Charles Dickens: A Life (61 page)

In August he travelled to Liverpool with Dolby to see him aboard ship for Boston, where he was to investigate what might be expected of a reading tour, and also to sound out the possibility of Nelly’s going to America with them. Dickens was using a stick for his lameness, and in Liverpool his left foot swelled so badly that on returning to London he went straight to a specialist, who diagnosed an inflamed bunion and insisted he must rest.
²⁴
For several days he lay on the downstairs sofa at Wellington Street. When he was a little better he wrote to Dolby, ‘Madame sends you her regard, and hopes to meet you when you come home. She is very anxious for your report, and is ready to commit herself to the Atlantic, under your care. To which I always add: “
If
I go, my dear,
if
I go.”’
²⁵
These are wonderfully revealing sentences, telling us that Dickens spoke of Nelly as ‘Madame’ to Dolby, a reminder of her French years and an acknowledgement of her status in his life. They also show that she was so eager to go to America that she was ready to make the crossing even under the care of Mr Dolby. What is not clear is what persona she would have been given in the US, since she could hardly be Mrs Dolby – or Mrs Tringham. The most interesting thing of all is that this is the only occasion on which we hear the voice of Dickens speaking to Nelly, his ‘my dear’ slightly jokey, and slightly admonitory too: ‘
If
I go, my dear,
if
I go.’ She is pushing him, and he is making his position clear.
²⁶
But how could any of them ever have expected to make such a plan work?

The diary shows that there were two cricket matches at Gad’s Hill in August. The Forsters were there for the first on the 13th and the 14th, and there was another on the 29th. Dickens also began work with Collins on the Christmas number of
All the Year Round
. On 2 September, hearing that there were rumours of his being unwell, he wrote to
The Times
asserting, ‘I was never better in my life,’ and repeating it in a second letter to the
Sunday Gazette
.
²⁷
He knew that reports of ill health might jeopardize the American tour. Meanwhile Dolby was on his way back to England, and at the end of the month there was a tripartite meeting – Dolby, Forster and Dickens – to decide on whether to go ahead with the American plan. Forster, like Wills, was strongly opposed to his going, Dolby was in favour. Dickens made up his mind to go and sent a telegram on 30 September to say he would go. It was followed by a letter to his friend and publisher in Boston, James Fields, telling him that Dolby, who was returning to America almost at once, was ‘charged with a certain delicate mission from me, which he will explain to you by word of mouth’, and on the same day he wrote to Mrs Fields declining her invitation to stay with them in Boston. Although James Fields was informed of Nelly’s existence, and at some stage passed on what he was told to his wife, it would have been out of the question for Dickens to take Nelly into their respectable household.
²⁸
Dolby sailed again on 12 October, charged with talking further with Fields as to whether he thought it possible for Nelly to travel with Dickens in America.

George Dolby and ‘The Chief ’ – Dolby cheered and cared for Dickens, and managed his later reading tours, with love and loyalty.

Nelly let her sister Fanny know that she planned to come to Florence with their mother at the end of the month.
²⁹
She told Dickens she was going to Italy, but both of them still hoped she might yet follow him to America. His diary entries for October show him at Peckham from the 1st to the 3rd, dining in London at Verrey’s on the 2nd with Nelly and Dolby. He was at Peckham again from the 7th to the 10th, and from the 15th to the 17th. On the 16th he wrote to Dolby, ‘It may be a relief to you when you get this, to know that I am quite prepared for your great Atlantic-cable message being adverse … I think it so likely that Fields may see shadows of danger which we in our hopeful encouragement of one another may have made light of, that I think the message far more likely to be No than Yes. I shall try to make up my mind to it, and to be myself when we meet.’ The ‘to be myself’ suggests how sharp the disappointment would be, even though he was prepared for it. On the 18th N and M were at his office. He was at Peckham again from the 20th to the 25th, with a farewell dinner at Verrey’s on the 25th (the diary entry, which read ‘Dine Verreys N’, was enclosed in a double-lined box). After this Nelly set off for Florence with her mother, arriving there at the end of the month.

Dickens arranged for Forster to have ‘a general and ample Power of Attorney to act for me in all things’ during his absence.
³⁰
He gave dinner to Forster and Macready at Wellington Street on the 28th, dined with Percy Fitzgerald on the 29th and Wilkie Collins on the 30th, and went to Drury Lane on 1 November. A committee that included Fechter, Wilkie Collins, Charles Kent, the editor of the
Daily Telegraph
and Bulwer had been busy setting up a public farewell banquet for him before he set off for America. It was fixed for 2 November, with sponsors sought and tickets sold to the general public, making it a curious mixture of grandees, friends and fans to be gathered together in the London Freemasons’ Hall. The venue was decorated for the occasion with laurel leaves and the titles of Dickens’s books in gilded lettering, and music was provided by the band of the Grenadier Guards. About 450 men attended, and a hundred ladies were allowed to watch from the gallery, Georgina, Mamie and Katey among them. They did not miss much, because according to one report the waiters were drunk, the soup cold, the ice cream warm; and there were scrambles for greasy fragments of tepid dishes.
³¹
Among the notables present were the Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Mayor of London and the President of the Royal Academy. Gladstone expressed doubts as to whether dining was the best way to show admiration for Dickens and both he and Disraeli declined invitations; other friends confined themselves to messages of support, among them Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Ruskin, Frith, Arnold, Lord Shaftesbury and Lord John Russell. Forster disapproved of the way the dinner was organized, and was prevented from attending by an attack of bronchitis.
³²
Dickens, almost overcome with emotion, and obliged to deal with a newly wired dental plate, spoke well as he always did, and was repeatedly cheered; and there were many more speeches and toasts, so that it was nearly midnight when he emerged into Great Queen Street, where a further crowd had gathered to cheer him yet again.

Among the letters wishing him well for the journey was one from Catherine, to which he replied, thanking her with something approaching warmth: ‘I am glad to receive your letter, and to accept and reciprocate your good wishes. Severe hard work lies before me; but that is not a new thing in my life, and I am content to go my way and do it. Affectionately yours –’
³³

A week later he was seen off aboard the
Cuba
in Liverpool by Georgina, Mamie, Katey, Charley, Wills, Wilkie and Charles Collins, Charles Kent, Arthur Chappell and Edmund Yates. He travelled with his valet Scott and his reading equipment, and took most of his meals in his cabin during the ten-day Atlantic crossing, nursing the painful foot. He had left Wills with instructions for communicating with Nelly. ‘If she needs any help will come to you, or if she changes her address, you will immediately let me know if she changes. Until then it will be Villa Trollope, a Ricorboli, Firenze, Italy … On the day after my arrival out I will send you a short Telegram at the office. Please copy its exact words, (as they will have a special meaning for her), and post them to her as above by the very next post after receiving my telegram. And also let Gad’s Hill know – and let Forster know – what the telegram is.’ A further note says that Forster ‘knows Nelly as you do, and will do anything for her if you want anything done’. Nelly would understand that if the telegram read ‘all well’ it meant she was to set off for America, but if ‘safe and well’ she was not to come. He knew she was in Florence and they must have discussed how she might travel to America, but on 21 November, two days after reaching Boston, he wrote to Wills ‘After this present mail, I shall address Nelly’s letters to your care, for I do not quite know where she will be. But she will write to you, and instruct you where to forward them. In any interval between your receipt of one or more, and my Dear Girl’s so writing to you, keep them by you.’
³⁴

The next day he sent a coded telegram to Wills: ‘Safe and well expect good letter full of hope’. Fields, sympathetic as he was to Dickens’s difficulties in his private life, had made it clear there could be no Madame on the tour. Nelly remained at the Villa Ricorboli throughout the winter, sewing shirts for Garibaldi’s soldiers, turning down an invitation to spend Christmas in Rome, and another to join her sisters and brother-in-law Tom Trollope on a trip to Vesuvius. She was still there in March on her twenty-ninth birthday.

Boston was Dickens’s favourite American city, and he made a good start in a comfortable hotel with a large suite adorned with flowers by Mrs Fields herself. His foot improved and the clear, frosty weather allowed him to take eight-mile walks with her husband. Both were flattered by the intimacy he offered, and he confided in James Fields his unhappiness in having so many children by an uncongenial wife. He enjoyed a few quiet dinners with old friends, Longfellow, Charles Norton, Emerson, but it was understood that he needed time alone. He was impatient for the first reading on 2 December, knowing how much lay ahead and how high expectations were. On 22 November the young Henry James wrote to his brother, ‘Dickens has arrived for his readings. It is impossible to get tickets. At 7 o’clock A.M. on the first day of the sale there were two or three hundred at the office, and at 9, when I strolled up, nearly a thousand. So I don’t expect to hear him.’
³⁵
James did in fact hear what he later described as the ‘hard charmless readings’, but his verdict was not the public’s, and from the first Dickens almost always commanded full houses and ecstatic applause.
³⁶
People knew that this was
the
event that must be caught now or never, and they were ready to come for miles and through all weather to hear the great man. Sometimes he was showered with bouquets and buttonholes, and always cheered. Dolby had to battle with speculators who bought blocks of tickets, and he was regularly and unfairly blamed in the press for the problems produced. He kept his head and acted as firmly as he could, and the sales were spectacular. In the first few days they made a profit of £1,000 and at the end of the tour the final sum was a dizzying £20,000.
³⁷

The first New York readings coincided with heavy snow storms. The audiences turned up just the same, but Dickens was struck down with one of his terrible colds in the head. He tried ‘allopathy, homeopathy, cold things, warm things, sweet things, bitter things, stimulants, narcotics, all with the same result. Nothing will touch it.’
³⁸
It turned into what he described as ‘American catarrh’ and kept its hold on him for the rest of the tour, made worse by the constant travelling in overheated and unventilated trains. In January he told Forster he had ‘no chance of being rid of the American catarrh until I embark for England. It is very distressing. It likewise happens, not seldom, that I am so dead beat when I come off that they lay me down on a sofa after I have been washed and dressed, and I lie there, extremely faint, for quarter of an hour. In that time I rally and come right.’
³⁹
The decision was made to cut down the ambitious original plan, which was to take the tour as far as Chicago and the west as well as to Canada and Nova Scotia, and to remain in the east throughout. He found it increasingly hard to sleep. Dolby describes going anxiously into his room during the night and each time finding him awake, although protesting he was perfectly cheerful; but Dickens told Georgy, ‘I can scarcely exaggerate what I sometimes undergo from sleeplessness.’
⁴⁰
He could not get up in the mornings, and presently had to be prescribed sedatives.

At the end of March he told Forster, ‘I am nearly used up … if I had engaged to go on into May, I think I must have broken down.’
⁴¹
During the later stages of the tour his lameness was so bad that Dolby had to help him across the platform to his reading desk and off at the end. His appetite diminished until he was eating almost nothing. He described his regime himself: ‘I cannot eat (to anything like the necessary extent) and have established this system. At 7 in the morning, in bed, a tumbler of new cream and two tablespoonsful of rum. At 12, a sherry cobbler and a biscuit. At 3 (dinner time) a pint of champagne. At five minutes to 8, an egg beaten up with a glass of sherry. Between the parts [of the reading], the strongest beef tea that can be made, drunk hot. At a quarter past 10, soup, and any little thing to drink that I can fancy. I do not eat more than half a pound of solid food in the whole four-and-twenty hours, if so much.’
⁴²
In spite of this, no reading once announced was cancelled. In all he delivered seventy-six.