One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  (That the Yates affair continued to rankle with Thackeray is shown by the fact that an essay published in the Cornhill Magazine in November 1863, only a month before his death, contains yet another veiled reference to the Garrick Club affair. Entitled ‘Strange to Say, On Club Paper’, the piece complains of the ‘tattle’ of ‘Club gossips and loungers’. ‘I’ve seen literary fellows at Clubs writing their rubbishing articles’, ‘literary vagabonds’ ready to ‘stab a reputation’ or ‘tell any monstrous falsehood’.31)

  In January 1859 the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent was among the provincial newspapers which picked up the news of the expected court case between Yates and the Garrick. ‘A considerable interest will be attached to the trial’, it wrote, ‘as it is understood that the line of cross-examination of Mr Thackeray is to deduce from his earlier works – long ago ignored, if not repudiated – sins against good taste exceeding those of which Mr Yates stands accused in the court of letters’.32

  The same paper expressed its mock sorrow on 2 April that the trial would not, after all, take place:

  The quid nuncs are deprived of a rare treat, but literature is saved from being a subject of scorn … The admirers of Thackeray must ever regret that he thought it worth his while to be moved by the scribbling of the editor of ‘Town Talk’ into writing a letter which was undoubtedly a mistake. The part played by Mr Yates needs no comment, still less does the pamphlet he has circulated, giving his version of the affair.33

  Yates’s pamphlet goes over the whole sorry business in detail. He complains that Thackeray was intentionally ‘arrogant and offensive’ towards him, and insists that Thackeray had committed at least as many ‘errors’ in taste in his youthful writings as he, Yates, had done at the tender age of twenty-six the previous summer. He blames the Garrick Club for finding a means to stop his suit by turning it into a Chancery matter: ‘That I, a young man with the world before me, could possibly survive long in a tilting-match with a rich Club and a dozen or two of not poor individuals … representing it … I suppose to be as plain to my readers as to the Garrick Club Committee.’ He finishes by asking his readers to ‘judge for themselves’ what would have happened ‘if Mr Thackeray had addressed me with any temper or generosity’.34

  Yates always felt his life had been unfairly blighted by this intense storm in a teacup. He repeated his complaints in his Recollections and Experiences, published in 1884, long after the deaths of most of those involved, going so far as to claim that the ‘whole affair was a struggle for supremacy, or an outburst of jealousy, between Thackeray and Dickens’, and that ‘my part was merely that of the scapegoat or shuttlecock’.35 He continued to work in the Post Office until 1872, and he also pursued his rather rackety career in journalism, where he endured mixed fortunes, now doing well out of editorships, now getting on the wrong side of the libel laws, and on one occasion appearing in the bankruptcy court, though he was relatively well off on his death in 1894.36

  Dickens kept up the friendship, publishing stories by Yates in his new weekly paper, All the Year Round, discussing his pamphlet about the Garrick quarrel with him,37 and commiserating with him on the death of his mother in August 1860. One reason for Dickens’s fondness for Yates was his admiration for Elizabeth Yates, who had played the part of Nancy in her husband’s adaptation of Oliver Twist at the Adelphi in 1839. He wrote in melancholy vein after her death that his memory of her was ‘a part of my youth no more capable of restoration than my youth itself’.38 When Yates got into financial difficulties in 1868 Dickens wrote encouragingly, ‘You are quite young enough, and have a sufficiently free stage before you, to play the play out yet to everybody’s satisfaction.’39 Yates could not avoid appearing in the bankruptcy court that summer, whereupon Henry Silver noted in his Punch diary, ‘How the Shade of Thackeray would chuckle.’40 Yates never forgot his youthful disgrace at the hands of the novelist he had most admired when growing up.41 He told a correspondent in 1889 that his expulsion from the Garrick had been the best-known thing about him all his life. ‘Think of being “expelled” from a club, as tho’ one had been a card-sharper, a cheat, a thief, a braggart about women!’42

  As for Edwin James, whose talents were not, after all, to be displayed in this high-profile case, he was not short of work. The Times records lawsuits almost daily during January and February 1859 in which he was active: there were libel cases, a case of false imprisonment, one of alleged abduction and seduction of a minor, and many more. In the midst of all this James found time to stand as the Liberal candidate in a by-election for the borough of Marylebone. He addressed the electors at a meeting on 21 February, declaring that he was a sincere reformer and, if elected, ‘would advocate a large and liberal extension of the franchise’. James was elected on 25 February, and on 1 March was already participating in a debate in the House of Commons.43 He continued to be successful until 1861, when his huge debts and an inquiry into his conduct by the Inner Temple brought an end to his career in London.

  Dickens and Thackeray did not correspond or converse again. They coincided at Drury Lane Theatre in May 1861 and shook hands but did not speak. Thackeray reported to a friend that he had no desire to make up the quarrel; he had ‘found Dickens out’, and knew that ‘poor Yates’ was only ‘the mouthpiece’ in the Garrick Club affair.44 He and Dickens met again by chance in the lobby of the Athenaeum Club on Pall Mall in May 1863. According to Henry Silver’s diary, they shook hands and tears came to Dickens’s eyes when he saw how ill Thackeray looked.45 They saw one another once more, in the same club, in December 1863; a week later, on Christmas Eve, Thackeray died, aged fifty-two, of a stroke.46 Dickens attended the funeral and was asked by George Smith, publisher of the Cornhill Magazine, of which Thackeray had been the editor, to write an appreciation of his old rival.

  As he told Wilkie Collins in January 1864, he would have ‘gladly excused’ himself from the task, but felt he had to write a few pages in tribute:

  Thus I have tried … to avoid the fulsome and injudicious trash that has been written about him in the papers,47 and delicately to suggest the two points in his character as a literary man that were bad for the literary cause … You can have no idea of the vile stuff that has been written: the scribes particularly dwelling on his having been ‘a gentleman’, ‘a great gentleman’, and the like – as if the rest of us were of the tinker tribe.48

  Though the last phrase betrays once again Dickens’s sense of being looked down on by Thackeray, he managed to write an extremely gracious piece, ‘In Memoriam’, which appeared in the Cornhill in February 1864. Calling Thackeray his ‘old comrade and brother in arms’, he tells the story Thackeray himself had told at the dinner preceding the opening of the Royal Academy exhibition in May 1858, shortly before the rift between them occurred. Naturally he makes no mention of the quarrel in his essay. They first met nearly twenty-eight years ago, Dickens writes, when Thackeray ‘proposed to become the illustrator of my earliest book’. They became friendly (though Dickens does not say they became ‘friends’), and Dickens saw many examples of Thackeray’s ‘genial, natural, cordial, fresh, and honestly impulsive’ nature. ‘We had our differences of opinion. I thought that he too much feigned a want of earnestness, and that he made a pretence of undervaluing his art’ (the ‘two points in his character’ Dickens notes in his letter to Collins), but when they had discussions on the subject, Thackeray often ended them with a laugh. With the Yates affair no doubt in mind but taking care not to point to it directly, Dickens adds that ‘in the reckless vivacity of his youth, his satirical pen’ had sometimes ‘gone astray or done amiss’, but he had often asked forgiveness for the fault. Dickens merely touches on the writings, which he could not truly admire; he praises Thackeray’s ‘subtle acquaintance with the weaknesses of human nature’, his ‘delighted playfulness as an essayist’, and ‘his mastery over the English language’. The short piece ends with a memory of the ‘bright wintry day, the last but one of the old year’, when Thackeray was buried in Kensal
Green cemetery with ‘a great concourse of his fellow-workers in the Arts’ in attendance.49

  Given their temperaments and backgrounds, and the inevitable rivalry between them as the two giants of fiction in the 1840s and 1850s, the two men could never have been close friends. Nonetheless, the unnecessary estrangement of 1858 surely happened because each was coping with difficulties that hot summer, especially Dickens. Both tried to ‘police the gossip’ about themselves, to avoid public humiliation, and to use newspapers to ‘manage’ their reputations.50 Neither can be said to have been entirely successful in these endeavours. Though the Garrick was the arena in which the cause of their estrangement occurred, and though its committee sided with Thackeray, the club continued to take pride in the membership of both writers. Today a portrait of Dickens by Charles Fullwood, copied from Daniel Maclise’s famous 1839 picture in the National Portrait Gallery, looks across the room at a drawing of Thackeray by Samuel Lawrence.51

  Success and embarrassment for Dickens

  When Dickens gave the final performance of his first grand reading tour in Brighton on Saturday, 13 November 1858, G.A. Sala was in town, hiding from his London creditors. He heard that ‘the great Panjandrum’ was coming and that he had already ‘banked £5,000’; after the readings he reported that they had ‘of course’ been ‘tremendous hits’. ‘Town Hall crammed on each occasion.’52 After his triumphant progress, Dickens lost no time in ensuring that he distanced himself and his writings from his old friends and publishers Bradbury and Evans. On 27 November he drafted a letter for Forster to present to the firm declaring that he intended to discontinue publication of Household Words in six months’ time, and asking if they were ‘disposed to treat with Mr Dickens for the sale to him of your interest in the work’.53 They rejected his offer of £1,000 for their share of the copyright, but Dickens went ahead with his plan to print the last number of Household Words on 28 May 1859, by which time he had already begun publishing his replacement weekly, All the Year Round, which – to Forster’s astonishment and horror – he had originally intended to call Household Harmony. He gave way rather ungraciously to his friend’s objection that this might be an unfortunate title given the nature of the events of summer 1858 which had led to the demise of Household Words.54

  Bradbury and Evans tried to stop him through legal proceedings, but had to concede defeat in May 1859, when an auction of Household Words took place, which Dickens won by having Arthur Smith buy the journal and its stock on his behalf.55 Dickens’s implacable hostility to the firm, and especially to Frederick Evans, was explained by the latter to Henry Silver at a Punch dinner in February. It all went back to the ill-advised personal statement Dickens printed in Household Words on 12 June 1858. Silver recorded Evans’s account of the split. Dickens had persuaded his old friend and publisher to be a trustee for Catherine in the separation arrangements, but resented the fact that Evans did not publish the statement in Punch.56

  Evans’s reward for reluctantly agreeing to Dickens’s pressing request to represent Catherine was thus to make himself into Dickens’s worst enemy. He and Bradbury made a financial loss out of the break with Dickens, though they exacted some revenge by printing a frank statement, ‘Mr Charles Dickens and His Late Publishers’, alongside the twentieth number of Thackeray’s still-ongoing novel, The Virginians, in June 1859.57 Here the publishers describe the friendly relations they had enjoyed with Dickens until he printed his personal statement ‘on the subject of his conjugal difficulties’ in Household Words the previous June. The public disclosure of his problem took most people by surprise, they say, ‘and was notoriously the subject of comments, by no means complimentary to Mr Dickens himself, as regarding the taste of this proceeding’. To their surprise, a friend told them that Dickens intended to break off relations with them because they had not printed the statement in Punch,

  in other words, because it did not occur to Bradbury and Evans to exceed their legitimate functions as proprietors and publishers, and to require the insertion of statements on a domestic and painful subject in the inappropriate columns of a comic miscellany … [T]he grievance of Mr Dickens substantially amounted to this, that Bradbury and Evans did not take upon themselves, unsolicited, to gratify an eccentric wish by a preposterous action.58

  In July 1859 Bradbury and Evans started another weekly paper, Once a Week, to rival All the Year Round. By the end of 1859 both papers were attempting to woo the new candidate for Great English Novelist, George Eliot. The ‘unknown’ pseudonymous author found immediate critical acclaim and financial success with Adam Bede, published in February 1859. Her partner G.H. Lewes had corresponded regularly from Germany over the summer of 1858 with her publisher John Blackwood, sending news of progress on the novel, which he teasingly called ‘the Bedesman’ in allusion to Beadsman, the horse which famously beat Lord Derby’s Toxopholite in the 1858 Derby.59

  With Adam Bede seen as the great literary publishing event of the year 1859, George Eliot became a target for rival publishers, including Bradbury and Evans and Dickens’s new publishers Chapman and Hall (to whom he was in fact returning, having left them for Bradbury and Evans fifteen years earlier after a disagreement over their handling of Martin Chuzzlewit). Lewes noted in his journal on 15 November that Frederick Evans and the editor of Once a Week, Samuel Lucas, had asked him if George Eliot – now generally known to be Lewes’s partner Marian Evans – would consider publishing her next novel (The Mill on the Floss, already half written and being negotiated for by Blackwood) in their paper, assuring him that they would pay more than Blackwood, no matter how much he might offer. The previous day Dickens, who greatly admired Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede, had written to ask if she would publish a story in All the Year Round the following year, assuring her that she could name her terms.60 Not liking to tie herself to deadlines, and feeling she owed loyalty to Blackwood, George Eliot declined both offers. According to Edmund Yates’s memoirs, when literary London was asking who this ‘George Eliot’ could be, Dickens joked that it was either Bradbury or Evans, ‘but I do not think that it is Bradbury’.61

  By this time Dickens had published A Tale of Two Cities in his paper; it was followed in November 1859 by the first instalment of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Though A Tale of Two Cities was reasonably well received, it was not the most popular of Dickens’s writings. He himself noted that the work, concerning the violent upheavals of the French Revolution, was a novel not of characterisation, but rather of plot. He told Forster in August 1859 that he had intended to write ‘a picturesque story’; ‘I fancied a story of incident might be written … pounding the characters out in its own mortar, and beating their interests out of them.’62 The people in the novel serve the plot rather than having interesting inner lives. In the case of Dr Manette, whose mind has gone after almost eighteen years of incarceration in the Bastille, Dickens told Collins in October 1859 that ‘the peculiarity of the Doctor’s character, as affected by his imprisonment’ rendered it ‘quite out of the question to put the reader inside of him’ in the way a writer might do for other characters.63 Of these the drunken self-loathing lawyer Sydney Carton is a psychologically credible figure, though still primarily a tool of the melodramatic plot, while Lucie Manette, the young woman with whom both Darnay and Carton are in love, is a mere cipher, a golden-haired girl whose only role is to be a loving daughter and eventually a loving wife.

  Dickens went on to write two great novels with protagonists who bear the intolerable burden of self-loathing and a guilty conscience, Great Expectations (1860–1) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), followed by his dark murder story The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which remained unfinished at his death in June 1870. From autumn 1860 he lived mainly in Gad’s Hill, spending nights in London above the offices of All the Year Round and presumably also with Ellen in one or other of the houses he rented for her and her mother over the years. He probably spent time with her in France too, for he often went there for a few days at a time without specifying to
his correspondents what he planned to do.64 It was his misfortune – and hers – that, having decided that his priority was to retain the respect of the public, he could not live openly with the woman he had chosen. (By contrast, Lewes and Marian Evans enjoyed an enduring and loving relationship, though they suffered – Marian particularly – disapproval and ostracism from some friends and family.) Dickens covered his tracks so carefully that Ellen disappears from view for some years in the 1860s.65

  While he went on earning money from his books and from doing more reading tours, including one in America in 1867–8, he also had many demands on his purse from members of his family, some of whom also caused him to fear yet more scandal. His two surviving daughters, Mamie and Katey, gave him pleasure, Mamie because she settled into the role of sensible unmarried daughter and joint organiser of the household with Georgina Hogarth, and Katey because she was clever and charming. A talented artist, in July 1860 she married Wilkie Collins’s younger brother, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Charles. The union was not exactly to Dickens’s taste, but he accepted her choice and gave her a wedding breakfast at Gad’s Hill. The boys were a different matter. No fewer than six of his seven sons disappointed him in one way or another. (Harry, the second youngest, was the exception: he succeeded in getting into Cambridge to read mathematics and became a successful lawyer and, in due course, Sir Henry Dickens.)