by Fred Kaplan
Catherine’s unhappiness prevented her neither from becoming pregnant in late January nor from participating with her husband in an ascent of Mount Vesuvius on the night of January 21, 1845. With “six saddle-horses, an armed soldier for a guard,” and, because of the harsh weather, twenty-two guides, they began the nearly perpendicular ascent at four in the afternoon. Georgina and Catherine “were put into two litters, just chairs with poles.” Dickens was on foot, with a tough stick in hand. Deep snow covered a “sheet of ice from the top of the cone to the bottom.” They formed a human chain to cross the ice. At the moment of sunset they reached the halfway point. Then, in the clear night, the moon brilliantly illumined the sea, the Bay of Naples, and the whole country visible below and behind them. From the cone, fire flared, “red-hot stones and cinders” exploding above it and then falling into the snow. Beyond the snow line, they climbed through what seemed like “a dry waterfall, with every mass of stone burnt and charred into enormous cinders, and smoke and sulpher bursting out of every chink and crevice.” The night was red with flames, and they could hardly breathe. Everyone on foot now, “my ladies were dragged higher, without making the least complaint.”
Only Dickens and the head guide went to the edge of the crater, Roche screaming that they would be killed. “Feeling at every step as if the crust of ground between one’s feet and the gulf of fire would crumble in and swallow one up,” Dickens insisted on climbing to the brink on the windy side and looking “down into the crater itself … into the flaming bowels of the mountain.… It was the finest sight conceivable,” even “more terrible than Niagara,” though equal “as fire and water are.” In the presence of the flaming mountain, he felt the same elevated transcendence that he had felt in the presence of the great falls, the two locations of his experience in which the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural, came together. He and the guide returned from the peak, “alight in half a dozen places, and burnt from head to foot.” Catherine and Georgina, who had had their clothes almost torn off their backs by the heat and wind, covered themselves. Descending, the head guide staggered, slipped, and plunged head first “down the smooth ice into the black night, five hundred feet below!” A man behind them on the descent stumbled and rolled down past them, shrieking in pain and terror. Months later, Vesuvius still was burning in Dickens’ thoughts, “beside the roaring waters of Niagara; and not a splash of the water extinguishes a spark of the fire; but there they go on, tumbling and flaming, night and day, each in its fullest glory.”31
Italy, though, was less bold scenery than impressive cities and a broad cultural experience. Unlike Vesuvius, Naples repelled him, its misery, degradation, and dirt, the “condition of the common people … abject and shocking … so sunk and steeped in utter hopelessness of better things, that they would make Heaven uncomfortable, if they could ever get there.” The presence of such seemingly irremediable misery made him uncomfortable. The condition of the city seemed best typified by the widespread practice of bearing the dead, “uncovered, on an open bier,” through the streets. The uncoffined bodies of paupers were flung into lime pits of which there was one opened and sealed for every night of the year.
His initial impression of Rome disappointed him. Its commonplace suburbs and banal modern streets seemed as nondescript as those of London and Paris, “degraded and fallen and lying asleep in the sun among a heap of ruins … no more my Rome” of the imagination “than Lincoln’s-inn-fields is.” From the distance, “it looked like—I am half afraid to write the word—like London!!!” Having arrived at Carnival time, he found the celebration “a very remarkable and beautiful sight … a remnant of the ancient Saturnalia”—music, masks, horse racing, street crowds, attractive women, and the rhythmic indeterminacy of a spectacular urban theatre performance.
Soon the other Rome, the ancient city on which the modern had been imposed, asserted itself with a grandness that the Coliseum and the southern side of the Campagna embodied. St. Peters did not impress him. The unavoidable presence of the Catholic Church stimulated his barely latent hostility, creating a constant minor tension between his enthusiasm for appreciating the vividness of his Italian experience and his manageable but still strong English prejudices. The Italians he gladly tolerated, with amiable condescension, as if they were a special kind of children, who have “a natural enjoyment of dirt, garlic, and oil.” The ancient sections of Rome, though, thrilled him. When he returned for much of March, the Colosseum, which “by daylight, moonlight, torchlight, and every sort of light” is “most stupendous and awful,” had become for him an image of the ancient and the modern, of man’s work and time’s destruction. He “went there continually, and never could see enough of it.”32
With a strong interest in art but with no pretension to high culture, he looked at a great many paintings, particularly in Rome, finding satisfaction mostly in those that had narrative drama and in portraits that emphasized individual personality. He delighted in those whose “tenderness and grace … noble elevation, purity, and beauty … relieve my tortured memory from legions of whining friars and waxy holy families.” Untrained and unsophisticated in the painterly tradition or in art as formal composition, he needed always to make intellectual sense of the representational element in the depiction. He preferred art that was heroic and elevating, his paragon Maclise, who had begun work on his frescoes for the new Houses of Parliament. He also admired realistic paintings, especially if the subject was social, his models Hogarth and Cruikshank. Amused by the artists’ bourse in the Piazza di Spagna, he had a keen eye for the ludicrous relationship between artists and models, “the falsest Rascals in the World,” who, like actors, exhibited their poses to show their prospective employers how they were the very stuff of high art. Despite his superficial knowledge of the subject, Dickens was confident of his ability to recognize and respond to art. His distrust of the humbug of what others considered great art both liberated him to see for himself and imprisoned him in his unwillingness to see beyond his limitations. The problem persisted that much of the Renaissance painting he saw dealt with religious subjects in such a way as to reduce “every mystery of our religion to some literal development in paint and canvas, equally repugnant to the reason and the sentiment of any thinking man.”33
When the de la Rues finally arrived, Rome took on a new emotional immediacy. Appropriately, Augusta became sick for three days. Her husband “called me up to her.… She was rolled into an apparently impossible ball, by tic in the brain, and I only knew where her head was by following her long hair to its source.… It was so alarming to see that I had hardly any belief in myself with reference to it. But in half an hour she was peacefully and naturally asleep, and next morning was quite well.” The illness, though, could only be alleviated, not cured, despite his hope that his medicine would succeed eventually in discharging, even destroying, the phantom whose origin he believed to be his patient’s disturbed nervous system. What relief he could give her, however, could be achieved only through constant concentration, frequent therapeutic sessions both to counteract the powerful dark figure and to increase her strength and confidence. Once, when she reported to him that she had seen the dark figure skulking in the shadows with his face covered, he triumphantly took it as a sign that the phantom was withdrawing. Its defeat seemed imminent. Early in April, the two couples left Rome for Genoa. Every day he “magnetized her; sometimes under olive trees, sometimes in vineyards, sometimes in the travelling carriage, sometimes at wayside inns during the midday.”34
Under the constant strain of her husband’s neglect, Catherine began to express her fear and frustration. So frequently in her company, the de la Rues, of course, had become aware of her tension. Dickens assured Fletcher, though, that the four of them “are exceedingly happy, and don’t fight much.” Finally, the three-month-pregnant Catherine made a stand. She insisted that her husband tell the de la Rues that she was distressed by what seemed to her the impropriety of his relationship with Augusta. Embarrassed an
d angry, Dickens complied. He spoke to the de la Rues, but insisted on apologizing for Catherine’s state of mind, calling her both oversensitive and insensitive to others. In his eyes, it was demeaning, irrational jealousy. Years later, he castigated her with the unforgettable memory of her insult to him and to them. “Whatever made you unhappy in that Genoa time had no other root, beginning, middle, or end, than whatever has made you proud and honored in your married life, and given you station better than rank, and surrounded you with many enviable things.”35 He was simply being himself, and she had not been willing to take him “for better and for worse.” The worse was as central and as necessary as the better, and if she chose to see his relationship with Madame de la Rue as something suspect, she ought to have known that it could also be seen—it should be seen—as an inherent expression of his creativity and nobility. It was part of the ground on which he held his greatest gift.
In the “charming spring days” in Genoa, after a visit to Florence, Dickens began to anticipate the end of his year in Italy. He had seen “so many wonders,” including Herculaneum and Pompeii, each with “a voice of its own.” But he would “leave here, please God,” on the ninth of June, in order to be in London again by the end of that month. In retrospect, he was happy with the experience. Part of April and much of May 1845 he spent lying on his “back on sofas, and leaning out of windows and over balconies, in a sort of mild intoxication.” He even discovered that he had grown stouter, his “waistcoat-buttons flying off occasionally, with great violence.”36 The tension with the de la Rues decreased as the spring advanced. Catherine felt calmer after her confession and in anticipation of their departure. He continued to mesmerize his “sad invalid,” and made efforts to teach Emile to administer the cure. Though he had initially intended to spend a month or two in Paris on his return trip, he had remained in Italy so long that he felt now he did not have time enough to make a long stay in Paris profitable, partly because he had decisions to make about transforming his Italian experiences into a book, mainly because he desired the familiarity of London and his own desk again after the longest time he had ever been away.
Dissatisfied with his letters to Forster, which would be the basis of his Italian travel book, he had been “half savage” with himself in the writing “for not doing better.” He had written nothing but letters since December. The thought of his writing obligations created an undercurrent of expectation and anxiety. He had a great deal of income to earn and borrowed money to repay. In early June, reading A Christmas Carol to a group of his Genoese intimates, he seemed, uncharacteristically, “extremely nervous and insisted that no one should sit behind him.” And the separation from the de la Rues must have been difficult, smoothed over by his insistence that not only would he never forget them but that he would visit them again and that they would visit him. “You must come to England. That’s clear. And I must come back to Genoa too.” They left on June 9, traveling to Milan and Lake Como, and then over the St. Gotthard pass, “the blue water tearing through the white snow with an awful beauty that is most sublime.” Switzerland, which seemed much more like England than like Italy, delighted him even more in this summer weather. From Zurich and Frankfurt, they traveled down the Rhine to Cologne, and finally to Brussels, where Forster, Maclise, and Jerrold, having come out to meet him, welcomed the self-described “Inimitable B” into their eager arms.37
SOON AFTER REPOSSESSING DEVONSHIRE TERRACE IN JULY 1845, “once more in my own house!” and out of “the hideous confusion, and chaos of boxes,” Dickens was again vigorously combining work and play. Brief excursions to Rochester and Brighton, September in Broadstairs, and hearty dinners at one another’s homes brought the Dickens circle together again. Maclise and Forster visited like members of the family. He felt increasingly warm toward Stanfield and Jerrold, whose recent play he thought “incomparably the best” of his dramatic writings. Forster, whose serious illness the previous winter had worried him, had mended, though “he looks thinner, and roars out sometimes, without any notice, in consequence of rheumatic twinges in one of his knees.” Maclise’s inability to get the best out of himself, to “give his magnificent Genius fair play,” distressed Dickens. In August, he published an extravagantly laudatory essay, “The Spirit of Chivalry in Westminster Hall,” to give his friend’s fortunes a boost. Maclise was often “very discontented and oh! how low in spirits.” The writer Laman Blanchard’s suicide, in February 1845, may have heightened his concern about Maclise’s moodiness. “Dear Dick how good and kind he is,” Maclise wrote to Forster—“he sets me in a glow while I read his warm praise.” Ainsworth remained a friend in the distance, though he lived close by, despite Forster’s efforts to bring him in. “You are,” he chided him, “what Enobarbus broke his head for being, a promise-breaker and a fugitive.… We shall never be, in military parlance, ‘as we were,’ at this rate.” Cruikshank was still “one of the best creatures in the World, in his own odd way … a live Caricature [of] himself.”38 David Colden visited from New York, without his beautiful wife. Though Mitton and Forster vied for who could be more indispensable to Dickens, Forster easily won.
For the author, no spontaneous fun could be as relaxing as that produced by the combination of exhaustion and exhilaration that he felt when organizing, arranging, directing, and acting in a play. With his usual Grimaldi reflex, he leaped onto the stage. After reading The Chimes in London in December 1844, he had rallied his friends to the commitment that they would put on a play when he returned. By mid-July, Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour had been decided on, to be accompanied by a farce, eventually Past Two o’Clock in the Morning, which he had done in Montreal. Anticipating “great amusement,” he set to work, casting, organizing rehearsals, deciding on costumes, renting the small theatre on Dean Street owned by the flighty, officious, middle-aged actress Fanny Kelly, setting the ground rules for the amateur company, dreaming great things for this new adventure. Jonson’s comedy had fine roles, the braggart Captain Bobadil for Dickens, the swaggering, rapacious Kitely for Forster, and parts for Jerrold, Leech, Lemon, Dudley Costello (a journalist whom Dickens had known since the late 1830s), Frank Stone, and Frederick Dickens. The participants shared the costs equally, about ten pounds each. Stanfield and Maclise were consulted about the scenery. The “perfectly good-natured and most agreeable … company” soon seemed to their perfectionist manager “damned bad.” Forster, taking Mac-ready as his model, to the extent that he even imitated “the great tragedian’s” stage mannerisms, immersed himself in his role so passionately that he seemed to have defined acting as an act of aggression against his colleagues, whose nerves he severely strained. Acting opposite Dickens in one of the two roles in the farce, Lemon turned out to be an excellent actor, and Leech, in Robert Browning’s judgment, superb.39 Dickens, though, astonished his friends with the professionalism of his performance, as if he had been acting all his life. In fact, he had.
The performance was scheduled for September 20. Early in the month, “supernatural exertions … being made for the Great Play,” he was still disappointed with some of the actors. “But they will improve perhaps, and come out better than I expect.” Exhausting himself with management details, he had everyone working away at it “as if it were the whole business of our lives.” Some of the company began to feel, as the night approached, “like used-up cab horses—going perceptibly at the knees.” But he humorously boasted to Macready that “I think of changing my present mode of life, and am open to an engagement.… I will undertake not to play Tragedy, though Passion is my strength.… I consider myself a chained lion.” The lion unchained performed brilliantly before an audience of five hundred invited guests, including Tennyson, Browning, Jane Carlyle, Lady Holland and the Countess of Blessington, both of whom he had become friendly with, and the Duke of Devonshire, an “audience so distinguished for one thing or another—every one so elegantly dressed—all in such a state of excitement and expectation.” The press, which had infiltrated the private event, widely
praised the acting. Suddenly the company was inundated with requests to do additional performances, perhaps for charity. The idea of appearing as an actor before a general audience did not appeal to Dickens, nor, he thought, would it to the company. He had performed for a paying audience “in Canada, once—But that is far away, and quite another thing.”40 Though he could not stop thinking and talking about the experience, the company did not perform again in 1845, and in 1846 did only a benefit performance for Miss Kelly, for which Dickens wrote a prologue that Forster recited. Through much of the fall of 1845 he was busy writing The Cricket on the Hearth, and there were other serious drains on his time.
In addition to the theatricals, for the previous six months Dickens had been intensively planning the disposition of his letters from Italy, the agreement to edit a magazine for Bradbury and Evans, and the commitment to write a new novel in twenty monthly numbers. Whether to write a travel book or to publish the letters in a journal or newspaper had suddenly seemed in early July 1845 secondary to his enthusiasm for an idea for a cheap weekly periodical. It would be “partly original partly select; notices of books, notices of theatres, notices of all good things, notices of all bad ones; Carol philosophy, cheerful views, sharp anatomization of humbug, jolly good temper; papers always in season, pat to the time of year; and a vein of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming reference in everything to Home, and Fireside.” Above all, it would be a regular source of substantial income. The memory of his bitter experience with Bentley’s Miscellany and the indifferent failure of Master Humphrey’s Clock had faded sufficiently for him to think that this time he could pull it off. It would be necessary for the journal to be closely identified with him both in spirit and in ownership. He would need complete editorial control. He would need compliant publishers who would take the financial risk and forgo all interference. Optimistic that he had such a publisher in Bradbury and Evans, whose handling of The Chimes seemed to him infinitely superior to Chapman and Hall’s of A Christmas Carol, though in fact the only difference had been that the former had been more popular with the public, he decided that The Cricket would be his title and that he would “chirp, chirp, chirp away in every number until I chirped it up to—well, you shall say how many hundred thousand!”41