Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  During the last weeks of January, when Forster came, they went sightseeing, “with a dreadful insatiability,” mainly to places he had already seen, to the morgue, the prisons, the palaces, theatres, and hospitals, to the Louvre, Versailles, the Bibliothèque Royale, and Saint-Cloud, “whirled out of one into another with breathless speed.” Those sites associated with the Revolution that he visited and revisited became fixed in his memory with a force and historical accuracy that he drew on years later for A Tale of Two Cities. Though he regretted Forster’s demands on his time and the interruption in his writing schedule, as if he never “had anything to do with a book called Dombey,” the friendship was not strained by the imposition. Dickens was at his best as a host. Forster delighted in having his friend and Paris at the same time.

  Maclise, whom he had invited to join them, had regretfully declined the invitation, hard at work on an important project. Exercising his minimal talents as a comic poet, he begged Forster (and Dickens) not to forget him:

  When by the Seine thou rovest

  With the friend thou lovest

  Still remember me.

  If Sue—or Victor Hugo,

  Geo. Sand—or Kock, to you go

  Still, still remember me.

  In Pere la Chaise while walking

  O’er Montmartre while stalking

  Be sure remember me.

  When with Dickens thou art dining

  Think of him at 14 pining

  In fast—then think of me.

  When with him you Lafitte drinking

  Let not—your spirits sinking—

  Of Lincoln’s Inn then thinking

  a tear bedim your eye,

  and then remember me.24

  During the week before Christmas 1846 Dickens had visited London, accompanied only by Roche, partly to consult about Fanny, mainly to participate in rehearsals of an authorized stage adaptation of The Battle of Life, initiated by his reading it to the cast and management. He also wanted to be in London on the day of its publication. Despite a severe cold, he enjoyed the company, at the reading and at dinners, of Forster, Mac-ready, Lemon, Leech, Maclise, and Elliotson, though he felt too ill to attend the premiere. “There was immense enthusiasm at its close, and great uproar and shouting for me.” On a second brief visit soon after the middle of February 1847, the Channel crossing was so rough that he felt more ill “than on our American voyage.” Though the visit had been necessitated by his having underwritten the sixth number of Dombey, the first time he had ever done such a thing, he took advantage of the necessity both for business and pleasure. In addition to the one hundred pounds per month Dombey provided, the new accounts revealed, “thank God,” an additional “£2000 clear” from the first four numbers alone. The financial projections for the future installments were joyously staggering. Arrangements for a cheap edition in numbers of all his completed novels also promised substantial profits. Finally enjoying a long-postponed dinner with Lady Blessington and other friends at Gore House, he had the pleasure of seeing his eldest son begin King’s College School, with Miss Coutts paying the bill. No sooner had he returned to Paris late in February than an urgent message from Forster, to whom he had just said good-bye, told him that Charley had come down with scarlet fever. “Forster and Elliotson removed him … from School, wrapped up in blankets,” crimson with fever, and brought him to his maternal grandparents’ home near Regent’s Park.25 Deeply concerned, he and Catherine returned to London immediately.

  THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1847 WERE A MODEST BUT NOTICEABLE turning point. The hard work for over ten years of establishing himself as a professional writer culminated in the success of Dombey and Son. He never again had serious financial worries. He had become independent, at least in the sense that his earning power was enormous. Whatever the pressures on him from a large family, his actual resources readily sustained all expenses, though his sense of being exploited, even harried, by greed or incompetence or both, pained him. There was always room for a hint of exasperation, an edge of bitterness, a rehearsal of insecurities that no amount of success could ever discharge fully. The size of his family, though, and their assumption of a costly upper-middle-class style of life dependent on his achievements were compulsions and choices of his own.

  He had also turned, with his new novel, David Copperfield, more explicitly to fictional autobiography, to an exploration of himself through his art more direct, more honest, more resolute than in his earlier fiction. In the novels that were to follow, even when they were not directly autobiographical, he was to use autobiographical tonalities for more subjective portraiture and psychological dramatization than in his earlier work. Additionally, with Dombey, he became a more careful, self-conscious craftsman, with a controlling overview inherent in the inception and the initial plans. His sense of himself as a professional author also expanded into bolder, more energetic efforts to define writers as socially valuable and communally cohesive professionals caring about one another and about their position in the culture. And in this effort and affirmation, he stepped more fully onto the public stage as an actor and as a reader of his own works in a series of performances whose underlying energy hinted at failures within his marriage and discontent with his life in general that quietly, slowly, perhaps inevitably, intensified the feelings and initiated the events that ten years later changed his life radically.

  The idealized images of himself and of wives and sisters in his fiction had set a disquieting counterpoint to the reality of his relationship with Catherine. His awareness of her increasing emotional distance and his growing identification of her with women like his mother and Mrs. Nickleby expressed itself in his fiction long before he was able to confront it consciously. It was, though, all along unwittingly expressed in their relationship. The birth of Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens, their seventh child, in April 1847, during which “my dear Kate suffered terribly,” was one of those moments in which his relief was stronger than his anger at the sheer number of children they seemed not to be able to avoid having and the consequences to him. His bitterness was self-lacerating, and he felt increasingly ambivalent not only about the deaths but also about the births of children. Later, he freely gave the advice, “don’t have any more children.”26 Over the next ten years, the youthful, handsome Dickens became, to his own shock, prematurely old. He grew painfully aware that one of the prices of hard work, success, and fatherhood was the unwanted assumption of middle age while inwardly feeling young, romantic, and unfulfilled.

  Soon after his return to London in February 1847, he had attended William Hall’s funeral “to pay that last mark of respect” to a man from whom he had been alienated. It was a moment of sadness and reminiscence. Hall had been only eleven years his senior. At the age of thirty-five, Dickens now had a sufficiently long personal history on which to focus his inherent tendency toward nostalgia. He detested the so-called good old times. But his increasing autobiographical orientation interwove the threads of nostalgia, sentiment, and personal history with an elegiac overtone for the lost self of his childhood and now sometimes also for the young man who had started his search for fame and fortune in the 1830s. He remembered vividly the day on which he had bought in a bookstore in the Strand, from William Hall’s hands, “the Magazine in which the first thing I ever wrote was published,” and another day, in 1837, when they had gathered in Chapman and Hall’s office to drink claret and watch the young queen pass in a state procession on her way to the Guildhall.

  Fortunately, though Charley’s bout of scarlet fever had him in danger for a short while, there was soon no need to fear for his life. But the danger of disfiguring infection, even death, to Catherine and the child she was carrying forced both father and mother to stay away from their son until the danger was past. By late March, “Charley, thank God,” was “quite well again.”27 Since they could not repossess Devonshire Terrace until the autumn, he took a short lease on I Chester Place, Regent’s Park. “The children, servants, and Virgin” returned from Paris at th
e end of March 1847. With Charley’s illness, Catherine about to give birth, and the dislocation of a strange house, he had difficulty in getting the eighth number of Dombey under way, feeling “the “deepest of despondency (as usual in commencing Nos.).” Fortunately, he was soon back on schedule.

  His family relations were cordial, even though he was not enthusiastic about Fred’s being “transported to madness” for love of Anna Weller, “the most volatile little minx in existence.” Taking his duties seriously, John Dickens continued working for the Daily News. Apparently his newspaper salary and pension were sufficient to keep him from pestering his son for loans or directing unpaid bills to him. In writing Dombey, and soon David Copperfield, Charles had his father frequently in mind, sometimes humorously, often painfully. He resonantly mimicked him to Forster, particularly his self-inflating, pretentious rhetoric, often with the tag line “as my father would observe—indeed did on some memorable ancient occasions…”28 Fanny’s illness brought the family into a sense of shared sorrow, and John Dickens showed himself as anxious a father as did Charles a brother. With the Hogarths, he had a companionable relationship, little different from what it had been for years. Mrs. Hogarth remained a somewhat officiously hysterical mother and grandmother. George Hogarth, proud of Dickens’ success, had gratefully seen three of his daughters absorbed into his son-in-law’s household.

  As soon as he returned from France, the Dickens circle reassembled. The rivalry between Maclise and Forster for Dickens had long been resolved in Forster’s favor. It had been both a serious and a playful triangle. Among the observers who had noticed its intensity was Count D’Orsay, who, with French self-awareness and openness about such things, teased Maclise: “Haave you concluded your little dam ridicule conquetterie avec that good Forster and Dickens. Bah! and we laughed joyously, and I told him he had exactly hit the very expression in coquetterie.” Working on “a great picture of the Sacrifice by Noah,” Maclise was increasingly preoccupied with his own professional frustrations. Dickens joked that “because he couldn’t put in more than eight people” he fulfilled “his tendency always … to cram in, hundreds” by making “it up in Beasts.” Feeling himself closer to Forster, Maclise sometimes resented the bond between Forster and Dickens. He felt with some anger that Dickens did not “care one damn” about his contributions to the Christmas books and sometimes treated him “harshly, not to say unjustly.” When ill, he felt hurt at Dickens’ neither calling nor writing. With moody confusion, he claimed, without the benefit of a pause between the clauses, “that I am really and truly unwell it may be hypochondria.” After falling down “at the door of [his] painting room,” he “had the most unquiet nights from palpitating fears.” Increasingly reclusive, he passed his life “within the walls of my painting room.… I hate going anywhere and so I do not go.” His immense Byronic vanity found middle age devastating. “My hair you will be delighted to hear is now quite grey.… This is the secret of keeping myself to myself. I quite understand Geo[rge] IV when his good looks departed, stopping at home.” At times, though, he was still a good companion, and he and Forster visited frequently at Devonshire Terrace. In early 1848, Dickens and Maclise considered “going to Ireland for six weeks in the spring, and seeing whether anything is to be done there, in the way of a book.”29 They did not go.

  Forster seemed “more silent than in the old days and his nose is higher,” the elevation reflecting the combination of his tendency toward arrogance—Eliza Lynn, who met him at Landor’s seventy-fourth birthday party in early 1849, thought him “pompous, heavy … ungenial … saturnine and cynical”—and the seriousness with which he took his role as a man of letters, a profession that he insisted was as dignified as the bar or the clergy. Still at work on his Life of Goldsmith, revising it again and again, “buried in Goldsmith and Examiner,” he also took on the duties and the income of general editor of The Examiner at Fonblanque’s retirement in early 1848. Yet he could twinkle with generosity and charm. Elizabeth Gaskell, who also met him in 1849, found him “little, and very fat and affected, yet so clever and shrewd and good-hearted and right-minded.” Dickens and Forster were mutually possessive, and Forster, who handled all the proofreading when he was abroad and continued to proofread Dombey as it went from printer to author to Browne to Forster and then to the printer again, probably still spent more time with Dickens than any of his other friends. But serious tension between them in the fall of 1847 threatened to end the friendship mainly because of Dickens’ frustration at Forster’s interfering arrogance. Forster spoke to Macready “as if the long and intimate friendship between himself and Dickens was likely to terminate or very much relax. They have both faults with their good qualities, but they have been too familiar.” Macready hoped that Dickens was “not capricious—not spoiled; he has, however, great excuse.”30 The tensions were suppressed; the interdependence continued.

  On one occasion Dickens volunteered to act as intermediary in a dispute between Forster and Thackeray. After years of barely successful journalism and fiction, Thackeray had begun to move emphatically through the gates of success with the beginning of the publication of Vanity Fair in monthly numbers in January 1847. Forster admired his talent but did not like the book, partly because it was “wicked.” Thackeray strongly admired Dombey and generously praised it, particularly “that chapter describing young Paul’s death: it is unsurpassed—it is stupendous!”31 With a humorously wicked drawing pencil, Thackeray had for years been doing caricatures of his friends. Some were genial. Others touched raw nerves. Over the decade most of the Dickens circle and other well-known literary and artistic figures had had their peculiarities exaggerated, their weaknesses satirized, in his private doodles and drawings, some of which he shared with friends. Certainly the sensitive, irritable Forster had been one of his subjects. When a mutual friend, the sensible, good-natured journalist and dramatist Tom Taylor, made the error of telling Thackeray that in a moment of characteristic temper Forster had said that Thackeray was “false as hell,” he responded, feeling that his honor had been attacked, by snubbing Forster at a party at Procter’s house early in June 1847.

  In a flurry of hostile and then conciliatory letters guided by Dickens and other intermediaries, the apparent insults became real misunderstandings. Taylor took the blame for being indiscreet. He had misjudged sensitivities. Forster took the blame for having expressed himself badly. Thackeray took the blame for having been ignorant of the context in which Forster made the remark, explained as a local, intemperate reference to a particular instance, most likely a response to one of his caricatures. Dickens’ role was beneficent and constructive, though, unlike Macready, he did not think that the quarrel was only “words, words, words.” Thackeray’s series of caricatures of novelists in Punch had offended him, though he was not one of the subjects, as a demeaning of the profession of letters that “did no honor to literature or to literary men.”

  Having identified himself so fully with the effort to increase the status of the profession, Dickens felt personally affronted by Thackeray’s dangerous indifference to sacred subjects. Though he did not find it easy to laugh at himself and his profession, he felt no personal hostility to Thackeray. At most, he felt some distance. That did not prevent him, though, from hosting a successful reconciliation dinner later in the month. Thackeray had a different sense of what was happening. “Jerrold hates me, Ainsworth hates me, Dickens mistrusts me, Forster says I am false as hell, and Bulwer curses me.… I was the most popular man in the craft until within abt. 12 months—and behold I’ve begun to succeed. It makes me sad at heart though, this envy and meanness…. Am I envious and mean too I wonder? These fellows think so I know. Amen. God only knows. I scarcely understand any motive for any action of my own or anybody else’s.” The next March, in response to Dickens’ good-natured claim that “it couldn’t be done without you,” he happily attended, with Forster, Ainsworth, and others, a dinner at Devonshire Terrace in celebration of the completion of Dombey.32

 
; With Hablot Knight Browne, the man with whom Dickens had the closest working relationship other than Forster, he communicated mainly by letter. Never a daily companion, “Phiz” had moved to the country. This businesslike relationship allowed Dickens the professional distance to control the content of the illustrations and to speak his mind unhesitatingly whenever he was dissatisfied. As long as Browne’s work was satisfactory—it had in fact become an important asset—it was better that his artist friends like Leech, Maclise, and Stanfield, who had converted to Catholicism in 1846, be friends who were artists rather than collaborators, except for special occasions such as the Christmas books.

  With two artists, the curve of intimacy was obverse. George Cruikshank still delighted him occasionally. His explosive vanity, though, and his increasing preoccupation with the dangers of alcohol set them apart. Cruikshank vigorously took up the temperance cause with the same extremism that had made him intemperate previously. In the summer of 1847, he published The Bottle, and one year later The Drunkard’s Children: A Sequel to the Bottle, both of which Dickens reviewed in The Examiner. While he recognized the power of Cruikshank’s art, he made clear in private conversation and in print that he thought “total abstinence” nonsense, an attempt by the weak-willed to make the temperate suffer for their inability to drink moderately.