Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  Catherine Dickens had no defence against her husband when he publicly proclaimed her alleged failings to justify his behaviour, but she kept her dignity.

  Georgina Hogarth chose to remain with Dickens, adding spice to the scandal and earning his profound gratitude.

  Mrs Ternan, a respected actress, played leading roles opposite Macready and Kemble. She brought up her daughters to earn their living on the stage from childhood, but money was always short. Dickens was impressed and entranced by them: Maria (left), Fanny (right) and Nelly (centre).

  Nelly looks like a child in this photograph, with a ribbon in her tightly curled golden hair, short sleeves and an uncertain expression. She did not take to the stage as readily as her elder sisters, she was never much of a performer, and in August 1859 she gave up her career as an actress. In March 1860, when she was twenty-one, she became the owner of a large house in Mornington Crescent, No. 2 Houghton Place, Ampthill Square. Soon after this she disappears from the scene and Dickens begins to make many mysterious journeys to France.

  The train crash at Staplehurst, where Dickens helped the injured while Nelly, who was hurt, was spirited away.

  Dickens bought Gad’s Hill House in 1856 and made it into his country residence, extending and improving it, buying more land, acting the village squire, and entertaining friends.

  Dickens loved France because literature was respected there, and he made many friends among French writers, often dining with Eugène Scribe, author of 300 comedies, and corresponding with Alexandre Dumas père in French, offering to be his ‘“guide à Londres” (faute de mieux)’ in 1851.

  Céline Céleste, dancer, actress, born in Paris, made her name in US, in England from 1830. Theatre manager Benjamin Webster was her lover and business partner; both worked with the Ternans and with Dickens, who relished her production of A Tale of Two Cities.

  Charles Fechter’s acting career was established in Paris, where Dickens first saw him. He gave a great Hamlet in London in 1860, and by 1865 Dickens described him as a very intimate friend, often at Gad’s Hill, ‘a capital fellow and Anti-Humbug’.

  ‘Whenever I am at Paris, I am dragged by invisible forces into their Morgue.’ It was an obsession he described without trying to explain. This illustration to an Uncommercial Traveller piece of 1860 catches the ‘neat and pleasant little woman’ with her child described by him, and charmingly suggests Dickens, middle aged, courteous. As he told it, he was taken faint, and went off to have a brandy and a dip in the floating swimming bath in the Seine.

  Dickens reading the murder of Nancy by Sikes to an audience eager to be horrified. It excited and exhausted him, and he loved doing it. ‘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,’ he told Forster.

  Katey Dickens, ‘Lucifer Box’ as her father called her for her fiery nature, was a loving daughter, but clear-sighted, and she determined to give posterity the truth about him as best she could.

  Nelly, Dickens’s ‘magic circle of one’, was, he said, gentle, proud and self-reliant, had much to bear alone, and would be distressed if her history were known.

  Charley Dickens never became the businessman his father tried to make him: well mannered and impractical, he left his family penniless.

  Henry, the only son to prosper, persuaded his father to let him go to Cambridge and became a lawyer.

  Cartoon showing Dickens crossing the Channel for Paris with books under both arms, published in L’Eclipse in 1868, drawn by the French artist André Gill – he took the pseudonym in homage to Gillray – from a photograph by John Watkins.

  ‘The British Lion in America’, an American cartoon of 1867, elaborates on a photograph by Jeremiah Gurney and shows Dickens wearing a flashy jacket and a lot of jewellery, and with a wine glass.

  The old lion, grizzled, ravaged, fierce, not giving up. He disliked being photographed but he put up with it, sitting at his desk, quill pen in hand – inimitable as ever.

  Notes

  ABBREVIATIONS

  AYR All the Year Round

  Catherine D Catherine Dickens

  D Charles Dickens

  F John Forster

  GH Georgina Hogarth

  HW Household Words

  P The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens (details for each volume can be found in the Select Bibliography)

  Prologue: The Inimitable 1840

  1. Dickens’s words from his account written many years later, ‘Some Recollections of Mortality’, AYR, 16 May 1863. Other information from the report on the trial at the Old Bailey printed in The Times, 10 Mar. 1840.

  2. D to F, [?15 Jan. 1840], P, II, p. 9. Taken from Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens, I (London, 1872), Chapter 13.

  3. There is a small discrepancy, however: in a letter written at the time he says he could not sleep on the night after the inquest, but in the 1863 account he says he dreamt of the face of the accused girl. ‘Some Recollections of Mortality’, AYR, 16 May 1863.

  Magdalen Asylums were well intentioned but not pleasant, and Dickens later formed a poor opinion of them when he saw a good many young women who emerged from their care during the 1850s, after he had set up the Home for Homeless Women. He thought they were too punitive in their attitudes, and did not feed the young women properly.

  4. D to Richard Monckton Milnes, 1 Feb. 1840, P, II, p. 16.

  5. D to F, [?Jan. 1840], P, II, p. 15; D to Mrs Macready, 13 Nov. 1840, P, II, p. 150.

  6. Louis Prévost, a linguist who later worked at the British Museum. There are several payments to him from Dickens.

  7. This is John Overs, to whom Dickens devotes a great deal of time and trouble over the years, advising him, helping him to place articles and finding him employment. Overs died at the age of thirty-six in 1844, leaving a wife and six children, whom Dickens continued to assist.

  8. D to Catherine D, 1 Mar. 1840, P, II, p. 36; D to Thomas Beard, 1 June 1840, P, II, p. 77.

  9. So his daughter Katey said: Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter (London, 1939), p. 223.

  10. ‘A Walk in the Workhouse’, HW, 25 May 1850.

  11. D to Jacob Bell, 12 May 1850, P, VI, p. 99.

  12. Walter Bagehot in National Review, Oct. 1858.

  13. He used the name in printed correspondence in Bentley’s Miscellany, which he edited in 1837 and 1838, and during this period his old schoolmaster sent him a silver snuff box inscribed ‘To the inimitable Boz’, ‘Boz’ being the name by which he first signed himself in print. With this encouragement, he began to refer to himself as ‘the inimitable’.

  14. Annie Thackeray, given in Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, II (London, 1981), p. 177.

  PART ONE

  1 The Sins of the Fathers 1784–1822

  1. Having been No. 13 Mile End Terrace, then No. 387 Mile End Terrace and then No. 396 Commercial Road, the property is now No. 393 Old Commercial Road.

  2. John Dickens had met Huffam when first working in London. He had an official position as ‘Rigger to His Majesty’s Navy’, having come to official attention by rigging a privateer to fight against the French. The extra h in ‘Huffham’ was a mistake.

  3. See article on ancestry of Dickens in the Dickensian [1949], based on research by A. T. Butler and Arthur Campling, assembled by Ralph Straus.

  4. See Gladys Storey’s Dickens and Daughter (London, 1939), pp. 33–4. But since Annabella Crewe was not born until 1814 and would hardly have memories before 1819, she cannot have remembered old Mrs Dickens complaining about her son. Perhaps she was passing on what she had been told by others.

  5. His book collection was taken over by his son Charles in Chatham – see below.

  6. Information about Frances Crewe from Eric Salmon’s article in the DNB, and from Linda Kelly’s Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London, 1997).

  7. D reporting to F on his father’s ‘characteristic letter’, written to Catherine Dickens, and
other remarks by him, [?30 Sept. 1844], P, IV, p. 197.

  8. An imagined episode could bring together Sheridan, aged thirty-three, with the housekeeper, aged thirty-nine, in a Crewe Hall back bedroom, and account for John Dickens’s inheriting Sheridan’s disastrous inability to live within his income, and Charles Dickens’s passion for the theatre. Too good to be true, of course.

  9. A private memorandum among Gladstone’s papers after reading the Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1853 goes: ‘The old-established political families habitually batten on the public patronage – their sons legitimate and illegitimate, their relatives and dependents of every degree, are provided for by the score.’

  10. The announcement read: ‘On Friday, at Mile-end-Terrace, the lady of John Dickens Esq., a son.’

  11. The source is her granddaughter Katey, given by Gladys Storey in Dickens and Daughter, p. 25.

  12. No. 16 Hawke Street was, according to Gladys Storey in Dickens and Daughter, p. 40, a tiny house built without a front garden on a ‘squalid little street’. Dickens told Forster that he remembered tottering about the front garden with his sister Fanny, with something to eat in his hand, watched by a nurse through the basement window: but it cannot have been the first home, which he left long before he could walk, so perhaps it was the back garden of Hawke Street, or Wish Street. His other Portsmouth memory was of being taken to see the soldiers exercising.

  13. Mansfield Park was written between 1811 and 1813 and published in 1814, so the Portsmouth she describes, which she knew from her brothers being at the naval school, is very much the place in which Dickens was born.

  14. Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, I (London, 1872), Chapter 1.

  15. She died in 1893.

  16. Forster, Life, I, Chapter 1 – he dates Dickens telling him this five years before the writing of David Copperfield, hence 1844. Dickens must have formed the phrases in his mind and kept them. In a speech given in 1864 Dickens talks about an old lady who ‘ruled the world with a birch’ and put him off print. But, by his own account, his mother taught him to read.

  17. Quoted in Philip Collins, Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, I (London, 1981), p. 2, taken from Robert Langton’s The Childhood and Youth of Dickens, first published in 1883.

  18. The spasms of pain are likely to have been caused by a kidney stone, according to ‘The Medical History of Charles Dickens’ in Dr W. H. Bowen, Charles Dickens and His Family (Cambridge, 1956). His reading position is described in Gladys Storey’s Dickens and Daughter, p. 44, presumably described by Dickens to his daughter Katey.

  19. D to F, 24 Sept. 1857, recalling his childhood in Chatham, P, VIII, p. 452 and fn. 5.

  20. In 1883 Alderman John Tribe, son of the old landlord of the Mitre Inn, said he had once possessed a note from his childhood friend Charles, written on John Dickens’s card, saying ‘Master and Miss Dickens will be pleased to have the company of Master and Miss Tribe to spend the Evening on …’ P, I, p. 1.

  21. Forster, Life, I, Chapter 7, quoting from a letter Dickens wrote to the press in 1838, after being attacked for editing Grimaldi’s Memoirs without having seen him perform.

  22. D to Mary Howitt, 7 Sept. 1859, P, IX, p. 119.

  23. D to Cerjat, 7 July 1858, P, VIII, p. 598.

  24. The stories of the recitation and of the snuff are from Forster’s Life, I, Chapter 1, and would have been told him by Dickens himself.

  25. A version of her appears in The Old Curiosity Shop, where she has no name until she is called ‘the Marchioness’ by Dick Swiveller.

  26. D to F, [?27–8 Sept. 1857], P, VIII, p. 455.

  27. A collection of essays by Oliver Goldsmith.

  2 A London Education 1822–1827

  1. Walking was the way all but the rich got about. ‘We used to run to the doors and windows to look at a cab, it was such a rare sight’: this is Dickens reminiscing about life in Camden Town and thereabouts in the 1820s, before the coming of the railways, in ‘An Unsettled Neighbourhood’, HW, 11 Nov. 1854.

  2. Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter (London, 1939), p. 44 – she gives Harriet Ellen as her name.

  3. See D to T. C. Barrow, 31 Mar. 1836, in which he recalls the visits he made and the affectionate relationship established. P, I, p. 144.

  4. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, I (London, 1872), Chapter 1.

  5. He had the watch before her death, because he talks about having it in his pocket when he was at the blacking warehouse in his account of that time. Forster, Life, I, Chapter 2.

  6. For his godfather’s tip and for his getting lost, see ‘Gone Astray’, HW, 13 Aug. 1853.

  7. My italics, from Forster, quoting Dickens’s words, in his Life, I, Chapter 1.

  8. The house was demolished in the late nineteenth century. Maples was built on the site, to be succeeded by the new University College Hospital.

  9. Forster, Life, I, Chapter 2. Mr Micawber appears in David Copperfield, the novel Dickens wrote in the late forties, parts of which draw on his own experience; and Micawber is loosely based on John Dickens in that he cannot keep out of debt, that he moves quickly from despair to cheerfulness, and that he expresses himself in elaborate turns of phrase.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid., Chapter 3.

  13. William Dickens inherited £500 from his mother, who had already given him £750. John Dickens got £450.

  14. Chandos Street is now called Chandos Place.

  15. Forster, Life, I, beginning of Chapter 2.

  16. Ibid.

  17. See Michael Allen’s arguments in the ‘The Dickens Family in London 1824–1827’, Dickensian (1983), p. 3, where Allen believes that Dickens went on working at Warren’s until Mar. or Apr. 1825, i.e., for over a year. In the Dickensian (2010), pp. 5–30, he suggests a quite different timetable: that Charles started working at the blacking factory in Sept. 1823, moved to Chandos Street in Jan. 1824 – the same month his father was arrested – and left work in Sept. 1824. His arguments are based on impressive research but not conclusive.

  18. Forster, Life, I, Chapter 2.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Dickens altered his intended finish to Great Expectations on a plea from Bulwer to let Pip and Estella be united in a happy ending, which seems a mistake, but even in the second version the tone of the narrative is not joyous or triumphant. See Chapter 21 below.

  3 Becoming Boz 1827–1834

  1. Richard Newnham, the retired tailor of Chatham who lent money to John Dickens, died in June and left £50 worth of shares to Letitia, in trust until her marriage.

  2. Skimpole, based on Leigh Hunt, appears in Bleak House as the prototype of the artistic man who professes unworldliness, never pays tradesmen and expects his friends to settle his debts and keep him supplied with money. His house at The Polygon is semi-derelict but he lives in a room furnished with beautiful objects, flowers, fruit, etc., as Esther sees when Mr Jarndyce takes her to visit him.

  The Polygon also appears in Chapter 52 of The Pickwick Papers, when Mr Pickwick’s solicitor’s clerk, arriving at Gray’s Inn just before ten o’clock, says he heard the clocks strike half past nine as he walked through Somers Town: ‘It went the half hour as I came through the Polygon.’

  The Polygon’s most famous inhabitants had been William Godwin and his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, who died there in 1797 giving birth to their daughter, Mary, who grew up to marry Shelley. In the 1830s, when the Dickenses were there, the theatrical painter Samuel De Wilde and the engraver Scriven also lived there. The Dickenses left just before the coming of the railways running to their great stations close by at Euston (opened in 1838), King’s Cross and St Pancras, when the air grew filthy and Somers Town descended into grim squalor. The Polygon was demolished in the 1890s and replaced by flats for railway workers, now also gone.

  3. In Chapter 30 of The Pickwick Papers he describes ‘office lads in their first surtouts, who feel a befitting contempt
for boys at day-schools … and think there’s nothing like “life”’.

  4. In The Pickwick Papers he makes the ‘salaried clerk’ in the law office go ‘half price to the Adelphi Theatre at least three times a week’.

  5. See ‘The Streets – Morning’, first published in the Evening Chronicle, 21 July 1835, ‘Sketches of London No. 17’.

  6. The girls are from ‘The Prisoners’ Van’, first published in Bell’s Life in London, 29 Nov. 1835, now Chapter 12 of the section ‘Characters’ in the Oxford Illustrated Sketches by Boz (Oxford, 1957; my edition 1987). The boy on trial is from ‘Criminal Courts’, first published as ‘The Old Bailey’ in the Morning Chronicle, 23 Oct. 1833. Dickens returned to the court in Great Expectations in 1860.

  7. George Lear left an account of Dickens at Ellis & Blackmore and suggests another clerk, Potter, certainly acted in the little theatre in Catherine Street, off the Strand, and possibly Dickens too.

  8. From ‘Private Theatres’, first published in the Evening Chronicle, 11 Aug. 1835.

  9. ‘Gin Shops’ first published 19 Feb. 1835 in the Evening Chronicle; and ‘Miss Evans and the Eagle’ first published 4 Oct. 1835 in Bell’s London Chronicle, a weekly journal.

  10. ‘A Christmas Dinner’ (originally called ‘Christmas Festivities’) appeared in Bell’s Life in London on 27 Dec. 1835. Jolly grandpapa goes to buy the turkey, grandmamma makes the pudding, all the accessible members of the family are invited, quarrels are made up, there is kissing under the mistletoe, blind man’s bluff, songs are sung, wine and ale drunk and everyone is happy.