Charles Dickens: A Life (71 page)

In 1837 John Forster became Dickens’s best friend and warmest admirer, advising and serving him in every way possible. In 1848 Dickens asked him to become his biographer, a task he fulfilled in the 1870s in his classic three-volume
Life
.

Catherine’s younger sister Mary became part of the household, adored by Dickens. When she died suddenly at the age of seventeen, his grief was so intense that for the only time in his life he cancelled the next instalments of the two serials he was writing.

The house in Doughty Street was bought in 1837 with the money made from
Pickwick
. Here he wrote
Oliver Twist
and
Nicholas Nickleby
.

Forster introduced Dickens to William Macready, the leading tragic actor of the day, who became another close and lifelong friend.

The Irish artist Daniel Maclise, also introduced to Dickens by Forster, became a boon companion for some years, but later withdrew into gloomy reclusiveness.

Other friends included the comic actor John Pritt Harley, dressed to act in Dickens’s farce
The Strange Gentleman
in 1836; the artist George Cruikshank, who illustrated Dickens’s first book,
Sketches by Boz
, and
Oliver Twist
; and the artist Hablot Browne, who took the name ‘Phiz’ to go with Dickens’s nom de plume ‘Boz’, illustrated
The Pickwick Papers
and worked with Dickens for twenty-three years.

A powerful, idealizing portrait of Dickens by Margaret Gillies, exhibited in 1844, engraved and since lost. Gillies was London-born in 1803, educated in Edinburgh and returned to London to earn her living as a painter. From the 1830s she lived with Dr Southwood Smith, the sanitary reformer and member of the royal commission on the employment of children, who had separated from his wife. Dickens knew him well, consulted him and trusted his advice. Gillies exhibited at the Royal Academy, and was interested in portraying ‘true nobility, that of genius ... to call out what is most beautiful and refined in our nature’. Other sitters were Harriet Martineau, Jeremy Bentham and Wordsworth.

Dickens leased No. 1 Devonshire Terrace, York Gate, Regent’s Park, in December 1839 for twelve years – years of hard work and lavish entertaining, during which five more sons were born.

More friends: T.N. Talfourd (
left
), liberal lawyer, politician, playwright; Dickens dedicated
The Pickwick Papers
to him. Count D’Orsay, artist and dandy, living beyond his means with Lady Blessington, mother of his divorced wife.

The aged poet Samuel Rogers gave breakfasts at which good conversation was required, to which Dickens went alone.

Miss Coutts, shy, good and spectacularly rich, became a true friend, seeking and taking Dickens’s advice on her charitable spending.

Dickens chose to cross the Atlantic in January 1842 on the earliest wooden Cunard paddle steamer. The weather was so bad and the experience so terrifying that the return was made by sailing ship.