by Fred Kaplan
A few professional actresses were added to the cast for the 1848 barnstorming. Dickens gratefully accepted the participation of an attractive, talented amateur, Mary Cowden Clarke, the wife of Charles Cowden Clarke, who had been a friend of Keats’s and was a lecturer and writer on Shakespeare and other authors. Three years Dickens’ senior and the author of The Complete Concordance to Shakespeare, Mary Clarke became the informal historian of the Dickens-Shakespeare revels. On opening night, while standing “at the side scene of the Haymarket Theatre … with Augustus Egg, waiting to make our first entrance together upon the stage, and face that sea of faces, he asked me whether I felt nervous. ‘Not in the least,’ I replied; ‘my heart beats fast; but it is with joyful excitement, not with alarm.’” The London performances were an outstanding success, partly due to his driving the company, “ever present … superintending, directing, suggesting, with sleepless activity and vigilance,” being torn to pieces, in his own view, “by the whole body of amateurs and Shakespeare House people.” The supreme amateur, Dickens demanded perfection, of others and of himself. Influenced by Macready, he went to great lengths to attain historical accuracy and stage effectiveness in costumes and scenery. As Justice Shallow, “his own identity was almost unrecognizable … his impersonation was perfect,” though Maclise thought that he did not have enough to do. To the star-struck Mrs. Clarke, Mark Lemon’s Sir John Falstaff, a role to which his natural girth and good humor contributed, “was a fine embodiment of rich, unctuous, enjoying raciness.… John Forster’s Master Ford was a carefully finished performance.” In Maclise’s view, it was “the best piece of acting” Forster had ever done. “John Leech’s Master Slender was picturesquely true to the gawky, flabby, booby squire.… Mr. G. H. Lewes’s acting, and especially his dancing … were very dainty, with a peculiar drollery and quaintness.… George Cruikshank’s … Pistol was supremely artistic … fantastic, spasmodic, ranting, bullying.”44
Driven by enthusiasm and restlessness, Dickens considered additional performances in Plymouth, Bristol, and other cities. At the same time as he arranged the details for Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham, then for Edinburgh and Glasgow, he adjudicated the competition and rivalry among his cast; he also helped with the arrangements for a gala retirement benefit for Macready, who had been unprecedentedly honored by the queen’s decision to attend. In Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham, the audiences were rapturous. In the middle of July 1848, they traveled to Edinburgh. There, he organized a visit to Holyrood and then to Loch Lomond, with Catherine and Georgina also in tow. After the last night in Glasgow, “he was in wildest spirits at the brilliant reception and uproarious enthusiasm of the audience … and said in his mad-cap mood, ‘Blow Domestic Hearth! I should like to be going on all over the kingdom, with Mark Lemon’ and ‘Mrs. Cowden Clarke … and acting everywhere. There’s nothing in the world equal to seeing the house rise at you, one sea of delighted faces, one hurrah of applause!’”45
AT HOME AGAIN IN JULY 1848, THE INEVITABLE REACTION SET IN. Exhaustion and dissatisfaction took their toll. Dickens’ comic tone came to his rescue. He missed Mary Clarke, he missed the travels, the acting, the audiences. “I have no energy whatever—I am very miserable. I loathe domestic hearths. I yearn to be a Vagabond.… Why have I seven children … taken on for an indefinite time at a vast expence …? A real house like this, is insupportable after that canvas farm wherein I was so happy.” Dombey had been finished in March. He had gone “about perpetually persuading” himself that he was choking, though he knew that there was “nothing the matter” with him. Feeling “rather nervous after [his] hard work,” he had turned to the theatricals for relief.46 The first thoughts of a new book were now dimly stirring, soon to be conceived in the undeveloped interstices between Dombey and the fragments of autobiography that he had written. And Catherine, whom he had described in March as “tremendously fat,” added another pregnancy to her figure, Henry Fielding Dickens, conceived in mid-April and to be born in January 1849.
Fanny was painfully, unmistakably dying. Since his return from France, her condition had deteriorated. He kept closely in touch, writing more than he had done before, describing his daily activities, chatting about his work, his health, and the family. As the spring had advanced, Fanny had declined, exhausted by seizures, racked with coughing, unable to keep food down. She worried incessantly about the fate of her children and husband. “Rest is the one great thing you want,” her brother urged, as if some act of the will could provide the context and the ability to do what her illness did not allow. “So look that fact steadily in the face and rest at all risks.” He combined tenderness with willful exhortation, as if there were nothing that could not be overcome. “Do not get worse when you may under God so easily get better.” His pleas partly expressed his unwillingness to accept helplessness, partly his attempt to encourage her to efforts that would make her dying less unrelievedly bleak. He responded to the example of a suicide that Fanny found attractive with a warning about how powerful ideas could be. “There are times with me after mental excitement and toil when such a circumstance as the suicide of your neighbor would become a dreadful idea that I could not shake off. I have had sufferings of that sort sometimes the oppression of which has been horrible.” Yet he knew she was dying, and thought it best that she know no more than she insisted on knowing. When she did learn how ill she was, he “promised her that [he] would faithfully assist and advise” her husband “at all times and endeavour to be your true friend and that of the dear children.” It was a “sacred … promise … lying always close to my heart not for today and tomorrow but for my whole life.”47
He wanted her out of Manchester, an unhealthy place. “If you decide to take a holiday … I will send you a hundred pounds whenever you say the word.” For that or any other need he offered as much money as would be required. When performing in Birmingham and Manchester, he had visited the Burnetts, and soon after made arrangements that brought Fanny and her family by the beginning of July 1848 to a rented home in Hornsey, near London. The air was better than Manchester’s. Good medical care and family attention were available. Expert opinion, though, made it clear that the most that could be done was to relieve the coughing and the pain. Though he had been able to forget much during the revels in mid-July, he had not forgotten his sister except for brief moments. During July and August he visited her almost daily. One day he brought Mamie and Katie to see their aunt, who “still lingers on, to the amazement of the doctors and all who see how worn and wasted she is.” Exhausted himself, and in response to Catherine’s “un interesting condition,” he went with his family to Broadstairs at the beginning of August. Thinking about his next Christmas book, playing with the children, receiving friends, exercising, he kept at his usual activities, aware of Fanny’s pain, in touch with her, with Burnett, with his father and mother, who visited Hornsey regularly.
Aware that her life was an agony to her, he both hoped and dreaded throughout August to receive news of her death. On September 1, he “found poor Fanny in one of those paroxysms described by my father … and could have conceived nothing more terrific. No words can express the terrible aspect of suffering and suffocation—the appalling noise in her throat—and the agonized look.… From that, she sunk into a kind of lethargy. Sleep seems quite gone, until the time arrives for waking no more.” The next morning she died. Dickens made the funeral arrangements, spending the tremulous day with Forster, remembering what his sister had been like when they had been children together, when, as he wrote later in an autobiographical story, “he had a sister, who was a child too, and his constant companion.” After the funeral, his hand shook. He could not hold his pen steady. He had the steadiness, though, to assure Burnett that he could “never forget the patience, gentleness and endurance of your affection for her.” Early the next year, her eldest son, “the little deformed boy,” the prototype of Paul Dombey, “whom my sister has left half unconscious of his bereavement,” was also to die. Dickens felt “that
the mercy of God [had] removed” him.48
With Forster and Stone, he returned to London in late September from Broadstairs via a walking tour that he had designed to bring them through the country of his childhood. In Rochester, they stayed at the Bull Inn, with resonances of Pickwickian glory, and walked through Chatham, where he remembered the years as golden. He retouched the places of primal memory, as if for Fanny’s sake as well as his own. “Dim visions of divers things are floating around me; and I must go to work, head foremost, when I get home.” The Christmas book had to be written. The dim visions may have included fragments of self and personal history, some glimmer of the possibility of creating an autobiographical novel or more fragments of an actual autobiography that would extend the fragments he had already written and put into writing what he had been saying about his past in conversations with Forster. With only the Christmas book to do, he spent a comparatively relaxed autumn, though once under way he fell into a “frowning … state of inaccessibility and irascibility which utterly confounds and scares the House.… Kate and Georgina quail (almost) when I stalk by them.” The idea that he had conceived in Lausanne in 1846 and then postponed, after writing a few pages in September developed into a psychological tale of the supernatural, The Haunted Man, which he finished at the beginning of December “crying my eyes out over it—not painfully but pleasantly as I hope the readers will.”49
One night that month he read it after dinner to an appreciative audience of friends, including the Watsons, Hannah Meredith and her husband, Dr. Brown, Miss Coutts, Forster, and Stanfield. “People will take anything for granted, in the Arabian Nights or the Persian Tales,” he told a friendly critic of the story’s mixture of supernaturalism and realism. “But they won’t walk out of Oxford Street, or the Market place of a county town, directly into the presence of a Phantom, albeit an allegorical one. And I believe it to be as essential that they come at that spectre through such a preparation of gathering gloom and darkness, as it would be for them to go through some such ordeal, in reality, before they could get up a private Ghost of their own.”50 Published in mid-December, with John Tenniel, later to illustrate Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, doing the illustrations, The Haunted Man, his final Christmas book, sold over seventeen thousand copies in two weeks for a profit to him of almost eight hundred pounds. That same month, there were two marriages in the family. His brother Augustus married Harriet Lovell, whom ten years later he deserted after she became blind. Frederick, whom he dressed down strongly for marrying with debts and attempting to borrow money from him, finally married Anna Weller, from whom he later separated. Relenting, he lent—for all practical purposes gave—his brother the money for which he had asked.
Fanny’s death intensified Dickens’ strong autobiographical preoccupation. Now his parents’ eldest living child, he clearly also was the only one of their children to have any significant intellectual or artistic gifts. In the middle of January 1849, his latest, and he hoped his last, child was born. He decided on the name Henry Fielding Dickens after rejecting Oliver Goldsmith Dickens, thus emphasizing his identification with the eighteenth-century novelist and having in mind the autobiographical novel, perhaps with Tom Jones as his model, that he had decided to write. His parents’ eldest son had begun the process of giving birth to what he later called his favorite child, David Copperfield, a version of himself the creation of which would give him the further opportunity to dramatize his adult sense of his childhood traumas. At first, with Fielding in mind, he intended it to be a third-person narrative. On Forster’s suggestion, and perhaps because of the autobiographical fragment, he soon decided to use the first-person. The narrator’s voice would be a fictional surrogate for his own. The story could absorb, with little change, some of the autobiographical fragment, particularly his responses to the blacking-factory experience, to parental neglect, and to mistakes of the heart.
At the start of the second week of January 1849, he set off by train on a midwinter working vacation to Norwich and Yarmouth, in Suffolk, with John Leech and Mark Lemon, his intrepid walking companions. The new novel was much on his mind. April was the likely date of publication of the first monthly number. Crucial decisions had to be made, among them “a local habitation and a name.” His awareness of his strong personal identification with Kent may have alerted him to the desirability of finding an alternative setting to provide some distance to the autobiographical elements. The journey was tedious and cold, “only improved by the Sparkler’s conversational powers” and afterward by the pleasure of good company on long walks. Norwich, where he bought Catherine a shawl, proved a disappointment. “The success of the trip,” though, was the seacoast fishing village of Yarmouth, “the strangest place in the wide world: one hundred and forty-six miles of hill-less marsh between it and London.” The Suffolk marshes may have reminded him of the Medway estuary. Soon after returning, he decided definitely to “try my hand” at the Suffolk setting. South of Yarmouth, he had seen a sign for the village of Blundeston, a name that appealed to his ear. He was soon in eager search of names, particularly for his main character and for the title. “Walking perpetually,” with scenes and character possibilities dancing in his mind, he felt the anxiety of finding the right name, without which he could not settle on other things, let alone begin. Getting it right was crucial. The night before his eldest son’s twelfth birthday party, he awakened, frightened that he had forgotten how to dance the polka, which he had recently learned from his daughters. He insisted on practicing it before going back to bed. “‘Remember that for my Biography,’” he told Forster.51
A brief family vacation in Brighton with the Leeches during the third week in February alleviated the tension. Sea scenes and colorful promenades delighted him, calmed him, with resonances of Paul Dombey’s death and of the water imagery of the novel he was contemplating. “The people, in carriages, on horseback, and afoot, jingling up and down the esplanade under the windows like gay little toys; and the great hoarse ocean roaring unheeded beyond them, and now and then breaking with a deep boom upon the beach, as if it said sullenly, ‘Won’t anybody listen?’ But nobody does; and away they all go, jingling up and down again, until the sun sets, and then go home to dinner.” He was listening, though, and beginning to speak in his own voice. One tone was comic, his call to Lemon to join them at Brighton:
Oh my Lemon round and fat
Oh my bright, my right, my tight ‘un,
Think a little what you’re at—
Don’t stay at home, but come to Brighton!—
Another was serious, his “mind running, like a high sea, on names,” though still not satisfied.
During the last week in February, “in the first agonies of a new book,” he transformed “Mag’s Diversions, Being the personal history of MR. THOMAS MAG THE YOUNGER, of Blunderstone House,” through various stages into six alternatives, all of which involved the name Copperfield or David Copperfield. On March 21, with the announcement of the first number for May 1, he told Bradbury and Evans to “let it stand. And may Heaven speed us!” The full title, “The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone Rookery, which he never meant to be published on any account,” he soon shortened to The Personal History of David Copperfield. When Forster pointed out that his main character’s initials were the author’s reversed, he was at first startled. But he immediately granted that such a coincidence was not remarkable at all. “Why else should I so obstinately have kept to that name when once it turned up?”52
Other suggestions and autobiographical elements were turning up with magical timeliness. On the journey to Norwich he met some acquaintances, one of them Alfred Mellon, the musical director of the Adelphi Theatre. Mellon had done the music for the recent dramatization of The Haunted Man, a semiauthorized adaptation that Dickens had helped with. The name and the association with music stuck in his mind for the creation of the flute-playing Mr. Mell. In Brighton, the raving mad daughter o
f one of the hotel guests, and then “her father … too, for company,” became even much more mad, putting in mind the dramatic possibilities of madness that soon contributed to the portrait of Mr. Dick. On his return from Yarmouth, he had received a letter from a committee that had been set up to present a testimonial to his old schoolmaster William Giles, which reminded him that he had lost the advantage of being his pupil “when I was very young indeed,” a subject he had already written about in the autobiographical fragment and that he had in mind to dramatize in David Copperfield.