Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  By the end of the month, the idea had been abandoned, mainly because it had been replaced by another exciting notion, so bold that it absolutely amazed him. Bradbury and Evans proposed that he edit a daily newspaper, which would be known as the Daily News. Its politics would be liberal and financing would come from the railway directors, who, profiting from “the railway mania,” wanted a public voice to counterbalance anti-industrial Tory interests. Its profits would be substantially augmented by advertisements for the financing and organization of new railroads. “Capital, down and ready, fifty Thousand Pounds!” Dickens claimed. The idea had probably been broached to Bradbury as early as 1840 by his country neighbor and financial adviser, the self-made Joseph Paxton, a talented gardener who had risen from garden boy to superintendent of grounds at Chatsworth, editor of gardening newspapers, and intimate friend of the Duke of Devonshire. His architectural genius was to produce the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851. His financial brilliance had made him wealthy from railroad-stock investments. By the autumn of 1845, he had “command of every railway and railway influence in England and abroad except the Great Western.” His conservative business practices but liberal politics contrasted sharply with the speculative business practices and the self-serving Toryism of the flamboyant “railway king,” George Hudson, who had also risen from obscurity to immense power and whose empire of over one thousand miles of railways rivaled Paxton’s. By October 1845, as the plan matured, Dickens learned that Hudson “is with us in influence though not as a proprietor.” Paxton, the moving force, “is in it, heart and purse.”42

  Tempted by the opportunity to have some direct say in the affairs of the country, he could not resist the blandishments of Bradbury and Paxton, the call of his own heart to do something striking for reform, and his expectation of the handsome salary he would receive. After spending October 18 at Chatsworth with Paxton, he committed himself. “The venture is quite decided on; and I have made the Plunge.” Forster, who “was to have some share in it,” gave the news to Macready, who heard it with “a sort of dismay.… I fear the means and chances have not been well enough considered. I hope and pray all may go well with and for them.” Dining together the next night, Dickens and his friends undoubtedly had a strong sense of the excitement as well as the danger of the venture. Two weeks later, reading his prospectus for the newspaper, Macready’s apprehensions increased. He perceived his friend to be “rushing headlong into an enterprise that demands the utmost foresight, skillfull and secret preparation and qualities of a conductor which Dickens has not.” Forster agreed with his objections, “but he did not seem to entertain much hope of moving Dickens.”43

  Dickens himself, though, may already have had doubts. Catherine was about to give birth, he was having difficulty getting his next Christmas book, to which he had transferred the prospective title of his journal, started, he had at times been “half dead with [the] Managerial work” of the new acting company, and now he was busily “trying to engage the best people, right and left,” for the newspaper. He was planning to go abroad to set up the overseas offices, which would permit a visit to the de la Rues. At the beginning of November, his body began warning him that something was wrong with what he was doing. Still, on the third of December 1845 he formally accepted the editorship of the Daily News, asking and receiving double the thousand pounds a year that had initially been mentioned. He agreed to publish there his Italian letters and to write frequent short papers “from day to day … constantly exercising an active and vigilant superintendence over the whole Machine.” He would not be a daily drudge, though. “When I am not there, or after I have left the office, I shall … have a Sub Editor to whom I can … hand over the practical management for the time being.”44

  An annual salary, though, was insufficient. He also wanted a portion of the ownership, his share of which “would then be a fine property.” Partial ownership would be the reward that would make palatable a position that probably he, and certainly his friends, suspected was antithetical to his work as a novelist. Even with a reliable subeditor, it would be possible only at damaging cost to function as the editor of a daily newspaper and to write a novel in twenty monthly parts, which he was committed to do and needed to do to maintain his primacy as a novelist. It was unrealistic to think that he could subordinate editing a newspaper to his writing fiction so that “the new calling shall not long supercede the old one.”45 A glutton for detail and control, he did not balk at the likelihood that the amount of administration he would be compelled to do each day would far exceed anything he had ever taken on before. Whatever his managerial talents, they did not include delegating responsibility effectively.

  Fortunately, the day after he had committed himself he was presented with the opportunity to back out. The arrangement that Paxton had made for financing the paper collapsed because of the “failure of a Great Broker in the City … which so affects two of my principal people that the Paper cannot be, on any proper footing.” Having already hired a substantial staff at salaries that bested those of rivals like The Times and the Morning Chronicle, he felt that it would be embarrassing, even painful, to withdraw the contracts, especially in those cases in which the reporters, some of them personal friends, had given notice to their employers. “But never say die is the Inimitable’s motto; and I have already pumped up as much courage as will set me going on my old track, please God, in four and twenty hours.”46

  As if saved from himself, he announced that he now had “no intention of connecting himself with any Newspaper.” He advised Bradbury and Evans to cut their losses. There was no saving the Daily News, since the confidence of the publishing and business world had been shattered as had his own. If they insisted on going on with it, he would give them “every advice and assistance” in his power. “But I cannot connect myself with it, as I originally designed. Nor can I conceal from you that I believe in my Soul it would end in your Ruin.” The publisher thought nothing of the sort. Additional money was raised. Despite efforts to persuade him, he at first held firm. After further discussions with Forster, Mitton, and Beard, the general opinion among his friends was that “to go on was desperate.” He complained that he had “been involved for the last fortnight in one maze of distractions.… Everything I have had to do, has been interfered with, and cast aside. I have never in my life had so many insuperable obstacles crowded into the way of my pursuits.”47 Despite all this, and advice to the contrary, or perhaps because of it, by the fourteenth of November he had withdrawn his resignation, and on the seventeenth the proprietors signed a formal agreement. Since there was no mention of his share in the profits, probably that was to be worked out at a later date. He had not been able to resist triumphing over “insuperable obstacles.” By the first of December 1845, he was able to date a letter from the “Office of the Daily News” at 90 Fleet Street.

  Though the newspaper was to have a long life, his association with it was brief. He spent much of November and December organizing it and January and February realizing that it was a “Daily Noose.” He found little to take pleasure in after the satisfaction of redeeming the staff appointments he had made initially, which now included Lemon, Forster, Fonblanque, and Jerrold as editorial writers, Costello as foreign editor, John Scott Russell as railway editor, George Hogarth as music and drama critic, Richard Henry Home as Irish correspondent, William Henry Wills, a contributor to Punch and the former assistant editor of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, as his personal secretary, the Countess of Blessington, at an impractical salary though only half the eight hundred pounds that she had originally proposed, for society tidbits, John Henry Barrow, his maternal uncle, as India correspondent, and the irrepressible John Dickens, popping up again “like a cork,” in charge of the reportorial staff. The elderly gentleman took great pleasure in once more haying a desk on which to put his feet. Bustling with enthusiasm, the portly father of the general editor took on his responsibilities with the bonhomie of a man who was back in familiar territory a
nd the pride of a father being paid his due after long neglect by his son and the world. Rather than a stipend, he now had a salary.48

  In addition to his position as general editor, Dickens took on, at no increase in salary, the chore of publicist for his “decidedly liberal” and, he anticipated, “extremely well written” newspaper. He quickly realized, though, that he had taken on tedious detail, infinite vexation, and the unanticipated frustration of problems with incompetent printers and nervous investors whose commitment to give him complete control over personnel was not fully honored. Bradbury angered him by what seemed unwarranted interference with his prerogatives, including treating his father in an insulting way. By the time of the trial edition on January 19, 1846, having corrected some of the initial problems, Dickens felt that “everything looks well for our Start.” But the effort took its toll. “I can’t sleep; and if I fall into a doze I dream of first numbers till my head swims.”49 The editors and owners of established newspapers, like the Times and the Morning Chronicle, were relieved by the thin appearance of the first copies, redeemed only by installments of Pictures from Italy under the title “Travelling Letters” on January 21, 24, and 31, February 9, 16, and 26, and March 2 and 11, a little less than half the full book, which was published in mid-May 1846.

  Dickens also took the opportunity to express strong opinions on a number of social issues, particularly on the relationship between criminality and lack of education, focusing on the potential of the ragged-school movement and on what seemed the ridiculousness of the advocacy of “total abstinence” because some people could not drink moderately. The widespread assertion that drunkenness was the cause of many evils rather than a result of already existing ones angered him, as if eradicating a symptom in any way dealt with the disease. Beginning with his earliest sketches, he had unequivocally claimed that societies with high levels of poverty and ignorance created the conditions that encouraged high levels of crime and alcoholism. The issue that most preoccupied him, though, was capital punishment. He dealt with it at length in five long letters published on February 23 and 28, and March 9, 13, and 16. It had been on his mind for many years, beginning with its indirect depiction in the accidental death by hanging of Bill Sikes, watched by a taunting, angry crowd, in Oliver Twist, the suicide by hanging of Ralph Nickleby, and the dramatic, extended presentation of the hangman and his work in Barnaby Rudge. With a strong touch of the obsessive voyeur, he found the highest drama in assaults on the body, in the depiction of the vulnerability of the human creature, who could be brought from wholeness to dismemberment, from life to death, in a moment of individual violence or state-sanctioned murder.

  In early July 1840, on an impulse, he had gone to see the hanging of the Swiss-born François Benjamin Courvoisier. After a sensational trial, he had been convicted of robbing and cutting the throat of his employer, Lord William Russell. Five weeks earlier Dickens had expressed his support of the abolition of capital punishment. He found himself drawn to the public execution, as if he needed to see with his own eyes, like a burning remembrance, the primal scene. At first, he persuaded himself and his friends only to go “to see what is being done in the way of preparation” for the hanging. Once at Newgate, the magnetism of the crowd of forty thousand gathering to see the spectacle and the single focus of the gallows became emotionally irresistible. “Just once I should like to watch a scene like this, and see the end of the Drama.” Despite their objections, he took his friends and himself out of the obfuscating press of thousands of people to an upper-floor room with an unobstructed view. For a small rental fee, they had an excellent vantage point. From that height, waiting from midnight until dawn, they watched what his brother-in-law described as “the sink of human filth” beneath them, the pickpockets, prostitutes, drunkards, the idle curious, the morbid, the obsessive voyeurs. He felt that he was both part of the crowd and an objective observer of that live performance no other theatre could provide. Suddenly he caught sight of Thackeray, towering over the people he stood among. The noise, though, prevented them from getting his attention, the crowd so pressingly taut that he could not have moved anyway. To get a better view, people shouted, “Hats off in front!” Suddenly, at eight in the morning, as the body swung, the neck breaking, there was a moment of complete silence at that “sight of helplessness and agony.”50

  Of this execution Thackeray wrote that “the poor wretch’s face will keep itself before my eyes, and the scene mixes itself up with all my occupations.” Dickens could not get the “horrible sight” out of his mind, a preoccupation that soon had a fictional representation in Barnaby. The onlookers disgusted him as much as the execution itself. “I did not see one token in all the immense crowd … of any one emotion suitable to the occasion. No sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flauting vice in fifty other shapes. I should have deemed it impossible that I could have ever felt any large assemblage of my fellow-creatures to be so odious.” He immediately wrote to the Morning Chronicle two letters, whose preoccupation with the procedures of the trial did not disguise his radical statement that what the murderer had suffered by state barbarity made him conclude that he would never cooperate in bringing a murderer to justice.

  When pressed by Macvey Napier for a contribution to the Edinburgh Review, an upper-middle-class Whig journal with a strong commitment to rational reform, he sketched out an argument in which he stressed that capital punishment was sufficiently harmful to society to warrant its being abolished. The spectacle of Courvoisier’s death “was so loathsome, pitiful, and vile … that the law appeared to be as bad as he, or worse.” Though he never wrote the article for Napier, his letters in 1846 to the Daily News (having by then left the paper’s editorship) developed the main points: 1) Death has a great fascination for all people because of “the Dread and Mystery surrounding” it; 2) Those who are “criminally disposed” are influenced by such a psychologically fascinating sight, which, among other things, “engenders a diseased sympathy”; 3) The ignorant mass of people in general, seeing the state murder but not the crime for which it is a punishment, “will almost of necessity sympathize with the man who dies before them”; 4) Since “all exhibitions of agony and Death have a tendency to brutalize and harden the feelings of men,” such public spectacles tend to make death less rather than more corrective. For him, death was a reminder of how precious life was, how moral its essence. Capital punishment denied both truths. And though the force of his argument was directed against the elimination of such public executions, he advocated the long-range goal of total abolishment, substituting “mean and shameful” punishments that would “degrade the deed, and the doer of the deed.”51

  Later, in 1849, having declined to attend a double public execution, with the added titillation of one of the condemned being a woman, he wrote two widely read letters to the Times, advocating elimination of public execution. Though he favored total abolishment, he had almost as much contempt for those who insisted on all or nothing as for the crowd that enjoyed the special excitement of seeing a woman hang. The law that created and condoned such an obscenity seemed to him barbaric. He felt almost as if he were “living in a city of Devils.” Just as he had not for years been able to go near Warren’s Blacking on the Strand, he could not think of Horsemonger Lane Gaol, where the Mannings were hanged, without seeing in his imagination “the two figures still hanging in the morning air,” figures whose execution he had not observed except in a vivid fantasy in which he saw “those two forms dangling on the top of the entrance gateway—the man’s, a limp, loose suit of clothes as if the man had gone out of them; the woman’s, a fine shape, so elaborately corsetted and artfully dressed, that it was quite unchanged in its trim appearance as it slowly swung from side to side.”52

  In February 1846, he liberated himself from the “Daily Noose.” There had been some successes. With the help of his father and other experienced reporters, he had succeeded in setting up a network and
a schedule that scooped other papers in getting into print an important speech by Robert Peel, evoking memories of his own reportorial achievements in the early 1830s on the hustings and in the House. Not even his friends, though, could pretend that the Daily News was a success. There is “nothing in it,” Macready complained early in February. “How can this interest its readers? The persons employed do not understand their business.” Elizabeth Barrett, who had earlier remarked that Dickens “has not … the breadth of mind enough for such work, with all his gifts,” thought the editorial texture intellectually vapid. Forster may not have shared with his intimate friend his “very low spirits about the paper” and his view “that no one could be a worse editor than Dickens.” But if not for the newspaper, then certainly for Dickens the road ahead looked to be a bleak, tedious one. He focused his perturbation on a new incident with Bradbury about personnel and his unhappiness with the newspaper’s “one-sided” prorailroad policy. With cold anger, he told his publishers at the end of January 1846 that they would either do things his way or he would leave, and that he would probably leave anyway.53

  Among other things, though, he had to assure Bradbury and Evans that his dissatisfaction with them as publishers of the Daily News did not extend to them as publishers of his novels. With Catherine, Georgina, Jerrold, and Forster, he went to Rochester at the beginning of the second week of February 1846, grounding himself in the old sites of his childhood, mulling over his situation, consulting with his friends, evaluating his sense of having gotten onto a wrong road. It was clear that he could not be both a novelist and the editor of a daily newspaper. On Monday the ninth, he announced his resignation. The owners agreed to Forster becoming the editor, a position he undertook with enthusiasm but from which, as Macready had anticipated, he unhappily resigned eight months later. “God knows,” Dickens was to console Forster, “there has been small comfort for either of us in the D.N.’s nine months.” With his letters on social issues, Dickens was to keep his hand in for some months and to receive some income from the newspaper thereafter. But by the end of February, “having subsided … into my old, and much-better-loved pursuits,” the novelist was “contemplating a new story,” which, by the middle of April, he had decided that he could “write … more comfortably and easily, abroad, than at home” and “I shall be saving money while I write.” Though it was not an easy decision to uproot himself and his family so soon again, after “discussing the pros and cons of all these questions, with Forster … in a condition of incessant restlessness, uneasiness, and uncertainty,” he soon made up his mind. “Abroad again.… I will write my book in Lausanne and in Genoa, and forget everything else if I can.”54