by Fred Kaplan
With Frank Stone, a successful minor artist whom he had met at the Shakespeare Club in 1837 and who contributed illustrations to The Haunted Man eleven years later, he became warmly friendly in 1847. In the company of Stone, Leech, and Lemon, he now found himself setting off for long walks each week, the comradeship dubbed, with his passion for naming things, though without his usual flair, the “Walking Club.” Occasionally a new friend accompanied them, the painter Augustus Egg, two years younger than Dickens, short, thin, sweet-tempered, and in poor health. An intimate of John Everett Millais, he also aspired to create an art that would embody the icons of Victorian modernity. At the end of March 1848, with Forster, Lemon, and Leech, Dickens went riding, “the greater part of it at full gallop,” on the Salisbury Plain during a two-day holiday, visiting the “Druidical remains, and then coming home by the Great Western Railway.”33
Soon after his return from France in 1847, Dickens declined to act in a performance of Sheridan Knowles’s immensely popular melodrama The Hunchback, whose profits would go for famine relief in Scotland and Ireland. He gave “the Fashionables” who were putting it on the cold shoulder, partly because he did not think much of their ability, partly because he would not be able to control the proceedings, and also because he was busy with Dombey, with managing the transition from Paris to London, and with getting himself comfortable again. In addition, he had his own charitable projects to attend to, one of which, Urania Cottage, had been in the planning stage for some years and was now about to become a reality. Actively searching for a building to function as a home for former prostitutes, in early June 1847 he successfully negotiated for a house in Shepherd’s Bush. In November, Urania Cottage opened. Deeply compassionate, Dickens’ nature expressed itself more naturally in particularized and personally meaningful activities and objects of charity than in broad, abstract philanthropies. He was no more than ordinarily generous in giving to charity, partly because he received so many requests, partly because of his own pervasive financial insecurity. Once he had decided on a cause, though, no amount of trouble was too great. One of his young friends, George Henry Lewes, later remarked that he “would not give you a farthing of money, but he would take no end of trouble for you. He would spend a whole day, for instance, in looking for the most suitable lodgings for you, and would spare himself neither time nor fatigue.”34
Seemingly indefatigable, he worked for the next ten years on behalf of Urania Cottage as if the redemption of a small number of fallen women symbolized the potential for wider salvation, for the triumph of humanistic liberalism, for the confirmation of his ability as a man of action to accomplish something in the real world of social problems, for the reaffirmation of his own idealized image of the higher moral sentiments inherent in the female. He wrote endless letters, both to Miss Coutts and to everyone who had to be corresponded with. He supervised the staff. He met almost every Tuesday with the governing board, on which his friends George Chesterton and Augustus Tracey also sat, both enlightened governors of well-known London prisons and his two most reliable conduits for likely residents of the home, which at any one time had no more than eighteen young women. He was familiar with the histories and personalities of every one of them, as if he had been given another chance to save Nancy from Bill Sikes. With an eye toward balancing the carrot and the stick, he instituted the marks system, a form of reward and punishment as inducement to improved behavior, and created a detailed “Explanation of the Mark Table” for internal Urania Cottage consumption. He wrote for public distribution an elaborate “Appeal to Fallen Women,” combining compassion, common sense, deeply believed stereotypes, and some minor priggishness. Convinced that a new start offered the best hope for permanent reformation, he supervised arrangements to send promising residents to Cape Town or to Australia. Only the prospect of marriage in a context free of past associations could be sufficient incentive for former prostitutes to give up their long-learned and endured vices. He exerted himself to teach Miss Coutts that generally the carrot was better than the stick, though the stick had its necessary uses. Like readers of his novels, “these unfortunate creatures are to be tempted to virtue. They cannot be dragged, driven, or frightened.”35
The notion of organizing his own amateur theatricals for charitable causes had been in his mind since 1845, when, before privately invited audiences, his amateur company had successfully performed Every Man in His Humour. They had also done a benefit performance for Fanny Kelly and for a private hospital. Pressed to do more acting for various charities, he had declined. The notion seemed tainted by the change from private guests personally invited to public audiences buying tickets, even if the proceeds were for charity. The experience, though, had helped bind together Dickens and his friends. It had been pleasurable to most of them. And it had afforded him direct personal contact with an audience so much a part of his self-definition from childhood on. Restless, especially when writing, he needed additional outlets. Having organized his schedule when working on a novel so that he wrote during the first two weeks of each month, he usually had the next ten days or so free from the obligation to be at his desk. Even during the first two weeks of the month his schedule allowed late afternoons and evenings for recreation. In June 1847, while writing the tenth installment of Dombey, he brought together a number of inclinations and preoccupations: his fascination with the theatre, his constant search for ways to bind his community of friends together, his charitable inclinations with their personalized focus, and his increasing sense of himself as a member of a literary fraternity whose members should take communal responsibility for one another.
He and Forster began to explore the “half-formed idea of reviving [their] old amateur theatrical company for a special purpose,” a series of benefit performances for Leigh Hunt. Hunt’s always precarious financial affairs had taken a turn for the worse during the past year. The eminent Romantic journalist, editor, reviewer, and poet had preceded and then hovered in the background of the Dickens circle, like both the beneficent spirit and the harlequin from a Christmas pantomime, the deep favorite of Forster, a friend of Talfourd’s, a legend whom the early Victorians inherited and embraced. Witty, bohemian, charming, politically liberal, even radical in his youth, he was a pleasant senior companion and a rallying cause for those, like Dickens and Forster, eager to assert the dignity of literature, the responsibility of the literary community to provide for its own, and the obligation of the government to reward merit in the arts by financial support. Hunt admired Dickens’ novels and flattered him with how well he knew them. He warmly liked Hunt, with an affectionate respect that was a bow to the past and a recognition of his good company in the present. “Once when he and Dickens were coming away from a party on a very rainy night, a cab not being readily procurable to convey Leigh Hunt home … Dickens had made him get inside the fly he had in waiting for himself and the ladies who were with him, taking his own seat outside; upon which … Hunt put his head out to protest,” quoting Mr. Mantalini in Nicholas Nickleby, “‘If you don’t mind, Dickens, you’ll become a demd, damp, moist, unpleasant body!’ which was responded to by a blithe, clear laugh that rang right pleasantly in the dark wet night.”36
By the end of the first week of June 1847, the party of amateurs had agreed to play again at one of the large London theatres for the benefit of Leigh Hunt, who “has done more to instruct the young men of England, and to lend a helping hand to those who educate themselves, than any writer in England,” and also to perform once in Liverpool and once in Manchester. Dickens and Forster, who corrected Hunt’s proofs, acted as his literary agent, and reviewed his work “regularly and influentially,” had determined to pressure the government to provide a pension by putting on benefit performances that would dramatize Hunt’s need and the government’s irresponsibility. In June, in a review of his new book, Forster directly called for a state pension for Hunt. The strategy worked. Within a few weeks the government leaked the news that two hundred pounds a year had been granted. On the ur
ging of Hunt, who had all along felt uncomfortable with benefit performances rather than a direct subscription, they canceled the performance at Covent Garden, but not those in Manchester and Liverpool, which would celebrate Hunt’s pension, with a prologue written for the occasion by Bulwer and spoken by Forster, and also financially assist the impoverished, alcoholic former playwright John Poole, one of whose farces Dickens had put on in Canada. Forster and Talfourd had known Poole for years. The playwright had been living in squalor in Paris since that summer. Dickens, who had known him casually, probably had been influenced in some of the stories in Sketches by Boz by Poole’s 1835 Sketches and Recollections.37 Though a small portion of the anticipated profits would still go to Hunt, the lions would feed the lion’s share to the destitute playwright, a combination of peer assistance and government help that Dickens thought salutary.
“Between Dombey and Management,” he groaned, “I am one half mad and the other half addled.” The Sparkler, as he often jokingly called himself, sparkled. “Gas,” as he now jokingly called himself, flamed. The complaints came from a man who, reveling in overexertion, wrote “100 letters a day, about these plays.”38 By the end of June, with frequent trips to London from Broadstairs, where he was staying for the summer, he had made arrangements for the July 26 performance at Manchester and the July 28 at Liverpool. He had also, like a one-man staff, arranged for advertising, assembled the cast, and directed the initial rehearsals at Miss Kelly’s theatre. They were to do Jonson’s familiar Every Man in His Humour with, appropriately, a short interlude by Poole, Turning the Tables, and a farce, Comfortable Lodgings. As in 1846, he played Bobadil and Forster Kitely. All the members of the Dickens circle, with varying degrees of talent and cooperativeness, took their parts, including Jerrold, Leech, Costello, Stone, Lemon, and Augustus and Frederick Dickens from the original company. The vain, cantankerous Cruikshank, boasting that he had once considered an acting career, insisted on one of the substantial roles as the price of joining the cast. Dickens, who thought his name would be helpful, was also happy to have his two new young friends Augustus Egg and George Henry Lewes. Among other things, Lewes was a talented, semiprofessional actor and a writer of steamy romantic novels.
With companionable good humor, the company traveled to Manchester, lodging at the same hotel, dining together, celebrating together. There were some spouses and other relations, like Georgina, along for the adventure, including three pregnant wives, Catherine, Helen Lemon, who was to give birth in October, and Annie Leech, who shocked everyone into “great confusion and distress” by unexpectedly going into labor at the railway station in London. “Wheeled to the Victoria Hotel in a Bath chair,” she was “there confined triumphantly. She was in my carriage; so I was a witness to the seizure and the wheeling. She is a capital little woman, and I’m glad it’s over.” The incident gave him the amusing but gauche idea for a story in which Mrs. Gamp, the comic, alcoholic midwife in Martin Chuzzelwit, “being informed that several of the ladies attached” to the theatrical company’s trip northward “were in various stages of an interesting state, accompanied it, unbeknown, in a second cladge carriage, on the chance of being called in.”
He had mixed feelings when the performances were over. “The success was brilliant, and you can imagine nothing like the reception they gave me at both places—standing up as one person, and shouting incessantly for a good ten minutes…. I never heard or saw such laughing in a theatre. The people were drooping over the fronts of the boxes like fruit.” Christiana Thompson thought his performances wonderful. At the “tremendous supper afterwards,” the company and their guests drank forty-six bottles of champagne into the small hours of the morning.39
Neither the pregnancies, though, nor the performances were over. When Annie Leech safely gave birth to a daughter, he prayed that “from any future personal participation in such achievements, may the humble individual who now addresses you (father of seven young children) be himself delivered!” The next year there were theatricals again, of a more sustained kind, directed toward what had now become a campaign to shame the British government into more generously funding the pension civil list for impoverished authors, artists, and scientists. In the fall of 1847, he attempted to regularize the amateur players into a system, with a secretary at fifty pounds a year. Frederick gladly undertook the position. In the late summer, he thought about and in the fall wrote a prospectus for “The Provident Union of Literature, Science, & Art … the Committee to consist of the Members of the Amateur Company.” The plan was to invest each year the profits from two London and two provincial performances to create annuities for elderly indigent artists and their families. Having decided not to write a Christmas book for 1847, though “very loathe to lose the money,” he found the time to take the new Society of Amateur Players through trial readings of several plays before they finally decided to add Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor to their repertoire.
By early January 1848, the Society had made a commitment to raise funds to support a needy author as the permanent curator of the Shakespeare museum in Stratford. What better way to memorialize both the greatest English literary genius, whose reputation he had long been championing, and the profession itself? The Dickens circle soon decided that the most appropriate candidate for the first curatorship was Sheridan Knowles, who, despite the popularity of The Hunchback and Virginius, lived at the edge of poverty. Having become religious, Knowles, who had decided that “the Bible is the only book,” was eager to be saved by the curatorship and to take time away from the Bible for Shakespeare.40 Shakespeare’s birthplace, in which the museum was to be housed, had been purchased the previous summer after years of fund-raising by a totally separate Shakespeare House Committee, a subcommittee of the London Shakespeare Committee, which had initiated the idea of the curator being “some Person honourably connected with Dramatic Literature,” and had agreed to appoint Knowles if the novelist and his friends could raise the money. Early in December, Dickens attended a Shakespeare panorama at Covent Garden, organized to, raise money to help repay funds borrowed to buy Shakespeare’s birthplace, in which many leading actors performed. Dickens’ amateur players agreed to raise the funds for the appointment of Knowles.
After speaking to the Leeds Mechanics’ Institute at the beginning of December 1847, suffering from a heavy cold, he stayed for the first time with the Watsons at nearby Rockingham Castle. Surrounded by servants, he heard muffled distant footsteps echoing in the cavernous halls. Back in London, which was in “a very hideous state of mud and darkness … everybody … laid up with the Influenza,” he worked at resolving how to present the erotic relationship between Edith Dombey and James Carker for the sixteenth number of Dombey. He provided sufficient ambivalence in the text to allow some readers to conclude that they had not had a sexual affair, others to think that they had. One of the former, Francis Jeffrey, eagerly awaited the author’s late December 1847 visit to Edinburgh. Having been ill, the elderly Jeffrey constantly anticipated dying. On the journey from Edinburgh to Glasgow, where Dickens was to preside at the first annual soiree of the Glasgow Athenaeum, Catherine, about six months pregnant, “was taken very ill … a miscarriage … coming on, suddenly, in the railway carriage.” Though she seemed better within a few days, “she was again taken violently ill.” The second “famous Doctor” countermanded the orders of the first “famous Doctor.” She was put to bed again immediately. While she was attended by servants and doctors, the bagpipes greeted him at the Glasgow Athenaeum dinner with “Welcome Royal Charlie.” The crowd cheered wildly. Outside it was “snowing, sleeting, thawing, and freezing.” Inside, “unbounded hospitality and enthoozymoozy the order of the day, and I have never been more heartily received anywhere, or enjoyed myself more completely.”41
He spoke again in May 1848, this time at the annual dinner of the Royal General Theatrical Fund, of which he was a trustee. At his request, Edward Bulwer-Lytton presided. Associated with drama and the novel, the long-haired, full-bearded
writer, his name recently hyphenated by a condition of his mother’s will, had for some time been a friend and close working associate of Forster’s, who helped make his closet dramas, The Duchess de la Vallière, The Lady of Lyons, and most recently Money, more practical for production by Macready. Bulwer-Lytton warmly supported Dickens’ effort to provide financial help to impoverished writers. Having met as early as 1838, the two men had established a formal relationship that soon became an admiring, even intimate friendship. At the fund’s dinner the next year, Dickens steered his way successfully between his close association with Macready and Forster and the presence of the actor Charles Kean, Macready’s chief rival, who detested Forster. With formal good humor, Dickens spoke in terms that were resonantly personal and economically astute. “It is not sufficiently recollected that if you are born to the possession of a silver spoon, it may not be very difficult to apply yourself to the task of keeping it well polished … but … if you are born to the possession of a wooden ladle instead, the process of transmuting it into that article of plate is often a very difficult and discouraging process. And most of all we should remember that it is so at a time of general trouble and distress … for then the peaceful, graceful arts of life go down, and the slighter ornaments of social existence are the first things crushed.”42 Famine in Ireland, revolution on the Continent, cholera in London, economic depression, government under financial as well as ideological pressure—in such times support for the arts was most vulnerable. The best resource was self-help.
In the same month in 1848, Dickens boasted that his amateur company “are all nearly worked to death” in preparation for the upcoming performances. He drove them relentlessly. “Stone is affected with congestion of the kidneys, which he attributes to being forced to do the same thing twenty times over, when he forgets it once. Beads break out all over Forster’s head, and boil there, visibly and audibly. Fred says upon his soul he never saw anything like it in all his life. And Leech is limp with being bullied.” Rehearsing at the Haymarket Theatre “all day and at Miss Kelly’s half the night,” he admitted that he began “to wonder why one does such things for nothing.” He knew why, of course. He had “set [his] heart on seeing Sheridan Knowles installed at Stratford on Avon, as the Curator of Shakespeare’s House.”43 Those who had played in Every Man in His Humour expanded their talents and anxieties to Merry Wives of Windsor, and the two plays were performed on consecutive nights in London. In addition they performed in three farces, Animal Magnetism; Love, Law, and Physic; and A Good Night’s Rest, the first in London and Birmingham and the other two in Manchester with Every Man. They also performed in Liverpool in June and then in Edinburgh and Glasgow in July. Two years later, in November 1850, the same company did Jonson’s play at Bulwer-Lytton’s ancestral home, Knebworth, north of London, for a new plan, a variant of the pension-and-insurance proposal for impoverished writers that Bulwer-Lytton enthusiastically supported.