One Hot Summer
Page 8
Dickens alone seemed to believe, as was convenient to his sense of his own honour, that the marriage had been disastrous more or less from the start, and this became the refrain of his letters to close friends over the next few months. To one or two female correspondents he spun a strange fairy tale which surely stems from his excitement about The Frozen Deep and his overwhelming feelings for Ellen. In December 1857 he addressed the widow of his friend Richard Watson, telling her that he was ‘the most restless of created Beings’:
I wish I had been born in the days of Ogres and Dragon-guarded Castles. I wish an Ogre with seven heads (and no particular evidence of brains in the whole lot of them) had taken the Princess whom I adore – you have no idea how intensely I love her! – to his stronghold at the top of a high series of Mountains, and there tied her up by the hair. Nothing would suit me half so well this day, as climbing after her, sword in hand, and either winning her or being killed. – There’s a state of mind for you, in 1857.32
After the excitement of Manchester he and Collins made a tour of the north of England, walking in the Lake District, visiting Carlisle and Lancaster, and fetching up in Doncaster in mid-September 1857, where the Ternan sisters were acting in a number of plays. Dickens and Collins attracted the attention of the local press when they attended a performance; their alibi was their walking tour and the comic piece they were to write about it.33 The two idle apprentices visit Doncaster races, as Dickens did with Ellen. In the final chapter of their account of their rambles, published on 31 October in Household Words, Dickens, Francis Goodchild to Collins’s Thomas Idle, ‘is suspected by Mr Idle to have fallen into a dreadful state concerning a pair of little lilac gloves and a little bonnet that he saw there’, together with the ‘golden hair’ under the bonnet.34
From now until May 1858, Dickens wrote obsessively to his correspondents about his incurable restlessness. In March he confessed to Collins, who knew more than anyone else about his troubles, ‘the Doncaster unhappiness remains so strong upon me that I can’t write, and (waking) can’t rest, one minute’. He recognises that the idea of reading to the public is directly connected with his state of mind: ‘I have never known a moment’s peace or content, since the last night of the Frozen Deep. I do suppose that there never was a Man so seized and rended by one Spirit. In this condition, though nothing can alter or soften it, I have a turning notion that the mere physical effort and change of the readings would be good, as another means of bearing it.’35 He dropped heavy hints to his closest friends about his intention to separate from Catherine; only Collins, Forster, and in due course W.H. Wills, his right-hand man at the office of Household Words, seem to have been informed by Dickens himself about Ellen, though many others heard rumours and indulged in gossip.
By 19 May 1858, Derby Day, Dickens knew that Miss Coutts wished to intervene on Catherine’s behalf. He wrote to her that day saying that ‘no consideration, human or Divine, can move me from the resolution I have taken’.36 Catherine wrote on the same day, thanking Miss Coutts ‘for your true kindness in doing what I asked’. ‘I have now – God help me – only one course to pursue. One day though not now I may be able to tell you how hardly I have been used.’37 Dickens was outraged by the rumours about him he believed Catherine’s ‘wicked mother’ had set going, calling her ‘that woman’ in his letter to Miss Coutts. In a second note to the same correspondent on the same day, he vented his annoyance with his son Charley for attending the Derby, complaining: ‘He might have let the Race pass him at such a time.’38 A week later he told Macready that he did not wish to go into ‘what is past and gone’, but ‘steadily desire[d] to dismiss it’.39
It is likely that Catherine’s family, upset by his treatment of her, were stoking the fire by discussing Dickens’s relations with his wife outside the family. In any case, if Dickens believed that he could keep the secret from the world in general, he was deluded.40 A few days later it came to Dickens’s attention that his affairs were being discussed by Thackeray in the clubs and societies which, as a virtual bachelor – his insane wife being permanently lodged with a kind housekeeper in Camberwell in southeast London and his daughters mostly living with their grandmother in Paris – he naturally frequented. This was one reason for the impending rift between the two men. Others, too, were soon talking about Dickens’s marriage troubles, and before long he found himself trying to manage the newspaper accounts which inevitably multiplied during May and June. Thackeray first heard the rumours while attending the races at Epsom in Derby week, 17–21 May, and became unintentionally if carelessly involved in spreading them at the Garrick Club, as he told his mother early in June:
Well, what to say? Here is sad news in the literary world – no less than a separation between Mr and Mrs Dickens – with all sorts of horrible stories buzzing about. The worst is that I’m in a manner dragged in for one. Last week in going into the Garrick I heard that D is separated from his wife on account of an intrigue with his sister in law [Georgina]. No says I no such thing – its [sic] with an actress – and the other story had not got to Dickens’s ears but this had – and he fancies that I am going about abusing him! We shall never be allowed to be friends that’s clear. I had mine from a man at Epsom, the first I ever heard of the matter, but I should have said nothing about it but that I heard the other much worse story whereupon I told mine to counteract it.41
Derby Day
Wednesday, 19 May dawned brightly on the Epsom Downs. After rain the previous day, the weather was mainly fine, and, at around 60 °F (16 °C), relatively warm for the time of year. (Some weeks later The Times reported that the weather for the whole of May had been about 6 °F warmer than average, but the really hot weather began only at the end of the month.42) All the newspapers, both sporting and general, anticipated the event on the preceding days, called the odds, described the crowds on the day, and gave the result. ‘All London seems under the influence of a great mania’, according to The Times on 20 May. Like every other journalist writing his piece about the Derby, The Times’s writer gasps at the numbers and the cheerful rubbing shoulders of all classes, from aristocrats to petty criminals: ‘The Downs on a Derby day stand alone as a spectacle, and there is nothing else on earth with which one can compare them.’ The betting at the start of the race is given: Lord Derby’s horse Toxopholite, the favourite, ran at ‘10 to 3 against’, with Beadsman, the eventual winner, running at 10 to 1.43
This Derby Day was of special interest, firstly because the prime minister’s horse was in the race, and secondly because the government was facing a motion of no confidence over its recent handling of Indian affairs. Some observers tut-tutted about the time-honoured adjournment of parliament to allow members to attend the race. The Times and others noted that Lord Derby seemed to be keener on the progress of his stables than that of his government, while newspapers more sympathetic to the prime minister insisted that the great English tradition of giving politicians a half-day holiday for the race need not be broken over a mere ministerial crisis. The Racing Times and the ultra-conservative St James’s Chronicle both ridiculed the notion that Lord Derby was more interested in horse races than politics, or that it was irresponsible for parliament to take time off in the midst of the India debate.44 Others revelled in the opportunity to link politics with sport. One prolific writer of popular books about contemporary London, J. Ewing Ritchie, captured the exciting possibilities of this particular Derby Day:
That man with spectacles and long black stock [a high stiff collar] … is England’s Premier, whose horse is the favourite – who has never yet won the Derby – who, it is said, would rather do so than have a parliamentary success – and who, it is also said, has offered his jockey £50 a-year for life should he win this race … And now, amidst a whirlwind of shouting and hurrahing, the race is over; and in two minutes and fifty-four seconds Sir Joseph Hawley, a Whig baronet, beats Lord Derby, the Conservative Premier, clears £50,000, while his jockey, for that short ride, earns as much as you or me, my good
sir, may win by the labour of many a long year. Pigeons fly off with the result. The telegraph is at work … and many a man goes home with a heavy heart, for some are hit very hard.45
All the newspapers, of whatever political persuasion, had taken the opportunity to combine speculation about the Derby winner with discussion of the chances of the government surviving. The odds were called jokily on both. On 16 May the Era, a Sunday paper which specialised in art, entertainment, and sport, and which supported Derby’s politics, carried a poem by ‘Baptiste’ entitled ‘The Derby Alphabet 1858’. The writer ran through the names of the horses alphabetically, noting that Beadsman was a good bet, and finishing with a message of good luck to Lord Derby:
… without going further the alphabet through,
To Lord Derby I give the Turf’s riband of blue;
And long may he flourish successful and great
In affairs of the Turf as in those of the State.46
The Racing Times printed a long poem two days before the race, playing on the name Toxopholite (a variation on ‘toxophilite’, or lover of archery):
Toxopholite, whom no one talks of lightly,
I’m not the one to fancy him but slightly.
He will be very near the mark – they say
They’ve had no horse like him for many a day;
And that Lord Derby, minister or not,
With this Toxopholite will hit the spot.47
Of all the comments on Derby politics, Punch came up with the most elaborate on the Saturday after the race. Dealing with the politicians as if they were horses, it gave the ‘closing prices’ for each when the India debate resumed the following week, including:
9 to 7 Lord Ellenborough’s Scapegoat
15 to 12 Lord Stanley’s Adhesion
20 to 19 The Dizzy Lot (taken)
99 to 1 Lord Chelmsford’s Anti-Jew-Mania
300 to 20 Lord John’s Finality (offered)
1,000 to 1 Pam and Lord John Russell coupled (take 10,000,000 to 1)
6 to 5 against Lord Derby’s Dissolution (offered)
6 to 5 Lord Palmerston’s Succession (taken).48
Roughly interpreted, this suggests that Punch, at least, believed that Derby and Disraeli (‘Dizzy’) were likely to survive narrowly, and that if they did not, Palmerston (‘Pam’) would probably come back in at the head of a Whig ministry. The chances of Palmerston and his colleague Lord John Russell, the two feuding leaders of the opposition, agreeing on a strategy were extremely slim – a thousand or even ten million to one, according to Punch – and, for good measure, the fanatical anti-Jewish Lord Chelmsford had very little chance of winning the ongoing parliamentary debate about the Oaths Bill.
Lord Ellenborough, president of the Board of Control, was, as Punch put it directly, the scapegoat of a bad diplomatic mistake over India which had brought about the current crisis.49
The Sepoy rebellion against the British army in May 1857 had led to massacres of Europeans in various places and to the fall of the British garrison at Lucknow, the capital of the province of Oudh. There was cruelty on both sides until Sir Colin Campbell, the chief of the army in India, succeeded in lifting the siege of Lucknow on 19 March 1858. The news of the massacre of British women and children shocked and enraged the British public. Dickens wrote to Miss Coutts in October 1857 that he wished he were commander in chief in India: ‘I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested.’50 His bellicose reaction is perhaps partly explained by the fact that 16-year-old Walter, his second son, was serving with the 42nd Highlanders in India; he was, as Dickens told a correspondent in February 1858, ‘in the thick of the Indian tussle’.51 Thomas Carlyle, on the other hand, responded with withering criticism to reports of cruelty on the part of the British army, which included strapping rebels to the muzzle of a gun and firing it:
I cannot bear to read those inhuman details in the newspapers, nor do I love in the least the spirit in wh[ich] the English People mainly have taken it up. To punish the Sepoys, and mince them all to pieces &c &c: it were far better if the English People thought of punishing themselves for the very great folly they have manifested there … whereby such results have become possible, and become inevitable.52
(Karl Marx made much the same point in a series of articles on the subject in the New York Daily Tribune in September 1857; he wrote of the Sepoy cruelty being atrocious, but also a ‘reflex’ of England’s conduct in India.53)
The governor-general of India, Lord Canning, made a punitive proclamation in March 1858, taking the property of Oudh into British possession. William Howard Russell, the India correspondent of The Times, who sent admirably informed reports back to London from Sir Colin Campbell’s headquarters, confided frankly to his diary on Sunday, 21 March that the sermon he had just heard in the mess tent, by the Scottish Presbyterian preacher, the Rev. McKay, was ‘eloquent but illogical’. McKay ‘sought to prove that England would not share the fate common to all the great empires of the world hitherto, because she was Christian and carried the ark of the covenant, whereas they had been heathen’. ‘I believe’, Russell continued, ‘that we permit things in India which we would not permit to be done in Europe, or could not hope to effect without public reprobation; and that our Christian character in Europe … will not atone for usurpation and annexation in Hindostan, or for violence and fraud in the Upper Provinces of India.’54
Russell was not the only onlooker who disapproved of Canning’s action. The chief commissioner of Oudh, Sir James Outram, objected to the severity of the terms, and persuaded Canning to soften them in order not to insult and enrage the local inhabitants by confiscating their lands wholesale. At home in London, Lord Ellenborough sided with Outram; without knowing that the terms had been made less provocative to the inhabitants of Oudh, he sent a dispatch to Canning censuring him. The language of the dispatch was uncompromising:
We cannot but express to you our apprehension that this decree, pronouncing the disinherison of a people, will throw difficulties almost insurmountable in the way of the re-establishment of peace … Other conquerors, when they have succeeded in overcoming resistance … have, with a generous policy, extended their clemency to the great body of the people. You have acted upon a different principle … We desire that you will mitigate, in practice, the stringent severity of the decree of confiscation you have issued against the landowners of Oude. We desire to see British authority in India rest upon the willing obedience of a contented people. There cannot be contentment where there is general confiscation. Government cannot long be maintained by any force in a country where the whole is rendered hostile by a sense of wrong; and if it were possible so to maintain it, it would not be a consummation to be desired.55
The dispatch was leaked at home before it reached Canning, and the embarrassed government was attacked on all sides for undermining him. Ellenborough resigned on 10 May in order to avert the fall of Derby’s ministry, writing on the same day to the queen to tender his resignation, but also to explain that he had intended to make it ‘unmistakably evident to the Governor as well as to the governed in India that your Majesty was resolved to temper Justice with Clemency, and would not sanction any measure which did not seem to conduce to the establishment of permanent peace’.56 Ellenborough’s honourable resignation did not stop Palmerston from planning a motion of censure which might easily bring down Derby’s minority government. His colleague Edward Cardwell was tasked with bringing the censure motion in the House of Commons, which he did on Thursday, 13 May, and Lord Shaftesbury brought it in the House of Lords on 14 May.
Derby and Disraeli thought their number was up. The following week was Epsom week, and they did not expect to survive it. On Sunday, 16 May Lord Derby told the queen and Prince Albert that he expected the censure debate to last another week and that he would be ‘beaten by from 15 to 35 votes’.57 The newspapers mainly predicted defeat on the return from the Derby but Disraeli was able to report triumphantly to the queen on
Friday, 21 May that the motion had been withdrawn. The opposition was, as ever, disunited, despite the so-called ‘Cambridge House Plot’, a meeting of opposition MPs held by Palmerston at his London residence on Piccadilly on the Friday before the Derby in an attempt to rally enough support for him to form a government if asked. For the debate on 21 May, as Disraeli reported to the queen, the House of Commons was full; 620 members were present and ‘it was supposed we sh[oul]d have divided at 3 o’c[loc]k in the morning’. ‘Very great excitement; when there occurred a scene perhaps unprecedented in Parl[ia]m[en]t.’ One after another, opposition members got up to ask Cardwell to withdraw his resolution; Cardwell and Palmerston retired from the chamber, then Palmerston reappeared, ‘embarrassed, with a faint smile’, and announced the withdrawal of the motion of censure. ‘It has revealed complete anarchy in the ranks’ of the opposition, Disraeli declared.58 He described the scene with gleeful hyperbole a few days later when speaking at a public dinner given for him at Slough in his Buckinghamshire constituency. There he compared the collapse of the previously confident opposition to an earthquake which started with ‘a rumbling murmur’, then a groan, a shriek, ‘a sound of distant thunder’, ‘a rent, a fissure in the ground, and then a village disappeared, then a tall tower toppled down, and the whole of the Opposition benches became one great dissolving view of anarchy’.59
Even Derby, described by Disraeli in his reminiscences as a man without imagination,60 was moved to use a dramatic metaphor in his own unusually loquacious account to the queen on Sunday, 23 May:
Your Majesty can hardly be expected to estimate, at a distance from the immediate scene of action, the effect of the event of that evening. It was the utter explosion of a well-constructed mine, under the feet, not of the assailed, but of the assailants; and the effect has been the greater from the immense attendance in London of Members of the House of Commons. No effort had been spared. Lord Castlerosse, only just married, had been sent for from Italy – but Lord Derby hopes that he had not been induced to come – for nothing. It is said that of the 654 Members of whom the House is composed, 626 were actually in London. The Government could rely on 304 to 308, and the whole question turned on the absence, or the conversion, of a small number of ‘Liberal’ Members.61