8. See P, V, p. 481, fn. 4, giving Forster’s letter to Leigh Hunt saying Dickens had gone to Bath to celebrate Landor’s seventy-fourth birthday and the bicentenary of the execution of Charles I.
9. D to Fanny Burnett, 3 May 1848, P, VII, pp. 886–7, and 9 May 1848, P, V, pp. 301–2.
10. D to Mitton, 1 July 1848, P, V, p. 358.
11. D to Macready, 4 Aug. 1848, P, V, p. 384.
12. Henry Burnett died, aged eight, in Jan. 1849.
13. D to Frank Stone, 5 Dec. 1848, P, V, p. 453. Augustus married Harriet Lovell, daughter of a deceased East India Company official.
14. Harriet Lovell was the daughter of Francis Lovell of Sloane Street, formerly Madras.
15. D to F, 31 Dec. 1848, P, V, p. 464.
16. D to Catherine D, 8 Jan. 1849, P, V, p. 471; D to F, 12 Jan. 1849, P, V, p. 474.
17. Forster’s Life, II, Chapter 20.
18. D to F, late Jan. 1849, P, V, p. 483.
19. David Copperfield, Chapter 4.
20. Forster, Life, II, Chapter 20. Mrs Leavis assumed that Dickens had read Jane Eyre in her chapter on David Copperfield in Dickens the Novelist, but U. C. Knoepflmacher, in ‘From Outrage to Rage: Dickens’s Bruised Femininity’, states, without giving a source, that ‘Dickens denied having read Jane Eyre before he embarked on the story of David Copperfield’, Joanne Shattock (ed.), Dickens and Other Victorians: Essays in Honour of Philip Collins (Basingstoke, 1988), p. 76. Philip Collins’s Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, II (London, 1981), p. 289, gives a note by an unknown hand on Gad’s Hill paper and thought to date from about 1860, which reads ‘Dickens had not read Jane Eyre and said he never would as he disapproved of the whole school. [This apropos of Miss Hogarth saying it was an unhealthy book.]’
21. Charlotte Brontë read and liked David Copperfield, telling W. S. Williams, 13 Sept. 1849, ‘I have read “DC”; it seems to me very good – admirable in some parts. You said it had affinity to “JE”. It has, now and then – only what advantage has Dickens in his varied knowledge of men and things!’ This was Brontë being modest, and surely the best parts of David Copperfield are the childhood, family and domestic scenes. T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington (eds.), The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence, III (originally pub. 1932; Oxford, 1980), p. 20.
22. The extracts from David Copperfield are from Chapters 2, 2, 2, 4, 10.
23. David Copperfield, Chapter 9.
24. Ibid., Chapter 12.
25. Ibid., Chapter 20. Later Dickens makes Rosa behave with coarse cruelty towards Em’ly, which seems to me to jar with the person shown in Chapter 20.
26. Ibid., Chapter 6.
27. Ibid., Chapter 46.
28. John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (London, 1969), p. 31.
29. D to Richard Watson, 21 July 1849, P, V, p. 579.
30. Thackeray to Mrs Brookfield, 23 July 1849, Gordon N. Ray (ed.), The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, II (Oxford, 1945), p. 569.
31. See Appendix G to P, V, p. 706.
32. D to F, 30 Nov. 1849, P, V, p. 663.
33. Dickens’s relations with the Garrick Club are hard to follow. He first joined in 1837, resigned in 1838, rejoined in Feb. 1844, resigned again in Dec. 1849, was a member again in 1854, resigned in the summer of 1858 over the Yates–Thackeray dispute, and resigned again in 1865 when Wills was blackballed.
16 Fathers and Sons 1850–1851
1. Jeffrey’s letter dated 6 Jan. 1850 is given in P, V, p. 461, fn. 3.
2. In his essay of 1836, ‘Sunday under Three Heads’, reprinted in the Oxford Illustrated The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces (Oxford, 1958; my edition 1987), pp. 635–63.
3. D to F, 23 Jan. 1850, P, VI, p. 14.
4. D to Mrs Gaskell, 31 Jan. 1850, P, VI, pp. 21–2. Mary Barton was published in 1848 and was attacked in the Tory press.
5. D to Mrs Gaskell, 25 Nov. 1851, P, VI, p. 545; D to Mrs Gaskell, 13 Apr. 1853, P, VII, p. 62; D to Mrs Gaskell, 25 Feb. 1852, P, VI, p. 609; D to Wills, 11 Sept. 1855, P, VII, p. 700.
6. For the gypsy life, see D to Spencer Lyttelton, 20 May 1851, P, VI, p. 393.
7. ‘A Detective Police Party’ appeared in HW on 27 July 1850. Field was the inspiration for Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, and Dickens employed him to keep an eye on Bulwer’s estranged wife Rosina when she threatened to cause trouble at one of their theatrical events. See Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (London, 1962), for a good account of Dickens’s relations with the police.
8. ‘Old Lamps for New Ones’ appeared in HW, 15 June 1850, and is reprinted in Michael Slater (ed.), The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism, II (London, 1996), pp. 242–8.
9. D to F, 21 Oct. 1850, P, VI, p. 195.
10. D to D’Orsay, 1 Oct. 1850, P, VI, p. 184: ‘this desolate Isle of Thanet. But I like it because it is peaceful and I can think and dream here, like a giant’ – Dickens’s striking vision of himself and his imaginative power.
11. Quoted by Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford, 1978), p. 236, from the Economist of 3 Apr. 1852.
12. This was in July 1863 and proved unavailing. In 1865 Russell, again Prime Minister, offered him a place for a son, and Dickens replied he had none needing one.
13. Mary Boyle, born in 1810, was the daughter of a vice-admiral and granddaughter of an earl, and her elder sister was a maid of honour to Queen Adelaide. She had published two novels in the 1830s and a volume of poems in 1849. Dickens found her amusing, enjoyed acting with her and was fond of her, and probably impressed by her background, but he did not allow her to impose on him professionally. He took one piece she offered for HW and rewrote it substantially, and although he was gentle about it he seems to have made it plain that he wanted no more. She remained devoted to him to the end of his life, for example arranging deliveries of fresh flowers to him during his American tour of 1867–8.
14. See P, VI, p. 780, fn. 3, quoting Owen’s private journal. Owen’s attacks on Darwin proved disastrous to his own reputation.
15. Dickens had served on the committee of the Royal Literary Fund but disliked its proceedings and did not attend its dinners after 1841. The Guild also gave grants and built houses for needy writers on the Lytton Estate at Knebworth, but, despite the great efforts of Dickens, Forster and Bulwer, the scheme did not succeed.
16. See Catherine Peters’s The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (London, 1991), p. 101.
17. D to Harriet Martineau, 3 July 1850, P, VI, p. 122.
18. D to Bulwer, 10 Feb. 1851, P, VI, p. 287. This Paris trip was made with Leech and Spencer Lyttelton, a raffish cousin of Mrs Watson.
19. D to Wills, 27 July 1851, P, VI, p. 448.
20. Henry F. Dickens, Memories of My Father (London, 1928), p. 26.
21. Balmoral House was close to Macclesfield Bridge crossing the canal, at the juncture of Avenue Road and Albert Road. It belonged to John Cheek, manufacturer. Dickens dealt through William Booth, an auctioneer, whose presumed son, another William Booth, reported that in 1911 a barge carrying gunpowder along the canal exploded, wrecking the house.
22. D to Henry Austin, 13 Mar. 1851, P, VI, p. 314.
23. D to Catherine D, 25 Mar. 1851, P, VI, p. 333. The death certificate stated that John Dickens had suffered a rupture of the urethra from old standing stricture and consequent mortification of the scrotum from the infiltration of urine. He was sixty-five.
24. D to F, 31 Mar. 1851, P, VI, p. 343.
25. D to Catherine D, 4 Apr. 1851, P, VI, p. 348.
26. Queen Victoria’s journal entry is given P, VI, p. 386, fn. 4.
27. D to Augustus Tracey, 10 Oct. 1851, P, VI, p. 517. Tavistock House, built at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was demolished in 1901, and the offices of the British Medical Association built on the site.
28. D to Coutts, 25 Oct. 1853, P, VII, pp. 171–2. Dickens was writing from Milan, where he was travelling with Egg and Collins. Egg married in 1860 an
d died young in Algiers in 1863.
29. Ibid.
17 Children at Work 1852–1854
1. Young Marcus Stone, son of Frank Stone, first saw him when he was ‘about forty’ and remembers him thus: manuscript in library at Charles Dickens Museum, p. 49.
2. Wills’s letter is quoted by Philip Collins in his Dickens: The Public Readings (Oxford, 1975), p. xx, and dated 30 Dec. 1853.
3. It was partly dictated and partly written in his own hand, and serialized at intervals in HW from Jan. 1851 to Dec. 1853. A slapdash but sometimes amusingly opinionated version of the nation’s story told through the kings and queens, it ends in 1688 with the flight of the last bad Stuart – ‘the Stuarts were a public nuisance altogether’ – and welcomes the establishment of the Protestant religion in England. A final note hails Queen Victoria as ‘very good, and much beloved’. In volume form it sold very badly.
4. The Megalosaurus was so named by William Buckland (1784–1856), geologist, palaeontologist and clergyman, in 1824 when he found the fossilized remains of a gigantic carnivorous lizard at Stonesfield in Oxfordshire and wrote the first full account of a fossil dinosaur.
5. Towards the end of Chapter 35. Esther is of course giving Dickens’s view. Charlotte Brontë asked her publisher, ‘Is the first number of “Bleak House” generally admired? I liked the Chancery part, but when it passes into the autobiographic form, and the young woman who announces that she is not “bright” begins her history, it seems to me too often weak and twaddling; an amiable nature is caricatured, not faithfully rendered, in Miss Esther Summerson.’ T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington (eds.), The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence, III (originally pub. 1932; Oxford, 1980), p. 322.
6. See P, IV, pp. 374–5, 454; P, III, p. 538, fn. 2; and more about Esther, P, III, P, IX.
7. The words were cancelled from the proof, presumably for reasons of space.
8. D to Coutts, 19 Nov. 1852, P, VI, p. 805.
9. Q. D. Leavis is the author of the chapter on Bleak House in Dickens the Novelist (London, 1970). This discussion is in Chapter 3 and on p. 137, and refers to Chapter 47 in Bleak House. She writes that the end of the chapter is ‘not sentimental but ironical in effect and … in intention, since it is followed by the indignant and generous outburst with which Dickens ends the chapter’. But it does not strike me as ironical, and I can imagine Alan Woodcourt finishing the prayer silently for himself.
10. All the travel is by coach, and in Chapter 55 Dickens writes, ‘Railroads shall soon traverse all this country, and with a rattle and a glare the engine and train shall shoot like a meteor over the wide night-landscape, turning the moon paler; but, as yet, these things are non-existent in these parts, though not wholly unexpected.’
11. John Sutherland raises the question of the causes of the deaths of Captain Hawdon, Jo and Lady Dedlock in his Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? (Oxford, 1999), and gives well-argued and convincing answers. He suggests that Hawdon deliberately overdoses on opium, but that Dr Woodcourt testifies that it was unlikely to have been deliberate because he was in the habit of taking large doses, so avoiding a verdict of suicide and allowing him to be buried in consecrated ground. Lady Dedlock then also takes opium to finish her life close to his grave, after her long night walk, which would have exhausted and chilled but not killed her, and again Woodcourt avoids specifying the opium as the cause of death. As for Jo, Dr Sutherland agrees with Susan Shatto’s view that he dies of pulmonary tuberculosis.
12. Unsigned review in the Examiner, 8 Oct. 1853, printed in Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London, 1971), p. 290, and Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, III (London, 1874), Chapter 1.
13. Forster, Life, III, Chapter 14.
14. Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford, 1978), p. 233.
15. For Dombey and Copperfield US sales see ibid., p. 209.
16. Ibid., p. 234.
17. D to Sheridan Muspratt, [?Feb. 1852], P, VI, p. 591 (Muspratt was a chemist, living in Liverpool, and married to an American actress, Susan, sister of Charlotte Cushman). D to Coutts, 16 Mar. 1852, P, VI, p. 627.
18. D to F, 30 June 1841, P, II, p. 313; D to Coutts, 10 Sept. 1845, P, IV, p. 373.
19. D to Coutts, 18 Apr. 1852, P, VI, p. 646.
20. D to Coutts, 14 Jan. 1854, P, VII, p. 245.
21. Dickens addressing the Warehousemen and Clerks’ Schools in Nov. 1857, describing the sort of schools he disliked, K. J. Fielding (ed.), The Speeches of Charles Dickens: A Complete Edition (Brighton, 1988), p. 242.
22. Unto this Last in the Cornhill Magazine, 2 (Aug. 1860), p. 159, given in Collins, The Critical Heritage, p. 314.
18 Little Dorrit and Friends 1853–1857
1. Dickens uses the word ‘imbecility’ of Mrs Hogarth in 1854 and of the whole Hogarth family on 17 Apr. 1856, in a letter to Wills, P, VIII, p. 99.
2. D to Catherine D, 14 Nov. 1853, P, VII, p. 198.
3. D to Catherine D, 5 Dec. 1853, P, VII, p. 224.
4. D to De La Rue, 23 Oct. 1857, P, VIII, p. 472.
5. This was in May 1854.
6. D tells Cerjat about this 3 Jan. 1855, P, VII, p. 496, but the reading must have happened earlier, possibly in 1852, 1853 or 1854.
7. D to Coutts, 27 May 56, P, VIII, p. 125.
8. D to F, [?Jan.–17 June 1854], P, VII, p. 354.
9. D to F, 29 Sept. 1854, P, VII, p. 428.
10. D to F, 10 Sept. 1854, P, VII, p. 412.
11. Both characterizations made later, of Albert after his death and of Louis-Napoleon in 1865, but representing his consistently held views of them.
12. D to Mrs Watson, 1 Nov. 1854, P, VII, p. 454.
13. D to Cerjat, 3 Jan. 1855, P, VII, p. 495.
14. D to Cerjat, ‘I fear that I see that for years to come, domestic Reforms are shaken to the root,’ 3 Jan. 1855, P, VII, p. 495; D to Layard, 10 Apr. 1855, P, VII, p. 587; D to F, 27 Apr. 1855, P, VII, p. 599.
15. D to Daily News, 14 June 1855, p. 2, given in K. J. Fielding (ed.), The Speeches of Charles Dickens: A Complete Edition (Brighton, 1988), p. 199. Dickens made the same point in his speech to the Association on 27 June: that he did his public service through literature, and would not step outside that sphere of action.
16. D to F, 30 Sept. 1855, P, VII, p. 713.
17. D in Folkestone to Macready, 4 Oct. 1855, P, VII, pp. 714–16.
18. D to Wilkie Collins, 4 Mar. 1855, P, VII, p. 555; D to F, [?2–3 May 1855], P, VII, p. 608; D to Mrs Watson, 21 May 1855, P, VII, pp. 626–7; D to Coutts, 8 May 1855, P, VII, p. 613; D to Coutts, 24 May 1855, P, VII, p. 629. The manuscript, like those of all the later novels, is written in a much smaller and more closely packed hand, and much more heavily revised.
19. A comparison with the working conditions of his fellow novelist Flaubert, writing and rewriting Madame Bovary at the same time, immured in the silent retreat his father had provided for him in the Norman countryside, unencumbered by wife, children or any other personal or professional obligations, able to spend days over a single page, is instructive. Both novelists lived their characters’ experience with them, grimacing as they wrote, but Flaubert could not endure interruptions and gave the world a perfectly considered, finished and polished piece of writing, while Dickens, who not only tolerated but often seemed to court distraction, pitted his prodigious inventive power against the demands of serialization and a tangled plot.
In spite of ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ Flaubert presents his characters with godlike contempt, whereas Dickens mocked some and pitied some but approached them on the whole as fellow human beings.
20. D to Wills, 9 Feb. 1855, P, VII, p. 531.
21. D to F, 3 and [?4 Feb.] 1855, P, VII, p. 523.
22. Dickens starts the narrative ‘thirty years ago’, and repeats ‘thirty years ago’ at the beginning of Chapter 6, which introduces William Dorrit. On the next page we are told that he had entered the Marshalsea Prison ‘long before’. We already know that Little Dorrit, e
ncountered in Chapter 5, is twenty-two, and was born in the Marshalsea, which means her father must have begun his imprisonment about 1802. This places the main action of the story in the mid-1820s, the reign of George IV and the childhood of Dickens.
23. Little Dorrit, end of Book One, Chapter 13.
24. In the first chapter. Dickens started smoking cigarettes, recently introduced into France, in 1854. D to Wills, 21 Sept. 1854, P, VII, p. 418, asking him to send four bundles of them from his office to Boulogne.
25. Chapter 14, headed ‘Little Dorrit’s Party’, has interesting preparatory notes: ‘Out all night – Woman in the street. “If it really was a party now!” – Burial Register for a pillow. This was Little Dorrit’s party <?after> The vice desertion, wretchedness of the great Capital. this was the party from which she went home.’
26. Little Dorrit, Book One, Chapter 31. Always a favourite scene of mine, and I was delighted to find that George Gissing, in his Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (London, 1898), writes of it, ‘For delicacy of treatment, for fineness of observation, this scene, I am inclined to think, is unequalled in all the novels.’
27. Little Dorrit, Book Two, Chapter 24.
28. D to F, 7 May 1857, P, VIII, p. 321, gives a slightly different account. The small boy he meets in Marshalsea Place is nursing a very big baby, tells Dickens about the history of the place, and calls the room’s tenant Jack Pithick.
29. Sales of the one-volume edition of Little Dorrit, published in May 1857 at 21s., were very good indeed: in eleven years it sold something like 85,000 copies.
30. D to Coutts, 11 Dec. 1854, P, VII, p. 482.
31. D to Coutts, 17 Nov. 1854, P, VII, pp. 468–9.
32. D to Coutts, 11 Dec. 1854, P, VII, p. 482. Maynard was her real name, but she was also known as Caroline Thompson, possibly taking the name of the father of her child, since Dickens sometimes referred to her as ‘Mrs Thompson’.
33. Revd William Tennant to Coutts, 3 Feb. 1855, P, VII, pp. 918–19.
34. See P, VII, p. 917, fn. 2.
Charles Dickens: A Life Page 56
