Charles Dickens: A Life (49 page)

His first plan was to use it as a summer residence and let it out to tenants in winter. He bought furniture here and there – a mahogany dining table, quantities of chairs, beds, bedding, marble washstands – and asked his brother-in-law Henry Austin to supervise the building work he wanted done.
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He told Macready he hoped that buying Gad’s was ‘the best thing I could do for the boys – particularly Charley, who will now be able to have country air and change all through the fine weather; the railway enabling him to go up for business, and come down for dinner’.
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The idea was that the house should be ready to receive friends on 19 May, when they would celebrate Catherine’s forty-second birthday with a housewarming party. This is the only time her birthday is mentioned in his known letters, and it was the last they spent together.

Walter had his sixteenth birthday, passed his examinations well and was preparing for India, where, in May, the Mutiny broke out: he was due to sail in July. Dickens and Collins went to Brighton for a freezing weekend in March. In April he was approaching the end of
Dorrit
, but found time to read two stories, ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’ and ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’, in
Blackwood’s Magazine
by an anonymous author, and recommend them to Forster: ‘They are the best things I have seen since I began my course.’
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They were George Eliot’s first venture into fiction and, along with a third story, were later published as a book,
Scenes of Clerical Life
. Also in
Blackwood’s
was an unfavourable review of
Dorrit
which upset him, appearing just before he began on the last section of the book. He was accused of bad construction, of making an unsuccessful attempt to write on social questions, and of giving ‘twaddle’ to William Dorrit to speak. He had broken an old resolution not to read attacks and told Forster he was ‘sufficiently put out by it to be angry with myself being such a fool’.
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A month later, on 9 May, the book was finished. Proofs of the last number were sent to Stanfield, to whom it was dedicated, with a tender letter saying it was ‘a little record importing that we loved one another’.
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Stanfield was in his sixties, they had known one another for twenty years, and all the sweetness of Dickens’s character is in these words to his old friend.

A good deal of June was spent at Gad’s Hill, where it was soon evident that neither the water supply nor the drains could cope with the new demands made on them. This meant troops of workmen tramping about the garden, boring holes, installing pumps, making new cesspools and digging up flowerbeds in order to lay pipes beneath the ground; then, after replacing everything, being forced to dig it all up again as further problems presented themselves. Only when they had bored to 217 feet in August did they find a sufficient spring of water, and this had to be pumped up daily by a horse. Dickens declared that when the first glassful was drunk at the surface, it would have cost £200.
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Hans Christian Andersen, invited in April by Dickens to visit, arrived in June and remained for five weeks, largely outstaying his welcome. Dickens started by liking him well enough, but his eccentricities and difficulties with the English language exasperated Georgina, Katey and especially Charley, who was horrified to be asked to shave him one morning. Andersen got on best with Catherine, who was patient and gentle, and whom he saw as the embodiment of Agnes from
David Copperfield
. Miss Coutts and Mrs Brown came to Gad’s to meet him, warned by Dickens that ‘he speaks no language but his own Danish, and is suspected of not even knowing that.’ They took him for a walk and lay on the grass while he made daisy chains, and afterwards suggested he should move on from Gad’s Hill to stay with them in Stratton Street, an invitation he accepted, to the relief of his host.
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The timing of Andersen’s visit was unfortunate because it coincided with Dickens being caught up in a new whirl of activity when he heard on 8 June of the death of his friend Douglas Jerrold, and immediately set about schemes to raise money for his widow and children. Here was his chance to revive
The Frozen Deep
and, knowing that the Queen was eager to see it, to arrange a performance for her. When she said she wanted it to be at Buckingham Palace, Dickens demurred on the grounds that it would put his daughters in a difficult social position at Court, and she allowed herself to be persuaded to come instead to the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street, where further performances for the public were to be staged. On 4 July she brought a large party, including King Leopold of Belgium and her son-in-law Prince Frederick of Prussia, to a performance which she found ‘intensely dramatic … touching … moving’, as she wrote in her diary. In the interval between
The Frozen Deep
and the farce she sent for Dickens to congratulate him, and he sent back a message to say he felt it inappropriate to meet her dressed as he was to play the farce. A second request met with the same refusal, a considerable breach of etiquette, since a royal request was considered a command. But Dickens was pleased with himself for sticking to his point, and the Queen had the sense not to hold it against him. Her secretary sent a letter conveying her fulsome praise for the piece, the acting and the moral message, and assured him, ‘Unofficially I may tell you – everything went off as well as possible.’
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Dickens also decided to give two paid public readings – the first ever – of
A Christmas Carol
at St Martin’s Hall in Long Acre, for the Jerrold fund. They were greeted with tumultuous enthusiasm by an audience of 2,000. Another two public performances of
The Frozen Deep
followed. Meanwhile the Boulogne schoolboys came home for the holidays, their first at Gad’s Hill, and saw Walter before he sailed for India. He wept as he said goodbye to his mother, sisters and younger brothers. Dickens and Charley went to Southampton to see him on board the
Indus
, and he was ‘cut up for a minute or so when I bade him good bye, but recovered directly, and conducted himself like a Man’.
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It was quite usual for boys of sixteen and younger to be sent off to serve in the Army and Navy, and after years of boarding school it may have seemed not much worse, but for the fact that India was half the world away.

Dickens too recovered directly, to deal with drains, rehearsals, another performance, another reading in Manchester and his plan, eagerly put forward, to create some new rooms at the Home. ‘I know my plan is a good one – because it is mine!’ he joked to Miss Coutts, but as so often the joke was meant seriously.
⁴⁵
Now there were builders’ estimates to be considered at Shepherd’s Bush. Meanwhile the
Edinburgh Review
printed an attack on
Little Dorrit
, accusing Dickens of unfairness in his presentation of the English civil service, and of a failure to understand the administrative system in his satirical depiction of the Circumlocution Office.
⁴⁶
Other objections were made which were open to rebuttal, and Dickens at once set about answering the attack, with great force and effect, writing half his article before one of his readings and finishing it the next morning, before another performance of
The Frozen Deep.
He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life, and what he might do about it.

A pressing request to take
The Frozen Deep
to Manchester now had to be considered. On 25 July he assured Miss Coutts that he was not going to do so, but a week later, after another visit to Manchester, and realizing that more money was needed for the Jerrold fund, he changed his mind. Francesco Berger was told to prepare for two performances at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 21 and 22 August. For this, given that the hall seated an audience of 4,000, it would be necessary to employ trained actresses, since the voices of the Dickens and Hogarth girls could not fill the space. It was not easy to find professional actresses to take over their parts at such short notice. Dickens was turned down by Emmeline Montague, and none had been found when he went to read in Manchester on 3 August.
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On 8 August the final London performance took place, leaving him so tired that he kept to his bed all the next day, and wrote to Frank Stone asking him to take over his part in the farce,
Uncle John
, in Manchester. Catherine was now also ill in bed. On 12 August he booked twenty-three rooms for the whole troupe in a Manchester hotel and the next day he told a friend he would be rehearsing with the ‘professional ladies’ at the Gallery on Tuesday and Wednesday, the 18th and 19th. Mrs Ternan and two of her daughters had been found and recommended by Alfred Wigan of the Olympic Theatre, a friend of Dickens since he played in his farce
The Strange Gentleman
in 1836. Mrs Ternan, known for her grace, elegance and intelligence as a young actress in the 1820s, had had a long career and was still playing leading parts alongside her old friend Macready, as well as Charles Kemble and Samuel Phelps at Sadler’s Wells, and her three daughters had been brought up to act from childhood. She and her two younger daughters, Maria and Ellen, had agreed to play in the farce as well as in
The Frozen Deep
, and were ready to learn their lines in the few days available.

Dickens remembered that he had seen Maria act as a child, and he took to both sisters and their mother immediately. The name ‘Ternan’ he pronounced Ter
nan
, with the emphasis on the second syllable, and the youngest daughter was always Nelly to him.
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He rehearsed them at the Gallery on 18 August, and the same day wrote to Stone saying he no longer wanted him to take over his part in
Uncle John
but would play it himself. Dark-eyed Maria had seen
The Frozen Deep
performed at the Gallery, and she was to take the major part of Clara; Nelly, fair and blue-eyed, would play opposite Dickens in
Uncle John
.
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After reassuring Miss Coutts in a last-minute note that his daughters were not to be subjected to the ordeal of appearing in the Free Trade Hall, he set off on 20 August for Manchester with a large family party, including Catherine, recovered from her illness, and his cast, musicians and technicians.

He was in such good spirits that he had everyone playing games on the train. There was no corridor, and conundrums were passed on sticks and umbrellas through the windows from carriage to carriage, with much laughter and shouting against the wind.
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His elation continued, and in Manchester he gave his finest performances yet, reducing Maria Ternan to sobs of grief as she knelt over him while he died on stage, her tears dropping straight into his mouth and soaking into his beard.
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Her mother and sister comforted her, everyone weeping and emotions running high, before they dressed for the farce.

Back at Gad’s Hill, he wrote to Mrs Brown to say he had heard from Walter, whose ship had reached the Mediterranean, and with this news he included an account of his own unsettled state of mind: ‘I feel as if the scaling of all the Mountains in Switzerland, or the doing of any wild thing until I dropped, would be but a slight relief.’
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The next day Collins was informed of his ‘grim despair and restlessness’, with a suggestion that they go away together to give themselves a subject for a travel piece in
Household Words
, and because he wanted to ‘escape from myself. For, when I
do
start up and stare myself seedily in the face … my blankness is inconceivable – indescribable – my misery, amazing.’
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In truth, he had found out that Mrs Ternan and all three of her daughters were going to be in Doncaster in mid-September, to perform at the theatre during race week, and he at once booked rooms at the Angel Hotel there for himself and Collins. Miss Coutts received a long account of Maria Ternan’s performance at Manchester, her ‘womanly tenderness’ and ‘genuine and feeling heart’.
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With Forster he exchanged letters, answering his request for ‘some confidences as in the old time’ with a bleak announcement that

Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I make her so too – and much more so. She is exactly what you know in the way of being amiable and complying, but we are strangely ill-assorted for the bond there is between us. God knows she would have been a thousand times happier if she had married another kind of man, and that her avoidance of this destiny would have been at least equally good for us both. I am often cut to the heart by thinking what a pity it is, for her own sake, that I ever fell in her way; and if I were sick or disabled to-morrow, I know how sorry she would be, and how deeply grieved myself, to think how we had lost each other. But exactly the same incompatibility would arise, the moment I was well again; and nothing on earth could make her understand me, or suit us to each other. Her temperament will not go with mine. It mattered not so much when we had only ourselves to consider, but reasons have been growing since which make it all but hopeless that we should even try to struggle on. What is now befalling me I have seen steadily coming, ever since the days you remember when Mary was born; and I know too well that you cannot, and no one can, help me.
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In his next letter he wrote of the ‘wayward and unsettled feeling which is part (I suppose) of the tenure on which one holds an imaginative life, and which I have, as you ought to know well, often only kept down by riding over it like a dragoon’. He went on to say he felt it would be better for Catherine as well as himself if ‘something might be done’, impossible as that seemed; and he conceded that there was blame on his side as well as hers. At the end of the letter he asked Forster, ‘What do you think of my paying for this place [Gad’s Hill], by reviving that old idea of some Readings from my books. I am very strongly tempted. Think of it.’
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