As the middle of the month approached, and with it the hottest day, complaints abounded about the heat in parliament, in theatres, and in people’s homes. By 12 June Carlyle had abandoned his study at the top of his Chelsea house to work on Frederick the Great under an awning in the garden. A few days later he had finished his book and was planning his getaway to Scotland, while worrying that his horse (called Fritz in honour of Carlyle’s subject) was ‘not quite himself’ at present, ‘owing to his hot stable’ nearby.77 He gave Forster a vivid account of his own state of mind and body: ‘I am just out, half-alive, from the Slough of Despond, temperature 82° in the shade: Thames River with a Stink worse than Acheron [one of the five rivers of Hades]; a gilt Old-Clothes man [a disparaging reference to Disraeli’s Jewishness] ruling the Empire of Britain; and Beelzebub, so to speak, doing his will on earth, with a clear working majority.’78
At Buckingham Palace Queen Victoria groaned about the blazing heat.79 Lord Derby fell ill and could not attend parliament. Disraeli told his friend Mrs Brydges Willyams that his ‘chief & colleague’ was suffering from ‘a raging fit of the gout, wh[ich] terribly disconcerts me’. ‘Fortunately, we are now, generally speaking, on velvet; but, unhappily, all the measures, wh[ich] I have carried thro’ the House of Commons, will soon be going to the Upper House, & he will be required to advocate & conduct them.’80 These included India and the tricky question, being batted to and fro between Lords and Commons at this time, of the Oaths Bill and Rothschild’s position.
The House of Lords had debated the Oaths Bill on 31 May, with Lord Lucan attempting to ‘restore harmony between the two houses’ by reminding peers that the question had been appearing before parliament since the 1830s. He begged the House of Lords to stop blocking the legislation, insisting that ‘the exclusion of the Jews was both impolitic and inexpedient’.81 Lucan was answered with objections by the lord chancellor, Lord Chelmsford, an ‘able lawyer and eager partisan’, according to a contemporary, and noted for being implacably opposed to having Jews in parliament.82 Lord Lyndhurst offered to present a compromise amendment to the bill which would allow each house to decide separately what to do about Jewish representation. ‘The days of Jewish disabilities are numbered’, said the Liverpool Mercury on 2 June, since ‘Lord Lyndhurst is to prepare the anodyne for the Peers.’83 On 9 June Lord Derby wrote a ‘Confidential Circular’ from his London home in St James’s Square to his young Tory colleague Lord Carnarvon, among other peers, expressing his unease about the embarrassing difference between the two houses. He believed the efforts by Lord Lucan and Lord Lyndhurst to reach a compromise should be accepted, and wished to know the opinion of his correspondents and whether they would send a proxy if they were unable to attend the vote. ‘I fear that on this occasion’, he wrote courteously, ‘I may differ from many of those with whom I generally agree.’ As an incentive he points out that if each house were to pass a resolution, it would be, ‘unlike an Act of Parliament’, ‘only binding on the House which passes it; and, on that, only during the Parliament in which it is passed’. In other words, if the opponents of Jewish representation really wished to bring the subject up again, they could do so in the next parliament.84 The juggling and toing and froing were coming to an end at last.
During June the Thames got ever smellier. On Monday, 14 June the lord mayor told an audience at Mansion House that he had received several complaints about the state of the river. His speech was reported in the Weekly Chronicle the following Saturday: ‘It might be beneficial to notice publicly a statement to the truth of which he could bear testimony himself, having been amongst hundreds of witnesses on the steam-boat passage from London-bridge to Westminster a day or two ago. Certainly no stench that ever he had encountered was comparable with that which assailed the passengers on that occasion. He would not try the experiment again.’85
People’s livelihoods were suffering, as pleasure boats, having no takers, ceased to travel along the stinking river.86 The People’s Paper noted that by the end of June those who ‘look forward to this time of year to make a little harvest by the letting of boats are completely at a standstill’, and ‘the only trade which is flourishing on the river is carried on in the cabins, where drops of brandy are in constant request’.87 The theatres found attendance decreasing, so oppressive was the heat; the critic of the Theatrical Journal sat out the performance of Othello at the Soho Theatre on 16 June, but could not bear to stay for the two short pieces which were to follow: ‘The heat of the theatre was so great, that we left the house at half-past eleven o’clock.’88 On that very hottest day in the Court of the Exchequer in Westminster Hall, one of the lawyers asked permission of the lord chief baron, Sir Frederick Pollock, ‘to dispense with his wig during this very hot weather’. Permission was granted, with jokes being exchanged about the weather in London as compared with hot countries, where wigs tended not to be worn.89
Meltdown in Clubland
Among the gossipy newspapers which fell greedily upon political and social events in the summer of 1858, from Disraeli’s flamboyant politics and Derby’s precarious position as prime minister to Dickens’s predicament, not to mention the state of the Thames and the constant news from the new Divorce Court and the Lunacy Commission, were two new weeklies. Both papers were started on 1 May and both featured the writing of young men about town who emulated Dickens and Thackeray in their journalism. Dickens was imitated sometimes for the righteous anger he expressed in his novels and in Household Words against social deprivation and the do-nothingism of the institutions which ought to be acting against it – from parliament to law court to church – though more often for the power of his satirical rhetoric when attacking the objects of his scorn. Thackeray, less of a radical social critic than Dickens, aimed his satire at class snobbery (while consciously sharing it himself) and in particular hypocrisy. His rather cynical view of mankind was taken up by the two new papers, the Welcome Guest and Town Talk, the latter in particular setting out to be offensive and notorious under its proprietor, the publisher John Maxwell. Two young men, G.A. Sala and Edmund Yates, leapt to relative prominence as they burned the midnight oil turning out copy by the yard for these papers.90
Sala, a bibulous and irrepressible bohemian, wrote for Household Words, persuading Dickens to pay for him to visit Russia in 1856 in return for sending back accounts of his adventures there. He was unreliable and often late with copy, and made the mistake of quarrelling with Dickens over the money he felt was owed to him. Dickens sacked him in 1857. Sala worked for an extraordinary number of papers, including the anti-establishment penny paper the Daily Telegraph, and he was engaged by the bohemian publisher Henry Vizetelly to write for a number of cheap papers that Vizetelly started up in the years after the repeal of newspaper taxes.91
One such paper, launched in May 1858, was Welcome Guest, a penny weekly which carried a successful series of sketches by Sala of London life, a racier version of Dickens’s early Sketches by Boz. Entitled ‘Twice Round the Clock’, the sketches take the reader into the streets and buildings of London by day and by night, sticking closely to the actual calendar, so that when London boils in June and July 1858, Sala gives a vivid sense of the discomfort experienced by many Londoners as they go about their business and pleasure. The ‘Twice Round the Clock’ pieces describe the morning activities in stuffy law courts and in parliament. The author drops in on the Court of the Queen’s Bench in Westminster Hall at 10 a.m. on a hot June morning and sees the jurymen ‘wiping their foreheads with blue cotton pocket handkerchiefs’ as they puzzle over the rhetoric of the counsels on both sides in the hot, cramped room. From that historic venue with its medieval carved roof and recent adornments of brass and stained glass by Sir Charles Barry, Sala moves dramatically to the contrasting Prison of the Queen’s Bench on the south of the Thames. Drawing cheekily on Dickens’s descriptions of the Marshalsea debtors’ prison in Little Dorrit (1855–7), he gives a picture of this place where prisoners are confined yet free to walk about and e
ven conduct business within the walls:
I am standing in the centre of a vast gravelled area, bounded on the south side by a brick wall of tremendous height … To the north there is a range of ordinary-looking houses … There are no barred windows, no bolts, bars, or grim chains apparent … The guardians themselves are ruddy men with very big keys; but they seem on the very best terms with the gentlemen whose intended exercise outside the walls they feel compelled … to debar … And what of the collegians [Dickens’s word in Little Dorrit] – the prisoners – themselves? It is ten o’clock in the morning, and they are sauntering about in every variety of shabby dishabille, smoking pipes …92
(Sala was soon to see the inside of the Queen’s Bench Prison himself, and not as an amused visitor. Having failed to gamble his way out of debt at the roulette tables on a visit to Homburg with Vizetelly and another penny-a-liner and writer of topical fiction, Augustus Mayhew, in September 1858, he got even deeper into trouble and in December found himself spending a couple of weeks in the prison. He wrote from there to his friend Yates at three in the morning, sending him a piece of writing for publication in one of the papers they both wrote for. Yates, who frequently lent his friend money, may well have paid his debts once more to get him out.93)
This is how Sala goes on, filling his pages with easy chit-chat and keeping his eye all the while on London life, reckoning – correctly – that there is a large readership for this new kind of journalism, adding to Dickens’s reportage a careless, jaunty air of the flâneur while at the same time giving an accurate view of London’s social geography. He flits around, noticing in July a scene of fashionable afternoon shopping in Regent Street with its carriages and crinolines (‘Dulcinea in a hoop petticoat’). Evening adventures include visits to uncomfortable theatres, concert halls, and rooms where ‘scientific conversazioni’ are being held. The night-time life of London is portrayed too. Famous late-night resorts for men of a bohemian tendency around the Strand and Covent Garden, like Evans’s Supper Rooms, are name-checked by Sala, who alludes to Thackeray’s frequent presence there and his portrait of the place as the ‘Cave of Harmony’ in The Newcomes (1853–5). He also visits the porters in Billingsgate fish market and in Covent Garden fruit market in the early hours, then at 5 a.m. looks into the offices of The Times, quoting from a famous passage in Thackeray’s novel Pendennis (1850), in which the young hero walks the streets at night and observes the brightly lit offices of a national newspaper in the small hours as it prepares to give the world’s news to the reading public next morning.94
In Sala’s amusing if unreliable memoirs of 1895, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala, Written by Himself, he claimed that long ago he had been told the ‘secret’ of Dickens’s ‘matrimonial troubles’, but that he would not reveal it. As far as he knew, apart from the Dickens family, only Wilkie Collins and Edmund Yates, both now dead, had been told.95 No doubt it was his close friend Yates, who almost certainly did know all about it in 1858, who had disclosed the not-so-secret secret of Dickens’s relationship with Ellen Ternan. Yates was friendly with Dickens. Like Sala, he came from an acting family with whom Dickens was familiar; unlike Sala, he had not fallen out with his older friend. It was the pair’s other literary hero, Thackeray, with whom Yates fell out in the summer of 1858. While Sala was probably the roguish author of a ditty making fun of Dickens’s marital situation in the ever-annoying Reynolds’s Newspaper on 20 June – ‘With tongue and pen, none can like Dickens fudge; / But now in vain in virtue’s cause he pleads; / Henceforth the public will his virtues judge, / Not by his “Household Words”, but household deeds’96 – Yates was supporting Dickens in print wherever he could. In another of Vizetelly’s papers, the twopenny Illustrated Times, he rushed to defend Dickens’s statement to the press. Writing as ‘The Lounger at the Clubs’ in the paper, he declared on 12 June that the rumours concerning Dickens’s domestic affairs were ‘absurd and mischievous’.97
In the following weeks he and Dickens supported one another in the scandals that each faced. For it was precisely because of Yates’s lounging in clubs that he got into trouble. Yates had been allowed to become a member of the Garrick Club in 1848, six months before his eighteenth birthday, on account of his parents’ profession.98 In June 1858, he was about to turn twenty-seven. The club, located in Covent Garden, had been founded in 1831 for people associated with the nearby theatres, and for literary men, though it also had members from other professions, particularly politics and the law.99 Both Dickens and Thackeray were members, but while Dickens scarcely ever went there, except when attending meetings of the committee, of which he was a member, Thackeray used the club as a home from home. Yates, who had admired Pendennis above all other novels and claimed to have been inspired by it to become a journalist and writer,100 wrote a foolish article on Thackeray which was printed on Saturday, 12 June, the day Dickens’s separation statement was widely published. Thackeray had a rush of blood to the head in response, and Dickens, already unhappy to know that Thackeray was gossiping about his marital difficulties, became unnecessarily involved.
Having written a portrait of Dickens in the new penny weekly Town Talk the previous Saturday, Yates had now set about doing the same for Thackeray. The article begins with a description of Thackeray’s appearance which starts neutrally and gradually builds up to unpleasantness:
Mr Thackeray is forty-six years old, though from the silvery whiteness of his hair he appears somewhat older. He is very tall, standing upwards of six feet two inches, and as he walks erect his height makes him conspicuous in every assembly. His face is bloodless, and not particularly expressive, but remarkable for the fracture of the bridge of the nose, the result of an accident in youth … No one meeting him could fail to recognise in him a gentleman; his bearing is cold and uninviting, his style of conversation either openly cynical, or affectedly good-natured and benevolent; his bonhomie is forced, his wit biting, his pride easily touched – but his appearance is invariably that of the cool, suave, well-bred gentleman, who, whatever may be rankling within, suffers no surface display of his emotion.101
So much for Thackeray’s physical appearance and social demeanour. Yates turns next to his career, praising his witty contributions to Punch and his Book of Snobs, which began life as essays in Punch in 1846 under the title ‘The Snobs of England, by One of Themselves’, though Yates does not acknowledge the self-deprecation of the title in his piece. As for the novels, Yates notes that Thackeray first achieved proper fame with Vanity Fair and its successor Pendennis. ‘Then came Esmond, which fell almost still-born from the press; and then the Newcomes, perhaps the best of all.’ Yates goes on to touch a raw nerve: ‘The Virginians, now publishing, though admirably written, lacks interest of plot, and is proportionately unsuccessful.’ Thackeray was only too aware of the truth of this, as he battled on to write his monthly instalments. He had told an American friend in April that he had only just written that month’s number in time, adding, ‘The book’s clever, but stupid, thats [sic] the fact … Here is a third of a great story done equal to two thirds of an ordinary novel – and nothing actually has happened, except that a young gentleman has come from America to England.’102
Yates ends his article with a paragraph accusing Thackeray of flattering the aristocracy in his ‘Lectures on the English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century’, which were ‘attended by all the court and fashion of London’, then going to America and attacking the British monarchy while praising George Washington. ‘Our own opinion is that his success is on the wane’, writes the young upstart. Finally, ‘there is a want of heart in all he writes, which is to be balanced by the most brilliant sarcasm and the most perfect knowledge of the workings of the human heart.’103 On this note, half censorious, half eulogising, Yates finishes his dashed-off piece of page-filling about a novelist he mainly admired. Of course, he may have had reason to feel, as Dickens keenly did, that Thackeray was inclined to look down on the likes of him from his public-schooled, university-edu
cated gentlemanly height. Still it seems likely that Yates’s motivation for writing the piece was, as he later claimed, the necessity for writing articles at speed to keep his family comfortably off (he was married with three young children and had a regular job as a clerk at the General Post Office). Perhaps he was also influenced by the atmosphere of flippant, careless, and uncaring journalism in which he worked.104
If Yates’s attack was unnecessary and perhaps even only half felt, Thackeray’s response was thunderous. He was often unwell at this time (his diary frequently records ‘spasms’, and he had to cancel engagements because of indisposition105), and struggling with his writing.
It is not known whether Thackeray sought advice from anyone, but given that he wrote to Yates on Sunday, 13 June, the day after the offending article appeared, it is likely that he did not. Someone had drawn his attention to Yates’s piece, as well as to a remark made in Town Talk the previous Saturday, also by Yates, to the effect that Thackeray was being paid £200 a month by his publishers Bradbury and Evans for the foot-dragging serialisation of The Virginians. Thackeray allows that Yates is entitled to his opinion of his works, ‘wh[ich] of course you are at liberty to praise or condemn as a literary critic’. His objection is to the ungentlemanly mention of his financial arrangements with his publisher and the accusation of hypocrisy in both his private conversation and his public lecturing:
As I understand your phrases, you impute insincerity to me when I speak good-naturedly in private; assign dishonourable motives to me for sentiments wh[ich] I have delivered in public, and charge me with advancing sentiments wh[ich] I have never delivered at all.
Had your remarks been written by a person unknown to me, I should have noticed them no more than other calumnies: but as we have shaken hands more than once, and met hitherto on friendly terms … I am obliged to take notice of articles wh[ich] I consider to be, not offensive & unfriendly merely, but slanderous and untrue.
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