, or performance, of the murder was to reduce him to a condition in which he found it difficult to get off stage, and once he had been helped to the sofa he had to lie down, unable to speak for some minutes – this was Dolby’s account. He recovered with the help of a glass of champagne and would then go blithely back on stage for the next reading; but later in the evening the shock to his nerves recurred, ‘either in the form of greater hilarity or a desire to be once more on the platform, or in a craving to do the work over again’. Here, as in so many other aspects of his life – in his dealings with his sons, in his complicated domestic arrangements – there were opposing forces at work. The Sikes readings were a strain on his physical and nervous system, as he came to realize, but they were also an experience he found irresistibly exciting and elating.

  The new tour had started on 6 October in London, and there were eighteen readings scheduled for London, Manchester, Brighton and Liverpool, taking them through November, when there was a pause for the period of the election, which brought Disraeli’s resignation and the return of Gladstone as Prime Minister. During the pause Dickens took up his London street walks again, going as far as Limehouse and Stepney, visiting the poorest and most miserable homes where sick people lay untended and the children had the pinched faces that came from three generations of undernourishment. While he was in this part of the East End he noticed a newly established hospital for sick children, set up by a young doctor and his wife, and was greatly impressed by the place and those who worked in it, including the nurses, who were paid only one pound a month and could have earned more elsewhere. Much of the sickness dealt with came from chronic malnutrition and filthy living conditions, and many young patients were invited back for meals after being discharged, simply in order to keep them healthy. His description of the living conditions in the area and of the East London Children’s Hospital’s commitment to its patients appeared in All the Year Round just before Christmas, and brought many offers of support for the hospital. His persistence in walking through parts of the East End regarded as no-go areas by the middle classes, and his journalist’s skill in describing what he saw and alerting others who might do something to help there, confirmed his reputation as the friend of the people, and his belief that working through his writing was more effective than any political action.

  In December he gave ten more readings in Scotland and Ireland. Soon, as Dolby wrote, ‘we found ourselves going on in the same way and leading the same life we had led so often before, and it was at times difficult to imagine we had ever had any cessation of it.’16 This meant that Dickens’s health showed signs of breaking down again as it had in America, with severe pains affecting his right foot. He did not let it slow him down. On 21 December he was at the office, on the 22nd he did a London reading, on Christmas Eve he was with Forster at the funeral of his sister, returning to his house party at Gad’s that evening and terrifying his guest, Austen Layard, in the bedroom next to his, from which Layard heard him rehearsing the Sikes and Nancy reading. On Christmas Day he wrote letters and on Boxing Day he refused an invitation, saying he had a previous engagement – possibly to visit Nelly, who was staying in Worthing. He was in London again on New Year’s Day. Having noticed that Georgina was in low spirits, he suggested she should go with him to Ireland for ten days while he read in Dublin and Belfast: Dolby’s account omits to mention that she joined them, no doubt out of tact.17 Just before they set off Dickens wrote to his Swiss friend Cerjat saying that if his daughter Mary were to marry (which he did not expect) he would sell Gad’s Hill ‘and go genteelly vagabondizing over the face of the earth’ – with whom, if anyone, he does not say.18 A few days later he was paying out the £2,500 for the land around Gad’s Hill.19

  After the Irish readings came the West Country ones, then the Midlands. The readings in Scotland had to be postponed when the pain in his foot was so excruciating that he could not stand on it, and he became ‘so faint while dressing that I was within an ace of Gone’.20 With rest, and a sofa installed on the train taking him north, he got through two readings in Edinburgh and two in Glasgow, giving the Sikes murder at all of them, and again in London on his return; he told Georgina he was no longer taking champagne during the readings, but only brandy and water.21 In March he celebrated Nelly’s birthday with her and Wills in London. Soon after this he read in Hull, where he went into Dixon’s shop in Whitefriargate and, in the course of buying six pairs of ladies’ silk stockings, asked the young assistant what he liked doing in the evenings, to which the assistant replied that he liked the theatre and dramatic readings, but could not get a ticket for today’s reading; a few questions showed that he had a good knowledge of the work of Dickens. Only when he found a card inscribed ‘Please Admit Bearer’ pressed into his hand did the young man realize he was talking to Dickens himself; but he remained baffled as to why the great writer should be buying ladies’ stockings.22

  From York, Dickens had to hurry south for the funeral of Sir James Tennent, the dedicatee of Our Mutual Friend, only eight years older than him, whose death upset him badly. Then back on the road, East Anglia, Manchester again, Sheffield, Birmingham and Liverpool, where a great banquet was given in his honour and had him on his feet again with a speech of thanks to the 650 guests and as many spectators in the gallery, with the band of the police force in the vestibule and the band of the Orphans Asylum in the gallery, flags, flowers, a silver-gilt fountain dispensing rose water, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Lord Houghton (Richard Monckton Milnes as was) all speaking before him. More readings in Liverpool, then on to Leeds: and here, since he was sleeping badly and his foot was ‘growling’ again, he and Dolby agreed to take a coach to the pretty town of Chester for two days’ rest before continuing the tour.

  In Chester on 18 April Dickens had a stroke. He did not describe it as such, telling Dolby only that he had suffered a very bad night, but from Blackburn, where they arrived the next day, he wrote to Frank Beard describing his symptoms: giddiness, uncertainty of footing especially on the left side and an extreme indisposition to raise his hands to his head. To his friend Norton, who had been at Liverpool, he wrote saying, ‘I am half dead with travelling every day, and reading afterwards.’23 To Georgina he wrote, ‘My weakness and deadness are on the left side, and if I don’t look at anything I try to touch with my left hand, I don’t know where it is.’24 The following day he began to feel more like himself, read A Christmas Carol and ‘Bob Sawyer’s Party’, travelled on to Bolton for the next reading, and wrote again to Georgina and to Forster to say he was better and expected to be able to continue the tour. But when Frank Beard
caught up with him in Preston and examined him, he said there were to be no more readings. Dolby had to cancel the rest, while Beard took Dickens back to London to consult Sir Thomas Watson, who confirmed Beard’s view that the patient had been on the brink of paralysis of the left side and apoplexy, meaning a haemorrhage of the brain.

  Dickens explained to all concerned that he had become ill from the ‘constant Express travelling’ and that the doctors had made him give up the tour as a precautionary measure, to stop him from becoming ill. At the same time he told Ouvry he wished to make a new draft of his will, set about it at once and signed it on 12 May.25 He was kept busy by the magazine, now without experienced assistants. He reviewed Forster’s biography of Walter Savage Landor himself, at length and with great warmth, when it appeared in July. In August he started running Fanny Trollope’s novel Veronica, a risqué story of a girl seduced by a man old enough to be her father. Knowing that Fechter was preparing to travel to America, he wrote a glowing account of his theatrical career for the Atlantic Monthly. His son Sydney wrote from his ship with an abject confession that he had run up debts and asking his father to settle them: it was an old familiar story, the debts were paid, Dickens was angry. Another unwelcome business was sorting the mass of papers left to him by his friend Chauncey Townshend, who had died while he was in America, leaving a will appointing him literary executor and asking him to publish a book giving an account of his religious opinions. It was a dismal waste of his time and energy, but he carried out the assignment honourably enough, telling Townshend’s lawyers privately that ‘it would be preposterous to pretend it [the book he compiled] is worth anything.’26