Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  14. Maclise to Catherine D, 8 Dec. 1844, P, IV, p. 234, fn. 6.

  15. D to Catherine D, 2 Dec. 1844, P, IV, p. 235. He also wrote to his sister Fanny, 8 Dec. 1844, that he had written ‘a decided Staggerer’, and of the impression it had made on his friends and on the printers, who ‘laughed and cried over it strangely’. He told her, ‘When you come to the end of the 3rd part you had better send upstairs for a clean Pocket Handkerchief.’ P, IV, p. 860 (in supplement).

  16. D to F, [?13 Dec. 1844], P, IV, pp. 238–9.

  17. D to F, 8 Jan. 1845, P, IV, pp. 246–7.

  18. Granet is not an English-sounding name, but information about Augusta De La Rue is lacking.

  19. Dickens gave this account to Sheridan Le Fanu, prolific writer of ghost and horror stories, 24 Nov. 1869, P, XII, p. 443. Le Fanu’s The Rose and the Key appeared as a serial in AYR six months after the death of Dickens, in Jan. 1871.

  20. Trinità dei Monti is the famous church at the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome. It has many side chapels with religious paintings and frescoes.

  21. D to De La Rue, 27 Jan. 1845, P, IV, pp. 254–5.

  22. D to De La Rue, 10 Feb. 1845, P, IV, p. 264.

  23. D to De La Rue, 25 Feb. 1845, P, IV, p. 274.

  24. Ibid.

  25. D reminded Mme De La Rue of this in a letter of 17 Apr. 1846, P, IV, p. 535.

  26. D to Lord Robertson, whom he had met in Edinburgh, 28 Apr. 1845, P, IV, p. 301.

  27. He revealed this in a review of a book about ghosts by Catherine Crowe, The Night Side of Nature, in the Examiner, 26 Feb. 1848, reprinted in Michael Slater (ed.), The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism, II (London, 1996), in which he speaks of a ‘patient’, and he drew De La Rue’s attention to the review in a letter, P, V, p. 255.

  28. D to Catherine D, 5 Dec. 1853, P, VII, p. 224.

  29. D to Mitton, 14 Apr. 1845, P, IV, pp. 297–8, and 20 May 1845, P, IV, p. 312.

  30. Dickens mentions the glass she gave him in a letter to her 27 Sept. 1845, saying he drank ‘a bottle of old Sherry from it, in my dressing room’ during an evening’s performance, P, IV, p. 390. On 23 Dec. 1845 De La Rue noted that she felt the effect from eleven to half past, ‘a most uncomfortable day I don’t know whether D. mesmerized her on that day in London’ – nor do we know. P, IV, p. 320, fn. 4.

  31. D to De La Rue, 29 June 1845, P, IV, pp. 323–5.

  32. D to Mme De La Rue, 27 Sept. 1845, P, IV, p. 391.

  33. D to Le Fanu, 24 Nov. 1869, P, XII, p. 444.

  34. See Chapter 18 below.

  35. D to F, 12 Nov. 1844, P, IV, p. 217.

  36. Pictures from Italy, ‘An Italian Dream’.

  37. Pictures from Italy, ‘Rome’.

  12 Crisis 1845–1846

  1. D’Orsay to D, 6 July 1845, P, IV, p. 326 and fn. 3.

  2. D to F, early July 1845, P, IV, p. 328.

  3. Macready’s diary for 2 and 3 Jan. 1846, William Toynbee (ed.), The Diaries of William Charles Macready, II (London, 1912), p. 318.

  4. Mary Cowden-Clarke (1809–98), Recollections of Writers (1878), cited in Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, I (London, 1981), pp. 90–96. A daughter of Vincent Novello, Italian-born music publisher, she was born in London and knew Leigh Hunt, the Lambs, Mary Shelley, Keats and Keats’s schoolmaster John Clarke, whose son Charles Cowden-Clarke she married. She compiled a concordance to Shakespeare and produced an edition of his plays. She persuaded Dickens to invite her to act with him as Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor. In 1856 the Cowden-Clarkes moved to Nice, then Genoa, where she died in 1898.

  5. Augustus Egg (1816–63), London born, had an inheritance from his father and a good artistic training, and he specialized in literary and historical subjects with considerable success. He suffered from asthma but was a hard-working, sociable and generous bachelor, and he readily agreed to join in Dickens’s theatricals and in the course of acting with Georgina formed an attachment to her.

  6. Mark Lemon (1809–70) worked in a brewery and then a pub before becoming the spectacularly successful editor of Punch in 1841. He was as convivial as Dickens and also shared his humanitarian concerns, in 1843 publishing Thomas Hood’s ‘The Song of the Shirt’, which tripled the circulation. Dickens first invited him to dinner in that year, and found that Lemon’s passion for amateur theatricals was as great as his own. A close friendship was formed between the two men and their large families (Lemon had three sons and seven daughters).

  7. D to Bulwer, 5 Jan. 1851, P, VI, p. 257.

  8. D to F, [?1 or 2 Nov. 1845], P, IV, p. 423.

  9. D to Evans, 26 Feb. 1846, P, IV, p. 506.

  10. D to Coutts, 10 Sept. 1845, P, IV, pp. 374–5; also D to T. J. Serle, 23 Dec. 1845, P, IV, p. 454. For Bleak House see Chapter 17 below.

  11. D to Coutts, 10 Sept. 1845, P, IV, p. 374; and D to Coutts, 1 Dec. 1845, P, IV, p. 442.

  12. D to Mrs Milner Gibson, 28 Oct. 1845, P, IV, p. 418.

  13. Mamie Dickens, My Father as I Recall Him (London, 1897), p. 16.

  14. See Arthur A. Adrian, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle (Oxford, 1957), p. 15. He cites a letter to The Times from Lady Robertson Nicoll, 22 May 1943: ‘My mother, when a girl, lived in Camden Square, and often used to see the Dickens family, then living in Devonshire Terrace. My grandmother used to relate laughingly that she always knew when a new Dickens baby was coming because Mrs Dickens would religiously take a walk twice a day, passing her window.’ If this is true, she was not a bad walker, as it is a good mile from Devonshire Terrace to Camden Square.

  15. Ibid., p. 14.

  16. The play was Fletcher’s The Elder Brother, ‘Adapted for Modern Representation’ by Forster and published by Bradbury & Evans. The rival brothers were played by Forster and Dickens.

  17. The novelist Frederick Marryat wrote of ‘a hundred more’ in a letter given in P, IV, p. 466, fn. 2.

  18. D to Coutts, 7 Jan. 1846, P, IV, pp. 466–7.

  19. D to W. J. Fox, 23 Jan. 1846, P, IV, p. 479.

  20. W. J. Carlton, ‘John Dickens, Journalist’, Dickensian (1957), p. 10.

  21. D to F, 30 Jan. 1846, P, IV, p. 485.

  22. D to De La Rue, 16 Feb. 1846, P, IV, p. 498.

  23. D to Wills, 16 Feb. 1846, P, IV, p. 500; D to Evans, 24 Feb. 1846, P, IV, p. 503.

  24. Philip Collins, in his Dickens and Crime (London, 1962; my edition 1994), p. 227, writes that Dickens addressed no other social question at such length as in these articles arguing the case against capital punishment; and that he changed his mind on the subject later.

  25. D to Bradbury & Evans, 5 Mar. 1846, P, IV, p. 514. He was paid £722.5s.5d. on 29 Apr., rather a generous payment for his short editorship. He had received a payment from them on 31 Dec. 1845, £300 to cover the months of Jan. and Feb. 1846. On 6 Mar., they paid another £300 into his Coutts account.

  26. D to Coutts, 22 Apr. 1846, P, IV, p. 539.

  27. Macready, Diaries, II, p. 333.

  28. R. B. Martin, Tennyson (Oxford, 1980), p. 302.

  29. D to F, [?17–20 Apr. 1846], P, IV, p. 537.

  30. Probably for £300, the rent paid for a year by the previous tenant.

  31. D to Coutts, 26 May 1846, P, IV, pp. 552–6.

  32. Ibid.

  33. D to F, 13 or 14 June 1846, P, IV, p. 561.

  34. D to F, [?22 June 1846], P, IV, p. 569.

  35. D to Morpeth, 20 June 1846, P, IV, pp. 566–7. Lord Morpeth, seventh Earl of Carlisle, was Chief Secretary for Ireland 1835–41, a supporter of liberal causes and a poet. Either he failed to answer Dickens’s letter or Dickens lost or destroyed his reply.

  36. D to F, [?28 June 1846], P, IV, p. 573.

  37. D to F, 5 July 1846, P, IV, p. 579.

  38. D to F, 25–6 July 1846, P, IV, p. 592.

  39. D to F, 7 Aug. and 9 and 10 Aug. 1846, P, IV, pp. 599, 600.

  40. D to F, 30 Aug. 1846, P, IV, p. 612.

  41. D to F, [?20 Sept. 1846], P, IV, p. 622.

 
42. D called them ‘spectres’ as an alternative to ‘phantoms’ in his letter to Sheridan Le Fanu about her case, 24 Nov. 1869, P, XII, p. 443.

  43. D to F, 26 Sept. 1846, P, IV, p. 625.

  44. Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford, 1978), p. 184.

  45. D to F, 30 Sept. and 1 Oct., 3 Oct. 1846, P, IV, pp. 626, 627.

  46. Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, II (London, 1873), Chapter 13, ‘Literary Labours at Lausanne’. D to F, 30 Nov. 1846, P, IV, p. 670. ‘I may tell you, now it is all over. I don’t know whether it was the hot summer, or the anxiety of the two new books coupled with D. N. [Daily News] remembrances and reminders, but I was in that state in Switzerland, when my spirits sunk so, I felt myself in serious danger.’

  47. D to F, 11 Oct. 1846, P, IV, p. 631.

  48. D to F, 13 Nov. 1846, P, IV, p. 656. The story was The Battle of Life, the fourth of the Christmas stories and possibly the worst.

  49. D to F, 4 Nov. 1846, P, IV, p. 653.

  50. Macready, Diaries, II, p. 347.

  13 Dombey, with Interruptions 1846–1848

  1. D to F, 30 Nov. 1846, P, IV, p. 669. Dickens went on ‘there can be no better summary of it, after all, than Hogarth’s unmentionable phrase’ – which is ‘French houses were gilt and bullshit’, which is probably what Dickens wrote, according to the editors.

  2. D to F, [?30 Nov. 1846], P, IV, p. 669. Charles Sheridan was the grandson of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, son of Thomas and brother of Caroline Norton, well known to Dickens. He died of tuberculosis a few months later, in May 1847, at the Embassy in Paris.

  3. D to Jeffrey, 30 Nov. 1846, P, IV, p. 670.

  4. D to F, 6 Dec. 1846, P, IV, p. 676.

  5. Ibid.

  6. The cheap edition put out all his existing titles in several different formats, as weekly numbers at a penny halfpenny, monthly parts at 7d., printed in double columns, and was intended for the very poor, ‘to be hoarded on the humble shelf where there are few books’, as he wrote in his prospectus. There were new frontispieces by well-known artists such as Leech, Browne, Stanfield, and new prefaces by Dickens. They went on sale in Mar. 1847. Sales were not as good as expected and by the end of 1848 Dickens acknowledged his disappointment, but they were kept going and in 1858 he did another cheap edition.

  7. D to Catherine D, 19 Dec. 1846, P, IV, pp. 680–81.

  8. D to F, 27 Dec. 1846, P, IV, pp. 685–6.

  9. D to F, [?early Jan. 1847], P, V, p. 3.

  10. D to Charles Sheridan, 7 Jan. 1847, P, V, p. 3.

  11. Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, II (London, 1873), Chapter 15. D to Countess of Blessington, 27 Jan. 1847, P, V, p. 15.

  12. D to De La Rue, 24 Mar. 1847, P, V, p. 42.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Dickens provided an introductory note to ‘the great French people, whom I sincerely love and honour’, Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford, 1978), p. 257. He later told the French writer Paul Féval that his fondness for France began in 1847, when he observed, at the funeral of another writer, Frédéric Soulié, how widespread the respect for literature was there. Féval and Soulié were both writers of popular, sensational novels.

  15. See R. H. Horne in A New Spirit of the Age, cited in Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London, 1971), p. 202.

  16. For Forster’s remark, Life, II, Chapter 15, ‘Three Months in Paris’: ‘He never spoke that language very well, his accent being somehow defective; but he practised himself into writing it with remarkable ease and fluency.’ D to F, 10–11 Jan. 1847, P, V, p. 5; D to D’Orsay, 5 Apr. 1847, P, V, p. 53 (‘Goodness! How horribly fast the months go by! The moment I am free I find myself a galley slave again. Courage Inimitable Boz! You loved him well enough, old fellow, after all!’). By 4 Aug. 1849, Dickens was able to write a well-expressed letter of condolence in French to his friend Régnier on the death of his daughter.

  17. Dombey, Chapter 3.

  18. D to F, 4 Nov. 1846, P, IV, p. 653.

  19. Maclise to F, 1843, V & A Forster Collection, 48.E.19.

  20. Quoted in P, V, p. 227, fn. 1.

  21. Dombey, Chapter 27.

  22. Ibid., Chapter 49.

  23. Ibid., Chapter 30.

  24. For the little houses in Staggs’s Gardens, with their runner beans, rabbits, hens and washing lines, and the railway lines that destroy the houses and transform the district with warehouses, taverns, lodging houses, improved stucco houses, clocks giving standardized railway time, and railway company buildings for the workers, see Dombey, Chapters 6 and 15.

  25. Dombey, Chapter 20.

  26. Wilkie Collins’s remark was written into the margin of Forster’s Life, noted by Frederic G. Kitton, The Novels of Charles Dickens: A Bibliography and a Sketch (London, 1897), pp. 109–10, and given by Patten in his Charles Dickens and His Publishers, pp. 207–8. Ainsworth’s remarks in letters to friends are given P, V, p. 267, fn. 2.

  27. Kathleen Tillotson, Humphry House, J. Hillis Miller and Stephen Marcus are among these critics.

  28. D to GH, 9 Mar. 1847, P, V, p. 33.

  29. Dickens told Miss Coutts about the attack, 16 and 23 May 1857, P, V, pp. 67, 70. He reverted to it fourteen years later in a letter to his sister Letitia, 25 Nov 1861, P, IX, p. 521.

  30. D to M. Power, 2 July 1847, P, V, p. 111.

  31. D to T. J. Thompson, 19 June 1847, P, V, p. 95.

  32. D to Coutts, 27 Nov. 1847, P, V, p. 204; D to F, 2 Dec. 1847, P, V, p. 204.

  33. D to GH, 30 Dec. 1847, P, V, p. 217; D to Alfred Dickens, 1 Jan. 1848, P, V, p. 221.

  34. D to Thackeray, 9 Jan. 1848, P, V, p. 228. Dickens does not appear to have written to Thackeray about Vanity Fair, but he praised its ‘treasures of mirth, wit and wisdom’ when he spoke at a dinner for Thackeray in Oct. 1855, according to Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens, III (London, 1874), Chapter 2. Paul Féval, the French novelist who met Dickens in 1862 through Fechter, and later visited Gad’s Hill, wrote in June 1870 that ‘Dickens looked on Vanity Fair as an absolute masterpiece.’ Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, II (London, 1981), p. 293.

  35. Forster, Life, II, Chapter 17.

  14 A Home 1847–1858

  1. Dickens’s preface to the Library Edition of 1858 makes the point about Nancy.

  2. D to John Overs, 27 Oct. 1840, P, II, pp. 140–41.

  3. Interestingly in a letter to Georgina, D to GH, 5 May 1856, P, VIII, p. 110, in which he describes an argument with Miss Coutts’s companion Mrs Brown about the morality of the French, which he defended so stoutly that she burst into tears – see Chapter 19 below.

  4. P, V, p. 276, fn. 10, reporting Emerson’s Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 1847–1848, M. M. Sealts (ed.), X (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), pp. 550–51.

  5. Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, II (London, 1873), Chapter 20.

  6. D to Coutts, 3 Nov. 1847, P, V, pp. 182–3.

  7. Dickens’s Appeal, which he sent to Miss Coutts, 28 Oct. 1847, and which was printed as a leaflet, is given as Appendix D in P, V, p. 698.

  8. D to Coutts, 15 Nov. 1848, P, V, p. 440. The lighter reading suggested by a matron, and approved by him, was the poetry of Wordsworth and Crabbe.

  9. Jenny Hartley, Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women (London, 2008), a remarkable piece of research and writing. I have made use of some of her discoveries about the histories of the young women in this chapter.

  10. D to Lord Lyttelton, 16 Aug. 1855, P, VII, p. 691. He went on, ‘Something is gained when it is by itself, and is in a degree under the restraint of a sort of social opinion.’

  11. D to Coutts, 23 May 1854, P, VII, pp. 335–6.

  12. Ibid.

  13. D to Coutts, 15 Nov. 1856, P, VII, p. 223.

  14. D to Mrs Morson, 14 July 1850, P, XII, p. 625.

  15. D to Mrs Morson, 31 Oct. 1852, P, XII, p. 644.

  15 A Personal History 1848–1849

  1. D to F, 14 and 22 Apr. 1848, P, V, pp. 279, 28
8–90.

  2. D to F, 7 May 1848, the anniversary of Mary Hogarth’s death, P, V, p. 299, and Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, II (London, 1873), Chapter 20.

  3. Forster says in the first chapter of his Life, from which the quotations are taken, that this was in Jan. 1849. It seems a long gap between the spoken and written account. Forster does occasionally misdate events in his book, and he may be mistaken here.

  In 1892 Charley Dickens stated, in his introduction to the Macmillan edition of David Copperfield, that his mother had told him that Dickens had read the account to her, telling her he intended to publish it as part of a planned autobiography, and that she had tried to persuade him not to, on the grounds that he had spoken harshly of his father and mother; and that he had accepted her advice and decided to make it into David Copperfield. Although this does not fit very well with Forster’s dates and the writing of David Copperfield, there is no particular reason to doubt Charley’s account.

  4. The Haunted Man was the last of the five Christmas stories published as separate volumes. It is a slight improvement on its two immediate predecessors, but still not a successful piece of writing. The most interesting character in it is a terrifying and credible feral child.

  5. D to F, 29 Feb. 1848, P, V, pp. 256–7. ‘Long live the Republic! Long live the people! No more kings! Let’s give our blood for liberty, for justice, for the cause of the people!’

  6. D to Coutts, 24 May 1848, P, V, p. 317. This is the only source for his being offered the seat.

  7. ‘Judicial Special Pleading’ appeared in the Examiner, 23 Dec. 1848, reprinted in Michael Slater (ed.), The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism, II (London, 1996), pp. 137–42. Dickens expanded his views on the Revolution of 1789 in A Tale of Two Cities.