Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  From the beginning, she struggled to resist the likelihood that he cared more for his work than for her. He would not admit that that had any validity. From the beginning, he presented himself as an unchanging and unchangeable given. He had no desire to be any other way. His protestations expressed the stiff formalism of self-deceit. When his back was up, he was a master of sincere excuses, of the heightened rhetoric of justification. On one occasion, having moved back to Furnival’s Inn, he sent his brother Frederick to tell her that he would not keep their appointment that evening. “If you knew how eagerly I long for your society this evening, or how much delight it would afford me to be able to turn round to you at our own fireside when my work is done … you would believe me sincere in saying that necessity and necessity alone, induces me to forego the pleasure of your companionship for one evening in the week even. You will never do me the justice of believing … that my pursuits and labours such as they are are not more selfish than my pleasures, and that your future advancement and happiness is the main-spring of them all.”14

  When she satisfied him, she was “My dear Kate” or “My dearest Katie” or “My Dearest Girl.” When she did not, she was “My Dear Catherine,” frozen in both acid and ice. When she complained that his letters were stiff and formal, he was surprised. “I don’t know how it is, but I am quite certain I had no notion of its being so, and if it really were (which I can hardly believe) it was quite unintentional.” There was never either retreat or awareness in his words and tone. His most frequent complaint was that she was “ill-tempered,” a code phrase for insensitivity to his needs and feelings. He regularly applied the carrot as well as the stick, sometimes in the same letter. “Your note my love … displays all that amiable and excellent feeling which I know you possess.… If you would only determine to shew the same affection and kindness to me … I should have no one solitary fault to find with you. Your asking me to love you ‘once more’ is quite unnecessary—I have never ceased to love you for one moment, since I knew you; nor shall I.”15 The courtship had its loving moments, its times of endearment and optimism. In her effort to weather the complexities of his personality, hoping that the storms would be short, she had a fund of little-girl mispronunciations, pet names, and cute phrases to deflect his anger and relieve her anxiety. She may have compared his assertiveness and persistence with her lack of emotional strength. He had been educated in a hard environment. She had been educated in the easygoing amiability of the Hogarth household. She needed to marry almost as much as he did, but less for personal than for social and cultural reasons.

  The courtship went on, with breakfasts, lunches, short excursions, brief visits to York Place, and with visits to the theatres, particularly to see plays he had been assigned to review. In late November 1835, keeping his eye open for a place to live, he looked at houses in Pentonville that were “extremely dear.” His own small apartment did not even have a kitchen. They needed space for Fred, who would continue to live with his brother, for Mary Hogarth, who had become Catherine’s closest companion, and for a servant. Just as he had helped his parents by taking Fred off their hands, the married couple would help relieve the crowded Hogarth household by taking Mary. The solution was next door, at 15 Furnival’s Inn. He took the lease, from Christmas 1835, of the “three-pair front south,” with a kitchen in the basement, at fifty pounds a year for three years. In mid-February 1836, he and Fred moved in. In March, he purchased most of the household furnishings, and suggested to Catherine, with a peremptory force that could not be denied, that they honeymoon in Rochester. The golden days he had spent in Kent in his childhood drew him back. At the end of the month, maneuvering around his heavy work schedule, he fixed the date as “Saturday next.” They were married in St. Luke’s Church, Chelsea, near the Hogarth home. Catherine was dressed modestly, becomingly, “a bright, pleasant bride.” In addition to the Hogarth and the Dickens families, a few friends were present, including Beard, who acted as his best man. “It was altogether a very quiet piece of business.” The wedding breakfast was held at York Place. As a present, the groom gave his bride an ivory-fitted workbox inscribed FROM CHAS. DICKENS TO KATE, APRIL 2ND, 1836, an appropriate symbol of her domestic mission.16 Sometime during their week-long honeymoon in Chalk, near Chatham, or in the next few weeks, Catherine became pregnant.

  THE PREVIOUS AUTUMN HE HAD HOPED THAT THEY MIGHT MARRY AT Christmas 1835. But he did not feel secure enough. With a developing entrepreneurial self-confidence, he had no need for an absolutely fail-safe net of security, and was willing to take limited risks. He had had, though, painful experience with overextension. The misery of trying to survive on less than a reasonable minimum was all too familiar. His only income still came from his salary, sufficient to maintain a single person but not a family. He needed additional money. Unexpectedly, the sketches he had been writing for almost two years, the only income from which had been two guineas a week added to his salary by the Morning Chronicle, became a property with a potential buyer, an ambitious twenty-six-year-old publisher who had just come to London. The inexperienced but shrewed John Macrone offered Dickens one hundred pounds for the copyright of the sketches that were already in print.17 He would bring them out, augmented by additional sketches, in two volumes, under the title Sketches by Boz, with a preface by the author and with art by a well-known illustrator. Undercapitalized, reflecting the severe depression in the publishing industry in the early 1830s, Macrone had just borrowed five hundred pounds on the security of good looks, charm, and a promise. It seemed a clever proposal.

  In making the offer, Macrone had taken the advice of his unofficial literary adviser, William Harrison Ainsworth. Rookwood, Ainsworth’s melodramatic novel, to which Macrone had bought the rights, had been a smashing success in 1834. Ainsworth had come to London in 1824 at nineteen years of age to train as a solicitor in the expectation of taking over his father’s Manchester practice. After completing his training, he had given up law for the more exciting practice of literature. The elderly essayist Charles Lamb introduced him to various literary figures. Early in 1830, the industrious Ainsworth, soon “a dandy and a literary lion,” notorious for quickly written, widely popular, sensationalistic fiction, became a founding member of a group of writers and artists associated with Fraser’s Magazine and called the Fraserians. By the autumn of 1835, when he brought Dickens and Macrone together, he had been for some time a well-established, even distinguished member of a disparate circle that included William Makepeace Thackeray, Bryan Procter, William Maginn, William Jerdan, and Daniel Maclise, some of whom were to become Dickens’ intimate friends.18 Ainsworth, who also knew Leigh Hunt, John Forster, and George Cruikshank, became his first channel into this world.

  Having purchased the copyright, Macrone would take all the risk as well as all the profit. To protect his investment, he engaged the usually difficult and always arrogant Cruikshank to do the illustrations. Mercurial, vulgar, moody, with a flare for the personally dramatic, Cruikshank had a “hawk nose, broad forehead … black hair and whiskers.” His “steely blue eyes had no merriment—only keenness and a certain fierceness in them.” Usually dressed in a “blue swallow-tail, a buff waistcoat, grey pantaloons, and Hessian boots with tassels,” at the age of forty-two he already had had a distinctive career. Trained with his brother in the studio of his artist-father, “cradled in caricature,” he had brilliantly illustrated in a series of cartoons the political fortunes, misfortunes, and corruptions of Britain and France in the late Napoleonic age. Afterward, collaborating with various writers and creating miscellaneous independent plates for separate sale, he took as his subject the pretension and corruption of urban life. The result was his successful Life in London. Like Dickens, he knew the city “better than the majority of Sunday-school children know their Catechism.” At the height of his powers, with a distinguished reputation as an artist, he had already agreed to do twelve etchings for Macrone’s fourth edition of Rookwood, to be published in May 1836.19 To Ainsworth and Macrone,
Cruikshank and the young writer seemed made for one another, the experienced, successful artist, the talented, youthful author, both sharp satirists and London visionaries.

  When he and Dickens met in November 1835, they quickly transformed a working relationship into a social extravaganza. Joined by Ainsworth, they created a dining and theatre trio, Dickens’ first artistic circle, supportive companions in business and pleasure. Cruikshank’s domestic life centered around a wife half his age, a house on semirural Myddleton Terrace in Islington, and frequent visits, in “clouds of tobacco smoke, and over foaming tankards,” to “all kinds of strange and queer places.” Ainsworth, whose marriage had collapsed in 1835, lived harmoniously with two female relatives at Kensal Lodge, in easy distance of Cruikshank and Dickens. From the beginning, his relationship with Cruikshank had its tensions. The few years of collaboration, though, were productive, and the friendship retained some warmth even when it lost its intimacy. Ironically, a relationship that began with buoyant consanguinity became strained by Cruikshank’s departure from the banquet table and the wine bottle when he later became a crusading teetotaler.

  Excited by Macrone’s projection of a Christmas 1835 publication date, Dickens, despite his heavy schedule, had no doubt that he would be ready. But, to his irritation, Cruikshank did not have the plates for Christmas. The coordination of the project among author, illustrator, and publisher was taking more time than had been anticipated. Having rushed to get additional sketches done to fill out the volume, he pressured Macrone and Cruikshank. The illustrator, used to being the dominant partner in such ventures and assuming that he had absolute authority to choose what scenes to illustrate, declined to finish the plates until he had the entire manuscript in hand. Probably he was also busy with other projects. Dickens steered his resentment into conciliatory rationalizations. He also had incorrectly assumed that each plate would have two rather than four illustrations, consequently misreading Cruikshank’s progress. Under pressure from Macrone, he wrote a puff for the book to appear in the Morning Chronicle and elsewhere. He sent out notes and directed review copies to likely places and people. He sent a sycophantic letter, with a copy of the book, to Lord Stanley, whose long speech on the condition of Ireland he had taken in shorthand in a private session in February 1833 after Stanley had been dissatisfied with the published newspaper transcription. Closer to home, his father-in-law-to-be, who “knows all the sketches by heart, and takes an interest in the book in no way secondary to my own,” wrote a “beautiful notice” for the Morning Chronicle, which appeared three days after publication, February 8, 1836.20 Hogarth’s partisan claim that it was “the work of a person of various and extraordinary intellectual gifts … a close and acute observer of character and manner, with a strong sense of the ridiculous,” who can produce “tears as well as laughter,” was confirmed by the reviews and the sales of the next few months.

  An unexpected success, Sketches repaid Macrone’s gamble on a relatively unknown author. Dickens soon received another £100 for a second edition; then he received £150 for a new volume of previously uncollected sketches, published in December 1836, designated the second series; and finally he was paid £100 for the copyright of both volumes. The initial £100 for the first series was a welcome minor supplement to his income. As Macrone’s profits mounted, eventually to more than £2,000, the author had reason to regret that he “was never a partner in the work, and never shared in the profits from it.”21 As his expenses increased, he needed more income. “Head over ears in work,” he juggled commitments, intent on exploring whatever might be artistically and financially profitable. The success of the book suggested that a further try at articles combining fiction, reportage, and realistic observation might provide a vehicle for fulfilling his ambition to be a successful professional author. There were other possibilities, though, one of which was the theatre. He had no special preference at this time for any particular genre. Eager to try his hand at anything that had potential, he had the energy, ambition, and financial need to take on as many projects as possible, even simultaneously. He preferred exhaustion to depletion, and the harder he worked the more energy he seemed to have, its level rising to meet the exhilaration he felt in his achievements.

  When, in late December 1835, while waiting for Cruikshank, he was queried about doing the libretto for a comic opera, he responded enthusiastically. Among other things, it spoke to his lifelong fascination with the stage. Fanny introduced him to John Hullah, who wanted to create a comic opera, to be called “The Gondoliers,” based on a stereotypical Venetian subject. Emphasizing that he was at home in England but abroad in Venice, Dickens convinced the composer that they should collaborate on a comedy of English country manners. Set in the eighteenth century, with the musical-dramatic structure of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, it would have the tone of eighteenth-century pastoral satire and the moral values of a relaxed Victorianism. With a mixture of dialogue and song in the English ballad opera tradition, it would gently parody popular Italian opera. He would do the libretto, based on one of his unpublished stories, Hullah the music. An untalented versifier who had written some squibs, comic verse, and sentimental ballads, he would write the rhymed verse for the songs as well as the dialogue. “The characters would act and talk like people we see and hear of every day.” Though they do nothing of the sort, the final text and score of The Village Coquettes, his share of which he wrote and revised throughout the first half of 1836, persuaded John Braham, a popular tenor and the owner-manager of the new St. James’s Theatre (built as an expensive speculation that soon failed), to produce it and to perform in it. George Hogarth, influential as a music critic, helped convince Braham that the opera, ready by the end of July, would run easily for fifty or sixty performances, especially since the popular John Harley was engaged to play the leading role. But revisions, rehearsals, and managerial complications delayed the production from the anticipated October opening until early December 1836.

  Always fascinated by the theatre, Dickens now had access to the professional stage. He eagerly attended rehearsals, even when he had to travel distances and suffer inconveniences. Able to afford new clothes, he began to dress theatrically, in the dandy tradition, partly to recompense himself for the rags of his adolescence. On one occasion, he did not appear at a dinner party partly because his clothes had gotten muddy and he did not have fresh things into which to change. Impatiently waiting for the appearance of The Village Coquettes, he adapted for performance, with Braham’s encouragement, “The Great Winglebury Duel,” which had appeared in the first series of Sketches by Boz. Retitled The Strange Gentleman, it opened on September 29, 1836, at the St. James’s Theatre, with songs and music that allowed Braham to call it a burletta. Harley’s talent helped the farce run for over fifty performances, one part of a series of entertainments that made an evening at the St. James’s. For this minor critical and financial success Dickens received only the thirty pounds for which he had sold the copyright. He made great personal capital, though, buoyed by the excitement and rewards of a premiere, of evenings at the theatre, of being a successful dramatist. When The Village Coquettes finally opened on December 6, with the fiftieth performance of The Strange Gentleman completing the evening’s bill, Dickens, his family, and his friends were in the theatre. His contribution had been advertised in the playbill. At the end of the performance, the audience “screamed for Boz.” It seemed surprised when it got only the ordinary-looking Dickens rather than one of his fictional characters. The reviews also were tepid, and one of them, by John Forster, the music critic of The Examiner, was ponderously unfriendly. Despite Hogarth’s partisan effort in the Chronicle, the opera closed after nineteen performances.22

  THOUGH HE FELT DISAPPOINTED, HE WAS ALREADY PREOCCUPIED with another, this time extraordinary, literary venture. In February 1836, the publisher William Hall unexpectedly came to see him at his lodgings at 13 Furnival’s Inn. Chapman and Hall, at 136 Strand, had been in business for six years, surviving the steep dep
ression in the book industry with the help of prudent commitments, including Scenes and Recollections of Fly-fishing, a sixpenny weekly, Chat of the Week, and a Topographical Dictionary in twenty-four monthly parts. For the Christmas trade of 1835, they published The Squib Annual, a coffee-table volume with illustrations by the humorist Robert Seymour. Brisk and businesslike, with an accountant’s fluency with figures, Hall handled the firm’s money matters. Retiring and contemplative, with wide knowledge and a keen sensibility, Edward Chapman represented the firm’s literary sensibility. Once decisions had been reached, Hall handled the negotiations. Chapman and Hall admired Sketches by Boz and were about to publish one of the stories, “The Tuggses at Ramsgate,” in their Library of Fiction. The success of Sketches had brought Dickens to their attention as someone to whom it might be appropriate to make a proposal that had already been turned down by a number of writers. When he responded to Hall’s knock at the door, Dickens, to his surprise, recognized the man from whom in December 1833 he had bought the copy of the Monthly Magazine in which he had seen his work in print for the first time. Though he had not realized it then, it had been in Chapman and Hall’s bookshop that he had made the purchase.23

  Having had considerable success with The Squib Annual, the publishers had agreed to Seymour’s proposal that they put out a volume of his humorous illustrations on the subject of Cockney sporting scenes. Seymour suggested that the focus be the adventures of a club of sporting gentlemen. A hardworking, practical artist who had been immensely productive, perhaps to the point of overwork, and who had had a nervous breakdown in 1830, Seymour agreed to the suggestion that it be a monthly serial accompanied by brief textual descriptions. Chapman and Hall had good reason to believe that there were financial advantages to publishing what would eventually be a book volume in monthly parts. In need of a journeyman writer, they proposed to Dickens that he provide each month a sheet and a half, or twenty-four printed pages, of text to accompany four comic illustrations. The pay would be £14 3s. 6d. “for each number [monthly serial part] to be made always on the day of publication, which is understood to be the last day of every month.” For the first number, he was “to provide copy … by the first of March [1836] and sufficient for the second by the 15th,” future numbers always to be ready “two months before the date of publication.” The contract called for “a book illustrative of manners and life in the Country.” Chapman, Hall, and Seymour had in mind a volume whose primary selling point would be the illustrations. On the evening of the day that Hall made the offer, Dickens wrote to Catherine that he had been asked “to write and edit a new publication … entirely by myself; to be published monthly and each number to contain four wood cuts.”24 Seymour was not mentioned in the letter. Within a week, the young author gave his “entire concurrence” to the proposed terms, with the one proviso that he be allowed to provide copy five rather than eight weeks in advance. Chapman and Hall probably had no knowledge of his other commitments and little sense that they were involving themselves with someone who was about to make additional ones.