Charles Dickens: A Life (69 page)

An eloquent letter for a woman of eighty-six, and it shows how close the bonds were between the two women who had shared their lives with Dickens, and shared his time and attention, fifty years before. Nelly died six months later, in April 1914, cared for by Geoffrey, who registered her age as sixty-five.
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Mother and son loved one another dearly, yet he had no idea of her real age or her early life, that she and her sisters had been actresses, or of her years with Dickens. He would find out none of these things until the 1920s, because he re-enlisted on 5 August 1914, fought a tough war and continued to serve in the Army with Dunsterforce in Persia until 1920. Only on his return did he go through his mother’s and aunt Fanny’s papers and begin to understand how they had deceived everyone.

Georgina lived to be ninety-one, dying in April 1917, cared for by Henry and his wife. Katey’s husband died at Christmas 1918, a great sorrow for her. Henry and Katey were now the only Dickens children left alive. They were also the most intelligent. Katey, called ‘Lucifer Box’ as a child by her father for her tendency to fire up, had been the last of his wanted children, and Henry was the son who surprised and delighted him at the end of his life. It was Katey who was most intent on speaking out about their father. When in the 1890s she told Bernard Shaw what she knew of her parents’ separation, she said she wished someone would correct the prevailing view of Dickens as ‘a joyous, jocose gentleman walking about the world with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch’.
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In the 1920s, regretting that she had not written a proper account of him, conscious that she knew more about him than anyone else living, and that neither Nelly nor Georgina needed to be considered any longer, she decided to do something. Lucifer Box went into action.

She asked a young woman friend, Gladys Storey, known to her since 1910, to take down what she had to say about her parents, and from 1923 Miss Storey made notes of their conversations. If there was not much method in their procedure, what Miss Storey put down makes good sense. Katey spoke out as no one had done before, mixing love and anger, but clear in what she said. One of her objects was to do justice to her mother and to atone for her own failure to give her support at the time of the separation; but she also loved her father and was not out to blacken his name, only to tell the truth as far as she was able. Sometimes she went too far for Miss Storey, who wrote down her remark ‘My father was not a gentleman – he was too mixed to be a gentleman’ in her notes, but did not quote it when she came to write her book.
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Katey died in May 1929, and it took Miss Storey a decade to shape her material into a narrative,
Dickens and Daughter.
It was published in 1939, five years after Thomas Wright’s
Life of Charles Dickens
had horrified his admirers with its revelations about the affair with Nelly. But he had not known Dickens, and this was the voice of Dickens’s daughter.
Dickens and Daughter
was furiously attacked, although the attackers were somewhat discouraged when Bernard Shaw wrote to
The
Times Literary Supplement
to say that Mrs Perugini had told him everything in the book forty years before. He accepted the truth of Miss Storey’s account, and she passed on another piece of information to him: that Nelly lived her later life in fear of her children learning of her association with Dickens.
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Katey had been old enough to be a clear-eyed observer of the break-up of her parents’ marriage. ‘Ah! We were
all
very wicked not to take her part,’ she said. ‘Harry does not take this view, but he was only a boy at the time, and does not realize the grief it was to our mother, after having all her children, to go away and leave us. My mother never rebuked me. I never saw her in a temper. We like to think of our great geniuses as great characters – but we can’t.’ Of her mother, she said, ‘My poor mother was afraid of my father. She was never allowed to express an opinion – never allowed to say what she felt.’
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She praised her mother for her ‘dignified and nobler course of silence’ when her husband was making public statements.
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She also said, ‘My father was like a madman when my mother left home, this affair brought out all that was worst – all that was weakest in him. He did not care a damn what happened to any of us. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home.’
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‘I know things about my father’s character that no one else ever knew; he was not a good man, but he was not a fast man, but he was wonderful!’ she said, her buts acknowledging the difficulty of making a definitive moral judgement on him.
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Miss Storey described a day when she said dramatically, ‘“I loved my father better than any man in the world – in a different way of course … I loved him for his faults.” Rising from her chair and walking towards the door, she added: “My father was a wicked man – a very wicked man.” And left the room.’
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She also reported Katey saying he did not understand women, and suggesting that any marriage he made would have been a failure.
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Everything she said about Nelly sounds credible, the ‘small fair-haired rather pretty actress’ who flattered her father and, while not a good actress, ‘had brains, which she used to educate herself, to bring her mind more on a level with his own. Who could blame her? He had the world at his feet. She was a young girl of eighteen, elated and proud to be noticed by him.’
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She said Dickens made a settlement on Nelly and kept an establishment with two servants for her at Peckham. She mentioned the son of Nelly and Dickens who had died in infancy.
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The existence of the son was confirmed to Miss Storey by Henry Dickens, who told her ‘there was a boy but it died’, and also that Nelly’s son Geoffrey had come to him to ask if it was true that his mother was Dickens’s mistress ‘and he had to admit it’.
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The discoveries Geoffrey made about his mother, and the realization that she and his aunts had deceived him to the end of their lives, horrified and wounded him. He destroyed papers, told his sister not to talk to anyone about their mother and remained silent himself. He died in 1959, leaving no children, a sorrowful man.

Henry never wrote or spoke in public of these matters. His reminiscences of his father, which appeared in 1928, were outspoken about other things: his father’s moods of depression and irritability, and the resentment of his brothers at the strict discipline imposed on them at home.
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He also mentioned his father’s ‘strongly radical political views’ and his laughing suggestion, mentioned earlier, that, ‘his sympathies being so much with the French, he ought to have been born a Frenchman.’
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A French Dickens defies the conventional view of him as an English national treasure, and he is that, but he is also something much wider. The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters. ‘All his characters are my personal friends,’ said Tolstoy, who kept his portrait hanging in his study and declared him to be the greatest novelist of the nineteenth century.

He left a trail like a meteor, and everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens. The child-victim, the irrepressibly ambitious young man, the reporter, the demonic worker, the tireless walker. The radical, the protector of orphans, helper of the needy, man of good works, the republican. The hater and the lover of America. The giver of parties, the magician, the traveller. The satirist, the surrealist, the mesmerist. The angry son, the good friend, the bad husband, the quarreller, the sentimentalist, the secret lover, the despairing father. The Francophile, the player of games, the lover of circuses, the maker of punch, the country squire, the editor, the Chief, the smoker, the drinker, the dancer of reels and hornpipes, the actor, the ham. Too mixed to be a gentleman – but wonderful. The irreplaceable and unrepeatable Boz. The brilliance in the room. The inimitable. And, above and beyond every other description, simply the great, hard-working writer, who set nineteenth-century London before our eyes and who noticed and celebrated the small people living on the margins of society – the Artful Dodger, Smike, the Marchioness, Nell, Barnaby, Micawber, Mr Dick, Jo the crossing sweeper, Phil Squod, Miss Flite, Sissy Jupe, Charley, Amy Dorrit, Nandy, hairless Maggie, Sloppy, Jenny Wren the dolls’ dressmaker. After he had been writing for long hours at Wellington Street, he would sometimes ask his office boy to bring him a bucket of cold water and put his head into it, and his hands. Then he would dry his head with a towel, and go on writing.

Charles Dickens’s grandmother worked as maid, then housekeeper, from 1781 to 1821, for John Crewe and his wife, Frances (
left and right above
), at their country seat, Crewe Hall (
above
), and their house in Mayfair. The Crewes’ constant visitors were the brilliant politicians Charles James Fox (
left
) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, promiscuous, hard-drinking, high-spending men: Crewe bailed out Fox, Sheridan had an affair with Mrs Crewe. The housekeeper’s son, John Dickens, born 1785, grew up in this household. In 1805 he was given a job at the Navy Pay Office through the patronage of the Crewes and their friends.

In the first of these modest houses (
above left
) Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812, the second child of John and Elizabeth Dickens. The family grew but the houses remained small: Ordnance Terrace, Chatham (
centre
), where they moved in 1817, and Bayham Street, Camden Town (
right
), into which they squeezed in 1822, by now with six children, a maid and a lodger.

In 1824 John Dickens was arrested for debt and held in the Marshalsea Prison. His wife and younger children moved in with him, leaving twelve-year-old Charles with a menial daytime job and lonely lodgings.