Charles Dickens: A Life (54 page)

His Hogarth in-laws remained unforgiven enemies, along with his former publishers Bradbury and Evans, and Catherine – ‘my Angel wife’ as he called her sardonically to Wills in a letter complaining of the financial demands made on him.
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He and Miss Coutts avoided an outright quarrel, but there very few meetings with her and Mrs Brown, and little contact except when Miss Coutts wrote pressing him to be reconciled with Catherine, and he declined, as happened in April 1860, and again in February 1864.
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Lemon, to whom he had been so close, was estranged and they met no more. Thackeray was also entirely lost, and in December 1859 he became a formidable rival editor of the newly founded
Cornhill
, specializing, like
All the Year Round
, in running high-quality fiction serials. Maclise had withdrawn into reclusiveness by the mid-1850s and did not reappear in his life. In the autumn of 1859 his old friend Frank Stone died, leaving Dickens to grieve, to arrange his burial in Highgate and to help his children, to which he applied himself with his usual generosity. The end of theatricals meant he saw less of friends who had taken part as actors or designers, such as Leech and Stanfield, although Leech brought his family to stay at Gad’s in the summer of 1861, and Stanny came to dine at Wellington Street.

Tom Beard, one of his oldest family friends, remained solid, whatever he thought of the separation. Charles Kent, a journalist and poet who had been writing favourable reviews of his work since 1848 and who held him in reverence, was promoted to a closer relationship, and began to be invited to Gad’s. Mary Boyle, his old acting partner, continued to adore him, and they exchanged cheery letters from time to time, and Mrs Watson of Rockingham was also loyal, although there were not many meetings with either. With Bulwer, Dickens was on excellent terms, and since he had suffered his own marital disaster he was sympathetic, even inviting Dickens to bring Georgina and Mamie with him to stay at Knebworth. Macready, now living in Cheltenham, remained affectionate and uncensorious. His granddaughter said later that he took the Nelly Ternan affair quite calmly as he knew that Dickens was not the celibate type, and that he quite approved of his separation from his wife. He was perturbed only when, as he thought, Dickens was conducting the affair with insufficient discretion, and risking a public scandal.
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Macready delighted Dickens by marrying again, in March 1860, Cecilia Spencer, a young woman of twenty-three to his sixty-seven, and his bride was soon pregnant.

Forster and Dickens had reversed roles: Forster was now the married man, rich and with a devoted wife, and Dickens the wayward ‘bachelor’ with hidden problems. Since Forster’s love was always greater than any disapproval he felt for whatever Dickens did, or planned to do, his friendship remained unwavering, the only drawback being that he was obliged to be away from London a good deal, now that he had a government job inspecting asylums. Dickens still consulted him about his work and sent him proofs when possible, and the Forsters came to Gad’s Hill for weekends. Proofs were also sent to Miss Ellen Ternan in Mornington Crescent, not only for her entertainment but her comments, because he valued her ‘intuitive sense and discretion’.
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So they discussed his writing in a way that must have been flattering to Nelly, and delightful for him. Francesco Berger, when very old, is said to have recalled musical Sunday evenings at Ampthill Square with Dickens and Nelly singing duets, but this often repeated and perfectly plausible story turns out to be a fabrication.
³²

Dickens’s spirits rose and fell markedly. In May 1860 he entertained James Fields – the American publisher he had first met in Boston, and who was now eager to persuade him to visit the US again – at Tavistock House. He liked Fields, who became a worshipper, and was charmed by his young second wife, Annie, whom he was meeting for the first time. She noted in her diary, ‘A shadow has fallen on that house, making Dickens seem rather the man of labor and of sorrowful thought than the soul of gaiety we find in all he writes.’
³³
Shortly after this Charley left for Hong Kong to become a tea buyer, and in July Katey married Wilkie’s brother Charles Collins, thirty-two to her twenty, a good-natured man but a semi-invalid, who was giving up art to try to write. Dickens blamed himself for Katey’s decision, knowing she was marrying without love and to get away from home, but he put on a showy wedding at Gad’s, with a special train to bring guests from London to Higham Station. Catherine was not invited, a piece of brutality in which Georgina, Mamie and Katey were all complicit. Katey left for her honeymoon wearing black, and the guests were entertained with games in the garden and taken to see Rochester Castle and Chatham before they departed. That evening Mamie found her father weeping into her sister’s wedding dress, and he told her how much he blamed himself for the marriage.
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Days after the wedding he heard of the serious illness of his one respectable and hard-working brother, Alfred, travelled north to be with him and arrived to find he had died, like their sister Fanny, of tuberculosis of the lung. His widow, Helen, left with five young children, became his responsibility, and he brought them first to Gad’s, then found them a nearby farmhouse before settling them in a house in London and ensuring that the boys got an education. At the same time he was doing his best for his mother, who had reached ‘the strangest state of mind from senile decay … her desire to be got up in sables like a female Hamlet, illumines the dreary scene with a ghastly absurdity that is the chief relief I can find in it.’
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At least he was able to give her into the care of Helen, installing them all in a house together. He was now maintaining three households of women in North London: his wife in Gloucester Crescent, the Ternans, a few streets south in Houghton Place, and his mother in Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town, with Helen and her children. The sale of the lease of Tavistock House for 2,000 guineas in 1860 gave him some extra funds, and he took a town house for the season each year, to please Mamie and Georgina. In 1861 it was at Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park, within walking distance of all the other North London houses in which his dependants lived. Furniture was moved from Tavistock House to Gad’s and to Wellington Street, where Dickens enjoyed showing off his ‘five very good rooms’ to friends who dined with him there; and where he had bedrooms for Georgy and Mamie should they ever need them.

In September 1860 he performed a ritual act, ridding himself of the past by burning thousands of letters accumulated over the years on a bonfire at Gad’s Hill. His appointed biographer, Forster, was not consulted.
³⁶
Eleven-year-old Henry Dickens, who lent a hand with the bonfire, remembered roasting onions in the hot ashes.
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It was a good summer for him because he persuaded his father to let him leave the school in Boulogne and go to Rochester Grammar School instead.

Dickens’s amusement for October was the sensational Road-Hill House murder in Somerset, much reported in the press, concerning a large and apparently respectable family and the discovery of the three-year-old son dead, suffocated and stabbed, in an outside privy. He had no doubt the murder had been committed by the child’s nursemaid and his father together, after the child woke up and found them in bed together, at their ‘blissful proceedings’ as Dickens put it, and they feared he would tell his mother. He relished the idea of such scandalous goings-on, damaging as they were to the sacred image of middle-class domestic respectability: for a moment he could look at the world with the cynicism of a Quilp or a Jaggers. But, although his belief that the father of the family was the murderer delighted him, it was not taken up by the prosecution.
³⁸

His chief worry in the autumn was the falling circulation of
All the Year Round
, and it was this that decided him to change his plans for
Great Expectations
and make it a shorter book suitable for division into weekly parts, in the hope of boosting sales of the magazine. It started on 1 December 1860, and in the same month Chapman & Hall published the first volume of his
Uncommercial Traveller
pieces, which sold out and reprinted twice. The winter of 1860/61 was the coldest for many years, and this was when Dickens was unwell. He returned to London on Boxing Day, leaving Georgina to cope at Gad’s while he settled at Wellington Street, seeing his doctor, going out with Collins and to theatres in the evening, and writing. As the weather improved he took his long walks again, discovering the new Millbank Road beside the river, with factories and railway work along it, and the ‘strangest beginnings and ends of wealthy streets pushing themselves into the very Thames. When I was a rower on that river it was all broken ground and ditch, with here and there a public house or two, and old mill, and a tall chimney.’
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He enjoyed contrasting the old urban landscape with the new, and looking back to youthful jaunts and river outings on a very different river.

Charley arrived home from China in February 1861, having seen Walter in Calcutta, and went to his mother’s just as Dickens moved to the Hanover Terrace house rented for the season. As well as being immersed in writing
Great Expectations
, he was preparing six readings to be given in London in March and April; and when he had done them, to great applause, and finished writing his book, he tried to be lazy at Gad’s. His sons Frank and Alfred both remembered rowing him on the Medway from Rochester to Maidstone, Dickens acting as cox, teasing and laughing with them, a river trip that must have given them a rare moment of shared enjoyment; and there were other expeditions on the Thames.
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But he found that the younger boys at home for the holidays disturbed him, and he had new readings, from
Copperfield
and
Nickleby
, to prepare for an autumn tour. Then the plans for the tour were thrown askew by the death of his manager Arthur Smith, and after that his brother-in-law and old friend Henry Austin also died, leaving his sister Letitia another widow dependant on him. He invited her to Gad’s, paid for the funeral, offered her money and set about vigorously applying for a pension for her through Lord Shaftesbury, citing the services Austin had given to public health. It took many letters and much insistence before he succeeded.

The last family event of 1861 was Charley’s wedding. The bride, Bessie Evans, daughter of Dickens’s onetime publisher, had been his sweetheart from childhood, and there was nothing surprising about the marriage, but Dickens chose to be outraged, having cast Evans into outer darkness. He tried to stop friends from attending the wedding, or entering the Evans house; and he blamed Catherine, who was of course at the wedding, and was indeed fond of the bride. He spoke ill of Bessie and warned Charley against going into partnership with his brother-in-law, young Frederick Evans, in a paper-making company, advice Charley, understandably enough, chose to ignore. His father was in any case embarked on a colossal reading tour, and on the day of the wedding he was somewhere between Brighton and Newcastle-on-Tyne and on his way to Scotland, impersonating Mr Micawber and Wackford Squeers in front of enraptured audiences. His Squeers, according to one observer, ‘impresses us with the belief that he enjoys being a brute and is not an actor being brutal’.
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In 1862 the Russian novelist Dostoevsky, an admirer of Dickens’s work – he had read
Pickwick Papers
and
David Copperfield
in prison – visited him at Wellington Street. Years later he wrote in a letter to a friend a remarkable account of what Dickens said in the course of their conversation about writing. Dostoevsky introduced Dickens’s words with his own:

The person he [the writer] sees most of, most often, actually every day, is himself. When it comes to a question of why a man does something else, it’s the author’s own actions which make him understand, or fail to understand, the sources of human action. Dickens told me the same thing when I met him at the office of his magazine … in 1862. He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.
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This is an amazing report, and if Dostoevsky remembered correctly it must be Dickens’s most profound statement about his inner life and his awareness of his own cruelty and bad behaviour. It is as though with Dostoevsky he could drop the appearance of perfect virtue he felt he had to keep up before the English public. It also suggests that he was aware of drawing his evil characters from a part of himself that he disapproved of and yet could not control. Dostoevsky’s Dickens reminds us of Eleanor Picken’s, now one sort of man, now another, the mood-swinging, the charm turning to aggression, the fun that gets out of hand.

Whatever Dickens felt about how he ought to feel, he was guided by no one but himself at this time. What little can be gleaned about his relations with the Ternans is that in September 1859 he wrote to his friend Régnier at the Comédie-Française to tell him that Fanny Ternan, ‘uncommonly clever and accomplished … as good and diligent as she is
spirituelle
’, would be in Paris with her mother in October.
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This was followed up by cheques for £50 to Mrs F. E. Ternan in Paris in October, and ‘£50 E. Ternan’s Bill’, so perhaps Nelly went to Paris to join her mother and sister. If Fanny had hoped to find work in Paris she was disappointed, but on her return she was engaged by the Eastern Opera House in the Mile End Road in London, and later joined the London Grand Opera Company, touring with them as Prima Donna. Maria was at the Lyceum acting with Madame Céleste and Mrs Keeley, both friends of Dickens, and Dickens went to see her perform more than once, but in February 1861 the Lyceum closed. The Census of April 1861 showed all the Ternans at Houghton Place with a seventeen-year-old servant, Jane, Mrs Ternan described as an ‘annuitant’, Fanny (25) a vocalist, Maria (23) an actress, and Ellen (22) without occupation.