by Fred Kaplan
Forster was the closest of these friends. His irascibility sometimes produced violent scenes, tests of pride and friendship. During one argument, Catherine fled the room in tears. But as the most reliable, devoted of his friends, the disciplined, hardworking, domineering, deeply loyal Forster became his literary negotiator and private editor. The novelist absorbed his eager friend into the gray area between his creativity and his business. Forster was even given responsibility for final cuts in monthly numbers when the length exceeded the required amount of pages. He was empowered to make these according to his own judgment, for “I knew so well you would do it in the right places.” Equally austere in his tastes, Macready also played seriously. He was dissatisfied with the state of the theatre, and he suffered from his sense of belonging to a profession and a society that valued pantomime more than Shakespeare. With the support of Dickens, Forster, Talfourd, Bulwer, Knowles, John Payne Collier, the eminent Shakespeare editor, and Charles Knight, whose pictorial biography of Shakespeare had become the standard life, he attempted to restore high artistic seriousness to the English theatre. Dickens, who delighted in any theatrical performance, from the ludicrously amateurish to the professionally brilliant, readily enlisted in the Macready corps. He was constantly involved with the theatre anyway. While Pickwick was still in progress, the first stage adaptation appeared. Oliver Twist was produced in numbers of versions. So theatrical was Nicholas Nickleby that it became, in a version with which Dickens cooperated, a financial successes.35 He usually attended at least one performance of the stage adaptations of his novels, though he at least once seems to have writhed on the theatre floor with laughter or embarrassment.
On the level of principle, Dickens subscribed to the value of serious drama as part of the dignity of the literary profession. Macready’s Shakespearean performances were among the most moving artistic experiences of his life. The effort to reform the theatre soon rallied around Shakespeare’s fame. Through the Shakespeare Club, the Stratford restoration, and a Shakespeare museum, literary values could be affirmed. Led by Forster and Macready, he and his friends raised money, created publicity, and supported a curatorship for a Shakespeare museum. They also made themselves into a formidable clique, supporting Macready’s innovative management of Covent Garden and then Drury Lane Theatre. Both management efforts failed. In a profession notorious for arrogance, Macready had made enemies in the theatre just as quickly as he made literary friends outside. Since only two theatres were licensed to produce legitimate drama, his scope for performance and principle was limited. As the star at Covent Garden, unhappy with his treatment and with the profession as a whole, one evening in late April 1836, blinded with anger, he had physically assaulted Alfred Bunn, the theatre manager. Talfourd had defended his friend in a trial for assault in which a jury levied damages against him that were small enough to allow both sides to claim victory. When, in 1837, the management of Covent Garden and then, in 1841, of Drury Lane, had become available, though at considerable financial risk, Macready had decided to gamble for his own artistic freedom and for the renewal of the English theatre. Dickens attended almost every performance, thrilled by Macready’s Lear and Richard II especially. He cheered a series of brilliant Shakespearean productions that created the Shakespeare that the modern theatre knows.
The Cerberus trio frequently entertained themselves with excursions by river to Greenwich and Richmond. Sharing dinners and drinks in city and country inns, rapid overnight trips to Kent, late-night walks through London streets, cigars, brandy, and conversation, they amused themselves with elaborate badinage, jokes about women, about eccentricities, about escapades. Maclise shared with Dickens his appreciation of “the wild attractions” of a beautiful actress, “the small waist, the neatly turned leg … you will like her, love her, doat upon her.” In 1841, Dickens tried to lure Maclise to join him on a holiday, telling him that “there are conveniences of all kinds at Margate (do you take me?) and I know where they live.”36 Never more truthful than when expressing himself humorously, in the security of such friendships Dickens could express his feelings in displaced and playfully creative ways.
With friends and business associates, he began the practice of celebrating the completion of each of his novels with a grand dinner. Amid glittering confectionery, elaborate dishes, and grandiloquent speeches, Pickwick’s success was toasted, in November 1837, by Ainsworth, Macready, Forster, Talfourd, Browne, Jerdan, Chapman, Hall, and even John Dickens, at a costly restaurant banquet for which the proud author paid. It was his way both of showing appreciation and of showing off. His father may have wistfully or even proudly noted that the cost was slightly more than what in 1824 he had gone to prison for being unable to pay. “Talfourd proposed Dickens’ health in a very good speech, and Dickens replied—under strong emotions—most admirably.” The “too splendid” Nickleby dinner in October 1839 took place at an even more expensive restaurant. Macready, who took the chair and felt uneasy about the ostentatious expense, thought Dickens not up to his usual toast-giving form. At similar future dinners, the vinous self-congratulations overflowed into both the exuberance and the tedium of “then Everybody proposes everything.”37 Dickens, though, soon became adept at toasts and public speeches. The techniques of memorization that he had learned while studying acting and while working as a shorthand reporter helped him overcome the disadvantage of his nasal voice and his tendency to talk too quickly. A prominent advocate of liberal causes, he soon began receiving speaking invitations, mostly to fund-raising dinners.
One engagement that he happily accepted was to a banquet in his honor in Edinburgh in late June 1841. He and Catherine traveled to her native city with unrestrained pride. Staying at the Royal Hotel, with a handsome view of the castle, they were besieged by admirers and the curious, their calendar filled with invitations to social events from literary, legal, and political notabilities. Formally elected a burgess, he was granted the keys to the city. Catherine was taken to visit the house in which she had been born. The public banquet had been arranged by a new friend, Francis Jeffrey, the Whig lawyer and politician who was still at the heart of Edinburgh literary society, though he had resigned as editor of the Edinburgh Review ten years before. Gregarious, enthusiastic, with a strong sense of propriety and a moderate Romantic disposition, the elderly Jeffrey found Dickens irresistible. Having supported and patronized Thomas Carlyle, though more at ease with his wife, Jane, than with the writer himself, Jeffrey found his relationship with Dickens less complicated.38 It was unequivocally warm, and his enthusiasm for the novelist’s female characters, particularly Little Nell, was unrestrained.
In a cool northern June, Edinburgh’s warmth of heart provided a gala welcome for the young author. John Wilson, the Tory journalist and essayist, looking “as though he had just come down from the Highlands, and had never in his life taken pen in hand,” described Dickens as “perhaps the most popular author now alive” to the over 250 distinguished men who had eagerly paid their subscription fee to attend the banquet. After dinner, 200 ladies, led by Catherine, entered the gallery to hear the toasts and speeches. “The room was crammed to the throat.” People were turned away. As Dickens came through the door and entered the hall, the orchestra struck up, to “tumultuous” applause and “shouts of delight,” the popular music-hall song “Charley is my Darling.” He was escorted to the high platform for full viewing. Their darling, “a little, slender, pale-faced, boyish-looking individual, the very last man in the room” whom someone who did not know him “could have picked on as being the author of Pickwick,” was thrilled. It “was very remarkable to see such a number of grey-headed men gathered about my brown flowing locks; and it struck most of those who were present very forcibly.”
When he rose to speak, the silence was anticipatory. Immediately surprising and delighting the audience with his fluency, he responded to two toasts, one to Scottish literature, the other to Lord Jeffrey and to the recently deceased painter David Wilkie, whom he had met and become frien
dly with in London. Implicit in his toast to Scottish literature was the memory and ghost of Sir Walter Scott, whom many in the room had known, and the general awareness that Scott was an influence on his novel-in-progress, Barnaby Rudge. The young author exuberantly accepted his hosts’ flattery and in return flattered them and “this capital of Scotland … which I shall love while I have life.” By midnight, the “most brilliant affair you can possibly imagine” was over.39
His Scottish travels continued with a Highland holiday, guided by Angus Fletcher, a sculptor with whom Dickens had become friendly in London. With enthusiastic inefficiency, Fletcher took them through the rugged, rain-and-wind-swept terrain of his native Highlands from Edinburgh into the Trossachs, from Loch Katrine through the Glencoe pass to Ballachulish (they were prevented by the hostile weather from going to Oban), back through Glencoe to Inveraray, Loch Lomond, and finally Glasgow. Constantly wet, cold, exhilarated, and sometimes frightened, Dickens could not get the chill out of his bones even with large amounts of Scotch whisky. The passage through Glencoe was terrifying, “an awful place … shut in on each side by enormous rocks,” like “the burial place of a race of giants,” with “great torrents … rushing down in all directions … such haunts as you might imagine yourself wandering in, in the very height and madness of a fever.” Then not only to have to go through the “terrible” pass again but to have to cross a dangerously swollen river. “It had rained all night, and was raining” still. Since the carriage had been damaged, they came down hills without sufficient drag, and had to hang out the back to keep it from flying downhill. At the crossing, they all got out. Catherine agreed to do so only at the last minute. They crossed precariously, dangerously, on a wooden platform, the carriage almost overturning, the horses almost drowning.40
He was glad to have his pen in hand each evening by a warm fireside, to write long accounts of his adventures to Forster, who possessively revealed their existence but declined to show them to Maclise, though Dickens meant the letters for him also. He was overjoyed to get letters from home, from the friends he desperately missed, including Macready and John Elliotson, a professor of medicine whose experiments with mesmerism fascinated him. He missed the faces of his friends in the audience at the Edinburgh banquet. He missed the children also. With home-turning enthusiasm, having arranged to have Forster and Maclise at Devonshire Terrace to meet them, he hurried back from Glasgow to London for a reunion with friends and family on July 18, 1841. He had looked forward to this reunion “with a delight past all expression.”41
DICKENS WAS, THOUGH, AT HEART A TRAVELING MAN, ALTERNATING between love of hearth and restlessness. Home was a willful construct, an abstraction made flesh. The road was a preexistent reality, a pattern of movement first created by his family’s moving from Portsmouth, to London, to Kent, and back to London. During his youth, London seemed universe enough, a place in which one could travel almost endlessly and not walk the same street twice. Increasingly aware of his own restlessness, he worked the harder at creating domestic stability and a circle of friends whose center would be stable, unmoving, secure. He found an anchor for his personal instability in London and Kent. Though he helped elevate domesticity into a national totem, he nevertheless needed, even during the first decade of his married life, to find safe ways in which to express his need for change, travel, and adventure.
Writing itself generated an impatience that he embodied in his nervous prose, frequently exorcised in city walks and country hikes. As a child, his moves were involuntary. He accompanied his parents from one residence to another. But he had been intensely curious about the world, with a gift for observation of a sort that prompted him to look and explore. As an adult, his intellect was observational and satirical rather than abstract and meditative. He thought with his senses and his feelings. Gifted with a fluency of feeling and a fluency of descriptive and expressive language, he recognized that the road was his natural environment. As a reporter, he had his first opportunity to see England. With the success of Pickwick, he took his first trip abroad, in July 1837, a whirlwind week-long holiday, with Catherine and Hablot Knight Browne, to Calais, Ghent, Brussels, and Antwerp. In February 1838, he visited Yorkshire with Browne, mainly because he wanted his illustrator to observe the setting for the early part of Nicholas Nickleby. In November 1838, with Browne and Forster, he toured North Wales and the Midlands, continuing his lifelong pattern of finding landscapes and communities in which to set his fictions.
The demands of his career, though, forced Dickens to spend most of his time in or near London. Long trips seemed out of the question. In March 1838, he had begun his “sequel” to Pickwick Papers, another long novel in twenty monthly parts for Chapman and Hall. Then, having liberated himself from daily editorial tasks by resigning from Bentley’s Miscellany, he finished the last weekly installment of Oliver in April 1839. The extraordinary demands of Nicholas Nickleby kept him to the remunerative grindstone until late September 1839. During the brief period between the Nickleby dinner in early October and the start of a new, demanding project, he wrote for Chapman and Hall the brief Sketches of Young Couples, a follow-up to the anonymously published Sketches of Young Gentlemen of early 1838, pleasantly perfunctory humor for which he was paid a flat fee. (This was about the time he brought his relationship with Bentley to a close, except for the still unwritten Barnaby Rudge, and moved to Devonshire Terrace.) The new project, for which he signed an agreement in March 1840, was a weekly magazine called Master Humphrey’s Clock, twelve of whose sixteen pages were to be his own original material, initially envisaged as a series of stories linked together by the pretense that they were manuscripts, and placed in the case of a large clock.
When the sales of the second and following issues of the weekly plummeted, apparently because readers realized that they were not being provided with an ongoing story, he tentatively began in June 1840, as the twelfth number of Master Humphrey, a new novel, The Old Curiosity Shop. Soon, feeling “the story extremely myself and “warmly interested in it,” he had set out on a journey with his characters that brought him and his readers to a pitch so intense that it became the Victorian touchstone for the empathetic novel, in which author and reader create a community of shared feeling. It quickly became an extraordinary success, culminating in widespread public mourning for the death of the main character.42
With the completion of The Old Curiosity Shop in February 1841, he began, finally, to write Barnaby Rudge, which had been conceived in 1836. He had started to write it in November 1839 only to give up in disgust. In July 1840, with a substantial loan from Chapman and Hall, he bought back from Bentley for £2,250 his contract for Barnaby, settled his rights in the Miscellany and other copyright agreements, and transferred the novel to Chapman and Hall, who seemed more like friends and private bankers than publishers. Though his relationship with Chapman and Hall was to have its difficulties, he had good reason to insist to Edward Chapman that he and his partner were an exception, “the best of booksellers past, present, or to come; and my trusty friends.”43 With the success of The Old Curiosity Shop in the weekly format of Master Humphrey’s Clock, it made sense to publish Barnaby in the same way, though he was less keen on weekly publication than on a novel in monthly numbers. In the weekly format he felt his artistry more cramped, his schedule more intensely hectic.
His first venture into historical fiction, Barnaby was written with Sir Walter Scott’s example in mind, both Scott’s ability to vividly re-create a historical past that spoke meaningfully to the needs and values of the present and his immense commercial success. Having read some of the obvious sources for the George Gordon antipopery riots of 1780, he solicited oral accounts from those who had memories of the events. With a novelist’s sure sense of artistic efficiency, he distorted and simplified the historical facts in order “to select the striking points and beat them into the page with a sledge-hammer.” In the climactic riot scenes, conveying his own and Victorian England’s attraction to and abhorrence of rev
olution and mass movements, he brilliantly fulfilled his desire “to convey an idea of multitudes, violence, and fury” seen “dimly, through the fire and smoke.”44 It is a novel whose historical placement anticipates the French Revolution and the revolution that the English Victorians hoped to avoid. It also dramatizes Dickens’ personal aspirations toward domestic security and his sense of the complicated relationships between fathers and sons alternatively with the problems of private and public madness in a moment of cultural anarchy. Barnaby began its appearance in February 1841, and mercifully ended, as far as the tired author was concerned, that November. Even while dashing through the wind and rain of the Scottish Highlands in July, he had hardly been able to afford not to keep at it. In that sense, he had been traveling very hard.
For his fictional characters, from Pickwick onward, he created self-defining and culturally expressive journeys. In the three major novels he wrote in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the lives of the main characters are projected outward into the world as a pilgrim’s progress, limited voyages toward personal fulfillment. In The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Nicholas travels a series of roads that cover the map of the traditional English Bildungsroman, the novel of the education of an instinctively good young man whose progress toward maturity bridges the landscape of country and city, north and south. It is a voyage of noble ambition in search of a home, toward whose domesticity Nicholas aspires as the highest affirmation of his self-worth. As with Dickens, the road is one of hard work guided by talent and a good heart. No evil, no obstacle, can defeat his energy, and his travels affirm the inevitable and decisive victory of goodness. Like Dickens, Nicholas feels omnipotent. No career is closed to him, not even a career in the theatre. In Nicholas, Dickens celebrates, through parody as well as praise, the magic of the theatre, drawing on his fascination with the stage and his friendship with Macready, absorbing his theatrical experiences into the plot, delighting in depictions of actors, actresses, and performances, from the absurdly banal to the humorously serious.