One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  I should have tried to be, not a writer, but a painter, or designer of pictures. That was the object of my early ambition, and I can remember when Mr Dickens was a very young man, and commenced delighting the world with some charming humorous works of which I cannot mention the name (laughter), but which were coloured light green, and came out once a month (a laugh), that this young man wanted an artist to illustrate his writings, and I recollect walking up to his chambers with two or three drawings in my hand, which, strange to say, he did not find suitable. (Laughter.) But for that unfortunate blight which came over my artistical existence, it would have been my pride and my pleasure to have endeavoured one day to find a place on these walls for one of my performances. This disappointment caused me to direct my attention to a different walk of art … [and I] shall always be happy to receive your welcome and partake of your hospitality.3

  This was a characteristically gallant reference to a man with whom Thackeray never felt completely at ease. Though he was seven months older than his admired rival, he had, as he indicates in his speech, turned to writing much later than Dickens, who made his name overnight in 1836 with the early monthly numbers of Pickwick Papers, the work to which Thackeray refers here. Thackeray had applied to illustrate it in April 1836, just after the publication of its first number and the unfortunate suicide of the original illustrator, Robert Seymour. Hablot Knight Browne, known as ‘Phiz’, was chosen as Seymour’s replacement.4 Only with the publication of Vanity Fair in monthly numbers in 1847–8 did Thackeray achieve, at the age of thirty-six, the kind of sudden success Dickens had enjoyed at twenty-four.

  Though Dickens paid no compliment to Thackeray at this dinner, he had recently addressed him at another function to which both novelists were invited, a dinner held at the end of March to raise money for the Royal General Theatrical Fund. On that occasion Dickens described his fellow novelist as ‘a gentleman who is an honour to literature, and in whom literature is honoured’. Thackeray’s works were full of wit and wisdom; they held a ‘great mirror’ up to nature.5 On Sunday, 9 May Thackeray hosted a dinner to which Dickens and the painters Daniel Maclise and Edwin Landseer were invited.6 Thackeray’s two daughters were friendly with Dickens’s girls, and Charles Dickens Jr moved in Thackeray’s Punch circle, but things were about to change. Barely a month after the Royal Academy dinner, with the temperature outside rising steeply and causing universal comment, both men would behave recklessly, becoming embroiled in rows and rumours, and their erstwhile polite, if awkward, friendship would come to a premature end.

  The Royal Academy exhibition, formally opened by Queen Victoria on Thursday, 29 April, allowed ‘the great public’ to ‘rush in’, as the Athenaeum reported, on Monday, 3 May. Opinions in the press were divided about the merits of the pictures. More than one critic noted that there were no Pre-Raphaelite paintings on show this year, but there was Frith’s acclaimed Derby Day, Egg’s controversial triptych, admired by some as Hogarthian but condemned as ugly by others, and Tait’s Chelsea Interior with its ‘faithful’ representation of the literary giant of the age and his wife, both known for their sharp, witty conversation.7 Not many other pictures found favour, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who did not exhibit in 1858, described the exhibition as ‘frightfully seedy’, containing ‘not a picture which is not done in prose’, as he told his fellow painter William Bell Scott in June;8 this is hardly true of Egg’s work, which many found melodramatic in the extreme.

  Equally melodramatic was Dickens’s behaviour, in public and in private. The public manifestation was hailed as a marvellous success. On Thursday, 29 April 1858 Dickens gave his first public reading for money. He had long been in demand by charities and philanthropic institutions to give readings from his works to raise money for their endeavours. In February he made a stirring speech at a dinner at Freemasons’ Hall in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street, helping to raise over £3,000 to extend the building. He was made an honorary governor of the hospital and asked to give a public reading to raise more money.9 He duly read from A Christmas Carol at St Martin’s Hall on 15 April. A year earlier he had read from the same story to an ecstatic audience of 2,000 to help the widow and children of his friend Douglas Jerrold. Now with this reading for the benefit of the hospital, he carefully let it be known that he would henceforth lecture for his own benefit, an undertaking which he knew was risky and against which his friend John Forster had strongly argued, fearing that Dickens’s honour as a writer might be endangered by his earning money as a public performer.10

  Dickens had, along with Forster, Augustus Egg, and many other friends, often acted with his own amateur theatre company, but had done so either in his own or others’ houses or in public places for good causes.11 Never one to do things by halves, he had a private theatre built at the back of Tavistock House, his large house in Bloomsbury. According to Francesco Berger, the young composer commissioned by Dickens to write overture and incidental music for some of these performances, this little theatre was ‘complete in every point’, with ‘proper footlights, proper scenery [designed by the famous theatrical scene painter Clarkson Stanfield], proper curtain’, dresses made by the tailor from the Adelphi Theatre, wigs by ‘Wilson of the Strand’, and properties by ‘Ireland of the Adelphi’.12 In July 1857, as part of his effort on behalf of Jerrold’s family, Dickens had arranged a private performance for members of the royal family of Wilkie Collins’s melodrama of male rivalry and sacrifice, The Frozen Deep. Dickens played the part of the fellow intent on murdering his love-rival who instead saves his enemy’s life at the expense of his own, a role he would give in slightly modified form to Sydney Carton in his next novel, A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859. Berger noted that in the crucial scene in which Dickens’s character, alone on the stage, is faced with his moral decision, Dickens’s acting was at its best: ‘Anything more powerful, more pathetic, more enthralling, I have never seen.’13

  Dickens’s son Charley, daughters Mamie and Katey, sister-in-law Helen Hogarth, and friends including Augustus Egg, John Forster, and Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch, were among the members of the cast who played at the Gallery of Illustration on Regent Street before Victoria and Albert and their guests, King Leopold of the Belgians and his children. Victoria noted in her journal on 4 July 1857:

  At 9 went with dear Uncle [Leopold], our other guests, & 4 eldest children, to the Gallery of Illustration, to see an amateur performance of a Play, a romantic Melodrama in 3 acts, by Wilkie Collins, called ‘The Frozen Deep’, – a tale of the Northern Arctic Expedition, – most interesting, intensely dramatic, & most touching & moving, at the end. The Play was admirably acted by Charles Dickens (whose representation of Richard Wardour was beyond all praise & not to be surpassed) … We were all kept in breathless suspense, & much impressed.14

  Dickens was fully aware of his tremendous success as an actor-director with all kinds of audiences, and he decided in the spring of 1858 that he could make a lot of money performing scenes from his novels in halls first in London, then on a tour of the whole kingdom, and later in America, where he reckoned he could earn £10,000 from readings.15 From 1858 until his death in 1870, which may have been hastened by his insistence on continuing his public readings at home and abroad in spite of poor health, Dickens put on an energetic one-man show. He designed his own low table at which he would stand in front of a specially lit screen, and revelled in doing the various voices of his characters in the most comic and tragic scenes from his fiction. The most notable and dramatic reading of all was the rendering of the vicious murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist, which Dickens acted out physically as well as verbally.16 He had always sought the love of his reading public, but now at the darkest time in his personal life he needed their adoration more than ever.

  Anxious not to spoil his reputation or to be seen as a mere showman – and thus not a gentleman – Dickens alerted The Times to his new plan, due to commence in the late spring of 1858. On 16 April the newspaper ra
ved about his final amateur performance the previous night in aid of sick children. Not only is Dickens described as an actor ‘of such proficiency that he is hardly to be termed an amateur at all’, but his readings from his books are said to give ‘additional colouring to his already highly elaborated work’. ‘Such was the assembled multitude’ at St Martin’s Hall, the review continues, ‘that the sum produced must have been sufficient to physic all the sick children in the United Kingdom’. The paper welcomes the announcement that ‘the benevolent “reader” is at last about to employ his elocutionary talents for his own advantage’ on Thursday evenings, beginning on 29 April.17 However positive this sounds, there is still an awkwardness about the plain truth that a man already made rich and famous by his writings intended to become even more so by performing before audiences of up to 3,000 in St Martin’s Hall, a huge mock-Tudor building on Long Acre, Covent Garden, before travelling the country addressing his adoring audience. It was the aspect of Dickens that Thackeray and his circle found vulgar. Forster was aware of this and warned his friend, and Dickens knew it too, but was impelled to make the attempt, partly for the money’s sake but much more for the sake of gaining and keeping the love of the multitude.

  Dickens could not resist explaining his reasoning when he gave his first reading for his own financial gain on Thursday, 29 April. A few days later the Era printed his speech in full and without criticism. It is hardly Dickens at his best, with its courteous defiance and false consciousness in claiming moral responsibility as his chief motive for the new venture:

  Ladies and gentlemen, it may perhaps be known to you that for a few years past I have been accustomed occasionally to read some of my shorter books to various audiences in aid of a variety of good objects, and at some charge to myself both in time and money. It having at length become impossible in any reason to comply with these always accumulating demands, I have had definitively to choose between now and then reading on my own account as one of my recognised occupations, or not reading at all. I have had little or no difficulty in deciding on the former course. (Cheers.)18

  While it is reasonable enough for Dickens to mention his longstanding generosity in lending his name and his time to charity, and utterly believable that he is finding it increasingly difficult to say yes to the many appeals to him, it is hardly logical to claim that the only answer is to go on giving readings, but only for financial gain. Sensitive to the charge of demeaning his profession, he states that he has thought long and hard and has decided that the new plan ‘can involve no possible compromise of the credit and independence of Literature’. ‘Whatever brings a public man and his public face to face, on terms of mutual confidence and respect, is a good thing.’ He may even claim a ‘personal friendship, which it is my great privilege and pride, as it is my great responsibility, to hold with a multitude of persons who will never hear my voice or see my face’.19 This elaborate explanation was no doubt partly forced on Dickens by the snobbery that still existed in some quarters about the ‘profession’ of writing and in even wider circles about the ‘profession’ of acting, but much of the forcefulness is likely to have come from Dickens’s own need to assert himself at a time when he was struggling with misery and guilt in his personal relations.

  On 9 May 1858, the day he dined with Thackeray, Dickens wrote a truly terrible letter to his friend and fellow philanthropist, the banking heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts. It began:

  My Dear Miss Coutts,

  You have been too near and dear a friend to me for many years, and I am bound to you by too many ties of grateful and affectionate regard, to admit of any longer keeping silence to you on a sad domestic topic … I believe my marriage has been for years and years as miserable a one as ever was made. I believe that no two people were ever created, with such an impossibility of interest, sympathy, confidence, sentiment, tender union of any kind between them, as there is between my wife and me. It is an immense misfortune to her – it is an immense misfortune to me – but Nature has put an insurmountable barrier between us, which never in this world can be thrown down.20

  Dickens goes on to claim that the children – there were nine surviving out of ten born between 1837 and 1852 – did not love Catherine. ‘She has never attached one of them to herself, never played with them in their infancy, never attracted their confidence as they have grown older, never presented herself before them in the aspect of a mother.’ The children themselves in later years, and many friends including Miss Coutts, rejected this cruel and sweeping opinion of the woman Katey called her ‘poor, poor mother’.21 That Catherine was rather slow and clumsy beside her mercurial, energetic husband is undeniable, and that she was helped in bringing up her large family by her unmarried sister, Georgina Hogarth, whom Dickens constantly praised for her domestic talents, is also true. Georgina had lived with them since 1842, when she was fifteen, and when the bitter separation came in 1858, she sided with Dickens and chose to live with him and look after the eight children he kept with him, from twenty-year-old Mamie down to 6-year-old Edward – all of them, that is, except the eldest, Charles Jr, who was by now twenty-one and could make up his own mind in any case. He did; he chose to stay with his mother.22

  Miss Coutts was told that Forster was trying to make arrangements for Catherine, who was to leave Tavistock House, the family home in Bloomsbury, where so many amateur theatrical performances had been held, with the whole family, including Catherine, involved. Dickens, meanwhile, was staying overnight at the office of his weekly paper, Household Words, in Wellington Street, off the Strand.23 Though Dickens undertook the upbringing of his younger children, all boys, in fact they were sent away to school at the age of eight or nine, and most were destined by their father to make their careers abroad: Frank (born in 1844) left for India in 1863, Alfred (born in 1845) went to Australia in 1864, Sydney (born in 1847) joined the navy in 1859, and the youngest, Edward, emigrated to Australia in 1868. Only Henry, born in 1849, was kept in England; he read mathematics at Cambridge and became a barrister. Walter, born in 1841, was serving in the army in India in 1858; he died in Calcutta in December 1863, aged twenty-two. Frank returned to see his mother in 1871 (Dickens having died the previous year); neither parent saw the others again after they left Britain as teenagers.24

  The decision to separate was not merely the result of the extreme incompatibility Dickens described to Miss Coutts. He had been contemplating the break for almost a year, and his acting hobby was intimately involved in his reasons. Though his female relatives and friends took on parts when his company was performing in private or for the queen, he always hired professional actresses for engagements in theatres. This was partly because he felt his womenfolk might not be able to project their voices sufficiently and lacked the required physical presence for such performances, and partly because, despite the efforts of his friend William Charles Macready and other leading actor-managers, it was still generally felt that acting was unbecoming for a woman, and at worst connected with prostitution; this lingering suspicion dated from the time when assignations were made in and around theatres, before Macready in particular sought to clean up the theatrical environment in the 1830s and 1840s.25

  By the 1850s the chief theatres were respectable spaces, but actresses still had to be especially careful of their reputations. This was true of the family of female actors with whom Dickens became acquainted in the summer of 1857 when planning to put on The Frozen Deep in Manchester. On 2 August 1857 Dickens wrote to Wilkie Collins that he had arranged to stage his friend’s play in the city’s Free Trade Hall. ‘It is an immense place’, he wrote, ‘and we shall be obliged to have actresses’.26 He met and engaged Frances Ternan, an actress in her fifties whose actor-manager husband had died of syphilis in an insane asylum in Bethnal Green in 1845, and two of her three daughters, Maria, who took the main female role in the drama, and Ellen, also known as Nelly, who was given a smaller part.27 Dickens described in detail to Miss Coutts in September how moved he had been by the 20-year-old Maria
Ternan’s complete immersion in the sentiment of her part. As she knelt over the dying Richard Wardour (Dickens), ‘the tears streamed out of her eyes into his mouth, down his beard, all over his rags – down his arms as he held her by the hair’, and she ‘sobbed as if she were breaking her heart and was quite convulsed with grief’.28

  After returning from the triumph in Manchester on 25 August, Dickens could not settle. He described to Collins ‘the grim despair and restlessness of this subsidence from excitement’ after The Frozen Deep and confessed, ‘I want to escape from myself’. ‘When I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable – indescribable – my misery, amazing.’29 He arranged to go on a walking holiday with Collins, ostensibly in order to co-write a piece for Household Words entitled ‘The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices’, which duly appeared in October. The real reason was his burning desire to see the younger Ternan sister, 18-year-old Ellen, with whom he had fallen in love. He chose Collins as his companion and confidant; Collins was thirty-four, eleven years younger than Dickens, and had a mistress, Caroline Graves, with whom he lived without ever marrying her. He was racy, a keen visitor to disreputable haunts in London and Paris.30 Dickens knew that his older, more staid friend John Forster, whom he still relied on to help manage problems with publishers and who would soon undertake negotiations with Catherine’s family, would not approve of his taking up with a girl the same age as his own daughter Katey (Nelly was born in March 1839 and Katey in January of the same year), any more than he approved of the plan hatched a few months later to give public readings for profit. To Forster Dickens wrote early in September 1857 that ‘poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it’. He told Forster that the realisation was not new. ‘What is now befalling me I have seen steadily coming, ever since the days you remember when Mary was born.’ Mary, known as Mamie, was Dickens’s second child, born in 1838, two years after his marriage. This declaration was nothing but obfuscation and self-delusion. In fact Dickens had only begun to hint to Forster in 1854 that his domestic life was no longer happy.31