by Fred Kaplan
Born in the same year as Dickens, Forster began his literary mission as a young man in Newcastle upon Tyne, his mother the daughter of a farm laborer, his father a butcher and cattle dealer. Their enlightened Unitarianism brought him firmly into the secular world. His uncle’s prosperity paid for his fees at the secular Royal Grammar School, where he became head boy, eager to justify the confidence of his uncle, his “best friend all through life … a true good man.” Like Dickens, he needed to imagine and create an environment different from his family’s. As a boy of sixteen, he went to Cambridge to study classics, with his uncle’s support. Within months, he left for London University to study law. Despite a diligent effort, aware that he was disappointing many, aware of the potential loss of income, Forster soon gave up studying law. He could not resist envisioning himself a man of letters and of the theatre. Like Dickens, he had an avid imagination fired from childhood by literature. The law had certainty, security. His writing and argumentative skills, his avid support of the Reform Bill, his tenaciousness, his energy, and his imposing physical presence, could carry him far. His teacher Thomas Chitty believed that had he remained at the bar eventually he would have become lord chancellor.3 But he readily exchanged the fantasy of being lord chancellor for that of being what Dickens later good-humoredly called the “Great Mogul” of literature.
Forster’s passion for the theatre had also begun in childhood. At fifteen, he wrote an argumentative “Vindication of the Stage” in response to a puritanical pamphlet that the mother of one of his friends thought he would benefit from reading. The next year his quasi-Byronic but moralistic “Charles at Tunbridge or The Cavalier of Wildinghurst … by a gentleman of Newcastle” was performed and favorably noticed, with the prediction that he would “one day become an ornament of his country,” by the editor of the Newcastle newspaper for which he had begun to do reviews. His creative talents, though, were more managerial than histrionic. He could play only one role—the evaluator, the arbitrator, the enthusiast sure of his middle-class values and his aspirations for himself and his culture. With an expressive reading voice, “rich and melodious, and full of varied intonations,” he performed only the stentorian part.4 Brought up in a narrow world of provincial Unitarianism, he had confidence in a combination of reason and force of personality that made him at times a self-deceptively imperceptive man. With only a little poetry and less imagination, his preference for the straight and narrow was deeply embedded in his simplistic rationality. Unlike Dickens, he had no ability to fall, only to remain steadily conventional. Like Dickens, he defined literature and theatre as moral exemplars. But he had no visible alternative forces operating. Though he acted it brilliantly, he could act only one role.
When he reviewed The Village Coquettes in December 1836, the tall, dark-haired, handsome, twenty-four-year-old Forster had been active in London journalism and literature for almost seven years. With prodigious enthusiasm, he had pursued every available opportunity, reviewing for the Newcastle Mercury and the New Monthly Magazine, promising to write a series of biographies of civil war figures, making a start at a biography of Oliver Cromwell, publishing a volume of execrable verse, Rhyme and Reason, becoming drama critic of the radical newspaper the True Sun, and then, in late 1833, of the Liberal newspaper The Examiner, originally founded by Leigh Hunt. Mostly with a young man’s hero worship, always with a sense of mutual mission, he pursued Charles Lamb, one of Dickens’ favorites, “the original, kind-hearted, veritable Elia,” and then Hunt, “the first man of letters of any note worthiness I ever knew,” who “influenced all my modes of literary thought at the outset of my life” and “confirmed me in Literature as a profession.”5 Hunt’s influence helped turn him away from the law. Poised between Romantic and Victorian generations, he sought the continuity of holding with one hand the remnants of Romanticism, Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, Hunt, and Walter Savage Landor, and, with the other, the young soon-to-be Victorians, Edward Bulwer, Robert Browning, Daniel Maclise, and Charles Dickens, and the two transitional figures who touched both cultural modes, William Charles Macready and Thomas Carlyle.
His appearance at the premiere of The Village Coquettes was in response to a note that Dickens had sent to Albany Fonblanque. The editor of The Examiner assigned his young reviewer to see what the talented author of Sketches had done. Dickens took with good grace Forster’s criticism that the libretto was “totally unworthy of Boz” and his humorous condemnation of the unprofessional appearance of the author and the composer on the stage after the performance, in response to the cheering crowd. Dickens could not, though, help laughing, “for the life and soul of me,” at the comment that the audience was “left in perfect consternation that he neither resembled the portraits of Pickwick, Snodgrass, Winkle, nor Tupman. Some critics in the gallery were said to have expected Sam Weller.”6 Friendly feelings were expressed in March 1837 and the two men began to see one another socially. By late May, the formality of “My Dear Sir” had been replaced by the intimacy of “My Dear Forster.” Forster’s ecstatic response, “the highest of all praise,” to Dickens’ new novel in progress in Bentley’s Miscellany and his strong sympathy for Dickens’ pain in the midst of a personal tragedy in May encouraged Dickens to take Forster more into his confidence. Forster’s good business sense and skill soon came to seem wonderful assets to an ambitious author increasingly damaging himself by compulsively signing disadvantageous contracts. Through Forster, he met Macready, the prickly, sometimes morose, most brilliant actor of the early Victorian stage, and Thomas Noon Talfourd, the facile, good-natured, rather bland poet-dramatist and member of Parliament who earned his living as a barrister. Shortly, mainly through Forster and Maclise, he knew almost everyone worth knowing.
Macready and Talfourd were almost contemporaries, Talfourd forty-two years of age and Macready forty-four in late spring 1837 when Forster introduced them to Dickens. Talfourd combined the security of law and the civil service with the glamour of literature. Dickens already knew him by reputation as a dazzling speaker and conversationalist. He also knew him by sight, having reported for the Morning Chronicle Talfourd’s parliamentary activities and his role in the scandalous Norton-Melbourne trial for adultery on which Dickens had loosely based the Bardell-versus-Pickwick trial.7 Talfourd was gifted with a great deal more ego and vanity than talent. Macready, who had preferred not to become an actor, who abhorred his profession, and who looked forward to saving enough money to retire from a world that his society did not consider respectable, had an equal amount of both. He had introduced to the theatre naturalistic techniques, stylized poetic devices, and the value or at least illusion of absolute performance sincerity. He also emphasized the desirability of authenticity in costuming and setting, particularly the importance of creating individualized sets rather than all-purpose scenery. With the help of literary allies, he attempted to reestablish the dignity of the theatrical profession. Collaborating on scripts with his friends, taking on the management of Covent Garden Theatre, reviving Shakespeare’s plays, stripping away the bowdlerizing encrustations of the eighteenth century, he had become, by the late 1830s, a theatrical tyro whose energy was transforming the English stage.
An unsuccessful actor and theatrical manager, his father had been, like Dickens’, an imprisoned bankrupt. But he had sent his son to Rugby to become a gentleman. Unlike his father, Macready embraced the theatre as a distasteful duty at a time of economic necessity. With his spinster sister, the stern guardian of his mind, he trained a young actress with whom he had fallen in love to become the dutiful wife of a gentleman and the mother of his family. Before marriage, she was “Katie.” Afterward, she was invariably “Catherine.” With a growing family, eager for respectability, he bought a country home in Elstree, seventeen miles from central London. Combining Victorian earnestness with Romantic resentment, inflamed sometimes by an almost uncontrollable temper, he became a moral tyrant both on and off the stage. Deeply compassionate, he elevated duty to a religious law and moral rigor to k
indness. Though he breathed happily outside the world of the theatre, the stage was the center around which his friendships revolved.
Dickens, who later claimed that he went to the theatre every night for two or three years in the early 1830s, first saw the “eminent tragedian” perform in December 1832. Forster had contrived to meet Macready in May 1833 at the funeral of his rival the actor Edmund Kean, where he also met the successful marine painter Clarkson Stanfield, who had done stage sets for Kean, Macready, and Sheridan Knowles. Knowles was the improvident, overworked Irish dramatist who had written Virginius, one of Macready’s most successful vehicles. Forster appeared to Macready “quite an enthusiast; I like him.” They soon took pleasure in long conversations in which the younger man’s admiration for and support of him became paramount. With access to the theater, with his position as drama critic of The Examiner, with his energy and ambition, Forster became intimate with Macready’s friends, particularly Stanfield, Talfourd, and Bryan Procter, a lawyer and civil servant who wrote poetry and plays under the pseudonymn Barry Cornwall. In mid-June 1837, he came into Macready’s dressing room at Covent Garden, where he was a familiar visitor, “with a gentleman, whom he introduced as Dickens, alias Boz.” Macready was “glad to see him.”8 With theatrical stars in his own eyes, Dickens was strongly attracted to the actor’s courage, warmth, and dignity. He seemed a figure of steel-gray assiduousness, so different from his father and so like the model of his own aspirations. Before he had been a visitor to the theatre. Now he became Macready’s guest. Before he had been on the lower level of the widespread free-ticket arrangement. Now he became part of the preferential world of those who were acknowledged to belong.
When Pickwick was published in book form in late 1837, he dedicated it to Talfourd, partly because the latter had introduced into Parliament a copyright bill that Dickens avidly supported. The pirated versions and imitations of Pickwick that its success immediately spawned had made him realize how much he was losing because of the national and international disregard of an author’s rights to his property. When Nicholas Nickleby was published in book form in October 1839, he appropriately dedicated that most theatrical of novels to Macready. When The Old Curiosity Shop was published in 1841, he dedicated it to another, even more patriarchal representative of the older generation, the lame banker-poet Samuel Rogers, known for his cruelly sharp tongue, his humanitarian principles, and his celebrity breakfasts. In 1840, Forster introduced him to Walter Savage Landor, the irascible Romantic poet and essayist, who soon became partly an uncle, partly a father figure, whose admiration and love he quickly responded to. In the same year, he met Thomas Carlyle, to whom, over ten years later, he dedicated Hard Times. Such dedications had one eye on professional advantage, another on warm personal gratitude, inseparable elements in his personality and in the increasing professionalization of literature in early Victorian society.
THOUGH THE BELLS TOLLING THE DEATH OF THE OLD KING WERE loud, they were emotionally muted. But the unexpected death, in May 1837, of his seventeen-year-old sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, rang a devastating emotional change. It touched him to the depths, providing a personal and a cultural touchstone for his definition of himself and his fictional world. She died in his arms, the first time he had literally embraced both life and death. While he courted Catherine, the lively Mary became another sister to him. The “sweet interesting creature” had seemed to sparkle with sensitivity and intelligence. A cooperative chaperone, especially at those bleary-eyed breakfasts at Selwood Place, she and her brother-in-law-to-be exchanged small tokens of affection. In April 1836, she spent “a most delightfully happy month with dearest Catherine in her own house … she makes a most capital housekeeper and is as happy as the day is long—I think they are more devoted than ever since their Marriage—if that be possible.” Her successful brother-in-law was “such a nice creature and so clever he is courted and made up to by all the Literary gentlemen.” Delighting in her liberated role, her eldest sister’s frequent guest and companion, she participated energetically in the blessings of her second family, attending parties and the theatre, shopping with her brother-in-law, and helping Catherine in her confinement. With the birth of the Dickenses’ first child on January 6, 1837, she was “so taken up with [Catherine] and her Baby that I have not been able to think of anything else. “9 Throughout January, she kept house for her sister, who was incapacitated and depressed after giving birth. At the end of March, when they moved from Furnival’s Inn to 48 Doughty Street, Mary was a quietly cherished participant in the household. Without apparent strain or threat to either of them, she had become Charles’s intimate friend, a privileged sister and domestic companion.
On Saturday evening, May 7, 1837, she accompanied her sister, her brother-in-law, and her parents to the St. James’s Theatre. She had stayed that previous week at Doughty Street, and probably had been among the “numbers of elegant females” in the gallery at the Literary Fund dinner five days before. Looking exceptionally lovely, she leaned “her sweet face” over the box toward the stage on which Dickens’s comic burletta Is She His Wife? was being performed, followed by two musical dramas in which the lead parts were sung by Henry Burnett, Fanny’s fiancée. Braham and Dickens were attempting to capitalize on the success of The Strange Gentleman and the popularity of Pickwick. The contretemps in the play between the two contentious, confusing marriages, with lines such as “How little did I think when I married you six months since that I should be exposed to so much wretchedness” and “If you are perpetually yawning and complaining of ennui a few months after marriage, what am I to suppose you’ll become in a few years,” may have suggested to Mary some of the recent tensions between her sister and brother-in-law. The local bickerings, the conflicting personalities, and his occasional emotional substitution of Mary for Catherine and Catherine for his mother probably created sufficient tension for even the innocent and the denying to be aware that there were problems, though not yet quite of the kind that could justify Dickens’ claim years later that “Mary … understood … in the first months of our marriage” that the marriage was “as miserable a one as ever was.”10
After the performance, they returned home. Having retired to her bedroom to undress for sleep, soon after midnight Mary suddenly became severely ill. Medical assistance was requested immediately. The doctors suspected heart disease of long standing, a stroke resulting from gradual arterial weakening. “Every remedy that skill and anxiety could suggest” was tried. The Hogarths came, Mary’s mother increasingly hysterical to the point of insensibility. Charles, Catherine, and Mrs. Hogarth stayed up with her all night. The daybreak brought no relief. Having seen her perfectly healthy just hours before, the family at first could not imagine that she was dying. By early Sunday afternoon the likelihood was apparent. After she took a little brandy from him, he held her in his arms. “The very last words she whispered were of me.” Sinking, as he held her, into a “calm and gentle sleep,” she died at three in the afternoon. “The light and life of our happy circle … passed quietly away to an immortality of happiness and joy.” Catherine could be more powerfully succinct: “I never saw her look so lovely and the next morning she was dead!”11
Charles responded to her death with controlled hysteria, the immense pain destroying his usual equilibrium. The next monthly number of Pickwick Papers and the installment of the new novel that he had begun publishing in Bentley’s Miscellany were aborted, the only time in his life in which he did not keep a writing commitment. As an ultimate act of homage and as an expression of his own paralysis, he wrote nothing for the rest of the month. With the baby, in the middle of May he and Catherine went to a small farm in Hampstead “to try a fortnight’s rest and quiet.” Three months pregnant, Catherine miscarried. She became pregnant again by the middle of June with a Mary who was to be. To Charles Mary’s death seemed a desertion so devastating that he kept her memory alive with conscious memorials and in recurrent dreams. His mother had distanced herself from him in his inf
ancy, reinforcing his feeling of abandonment when she had argued for his remaining in the blacking factory. Maria Beadnell had provided the pain of romantic rejection. He had recently allowed himself, though, to believe that such painful experiences were behind him. Idealized as the female who genuinely loved him and whom he could trust, Mary had been elevated into the perfect sister. Unlike Fanny, she would not be his rival but his supporter. She had sympathized “with all my thoughts and feelings more than anyone I knew ever did or will.… If she were with us now … I think I should have nothing to wish for, but a continuance of such happiness.” Her presence among them had been a special dispensation, a golden age of perfection in which “we were too happy together to be long without a change.”12 The faultless Mary had been a better mother, a better sister, and a better Catherine, an alternate Catherine, a completion of Catherine, adding insight, sympathy, and intelligent understanding.
Having held her mortality in his arms, he had also held his own. He strained to translate her into the permanence that he wanted to have available for himself. He could control both the pain of desertion and the fear of mortality by insisting, in an ever-rising rhetoric of transcendental affirmation, that “she is sentient and conscious of my emotions somewhere.” The faultless Mary, who, like Richardson’s Clarissa, was “far above the foibles and vanity of her sex and age … is now in Heaven.” There is, he insisted, “the certainty of a bright and happy world beyond the Grave, which such young and untried creatures (half Angels here) must be called away by God to people.” With typical emotional recklessness, he gave himself up to his grief, finding in an exaggerated language of bereavement a strategy for dealing with his strong feelings. Though he attended Sunday services regularly, he had no real commitment to the Anglican faith. But he found it impossible not to seek the emotional satisfaction of a general Christian belief in a personal afterlife. For years he had the same dream of Mary visiting him, whose “perpetual repetition is extraordinary.”13 In the fiction he wrote during this period, he anticipated the emotional ramifications of her death in his depiction of the death of Oliver’s mother and he dramatized these feelings in the death and ascension of Little Nell. Thereafter, though the force of what she had been to him remained strong, the rhetoric of heaven weakened and almost disappeared from his fiction.