Charles Dickens: A Life (72 page)

Daniel Maclise painted five-year-old Charley, Mamie, Katey and baby Walter for Dickens and Catherine when they went to America for six months, leaving them in the care of nurses and the Macreadys.

Maclise’s triple profile drawing of Charles, Catherine and Georgina fixes the domestic situation at Devonshire Terrace: husband in charge, submissive wife, little pet – little, but strong-minded.

Many family holidays were taken at Broadstairs on the Kentish coast, which Dickens described to D’Orsay oddly as ‘cette Ile désolée de Thanet’, where he could think and dream ‘comme un géant’.

Dickens travelled from Genoa to London in midwinter 1844 to read his Christmas story
The Chimes
, attacking the callousness of the rich towards the desperate poor, to a group of friends in Forster’s rooms: these were the Hungry Forties. Maclise gave him a halo.

‘About Paris! I am charmed with the place,’ wrote Dickens in 1847. In the fifties and sixties he stayed at the Hôtel Meurice in the rue de Rivoli (
above
) and considered the French to be ‘the finest people in the universe’.

He knew Lamartine (
left
), poet and liberal statesman, who headed the government in 1848, and Victor Hugo, who received him with ‘infinite courtesy and grace’.

Boulogne became his favourite resort in the 1850s: ‘best mixture of town and country (with sea air ...) I ever saw; everything cheap, everything good’. He admired the honest and industrious people and the young women going barefoot ‘with legs of bright mahogany, walking like Juno’. He rented several houses over the years, and sent four of his sons to boarding school here.

William Wills was always in England to hold the fort at the office from which they put out the magazine
Household Words
each week. He was the perfect assistant, devoted, diligent, a little dull, but discreet.

Wilkie Collins, novelist and Bohemian, met Dickens in 1851 and became a favourite companion in ‘festive
diableries
’. They collaborated on stories and plays.

Dickens became obsessed with mesmerism, which he learnt about from his London doctor, Elliotson, and practised himself, on Catherine, on friends and on a sick woman he met in Genoa, Augusta De La Rue, wife of a banker. It was an intense emotional experience for all, arousing Catherine’s jealousy without curing Madame De La Rue.

‘What a great creature he is,’ wrote Dickens of Tennyson, reading his poetry in 1844, and again in 1859 of the
Idylls
, ‘they are all wonderfully fine – chivalric, imaginative, passionate.’