One Hot Summer
Page 13
Much worse for Dickens was his treatment at the hands of two of the gutter press weekly newspapers, the cheekily titled Court Circular of Saturday, 12 June and Reynolds’s Newspaper of Sunday, 13 June. Both filled in the gaps in Dickens’s account, the former going straight for ‘the story in circulation’ that Mrs Dickens has left the marital home ‘on account of that talented gentleman’s preference of his wife’s sister to herself’, warning Dickens that he is ‘in a fair way to figure in the new Matrimonial Court, and in a mode which will add little to his laurels’. Not to be outdone, Reynolds’s affirms that the rumours alluded to in Dickens’s statement ‘have, indeed, been widely circulated, and generally credited in literary and artistic circles’. ‘We trust’, it continues mock-sonorously, that
they are, as he alleges, nothing but calumnies. The names of a female relative and of a professional young lady, have both been, of late, so intimately associated with that of Mr Dickens, as to excite suspicion and surprise in the minds of those who had hitherto looked upon the popular novelist as a very Joseph in all that regards morality, chastity, and decorum … Mr Dickens has been ill-advised. He should either have left the ‘calumnies’ to die a natural death, or have explained them away in a style less ambiguous and stilted than that he has adopted in the above letter [i.e. the Household Words statement].46
Though Dickens got his Household Words colleague Wills to ask his solicitor Ouvry if ‘it would be expedient to move for a Criminal Information’ against the proprietor of the Court Circular and possibly the proprietor of Reynolds’s too, common sense prevailed in this case, and Dickens dropped the idea of prosecuting his tormentors.47 (G.W.M. Reynolds had long been a thorn in Dickens’s side. A radical, impulsive, often insolvent journalist and writer of potboiling fiction, he had quickly cashed in on Dickens’s success with his suggestive fictional ‘guide’ to Paris, Pickwick Abroad, or, the Tour in France (1837–8). As if to irritate Dickens further, Reynolds’s newspaper office was at No. 7 Wellington Street North, off the Strand, while Dickens’s Household Words office was diagonally opposite at No. 16.48)
Dickens survived this mainly metropolitan literary gossip. The young men about town, both those who idolised and openly imitated Dickens in their fiction and journalism, like G.A. Sala and Edmund Yates, and those who looked down on him for not having been to one of the two ancient universities, such as Thackeray and some of his fellow Punch writers, talked in club rooms, supper rooms, theatres, and at horse races. Other members of the literati discussed the affair too, including Dickens’s friend Carlyle, to whom in 1859 A Tale of Two Cities was dedicated in homage to Carlyle’s vibrant history of the French Revolution (1837). Carlyle attempted to dampen speculation even while he shared it. He wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson in America, telling him on 2 June – a few days before Dickens’s statement in The Times – that the newspapers ‘will babble to you about Dickens: “Separation from Wife” &c &c: fact of Separat[io]n (Lawyer’s Deed &c) I believe is true; but all the rest is mere lies and nonsense. No crime or misdemeanour specifiable on either side: unhappy together these good many years past, and they at length end it.’49 If Carlyle knew about the impending separation a week before it was announced, another member of London’s literary world had heard the news a week before that. Edward Leman Blanchard, one of the most successful writers of burlesques and pantomimes for the theatres, noted in his diary on Wednesday, 26 May, ‘Hear of Charles Dickens’s separation from his wife on Saturday!’50
While Carlyle was content to take Dickens at his word on the nature of the separation, others shook their heads. Thackeray, telling his mother early in June about the gossip, added that he felt sorry for Catherine, mother of nine children and blameless, having to leave her marital home: ‘To think of the poor matron after 22 years of marriage going away out of her house!’51 Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes, who were spending the summer months in Germany, learned about the separation while in Munich. They knew all about the unpleasantness and damaging gossip that awaited those who embraced unorthodoxy or irregularity in their personal lives. They had suffered when they began to live together openly in 1854 (also in Germany) after the breakdown of Lewes’s marriage and the birth of two children to his wife Agnes by another man. Their chosen path was different from the one Dickens was about to go down; they continued their devoted partnership, accepting that some friends might cut off ties completely, as Marian’s brother Isaac did. One thing they refused to do was to join in tittle-tattle about the affairs of others. Lewes merely noted sadly in his journal on 14 June that on visiting the famous chemist Justus von Liebig after dinner that night, ‘we spoke sorrowfully of Dickens’s public separation from his wife, which is making a scandal here as in England.’52
Dickens busied himself with his Thursday evening readings and prepared to flee London, which had got too hot for him, both literally and metaphorically. He went off with his shrewd manager Arthur Smith on his reading tour from 2 August to 13 November, starting in Bristol and finishing in Brighton, after taking in towns in every part of England, Scotland, and Ireland.53 He had some more bad moments to negotiate, but for now he was relieved that Catherine had signed the deed of separation on 4 June and was preparing to move, with Charley, to Gloucester Crescent, near Regent’s Park. Dickens himself would henceforth spend most of his time between the office of Household Words and his country home, Gad’s Hill in Kent. Tavistock House, the family home for almost a decade, complete with its private theatre, was soon given up as the Dickens family split for ever.
Midsummer madness
The hot weather began in the last days of May and continued to increase through the first week of June. Queen Victoria’s journal records it as ‘stiflingly hot’ in London on Friday, 4 June, ‘steamy & heavy’ the next day after a thunderstorm, and ‘oppressive’ on the following days.54 On Monday, 7 June, the same day on which it printed Dickens’s statement, The Times, in its notice of the long-running entertainment, The Ascent of Mont Blanc, by Arthur Smith’s better-known brother Albert, added that in this hot weather ‘Mr Albert Smith places filters of iced water in different parts of the Egyptian-hall at the service of his audience’.55 Smith was an entrepreneur, loud and bohemian; he had climbed Mont Blanc in 1851 and opened his show at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly the following year. It consisted of a moving panorama of the ascent of the mountain complemented by Smith’s topical songs and humour. Smith finally closed the show on 6 July 1858 after the 2,000th performance.56 Meanwhile his brother Arthur, who had managed Albert’s performances, turned to helping Dickens arrange his readings outside London over the summer.
Among those bothered by the extreme heat in this first week of June was Disraeli. On the same Monday, 7 June, when the temperature reached 75 °F (24 °C) in the shade, he wrote a brief note from the House of Commons to his wife in Buckinghamshire asking her to send him ‘a pair of boots for my feet are quite damp in these varnished [patent leather] ones’.57 The Times was receiving letters from correspondents about the heat (and soon about the smell in London); on 11 June the paper printed a letter from someone in Fareham, Hampshire, declaring that on Tuesday, 8 June,
the heat was at one time so intense at this place that my thermometer, at 1 p.m., showed 136 deg. [well over 50 °C] of heat in the sun. I never observed during last year [the previous record breaker] a greater degree of heat than 123 [about 50 °C] in the sun. I write this, as doubtless you will give us from some of your numerous scientific correspondents some interesting statistics.58
Tuesday, 8 June was hot in Hertford, 30 miles north of London, too, where Bulwer Lytton was obliged to seek re-election in order to take up his cabinet appointment. His fears of being beaten and losing his seat were eased when it became clear that the Liberal opposition would not, after all, put up a candidate against him.59 This was good news, but not so the fact that he was dramatically denounced, as he gave his speech to the voters, by his furious wife, Rosina, who travelled to Hertford from her home in Somerset to placard the town and embarrass
him at the hustings. Disraeli wrote urgently to his colleague about her renewed bout of letter-writing in advance of the election:
My dear Bulwer,
I thought you had tamed the tigress of Taunton – but, unhappily, this is not the case.
She is writing letters to your colleagues, & friends, of an atrocious description, such as, I thought, no woman could have penned, accusing you of nameless crimes, at least wh[ich] can only be named by her, & threatening aggravated hostilities.
This is not very pleasant to your friends: I should think hardly, to yourself.
What can be the explanation? Is it possible, that your agent has been so negligent, or so imprudent, as to leave her allowance in arrear?60
The friend to whom Rosina’s activities were particularly unpleasant was Disraeli himself, since she was freely naming him in her letters as not only a crony of Bulwer Lytton’s, but also a fellow sodomite; hence his sharpness with his friend here. As Bulwer Lytton was notoriously stingy – Rosina constantly complained that her allowance from him was mean and often not paid on time – it is likely that Disraeli’s question at the end was intended as a rebuke. If Bulwer Lytton would only increase her allowance and in that way buy her off, or at least remove that motive for her aggression, it would be better for Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli alike.
On that hot Tuesday Bulwer Lytton was staggered to find himself interrupted by his estranged wife as he spoke in a field outside Hertford. Rosina shouted that he had murdered their daughter Emily through neglect, and declared, echoing her remarks in her letters to Lord Derby and his colleagues, that instead of being appointed secretary for the colonies, he should be transported there for his crimes. The details of her ambush vary according to the source. Rosina herself wrote letters to her friend Miss Ryves; she also, through supporters in Taunton, fed juicy morsels to local Somerset and Hertfordshire newspapers. Much later she wrote a gaudy account in her vituperative autobiography, A Blighted Life, which was printed in a swiftly suppressed edition in 1867, before being eventually published in 1880, some years after Bulwer Lytton’s death and the deaths of many others who were libelled in the book.61 It was generally agreed that when Bulwer Lytton saw Rosina approaching, he almost fainted off the platform and made a hasty retreat through a nearby garden, while she harangued the crowd about the misdemeanours of ‘Sir Liar’.62 Carlyle, having escaped the London heat to stay with his sister in Dumfriesshire, heard from the newspapers some weeks later about ‘the furious Lady’s spring up upon the Public Stage, and clutching her Phantasm Husband in sight of the world, at some sublime acme of his Harangue’, as he put it with his usual brightly coloured verbal portraiture.63
Rosina soon set about getting her denunciation published, but it took several weeks before any national newspaper would oblige her. The Bulwer Lytton-friendly Times – she called it ‘that beastly National Typographic Weathercock’ – reported his successful re-election on 9 June. The paper quotes sycophantic speeches by his supporters, followed by Bulwer Lytton’s own speech, which reveals that Rosina’s parodies were by no means excessive; he apparently began by claiming that an ancestor of his ‘somewhere between 300 and 400 years ago … held a considerable station in the council of Henry VII’.64 There is no mention in The Times’s report of Rosina’s interruption. Bulwer Lytton’s influence in high places seems to have kept the news of his humiliation out of the national press for a while. But by his own desperate actions a few weeks later, he ensured that by the beginning of July the story was being run day after day across the country.
The letters Rosina wrote to her friend Rebecca Ryves in the days following 8 June reveal that she told the electors of Hertford that her husband was plotting to make her out to be mad. He was. In March 1858 he had asked six doctors for their written opinions on her sanity, but though they supported his view that she was insane, he did not take action at that time.65 His friend John Forster, busy enough acting for Dickens over his separation from Catherine, was called in to help here too. Forster, known in literary and journalistic circles as ‘the beadle of the universe’, had acted for Bulwer Lytton when he separated from Rosina in 1836 and had even spied on her for his friend in 1839.66 He was also, since January 1856, secretary to the Lunacy Commission, a body which had come into existence after the passing of the Lunacy Act of 1845, with powers to inspect and regulate asylums. In October 1857 Forster had advised Bulwer Lytton not to incarcerate Rosina; though he agreed that she was mad, he believed it would be difficult to persuade doctors to certify her.67 But Bulwer Lytton was determined to frighten Rosina into silence by threatening to commit her to a madhouse. On 12 June 1858, back in Taunton, she was visited by two doctors and a woman from a local lunatic asylum who attempted to dissuade her from publishing her accusations about her husband. According to her hectic account to Miss Ryves, Dr Hale Thomson, sent up from London by Bulwer Lytton, said to her:
‘But surely, Lady Lytton, you dont [sic] mean to give lectures through the Kingdom, – narrate your own history, and read out all Sir E’s letters?’ Don’t I? – as there is a god in Heaven I’ll do it; unless he pays what I owe, and gives me at least an adequate – and above all a clear unmortgaged allowance … I then wrote that if he would pledge himself to … pay the £2,500 of debt his 26 years persecution had entailed on me, and settle £500 a year on me for my life, not his, as his beggarly £400 is now settled – I would pledge myself never to mention his name, which indeed I should be only too glad to forget.68
Such an agreement to pay her debts and improve her settlement might have brought the episode to a reasonable conclusion, but neither Rosina nor her husband could do the sensible thing. She continued to send furious letters to his supporters, and began threatening to turn up in London, where he ‘may chance to find the Colonial office rather too hot to hold him’.69 Before the end of the month the full-blown scandal Disraeli feared for his friend (and himself) had materialised.
Stories of incarcerations in lunatic asylums were among the hot topics of the day. Sometimes they related to husbands locking up inconvenient wives on the pretext that they were mad. It only took two corrupt medical men to sign a statement, and scandals were beginning to erupt over conspiracies between unscrupulous husbands who paid unscrupulous doctors, who in turn referred the ‘patients’ to the unscrupulous owners of private asylums. There were cases where husbands, not wives, were wrongly locked up, and others which involved parents and children, or other relatives who resorted to desperate measures in order to gain a disputed inheritance.70 The most publicised case concerned a man who everyone agreed was insane, but whose wife was in dispute with his three sisters over who should gain from his enormous wealth when he died. The question at issue over nine ‘very exceedingly hot days’ in June 1858, as The Times reported at the end of the case, was whether the unfortunate lunatic had been mad when he made a codicil to his will the previous year, leaving everything to his young wife and nothing to his sisters, or only became mad subsequently. In other words, was the new will valid or not?71
The lunacy trial, held in the Thatched House Tavern on St James’s Street, off Piccadilly, was that of the fabulously wealthy Sir Henry Meux, a member of a famous brewing family, and, along with Bulwer Lytton, one of the three Conservative MPs for Hertfordshire. At the general election in April 1857 Bulwer Lytton and his colleagues had tried to persuade Meux to stand down, since he could not speak coherently. Though on that occasion Meux ‘presented a most pitiable sight’, appearing ‘haggard, worn, and distressed’, and taking ‘no notice of what was going on’, he remained as a candidate.72 He therefore continued as an MP, though an inactive and incapacitated one, until the general election of May 1859, which saw Derby’s government thrown out and Palmerston’s ushered back in. The lunacy case attracted huge attention because of the stakes; during the trial, brought by the disinherited sisters, it became clear that Meux’s estate was worth more than £600,000 (approximately £60 million today73). The proceedings began on Tuesday, 8 June 1858, the same day as Bulwe
r Lytton’s troubles occurred at Hertford, and lasted till Thursday, 17 June, when the jury, exhausted by the heat – which had reached the record of 94.5 °F (35 °C) in the shade on 16 June – and the complications of the case, declared that it could not say precisely when Sir Henry had become insane in law, and therefore could not find in favour of either the greedy sisters or the apparently gold-digging young wife. The case was dismissed without resolution, and against all odds Sir Henry lived on until 1883, though in a hopeless state.74
The counsel acting for Lady Meux was Edwin James, who specialised in lunacy and other headline-hitting cases; in fact, he was becoming well known for taking on difficult briefs, often defending the indefensible. In the Meux case he made the court laugh, despite the uncomfortable heat, when he addressed the jury. According to the People’s Paper of 19 June, he ‘went into a minute analysis of the evidence, and was extremely humorous in his attempts to laugh out of court the various acts of delusion which were ascribed to Sir Henry Meux’, declaring that ‘if he was insane at the time contended for, he was also equally insane when he advanced … sums to his relatives’.75
One person who followed the case with eagle eyes was the indefatigable Rosina, who, in the midst of her own fight against being branded a lunatic, wrote to Miss Ryves on 11 June: ‘As they are having an inquiry about Sir Henry Meux’s state of mind, I think they had better have one about Sir Liars [sic] who is much the madder brute of the two.’76