Charles Dickens: A Life (82 page)

14.
See
P
, VI, p. 780, fn. 3, quoting Owen’s private journal. Owen’s attacks on Darwin proved disastrous to his own reputation.

15.
Dickens had served on the committee of the Royal Literary Fund but disliked its proceedings and did not attend its dinners after 1841. The Guild also gave grants and built houses for needy writers on the Lytton Estate at Knebworth, but, despite the great efforts of Dickens, Forster and Bulwer, the scheme did not succeed.

16.
See Catherine Peters’s
The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins
(London, 1991), p. 101.

17.
D to Harriet Martineau, 3 July 1850,
P
, VI, p. 122.

18.
D to Bulwer, 10 Feb. 1851,
P
, VI, p. 287. This Paris trip was made with Leech and Spencer Lyttelton, a raffish cousin of Mrs Watson.

19.
D to Wills, 27 July 1851,
P
, VI, p. 448.

20.
Henry F. Dickens,
Memories of My Father
(London, 1928), p. 26.

21.
Balmoral House was close to Macclesfield Bridge crossing the canal, at the juncture of Avenue Road and Albert Road. It belonged to John Cheek, manufacturer. Dickens dealt through William Booth, an auctioneer, whose presumed son, another William Booth, reported that in 1911 a barge carrying gunpowder along the canal exploded, wrecking the house.

22.
D to Henry Austin, 13 Mar. 1851,
P
, VI, p. 314.

23.
D to Catherine D, 25 Mar. 1851,
P
, VI, p. 333. The death certificate stated that John Dickens had suffered a rupture of the urethra from old standing stricture and consequent mortification of the scrotum from the infiltration of urine. He was sixty-five.

24.
D to F, 31 Mar. 1851,
P
, VI, p. 343.

25.
D to Catherine D, 4 Apr. 1851,
P
, VI, p. 348.

26.
Queen Victoria’s journal entry is given
P
, VI, p. 386, fn. 4.

27.
D to Augustus Tracey, 10 Oct. 1851,
P
, VI, p. 517. Tavistock House, built at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was demolished in 1901, and the offices of the British Medical Association built on the site.

28.
D to Coutts, 25 Oct. 1853,
P
, VII, pp. 171–2. Dickens was writing from Milan, where he was travelling with Egg and Collins. Egg married in 1860 and died young in Algiers in 1863.

29.
Ibid.

  
1.
Young Marcus Stone, son of Frank Stone, first saw him when he was ‘about forty’ and remembers him thus: manuscript in library at Charles Dickens Museum, p. 49.

  
2.
Wills’s letter is quoted by Philip Collins in his
Dickens: The Public Readings
(Oxford, 1975), p. xx, and dated 30 Dec. 1853.

  
3.
It was partly dictated and partly written in his own hand, and serialized at intervals in
HW
from Jan. 1851 to Dec. 1853. A slapdash but sometimes amusingly opinionated version of the nation’s story told through the kings and queens, it ends in 1688 with the flight of the last bad Stuart – ‘the Stuarts were a public nuisance altogether’ – and welcomes the establishment of the Protestant religion in England. A final note hails Queen Victoria as ‘very good, and much beloved’. In volume form it sold very badly.

  
4.
The Megalosaurus was so named by William Buckland (1784–1856), geologist, palaeontologist and clergyman, in 1824 when he found the fossilized remains of a gigantic carnivorous lizard at Stonesfield in Oxfordshire and wrote the first full account of a fossil dinosaur.

  
5.
Towards the end of Chapter 35. Esther is of course giving Dickens’s view. Charlotte Brontë asked her publisher, ‘Is the first number of “Bleak House” generally admired? I liked the Chancery part, but when it passes into the autobiographic form, and the young woman who announces that she is not “bright” begins her history, it seems to me too often weak and twaddling; an amiable nature is caricatured, not faithfully rendered, in Miss Esther Summerson.’ T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington (eds.),
The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence
, III (originally pub. 1932; Oxford, 1980), p. 322.

  
6.
See
P
, IV, pp. 374–5, 454;
P
, III, p. 538, fn. 2; and more about Esther,
P
, III,
P
, IX.

  
7.
The words were cancelled from the proof, presumably for reasons of space.

  
8.
D to Coutts, 19 Nov. 1852,
P
, VI, p. 805.

  
9.
Q. D. Leavis is the author of the chapter on
Bleak House
in
Dickens the Novelist
(London, 1970). This discussion is in
Chapter 3
and on p. 137, and refers to Chapter 47 in
Bleak House.
She writes that the end of the chapter is ‘not sentimental but ironical in effect and … in intention, since it is followed by the indignant and generous outburst with which Dickens ends the chapter’. But it does not strike me as ironical, and I can imagine Alan Woodcourt finishing the prayer silently for himself.

10.
All the travel is by coach, and in Chapter 55 Dickens writes, ‘Railroads shall soon traverse all this country, and with a rattle and a glare the engine and train shall shoot like a meteor over the wide night-landscape, turning the moon paler; but, as yet, these things are non-existent in these parts, though not wholly unexpected.’

11.
John Sutherland raises the question of the causes of the deaths of Captain Hawdon, Jo and Lady Dedlock in his
Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?
(Oxford, 1999), and gives well-argued and convincing answers. He suggests that Hawdon deliberately overdoses on opium, but that Dr Woodcourt testifies that it was unlikely to have been deliberate because he was in the habit of taking large doses, so avoiding a verdict of suicide and allowing him to be buried in consecrated ground. Lady Dedlock then also takes opium to finish her life close to his grave, after her long night walk, which would have exhausted and chilled but not killed her, and again Woodcourt avoids specifying the opium as the cause of death. As for Jo, Dr Sutherland agrees with Susan Shatto’s view that he dies of pulmonary tuberculosis.

12.
Unsigned review in the
Examiner
, 8 Oct. 1853, printed in Philip Collins (ed.),
Dickens: The Critical Heritage
(London, 1971), p. 290, and Forster’s
The Life of Charles Dickens
, III (London, 1874),
Chapter 1
.

13.
Forster,
Life
, III,
Chapter 14
.

14.
Robert L. Patten,
Charles Dickens and His Publishers
(Oxford, 1978), p. 233.

15.
For
Dombey
and
Copperfield
US sales see ibid., p. 209.

16.
Ibid., p. 234.

17.
D to Sheridan Muspratt, [?Feb. 1852],
P
, VI, p. 591 (Muspratt was a chemist, living in Liverpool, and married to an American actress, Susan, sister of Charlotte Cushman). D to Coutts, 16 Mar. 1852,
P
, VI, p. 627.

18.
D to F, 30 June 1841,
P
, II, p. 313; D to Coutts, 10 Sept. 1845,
P
, IV, p. 373.

19.
D to Coutts, 18 Apr. 1852,
P
, VI, p. 646.

20.
D to Coutts, 14 Jan. 1854,
P
, VII, p. 245.

21.
Dickens addressing the Warehousemen and Clerks’ Schools in Nov. 1857, describing the sort of schools he disliked, K. J. Fielding (ed.),
The Speeches of Charles Dickens: A Complete Edition
(Brighton, 1988), p. 242.

22.
Unto this Last
in the
Cornhill Magazine
, 2 (Aug. 1860), p. 159, given in Collins,
The
Critical Heritage
, p. 314.

  
1.
Dickens uses the word ‘imbecility’ of Mrs Hogarth in 1854 and of the whole Hogarth family on 17 Apr. 1856, in a letter to Wills,
P
, VIII, p. 99.

  
2.
D to Catherine D, 14 Nov. 1853,
P
, VII, p. 198.

  
3.
D to Catherine D, 5 Dec. 1853,
P
, VII, p. 224.

  
4.
D to De La Rue, 23 Oct. 1857,
P
, VIII, p. 472.

  
5.
This was in May 1854.

  
6.
D tells Cerjat about this 3 Jan. 1855,
P
, VII, p. 496, but the reading must have happened earlier, possibly in 1852, 1853 or 1854.

  
7.
D to Coutts, 27 May 56,
P
, VIII, p. 125.

  
8.
D to F, [?Jan.–17 June 1854],
P
, VII, p. 354.

  
9.
D to F, 29 Sept. 1854,
P
, VII, p. 428.

10.
D to F, 10 Sept. 1854,
P
, VII, p. 412.

11.
Both characterizations made later, of Albert after his death and of Louis-Napoleon in 1865, but representing his consistently held views of them.

12.
D to Mrs Watson, 1 Nov. 1854,
P
, VII, p. 454.

13.
D to Cerjat, 3 Jan. 1855,
P
, VII, p. 495.

14.
D to Cerjat, ‘I fear that I see that for years to come, domestic Reforms are shaken to the root,’ 3 Jan. 1855,
P
, VII, p. 495; D to Layard, 10 Apr. 1855,
P
, VII, p. 587; D to F, 27 Apr. 1855,
P
, VII, p. 599.

15.
D to
Daily News
, 14 June 1855, p. 2, given in K. J. Fielding (ed.),
The Speeches of Charles Dickens: A Complete Edition
(Brighton, 1988), p. 199. Dickens made the same point in his speech to the Association on 27 June: that he did his public service through literature, and would not step outside that sphere of action.

16.
D to F, 30 Sept. 1855,
P
, VII, p. 713.

17.
D in Folkestone to Macready, 4 Oct. 1855,
P
, VII, pp. 714–16.

18.
D to Wilkie Collins, 4 Mar. 1855,
P
, VII, p. 555; D to F, [?2–3 May 1855],
P
, VII, p. 608; D to Mrs Watson, 21 May 1855,
P
, VII, pp. 626–7; D to Coutts, 8 May 1855,
P
, VII, p. 613; D to Coutts, 24 May 1855,
P
, VII, p. 629. The manuscript, like those of all the later novels, is written in a much smaller and more closely packed hand, and much more heavily revised.

19.
A comparison with the working conditions of his fellow novelist Flaubert, writing and rewriting
Madame Bovary
at the same time, immured in the silent retreat his father had provided for him in the Norman countryside, unencumbered by wife, children or any other personal or professional obligations, able to spend days over a single page, is instructive. Both novelists lived their characters’ experience with them, grimacing as they wrote, but Flaubert could not endure interruptions and gave the world a perfectly considered, finished and polished piece of writing, while Dickens, who not only tolerated but often seemed to court distraction, pitted his prodigious inventive power against the demands of serialization and a tangled plot.

      In spite of ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ Flaubert presents his characters with godlike contempt, whereas Dickens mocked some and pitied some but approached them on the whole as fellow human beings.

20.
D to Wills, 9 Feb. 1855,
P
, VII, p. 531.

21.
D to F, 3 and [?4 Feb.] 1855,
P
, VII, p. 523.

22.
Dickens starts the narrative ‘thirty years ago’, and repeats ‘thirty years ago’ at the beginning of
Chapter 6
, which introduces William Dorrit. On the next page we are told that he had entered the Marshalsea Prison ‘long before’. We already know that Little Dorrit, encountered in
Chapter 5
, is twenty-two, and was born in the Marshalsea, which means her father must have begun his imprisonment about 1802. This places the main action of the story in the mid-1820s, the reign of George IV and the childhood of Dickens.

23.
Little Dorrit
, end of Book One,
Chapter 13
.

24.
In the first chapter. Dickens started smoking cigarettes, recently introduced into France, in 1854. D to Wills, 21 Sept. 1854,
P
, VII, p. 418, asking him to send four bundles of them from his office to Boulogne.

25.
Chapter 14
, headed ‘Little Dorrit’s Party’, has interesting preparatory notes: ‘Out all night –
Woman in the street.
“If it really was a party now!” –
Burial Register for a pillow.
This was Little Dorrit’s party The vice desertion, wretchedness of the great Capital. this was the party from which she went home.’

26.
Little Dorrit
, Book One, Chapter 31. Always a favourite scene of mine, and I was delighted to find that George Gissing, in his
Charles Dickens: A Critical Study
(London, 1898), writes of it, ‘For delicacy of treatment, for fineness of observation, this scene, I am inclined to think, is unequalled in all the novels.’