Charles Dickens: A Life (22 page)

Oliver
was finished and with the printers by the end of October, and Dickens had now only
Nickleby
to worry about. Restless as ever, he set off with Browne for a sightseeing trip to Leamington, Kenilworth, Warwick Castle and Stratford, and on into north Wales, leaving Forster to deal with the proofs of
Oliver
, and to keep Catherine cheerful with his visits. As so often happens after a period of intense work, Dickens became ill, and wrote home to say he had suffered such an ecstasy of pain in his side during the night that he felt half dead. He dosed himself with henbane, a violent and dangerous herb which acts as a sedative and pain-killer, and it did wonders for him. Forster decided to come to meet him in Liverpool – ‘I trust you to see my dear Kate, and bring the latest intelligence of her & the darlings,’ Dickens wrote to him.
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Forster travelled up on the new Grand Junction Railway, and together they decided to cut short the trip and return to London to make sure
Oliver
went to press without any mistakes. This meant leaving Liverpool at three in the morning to arrive at Euston Square in the afternoon, but both felt it worth the effort. On 9 November
Oliver Twist
was published in three volumes. It sold well, and was read that winter by the young Queen Victoria, who found it ‘excessively interesting’.
¹⁹
Oliver
is the only one of Dickens’s novels without a dedication, perhaps because he was too hard pressed to remember to make one: the obvious dedicatee was Forster, but he had to content himself with being Mamie’s godfather.
²⁰

Having earned himself a little time off in November, Dickens finished a farce intended for Macready,
The Lamplighter
. Macready had to tell him it was not worth putting on, and Dickens accepted the verdict with good grace. He was able to see an early dramatization of
Nickleby
at the Adelphi Theatre, which caused him some groans. He also went to a demonstration of mesmerism, or magnetizing, by Dr John Elliotson, one of the founders of University College Hospital, London. Elliotson was denounced when the girls with whom he was working were found to be faking, and he resigned from the hospital, but he denied the charges against him and continued to practise medicine and mesmerism. Dickens believed in him, became a friend, employed him as his family doctor and was fascinated by mesmerism, so much so that he began to experiment with it himself three years later.

His chief problem during the autumn was the behaviour of his father, who had once again defaulted on a loan, leaving another Barrow brother-in-law, this time Edward, to pay £57. Dickens settled the debt, furious at the shame of it, and at the waste of his hard-earned money. He accepted that he must help his father with regular handouts, but he began to think of moving him out of London to keep him away from further temptation. December brought a great round of social activities, including the forming of the Trio Club with Forster and Ainsworth, which meant more dinners together. He dined with Elliotson on 27 December, Ainsworth on the 29th, Talfourd on the 30th and gave a dinner at home for New Year’s Eve with Forster, Ainsworth and Cruikshank. Forster stayed at Doughty Street for several nights, so that little Charley, trotting confidently to the guest room on 4 January, ‘was much disappointed to find you had not taken up your quarters there, permanently’.
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Forster must have gone home to collect his present for Mamie’s christening the next day at the new St Pancras Church. This was followed two days later by a long-planned ‘gentle flare’, which turned into a great gathering of family and friends, to celebrate both the christening and Charley’s second birthday.

After a rapid visit with Ainsworth to Manchester, where they were offered a joint celebratory dinner, Dickens made the main business of January 1839 another fierce skirmish in his long battle with Bentley. The underlying cause was the impossibility of satisfying the two publishers he had engaged himself to, who were competing for his work. Chapman & Hall were also markedly more generous in their dealings with him than Bentley, who was inclined to stick to the terms already agreed. By now Dickens had decided he wanted to give up the editorship of the
Miscellany
, and to postpone the delivery of the promised next novel,
Barnaby Rudge
. He knew he needed a rest, he was angry with Bentley, and he decided that the best way forward was to send him a written blast of complaint. It is a mixture of rage and high-sounding rhetoric, and he submitted it to Forster, who may have added his own editorial touches. Part of it goes,

the consciousness that my books are enriching everybody connected with them but myself, and that I, with such a popularity as I have acquired, am struggling in old toils, and wasting my energies in the very height and freshness of my fame, and the best part of my life, to fill the pockets of others, while for those who are nearest and dearest to me I can realise little more than a genteel subsistence: all this puts me out of heart and spirits … I do most solemnly declare that morally, before God and man, I hold myself released from such hard bargains as these, after I have done so much for those who drove them. This net that has been wound about me, so chafes me, so exasperates and irritates my mind, that to break it at whatever cost … is my constant impulse … and for the time I have mentioned – six months from the conclusion of
Oliver
in the
Miscellany
– I wash my hands of any fresh accumulation of labour …
²²

Bentley was ready to agree to much of what Dickens asked for, but on condition that he set aside
Nickleby
for six months and took on no other tasks. The condition was aimed at his rival publisher and was an impossible one for Dickens to accept, because there was no question of giving up
Nickleby
in mid-serialization. He accused Bentley of ‘offensive impertinence’. Then he persuaded Ainsworth to take over the editorship of the
Miscellany
and at once resigned from it himself. All through February solicitors worked at yet another new agreement. It was the ninth, and it left Dickens with a good offer of bonuses for
Oliver
and a commitment to deliver
Barnaby
to Bentley on 1 January 1840. After these considerable concessions it was as well for Bentley that he did not see Dickens’s diary entry for his twenty-seventh birthday on 7 February, with its smug cheerfulness: ‘the end of a most prosperous and happy year, for which and all other blessings I thank GOD with all my heart and soul’. There is something Pepysian about this pious remark, coming on the heels of his cries of woe and ferocious dealings with his publisher.
²³

With only one serial in hand now, there was time to attend to other things. In March 1839 he travelled to Devon alone, having failed in an attempt to persuade Forster to make the trip with him (‘you know how much you would lighten its weariness’).
²⁴
His intention was to find a house in which to settle his parents and youngest brother, Augustus. He had made up his mind to spend several hundred pounds on providing them with somewhere comfortable, but far enough from London to keep his father out of mischief. With his usual quickness he lighted on a cottage at once, a mile out of Exeter, ‘a jewel of a place’, with a respectable landlady, excellent parlour, beautiful little drawing room, noble garden, view of Exeter Cathedral, a thatched roof, cellars, coal holes, two or three bedrooms, etc., etc., and all exquisitely clean.
²⁵
He took it immediately, stayed on to furnish it from local suppliers, and characteristically began to think how happily, if he were older, he himself might live there for many a year; only failing to consider that his parents were not choosing to live there but being told they must. Their opinion of the plan is not on record. He sent for his mother first, to deal with the curtains and prepare the house further, his father and brother to follow a few days later. His letters to Catherine were tender: ‘To say how much I miss you, would be ridiculous. I miss the children in the morning too and their dear little voices which have sounds for you and me that we shall never forget.’
²⁶
It looks as though their difficulties were no longer troubling him; and Catherine was pregnant again.

Having set up his parents, in May he took his own family to Elm Cottage at Petersham, a quiet village set between Richmond Park and the water meadows bordering the Thames. They stayed for four months, inviting the usual troops of friends to share their pleasures, the large garden with a swing, flowers and green leaves everywhere, glow worms jewelling the roads after dusk, the great tidal river. Dickens went to the races at Hampton several times, set up bowling, quoits and Battledore
²⁷
to play with his friends, and caused amazement by getting up at six to plunge into the Thames and swim to Richmond Bridge before breakfast. He sometimes rode into town and back, even late in the evening, and now also had a carriage and groom to collect him when necessary. His fame can be judged by the fact that the local grandees wished to meet him, and on 1 July he dined at Little Strawberry Hill with the two ancient and learned Miss Berrys, Mary and Agnes, who had lived there since 1791, when their friend Horace Walpole had left them the house. They were historians and editors, they had known the salons of Paris before the Revolution and breathed another world; but what they made of Dickens, or he of them, is lost.

As he got on towards the end of
Nickleby
he began to turn over an idea for a new project to be carried out with Chapman & Hall the following year, that of a threepenny weekly magazine of occasional pieces and stories, which would be made up into volumes. He convinced himself that this would be less demanding than writing another novel as a serial, and it seemed to promise an attractive financial return. There was naturally much discussion with Forster. In July he also found that sending his father to Devon had not solved his problems. A letter with bad news from his mother made him ‘sick at heart with both her and father too, and think this
is
too much’, though he doesn’t say what the trouble is. Then ‘Alfred is instructed by his Papa that it’s “all up”!!!’
²⁸
His confidant was Mitton, who seems to have dealt with the problems for the moment.

Dickens was invited to speak at a celebratory dinner for Macready, after which Macready asked him to be godfather to his latest child. In agreeing, Dickens proposed that, in exchange, Macready should be godfather to the baby he and Catherine expected in the autumn, described as ‘that last and final branch of a genteel small family of three’.
²⁹
The letter makes clear that he wants to have no more than three children and sets up a mystery as to why, with his inquiring mind, and friends with medical knowledge, he appears to have done nothing to make sure that no more arrived.

From Petersham they went on almost at once, on 3 September, to Broadstairs, beside the sea in Kent, where they took another house and were joined by brother Fred for his holiday. Now Dickens’s diary has the single word ‘Work’ every day until, on 20 September, he was able to write, ‘Work./Finished Nickleby this day at 2 o’clock, and went over to Ramsgate with Fred and Kate to send the last little chapter to Bradbury & Evans in a parcel. Thank God that I have lived to get through it happily.’
³⁰
Forster was due to come down, but Dickens decided to travel back to town himself to look over his proofs, so that they could dine together, go through the last number of
Nickleby
and take the boat in the morning, still together: ‘beautiful passage. Kate and the dear children waiting for us at the pier.’
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After that it was swimming and sunshine from breakfast to dinner every day.

Nickleby
was to be published in one volume in October. It was dedicated to Macready, and his favoured publishers, Chapman & Hall, were giving a celebratory dinner in the City on 5 October. Dickens said it was to be a quiet affair for one or two intimate friends, but in the event there were something like twenty guests and it turned into an occasion which Macready felt was ‘too splendid’. The climax of the evening was the presentation of Maclise’s portrait of Dickens, commissioned by Chapman & Hall and painted in the summer. The most attractive and the warmest of all the portraits, it shows him just turned away from the desk where he has been working, his eyes ‘wonderfully beaming with intellect and running over with humour and cheerfulness’, as Forster wrote later. He went on, ‘there was that in the face as I first recollect it which no time could change … the quickness, the keenness, and practical power, the eager, restless, energetic outlook … Light and motion flashed from every part of it.’
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This was Dickens as angel, with no sign of the blackguard.

To Bentley, Dickens did not appear as an angel. Bentley was expecting to receive the completed text of
Barnaby Rudge
in January, and was preparing to advertise it as a three-volume novel for 1840. But although Dickens told Cruikshank to expect chapters of the manuscript for illustration in October, and said he was getting on well with it, he soon put it aside again. His head was full of ideas for the weekly magazine he was proposing to edit for Chapman & Hall, to be called
Master Humphrey’s Clock.
He was also, for good measure, scribbling some
Sketches of Young Couples
, also for Chapman & Hall; they would publish this anonymously, because he could not be seen to be breaking his agreement with Bentley to publish no other book.
³³
So the tangle of his dealings with the rival publishers grew worse.

American publishers were adding to his distrust of the whole tribe. Across the Atlantic there was no legislation of any kind covering the rights of foreign authors, and publishers simply took what they wanted and did what they liked with it: for example, the Philadelphia firm of Carey, Lea & Blanchard had put out
Sketches by Boz
under several different titles in 1837, and incorporated part of
Oliver Twist
into one of the volumes, without asking permission or offering any payment to the author. In June 1837 they made their first contact with ‘Mr Saml Dickens’, as they called him, offering him a one-off payment of £25 for the parts of
Pickwick
they had been selling to the public since 1836 at large profit to themselves. In 1838 they sent Bentley £60 and Dickens £50 for advance proofs of
Oliver
, and tried to get proofs of
Nickleby
, because the acquisition of advance proofs put an American publisher into a stronger position against his rivals. Later they offered Dickens down payments of a little over £100 for advance proofs of
Master Humphrey’s Clock
and
Barnaby Rudge.
³⁴
Dickens answered their letters politely, and for the moment accepted the situation he was helpless to change, but would challenge once he arrived in America.
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