by A. N. Wilson
Dolby was a bald, jolly, bewhiskered individual, just married and in his mid-thirties when he entered Dickens’s life. They took to one another immediately. Their journeys together became a Pickwickian odyssey of shared jokes and confidences. Dolby, too, quickly realized that in taking on the novelist and the performer, he took on the delicate business of managing Dickens’s ‘image’. When the possibility of an American tour materialized, for example, Dickens wanted to bring Nelly. The likelihood of Nelly’s presence failing to attract the notice of the gossips and journalists in New York was non-existent. On the American tour, as on the British, Nelly had to stay at home. The tours were all-male affairs, with Dickens’s valet, Henry Scott, an invaluable addition:
As a dresser he is perfect. In a quarter of an hour after I go into the retiring-room where all my clothes are airing and everything is set out neatly in its allotted place, I am ready, and then he goes softly out, and sits outside the door. In the morning, he is equally punctual, quiet and quick. He has his needles and thread, buttons and so forth, always at hand; and in travelling he is very systematic with the luggage.23
Such was the success of the British readings that it was inevitable Dolby should plan an American tour. By the time Dolby set off to the States on a reconnaissance visit, in the summer of 1867, it was almost a fait accompli that Dickens would accede to the plan, much as he dreaded it. To Georgy, on 10 May, he compared himself being drawn to America as Charles Darnay, in A Tale of Two Cities, was drawn to his lodestone rock, Paris,24 and to William Wills he bluntly said that the attraction was money: the hope of making ‘£10,000 in a heap’. To Wills, the devoted editor of Household Words and later All the Year Round, Dickens was able to list the ‘immense consideration’ of paying his wife’s income, and of having to finance his sons. ‘You don’t know what it is to look round the table and see reflected from every seat at it (where they sit) some horribly well remembered expression of inadaptability to anything.’25 Worries about money, especially money spent, lost or gained in the family, are never just about money. The fecklessness, uselessness, of his many children was quite largely something in Dickens’s own head – he saw them becoming his father and mother all over again. Across their bright, prosperous, middle-class faces in the 1860s fell the shadow of the Marshalsea from forty years previously. Work, work, work – he alone could pay for it all. £10,000 in a heap. So he was drawn to the lodestone rock, his Calvary, his destined end; for somehow it was clear to him that the American tour would mark the beginning of his end.
After the first trip to the United States, he had come to hate the place. He resented them pirating his works. In the Civil War he had sympathized, and more than sympathized, with the South, as did most English Liberals and Radicals. While hating the idea of slavery, they resented the idea of the Yankees imposing their will on the independent-minded, old-fashioned South. Palmerston, the (in some senses) Liberal foreign secretary and prime minister, had established a separate embassy for Texas in St James’s.
Yet there are indications that even before he finally made up his mind about Dolby’s planned American trip, Dickens was working his way in that direction. He rewrote a preface to Martin Chuzzlewit, softening his anti-American satires in that book. And when a boring Methodist pastor from Philadelphia asked to come to the offices of All the Year Round for an interview, Dickens said yes, in spite of being overwhelmed by work – writing, public readings in London, editing, and preparing a collected edition of his novels for the presses, the Library Edition, which, at the time of his death, had sold more than half a million copies in the UK alone and would make him a net profit of £6,250. He was at this time, as he wrote to Georgy on 10 May 1867 from the Wellington Street offices, so tired that ‘I could hardly undress for bed’. But he saw the bore, Dr G. D. Carrow, and apologized to him and his American readers for the tone of his former ‘bitter criticisms’ of the American press.
Carrow in his clumsy way was rather a skilful interviewer. He remarked to Dickens that ‘a man must have really loved a woman if he would fully interpret the secrets of a woman’s heart’. Dickens was touched by this, and asked Carrow to expand. The clergyman cited the scene in Bleak House where the ‘little woman’ accepts her guardian marrying her off to the man she has secretly loved all along, Alan Woodcourt. Dickens seized both his hands and said, ‘I see you understand me! And that is more precious to the author than fame or gold.’ Asked point-blank whether he had loved a woman in this intimate way, Dickens exclaimed, ‘You are correct, sir!’26
The mutual-admiration society was intense. Dickens’s understanding of the human heart was comparable only to ‘that wonderful Galilean who knew the heart of all’.
The secrets of a woman’s heart, however, weighed heavily on Dickens during 1867. They remain secret to us, even though it is clear that, in a very busy year for Dickens, Nelly had been neither happy nor well.
It was only in 1922, in New York, that there came up for sale a small pocket diary, purchased by the Berg brothers and now to be seen in their collection housed in the New York Public Library. This was none other than Dickens’s appointment calendar, which he must have mislaid in New York in December 1867.
It is the closest documentary evidence in existence of Dickens’s hectic, secret life with Nelly. At this point in the story Nelly, twenty-eight years old, and her mother, sixty-five, had cottages in Slough, then a country village near Eton, easily reached by railway from London, Paddington, but quite a trek from Kent. The cottages had been leased by a Mr Tringham – that is, Dickens himself. The pocket book tells a story of Dickens constantly nipping to and from ‘SL’ and London, often at moments when he was assuring Georgy, back at Gad’s, that the pressure of work was keeping him in London. While Georgy supposed him in London, he would in fact have visited the capital for a few hours of necessary work at ‘off’ – the office – only to return to SL. The first three months of 1867 were an exhausting series of journeys, to Liverpool, to Norwich, to Cambridge, to Ireland, for readings, followed by the return to SL. For the month of March, he never went to Gad’s Hill once.
By the spring ‘Mr Tringham’ was house-hunting in the village-suburb of Peckham in South London. Now Peckham is part of the sprawling suburb of South London; then it was still a village in open country, but, crucially important, there was a new railway station at Peckham Rye, opened in 1865. Like Gad’s Hill, it was on the London, Chatham and Dover line. Before the reader echoes Lady Bracknell and says, ‘the line is immaterial’, she should pause and consider how vital the coming of the railways was to the story of Dickens, as to nearly all the Victorians. But to him in particular. Without the railway, there could have been no public readings; nor could there have been his secret life with Nelly. His life would have been completely, unimaginably different.
April in the diary contains two of the most mysterious entries, about which the speculation of the biographers has been understandably frantic. It contains the information that ‘N ill latter part of this month’. On 13 April, when Dickens spent the night in Slough, we read the word ‘Arrival’. On 19 April, Wills, his trusted confidant about the Nelly affair, accompanied him to Slough, and it was the day after that when Dickens wrote in the pocket book the single word, enclosed in big square brackets, ‘LOSS’. A baby? Opinions will remain forever divided. Claire Tomalin points out that the faithful Wills might have been brought to Slough in order to register the birth – and death? – of the child under an assumed name. But there is no evidence for this.
By May, Nelly’s sister Fanny Trollope (herself a novelist now married to the brother of the more celebrated novelist Anthony) had arrived in England from Italy. Three years later, Dickens would be candid about his hatred of Fanny Trollope. A mutual friend, Frances Elliot, a Scottish heiress with literary aspirations, had evidently asked him about his relationship with the Ternan family. She knew Anthony and Tom Trollope (Fanny’s husband), and Dickens wrote to her as follows:
The ‘magic circle’ consists of but one
member. I don’t in the least care for Mrs T. T. [Fanny] except her share in the story is (as far as I am concerned) a remembrance impossible to swallow. Therefore, and for magic sake, I scrupulously try to do her justice, and not to see her – out of my path – with a jaundiced vision…
I feel your affectionate letter truly and deeply, but it would be inexpressibly painful to N to think that you knew her history. She has no suspicion that your assertion of your friend against the opposite powers ever brought you to the knowledge of it. She would not believe that you could see her with my eyes, or know her with my mind. Such a presentation is impossible. It would distress her for the rest of her life. Thank you none the less, but it is quite out of the question. If she could bear that, she would not have the pride and self-reliance, which (mingled with the gentlest nature) has borne her alone [along?], through so much.
…Of course you will be very strictly on your guard, if you see Tom Trollope, or his wife, or both – to make no reference to me which either can piece into anything. She is infinitely sharper than the serpent’s Tooth. Mind that.’27
(Dickens and Mrs Ternan, who had played Desdemona to Kean’s Othello and Portia to his Shylock,28 would have remembered all the anecdotage about the great actor, who had revived the tragic ending of King Lear. Perhaps she was even present on the legendary occasion when the great tragedian, in his frenzied rendition of the famous lines, made the inadvertent substitution – ‘How sharper than a serpent’s thanks it is to have a toothless child!’)
Clearly, there was no love lost between Fanny Trollope and Dickens, and the elder sister had presumably seen how unhappy the relationship made Nelly, as such relationships are bound to do. Fanny came over to England at the end of May, without her husband. Her novel Mabel’s Progress was being serialized in All the Year Round, but there is no record of her actually seeing much of Dickens – perhaps she dealt with Wills. In June, writing from Slough on Nelly’s printed writing paper – with the monogram ‘E.T.’ at the top of the page – he warned Wills that the American trip was in the offing, if it could be possible for Nelly to accompany him. ‘The Patient,. I ack. to be the gigantic difficulty.’29
By June ‘Mr Charles Tringham’, that assiduous tenant of rented properties in villages within railway reach of the capital, had taken a house in Peckham in a row of villas close to Nunhead Cemetery called Linden Grove. Nelly’s was called Windsor Lodge. By the time he paid the rates in January 1868, Mr Charles had become Mr Thomas Tringham; on another occasion, Mr Thomas Turnham. Probably this was Wills who was paying the bill and forgetting Dickens’s pseudonym, since, when the rates were settled, Dickens was in America.
By the high summer the plans for Dickens and Nelly to go to America together in November were under way, and Fanny, who had returned to the Continent, was asking Nelly and their mother to come and stay with her in Florence. She arrived there, but with instructions that, if George Dolby felt it was possible, she should come back to England and follow Dickens to America in November. The code to be used, in telegraphs between Wills and Dickens, was ‘Tel: all well means You come. Tel: Safe and well means You don’t come.’
Before he set forth, he had a letter from Kate, his wife, wishing him well. He wrote back, on All the Year Round headed writing paper:
My Dear Catherine,
I am glad to receive your letter, and to accept and reciprocate your good wishes. Severely 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,
Charles Dickens.30
The last time he had crossed the Atlantic, it was a happier time; it had been with Kate. Now, four and a half months without Nelly stretched ahead. He sent her eleven letters during this period, as well as a cheque for £1,000 – all sent via Wills to whom (10 December) he confided, ‘my spirits flutter woefully towards a certain place at which you dined one day not long before I left with the present writer and a third (most drearily missed) person’.31
Dolby sailed on the China and arrived at Boston harbour on 23 October 1867. The point of starting in Boston was that it was supposedly a city where Dickens had many literary acquaintances – his publisher James T. Fields and his amusing, hospitable young wife in their house in Charles Street; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louis Agassiz, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Bret Harte, James Russell Lowell and others – and where he could spend two weeks of relaxation before the ardours of the readings commenced. Dolby secured Dickens an officer’s cabin on the deck of the Cuba, but he left Liverpool with a sad heart, and he was going to be homesick, and ill, for most of the cold months he was away.
The idea that he might have been able to travel about America with Nelly, and for her not to be observed, was dispelled even before embarkation. Swarms of newspapermen were crowding the docks to watch the arrival of the Cuba. To avoid them, Dolby had arranged that the US Customs steamer the Hamblin should be put at Dickens’s disposal; the steamer would meet the Cuba in the bay and come into harbour unobserved. It had been a difficult voyage, with rolling seas, and the Cuba had lost its way in the Bay of Fundy and then, as she approached Boston, got stuck in a mud bank for hours. By the time the Hamblin came ashore, the press were onto the ruse, and an exhausted Dickens and party were followed to their hotel, the Parker House. Even here, privacy proved impossible; the waiters left the doors of Dickens’s private dining room open so that ‘the promenaders of the corridor’ could peep at him. ‘These people have not in the least changed during the last five and twenty years – they are doing exactly now what they were doing then,’ sighed Dickens.32 He was in a very bad way. Then Dolby told him that a crowd had assembled such as had never been seen before, the night before tickets for the first reading went on sale. Already, receipts amounted to $14,000 – nearly £2,000. This was at a date when a Congressman’s annual salary was $7,500, (about $146,000 in today’s money) and a surgeon-general in the US Army could hope to earn $960; a bricklayer’s average take-home pay was $3 per week.33
It was clear, then, even before the readings began, that they were to be a huge commercial success. This was not without its problems. From the outset, Dolby was criticized for not doing more to prevent the ticket touts from block-buying seats and selling them on at inflated prices. Having clocked up takings of more than $16,000 for the first four readings in New York, he discovered that touts were reselling tickets for $50 and more. At New Haven, Connecticut, the problem became so acute that an actual riot broke out. Touts from New York had reached the venue before Dolby’s New York agents, and started to sell tickets for all the eight rows of the house. Dolby, when he read about it, made the eighteen-hour journey from Baltimore (which they happened to have reached on their leg of the tour) and actually cancelled the New Haven reading, refunding disgruntled ticket-holders only the price on the ticket. They made a heavy loss – but so did Dickens and Dolby ($2,600).
Wherever they went, the crowds were enormous, the response ecstatic.
It was not long, however, before Dickens, always prone to colds and catarrh, had gone down with what he called ‘a real American’ or ‘American catarrh’, and when the illness turned into influenza, Dolby cancelled the planned trips to Cincinnati, St Louis and Chicago. In spite of this, Dickens determinedly went on with the tour, taking in Washington DC, Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse and Albany in the state of New York, Brooklyn as well as Manhattan (enormous audiences in Brooklyn at the Plymouth Church, where they queued all night for tickets, sleeping on the snowy sidewalks on mattresses). In four hours, in New York, Dolby sold $20,000 worth of tickets.34 Similar successes could be reported from Baltimore and Philadelphia, though for some reason Washington was slightly less appreciative.
At Washington, however, Dickens was able to go to the White House, where he and Dolby were amused by the notices: ‘Please use the spitoons’. This was an interesting year in the United States. In 1867 President Andrew Johnson’s secretary of state, William Seward, committed what was deemed
to be ‘Seward’s Folly’, purchasing Alaska from Russia for a mere $7.2 million. History would have been very different had this ‘folly’ not been committed!
The rather dull Andrew Johnson (a Democrat, Republican Lincoln’s vice-president) had become president after Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865. Johnson was deemed by the House to be too lenient to the South, too much inclined to allow the Southern states to reform at their own pace and in their own way, and he was much hated by the Republicans. When he replaced Edwin M. Slate as secretary for war with Ulysses S. Grant, he was impeached, and only survived by a majority of one vote in the Senate. (It was Grant who had commanded the Yankee Army that received the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, thereby bringing the Civil War to an end. Less than a week later, Lincoln had been assassinated.)
It was while the momentous impeachment procedures were under way that Johnson received Dickens in the White House. Dickens told Fields:
I was very much impressed by the President’s face and manner. It is, in its way, one of the most remarkable faces I have ever seen. Not imaginative, but very powerful in its firmness (or, perhaps, obstinacy), strength of will, and steadiness of purpose. There is a reticence in it, too, curiously at variance with that first unfortunate speech of his. A man not to be turned or trifled with. A man (I should say) who must be killed to be got out of the way. His manner is perfectly composed. We looked at one another pretty hard. There was an air of chronic anxiety upon him, but not a crease or a ruffle in his dress, and his papers were as composed as himself.35
How Dickens always loved neatness! Cleanliness, for him, was not next to godliness, it excelled godliness.
Before they had even reached Philadelphia, the agency gave Dickens a cheque for £10,000. While the Americans rewarded him, however, he was paying heavily in terms of his health. He suffered from a second bout of severe flu and by the time he had done readings in Baltimore, his appetite had all but deserted him, and he was sleeping only three or four hours out of twenty-four.36 Young as Dickens was – not quite yet fifty-six – Dolby must have wondered whether, by putting him through such a punishing schedule, he was going to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. When his publisher, Fields, had come into Dickens’s dressing-room after the first of the Boston readings (and no one but the valet and Dolby was normally admitted), the publisher had exclaimed, ‘You have given me a new lease of life, for I have been so looking forward to this occasion, that I have had an idea all day that I should die at five minutes to eight tonight, and be deprived of a longing desire I have had to hear you read in my country for the last nineteen years.’37 It was a façon de parler, but one that revealed a sense of Dickens’s fragility. The two men heartily embraced and drank champagne.