Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  Katey died in May 1929, and it took Miss Storey a decade to shape her material into a narrative, Dickens and Daughter. It was published in 1939, five years after Thomas Wright’s Life of Charles Dickens had horrified his admirers with its revelations about the affair with Nelly. But he had not known Dickens, and this was the voice of Dickens’s daughter. Dickens and Daughter was furiously attacked, although the attackers were somewhat discouraged when Bernard Shaw wrote to The Times Literary Supplement to say that Mrs Perugini had told him everything in the book forty years before. He accepted the truth of Miss Storey’s account, and she passed on another piece of information to him: that Nelly lived her later life in fear of her children learning of her association with Dickens.36

  Katey had been old enough to be a clear-eyed observer of the break-up of her parents’ marriage. ‘Ah! We were all very wicked not to take her part,’ she said. ‘Harry does not take this view, but he was only a boy at the time, and does not realize the grief it was to our mother, after having all her children, to go away and leave us. My mother never rebuked me. I never saw her in a temper. We like to think of our great geniuses as great characters – but we can’t.’ Of her mother, she said, ‘My poor mother was afraid of my father. She was never allowed to express an opinion – never allowed to say what she felt.’37 She praised her mother for her ‘dignified and nobler course of silence’ when her husband was making public statements.38 She also said, ‘My father was like a madman when my mother left home, this affair brought out all that was worst – all that was weakest in him. He did not care a damn what happened to any of us. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home.’39

  ‘I know things about my father’s character that no one else ever knew; he was not a good man, but he was not a fast man, but he was wonderful!’ she said, her buts acknowledging the difficulty of making a definitive moral judgement on him.40 Miss Storey described a day when she said dramatically, ‘“I loved my father better than any man in the world – in a different way of course … I loved him for his faults.” Rising from her chair and walking towards the door, she added: “My father was a wicked man – a very wicked man.” And left the room.’41 She also reported Katey saying he did not understand women, and suggesting that any marriage he made would have been a failure.42

  Everything she said about Nelly sounds credible, the ‘small fair-haired rather pretty actress’ who flattered her father and, while not a good actress, ‘had brains, which she used to educate herself, to bring her mind more on a level with his own. Who could blame her? He had the world at his feet. She was a young girl of eighteen, elated and proud to be noticed by him.’43 She said Dickens made a settlement on Nelly and kept an establishment with two servants for her at Peckham. She mentioned the son of Nelly and Dickens who had died in infancy.44 The existence of the son was confirmed to Miss Storey by Henry Dickens, who told her ‘there was a boy but it died’, and also that Nelly’s son Geoffrey had come to him to ask if it was true that his mother was Dickens’s mistress ‘and he had to admit it’.45 The discoveries Geoffrey made about his mother, and the realization that she and his aunts had deceived him to the end of their lives, horrified and wounded him. He destroyed papers, told his sister not to talk to anyone about their mother and remained silent himself. He died in 1959, leaving no children, a sorrowful man.

  Henry never wrote or spoke in public of these matters. His reminiscences of his father, which appeared in 1928, were outspoken about other things: his father’s moods of depression and irritability, and the resentment of his brothers at the strict discipline imposed on them at home.46 He also mentioned his father’s ‘strongly radical political views’ and his laughing suggestion, mentioned earlier, that, ‘his sympathies being so much with the French, he ought to have been born a Frenchman.’47 A French Dickens defies the conventional view of him as an English national treasure, and he is that, but he is also something much wider. The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters. ‘All his characters are my personal friends,’ said Tolstoy, who kept his portrait hanging in his study and declared him to be the greatest novelist of the nineteenth century.

  He left a trail like a meteor, and everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens. The child-victim, the irrepressibly ambitious young man, the reporter, the demonic worker, the tireless walker. The radical, the protector of orphans, helper of the needy, man of good works, the republican. The hater and the lover of America. The giver of parties, the magician, the traveller. The satirist, the surrealist, the mesmerist. The angry son, the good friend, the bad husband, the quarreller, the sentimentalist, the secret lover, the despairing father. The Francophile, the player of games, the lover of circuses, the maker of punch, the country squire, the editor, the Chief, the smoker, the drinker, the dancer of reels and hornpipes, the actor, the ham. Too mixed to be a gentleman – but wonderful. The irreplaceable and unrepeatable Boz. The brilliance in the room. The inimitable. And, above and beyond every other description, simply the great, hard-working writer, who set nineteenth-century London before our eyes and who noticed and celebrated the small people living on the margins of society – the Artful Dodger, Smike, the Marchioness, Nell, Barnaby, Micawber, Mr Dick, Jo the crossing sweeper, Phil Squod, Miss Flite, Sissy Jupe, Charley, Amy Dorrit, Nandy, hairless Maggie, Sloppy, Jenny Wren the dolls’ dressmaker. After he had been writing for long hours at Wellington Street, he would sometimes ask his office boy to bring him a bucket of cold water and put his head into it, and his hands. Then he would dry his head with a towel, and go on writing.

  Charles Dickens’s grandmother worked as maid, then housekeeper, from 1781 to 1821, for John Crewe and his wife, Frances (left and right above), at their country seat, Crewe Hall (above), and their house in Mayfair. The Crewes’ constant visitors were the brilliant politicians Charles James Fox (left) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, promiscuous, hard-drinking, high-spending men: Crewe bailed out Fox, Sheridan had an affair with Mrs Crewe. The housekeeper’s son, John Dickens, born 1785, grew up in this household. In 1805 he was given a job at the Navy Pay Office through the patronage of the Crewes and their friends.

  In the first of these modest houses (above left) Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812, the second child of John and Elizabeth Dickens. The family grew but the houses remained small: Ordnance Terrace, Chatham (centre), where they moved in 1817, and Bayham Street, Camden Town (right), into which they squeezed in 1822, by now with six children, a maid and a lodger.

  In 1824 John Dickens was arrested for debt and held in the Marshalsea Prison. His wife and younger children moved in with him, leaving twelve-year-old Charles with a menial daytime job and lonely lodgings.

  John Dickens saw himself as a gentleman of cultivated tastes, dressed smartly, borrowed money and ran up bills with his wine merchant. His wife Elizabeth’s father also got into financial trouble, stealing from the Navy Pay Office for seven years until he was discovered and fled abroad.

  Charles was put to work in a rat-infested warehouse on the Thames, below the Hungerford Market (above) now Charing Cross Station. His job was to cover and label pots of shoe blacking. He was bitter at being left without education, but he managed to live within his earnings, dividing the few coins he was paid into seven paper parcels each week to make sure he did not run out of money. After a time he persuaded his father to find him lodgings near the prison so that he could be close to his family. He observed the prisoners and thought about them as characters, and he also made up stories to amuse the little maid from the workhouse who still served the Dickenses.

  Released from prison, John Dickens settled his family in The Polygon, a circle of houses in Somers Town, one of the new suburbs of North London, soon engulfed by more streets and sinking into shabbiness. It appears in Bleak House as the home of Harold Skimpole.

  Charles’s sister Fanny had gifts as a pianist and singer that won her prizes at the Royal Academy of Music, but her career was cut short and she died of tuberculosis in her thirties.<
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  Charles loved his brother Fred, took him to live with him and found him a job, but Fred’s scrounging and fecklessness became intolerable and he was cast aside and died penniless and alone.

  Wellington Academy, where Charles had his second taste of education, was a low-grade private school at Mornington Crescent. He kept mice in his desk, learnt a bit of Latin and enjoyed boyish games. At fifteen he had to leave because of his father’s renewed financial troubles, to become a smart office boy in a law firm.

  At eighteen Charles had his portrait painted by his uncle Edward Barrow’s wife Janet Ross, a professional artist. Dark curls, big eyes, carefully chosen clothes and a look that might be quizzical or apprehensive: he was about to fall in love with Maria Beadnell, who would torment him, and with the theatre, which grew into a lifelong obsession. He was also mastering shorthand to become a reporter.

  The Adelphi Theatre on the Strand, where Dickens went almost nightly in the late 1820s and early 1830s to see the comic actor Charles Mathews perform his famous monopolylogues, studying his technique in order to become an actor. Later many adaptations of Dickens’s books were played in the theatre.

  In 1836 Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, daughter of a cultivated Scots family. Pleasant and docile, she could never match his energy or willpower.

  In 1837 John Forster became Dickens’s best friend and warmest admirer, advising and serving him in every way possible. In 1848 Dickens asked him to become his biographer, a task he fulfilled in the 1870s in his classic three-volume Life.

  Catherine’s younger sister Mary became part of the household, adored by Dickens. When she died suddenly at the age of seventeen, his grief was so intense that for the only time in his life he cancelled the next instalments of the two serials he was writing.

  The house in Doughty Street was bought in 1837 with the money made from Pickwick. Here he wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.

  Forster introduced Dickens to William Macready, the leading tragic actor of the day, who became another close and lifelong friend.

  The Irish artist Daniel Maclise, also introduced to Dickens by Forster, became a boon companion for some years, but later withdrew into gloomy reclusiveness.

  Other friends included the comic actor John Pritt Harley, dressed to act in Dickens’s farce The Strange Gentleman in 1836; the artist George Cruikshank, who illustrated Dickens’s first book, Sketches by Boz, and Oliver Twist; and the artist Hablot Browne, who took the name ‘Phiz’ to go with Dickens’s nom de plume ‘Boz’, illustrated The Pickwick Papers and worked with Dickens for twenty-three years.

  A powerful, idealizing portrait of Dickens by Margaret Gillies, exhibited in 1844, engraved and since lost. Gillies was London-born in 1803, educated in Edinburgh and returned to London to earn her living as a painter. From the 1830s she lived with Dr Southwood Smith, the sanitary reformer and member of the royal commission on the employment of children, who had separated from his wife. Dickens knew him well, consulted him and trusted his advice. Gillies exhibited at the Royal Academy, and was interested in portraying ‘true nobility, that of genius ... to call out what is most beautiful and refined in our nature’. Other sitters were Harriet Martineau, Jeremy Bentham and Wordsworth.

  Dickens leased No. 1 Devonshire Terrace, York Gate, Regent’s Park, in December 1839 for twelve years – years of hard work and lavish entertaining, during which five more sons were born.

  More friends: T.N. Talfourd (left), liberal lawyer, politician, playwright; Dickens dedicated The Pickwick Papers to him. Count D’Orsay, artist and dandy, living beyond his means with Lady Blessington, mother of his divorced wife.

  The aged poet Samuel Rogers gave breakfasts at which good conversation was required, to which Dickens went alone.

  Miss Coutts, shy, good and spectacularly rich, became a true friend, seeking and taking Dickens’s advice on her charitable spending.

  Dickens chose to cross the Atlantic in January 1842 on the earliest wooden Cunard paddle steamer. The weather was so bad and the experience so terrifying that the return was made by sailing ship.

  Daniel Maclise painted five-year-old Charley, Mamie, Katey and baby Walter for Dickens and Catherine when they went to America for six months, leaving them in the care of nurses and the Macreadys.

  Maclise’s triple profile drawing of Charles, Catherine and Georgina fixes the domestic situation at Devonshire Terrace: husband in charge, submissive wife, little pet – little, but strong-minded.

  Many family holidays were taken at Broadstairs on the Kentish coast, which Dickens described to D’Orsay oddly as ‘cette Ile désolée de Thanet’, where he could think and dream ‘comme un géant’.

  Dickens travelled from Genoa to London in midwinter 1844 to read his Christmas story The Chimes, attacking the callousness of the rich towards the desperate poor, to a group of friends in Forster’s rooms: these were the Hungry Forties. Maclise gave him a halo.

  ‘About Paris! I am charmed with the place,’ wrote Dickens in 1847. In the fifties and sixties he stayed at the Hôtel Meurice in the rue de Rivoli (above) and considered the French to be ‘the finest people in the universe’.

  He knew Lamartine (left), poet and liberal statesman, who headed the government in 1848, and Victor Hugo, who received him with ‘infinite courtesy and grace’.

  Boulogne became his favourite resort in the 1850s: ‘best mixture of town and country (with sea air ...) I ever saw; everything cheap, everything good’. He admired the honest and industrious people and the young women going barefoot ‘with legs of bright mahogany, walking like Juno’. He rented several houses over the years, and sent four of his sons to boarding school here.

  William Wills was always in England to hold the fort at the office from which they put out the magazine Household Words each week. He was the perfect assistant, devoted, diligent, a little dull, but discreet.

  Wilkie Collins, novelist and Bohemian, met Dickens in 1851 and became a favourite companion in ‘festive diableries’. They collaborated on stories and plays.

  Dickens became obsessed with mesmerism, which he learnt about from his London doctor, Elliotson, and practised himself, on Catherine, on friends and on a sick woman he met in Genoa, Augusta De La Rue, wife of a banker. It was an intense emotional experience for all, arousing Catherine’s jealousy without curing Madame De La Rue.

  ‘What a great creature he is,’ wrote Dickens of Tennyson, reading his poetry in 1844, and again in 1859 of the Idylls, ‘they are all wonderfully fine – chivalric, imaginative, passionate.’

  Another of Dickens’s obsessions was with prisons and the treatment of society’s rejects. He visited them wherever he went and was friends with prison governors in London. When he and Miss Coutts set up their Home for Homeless women, he sought advice from Tracey, Governor of Tothill Fields Prison – the picture above, made in 1862, shows women prisoners there working under the ‘Silent’ system, which Dickens disliked – and from Chesterton, Governor of Coldbath Fields Prison. A view of its men’s dormitory in 1857 is shown below.

  Dickens was a passionate supporter of the efforts made in the industrial towns of England to offer education to the workers, and he visited them often to speak. This is Birmingham Town Hall, where he appeared from the 1840s to the end of his life. He was loved in these places because the people believed he was on their side and spoke for them.

  Lord John Russell, later Earl Russell, born 1792, educated Edinburgh, travelled abroad, loved France, toured English manufacturing cities 1811, entered parliament 1813, introduced the Reform Act of 1832, prime minister 1846–52. Dickens reported his early speeches, and knew him personally from 1846. Russell wrote to him praising Bleak House, invited him to dinner regularly and held him in affection. A Tale of Two Cities was dedicated to him.

  Three more artists especially loved by Dickens: Frank Stone (‘Old Tone’), Manchester-born 1800, self-taught, unconventional marital set-up. Clarkson Stanfield, son of an actor, went to sea, became a scene painter then marine artist, Littl
e Dorrit dedicated to him. John Leech, Londoner, radical, worked for Punch, illustrated A Christmas Carol, family holidays with the Dickenses.

  Dickens looking solid and confident, as he had reason to be in 1850 when this photograph was taken by the young French photographer Henri Claudet. He was engaged in writing David Copperfield, his favourite book. He launched his weekly magazine Household Words successfully. He gave much time to running the Home for Homeless Women. His son Charley started at Eton and a third daughter, Dora, was born. But Catherine was not well, and early in 1851 his father (inset) died, and Dickens, who had been so angry with him, now wept in his mother’s arms and walked the streets for three nights grieving. Forster went with him to the funeral at Highgate Cemetery.

  Dickens lying on the grass with his theatrical group – Charley, Katey, Georgina and Mamie all visible – in the summer of 1857. He had grown his beard the year before in preparation for taking the lead as the self-sacri.cing hero in Wilkie Collins’s ‘Romantic Drama’ The Frozen Deep.

  Frith’s 1859 portrait of Dickens shows him in a state of excited misery, parted from Catherine, in love with Nelly Ternan, obliged to protect his own reputation from attack, and unwell – all of which doubtless contributed to the ferocity of his expression.