by Fred Kaplan
When the barnstorming to raise funds for the curatorship for the Shakespeare House Museum came to an end in 1848, he had given up only briefly the pleasures of that “one sea of delighted faces,” that “one hurrah of applause.” In November 1849, visiting Rockingham Castle with Catherine and Georgina, “the best … of all the country-houses and estates I have yet seen in England,” he had organized a brief amateur theatrical in which he performed with a new friend, Mary Boyle. With a reputation as a fine amateur actress, Miss Boyle, the well-connected daughter of a vice-admiral, was a distant cousin of Lavinia Watson. Two years older than Dickens, she had published two novels and a volume of poetry, none of which rivaled her charm, her good looks, her warmth, and especially her ability to delight herself and others. Later, Tennyson was to call her his “girl of girls.” Immediately taken by her beauty, Dickens helped transform the immense dining room at Rockingham, with its “oak-panelled walls, decorated with innumerable shields of relations and neighbours, blazoned in proper heraldic colours,” into a theatre in which “hastily-concocted scenes” from Nicholas Nickleby and some scenes from Sheridan’s School for Scandal were performed. Dickens was delighted to have another lovely woman in his life with whom to exchange fantasies, especially upon the safe stage of make-believe. No sooner had the company departed from Rockingham than he indulged in a variant of his usual comic lovemaking in verse, a parody of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” In the epitaph, he proclaimed that “here rests his head upon his native soil/ A Youth who lived once, in the public whim:/ His death occasioned by a mortal BOIL,/ Which settled on his brain, and settled him.”34
In the late summer of 1850, with Household Words off to a good start and Copperfield close to its end, he relaxed with a new series of amateur theatricals. Joining forces with the wealthy Bulwer-Lytton, who for years had had in mind a plan to build retirement cottages for artists on his estate at Knebworth, they became partners in an effort to earn ten thousand pounds within two to five years to finance the Guild of Literature and Art. A kind of “heraldic monstrosity,” the enchanted castle at Knebworth became, appropriately, the headquarters of a project that combined the medieval guild mentality with modern social welfare. Heavily bearded and partly deaf, Bulwer-Lytton was, in Dickens’ opinion, “the greatest conversationalist of the age.”35 A successful novelist, playwright, and mesmerist, and a notorious dandy, he also had political and social power. And despite a distinguishing streak of eccentricity, he, like Dickens, had the energy and the idealism of a charismatic enthusiast.
By late September, the preparations were proceeding briskly, the amateur company having been called out of semiretirement to act Every Man in His Humour and a farce. Catherine was satisfactorily replaced after badly twisting her ankle. When Mary Boyle, “the very best actress I ever saw off the stage, and immeasureably better than a great many I have seen on it,” had to withdraw after more than a month of rehearsals because of the death of a dear friend, Dickens was thoroughly disappointed. Still, costumes by Maclise, scenery by Stanfield, performances by Dickens, Forster, Jerrold, Lemon, and Georgina, realized his intention “to make the nights at Knebworth triumphant. Once in a thing like this—once in anything, to my thinking—it must be carried out like a mighty enterprise, heart and soul.” The three performances at the end of the third week in November went “off in a whirl of triumph.” So too did the slightly more private theatricals at Rockingham early in January 1851 in which Dickens, “your Ever Devoted,” finally got to make stage love to Mary Boyle in a comedy called Used Up, which Charles Mathews had adapted from the French.36
He was unhappy at having to return to town after the warmth and excitement of the Rockingham theatricals, confiding to Boyle that “there may be many things wanting to complete [my] happiness.” The “first shadows of a new story” hovered “in a ghostly way about [him].” With “stupendous proposals” of Switzerland and Italy in his mind, he plunged more fully into the scheme for the Guild of Literature and Art. At his urging, Bulwer-Lytton, writing with his usual rapidity, dashed off a lengthy five-act historical comedy, Not So Bad as We Seem. Unfortunately, having read it twice, Dickens was still not quite sure what it was about, though he was sure that it “was singularly undramatic.” Editing it heavily during rehearsals, and pairing it with a slapdash farce, Mr. Nightingale’s Diary, that he and Lemon dashed off, he managed to make it performable. In May 1851, the company began a series of performances in London and around the country before a distinguished audience that included the queen, Prince Albert, and the Duke of Wellington. The fifth Duke of Devonshire, William George Cavendish, who soon became an unofficial member of the company and a contributing angel, generously lent Devonshire House in Piccadilly for the premiere. Probably Dickens had used his acquaintance with Joseph Paxton, the duke’s former estate manager, who soon showed him around the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, his most brilliant creation, to meet “the best of Dukes.” Joseph Turner’s immensely wealthy patron, the duke still had a keen and generous eye for art and artists. Dickens took the opportunity of the duke’s hospitality in September to enjoy Paxton’s gardens at Chatsworth, particularly the immense conservatory, and probably the extraordinary library, painting, and coin collection. He slept “in a state bedroom of enormous dimensions, with a bedstead like a brocaded and golden temple…. The place is the most wonderful thing in the world … and … the principal fountain is just twice the height of the Great Horse Shoe Fall at Niagara.” The two performances in May 1851 at Devonshire House were “a great success, and we begin by making a great deal of money.”37
At the end of June, Dickens went to Bath with Lemon, making arrangements for a September performance to what turned out to be “a horribly dull audience.” A new friend and acting colleague remarked that they had to speak so very distinctly because of “the great size of the room … that the performance took longer than usual.” In November, they acted in Clifton and Bristol. Exhilarated, Dickens remarked that “we never played to a better audience. The enthusiasm was prodigious.” But he was happy to leave “the smoke and filth of Bristol. My eyes are so redolent of gas, that I can hardly see.… As to voice, I am a Raven. And my hair has got into the state from wigs, glue, and exhaustion, that it is more like a Ratcatcher’s case for his game than … the greatest ornament of the human form.” Jerrold seemed “in extraordinary force. I don’t think I ever knew him so humorous.” Forster continued to be his usual assertive self. “I have always a vicious desire to electrify [him] (when he is acting) violently, in some sensitive part of his anatomy.” In December, they performed in Reading, in February 1852 in Liverpool, where they “filled the Philharmonic Hall” for two nights. In Manchester, “everything went to perfection.” Clearing six hundred pounds from an audience of three thousand, Dickens “stepped forward … after the comedy, and made them a little speech.”
Leaving Liverpool at four in the morning, he was “so blinded by excitement, gas, and waving hats and handkerchiefs, that [he] could scarcely see…. All the sights of the earth turned pale in my eyes, before the sight of three thousand people with one heart among them … testifying to you how they believe you to be right, and feel that they cannot do enough to cheer you on.… I have been so happy in all this that I could have cried on the shortest notice any time.…” Expecting to “bank (after payment of all the heavy expenses) a thousand pounds from that short trip alone,” he wanted to act endlessly. In May, performing in Birmingham, Stratford, Kenilworth, and Shrewsbury, they were breakfasted, toasted, dined, and partied, as if they “had been at a wedding.”38
In August 1852, he took the company to Newcastle, Sunderland, Derby, Sheffield, Manchester, and Liverpool, the last series of performances for the guild. The tour was brilliant but exhausting, and Dickens had to work especially hard to clear his desk “with a view to this confounded trip.” Though tired and eager to see the guild venture concluded, the intrepid manager arranged a printed travel schedule, bedroom lists, and post-office
schedules for every member of the company. In Derby, where some of the clergy puritanically denounced the acting company, they nevertheless had “a very fair audience of sinners” and made “money in spite of his saints.” In Manchester, they tried two new plays, having finally realized that Not So Bad as We Seem had been puzzling and boring audiences, most of whom came more for the sight of the literary celebrities than for the interest of the plays. While in Manchester, Dickens, with Catherine and Georgina, called upon Elizabeth Gaskell, who subsequently attended his speech celebrating the opening of the Free Library. During the long addresses, her “only comfort [was] seeing the caricatures Thackeray was drawing which were very funny … till [he]… was called on to speak & broke down utterly, after which he drew no more caricatures.” Concluding at Liverpool, where they cleared another five thousand pounds, they brought the receipts up to the goal that he and Bulwer-Lytton had set. Unfortunately, ten thousand pounds was not enough to make the guild an immediate reality.39 There were also legal complications in creating the corporation. Some of the funds were tied up. When the guild came into existence toward the end of the decade it suffered an anemic life, without popular support, until its dissolution in 1897.
One addition to the company who proved himself a competent actor was Richard Henry Home. He remained a colleague, though, at Household Words for only a short time. Restless, irresolute, given to romantic fantasies, at the end of 1852 he left for Australia to make his fortune in the gold fields, with an indefinite loan of fifty pounds from Dickens. Though far from sure that Home had taken “a wise step in emigrating,” Dickens attempted to enlist Miss Coutts’s help on his behalf once he was in Melbourne. Kate Horne was left dependent on her husband’s expectations and on the goodwill of his friends in England. Finding her attractive, Dickens enjoyed flirting with her. Catherine, who liked her as well, invited her to parties and for summer visits over the next few years. Soon Mrs. Home faced the bittersweet challenge of penury and independence.40 The marriage was never to be resumed. Horne was not to return to England for almost twenty years.
Dickens, though, lost a dearer friend in July 1852. While in Hamburg with his family, preparing for a holiday in Lausanne, Richard Watson “was taken suddenly ill with violent inflammation of the bowels, and died (quite easily) in four days.” He was fifty-two years old. Dickens’ friendship with the Watsons had strengthened recently. Two weeks earlier, “on the day before he left town … in unusually good spirits and full of plans for future enjoyment at Rockingham,” Watson had dined at Tavistock House. Dickens and Watson were bound together by their memories of Switzerland, their plans for trips to the Continent, their enjoyment of one another’s hospitality, and their mutual delight in theatricals. To Dickens, he “was as true a friend as I have ever had … a thoroughly good man, of a most amiable and affectionate nature, and as simple hearted as a child.… I really held him in my heart.” The body was returned to Rockingham, where Watson was buried in “his own church.” Dickens’ feelings for Lavinia Watson were equally strong. She now had the agony of being a young widow with four children. She “expects to be confined” in February—”which is very sad.” A heroic and idealized figure of femininity, “a woman of great courage and understanding, and of a well disciplined though very affectionate nature,” Lavinia soon seemed to him “very tranquil and resigned.”41
When the stage-shy Wills had declined in March 1851 to perform the role of the valet in Not So Bad as We Seem, Augustus Egg had suggested his close friend Wilkie Collins. A moderately successful painter with a comfortable private income, Egg had become a worshiping intimate. Frequently in Georgina’s company, he had developed strong feelings for her, and in 1852 was to propose marriage. Dickens and the twenty-eight-year-old Collins had never met. He knew, though, of his intimacy with Egg and his friendship with a group of young painters, frequent dinner guests at Egg’s apartment in Bayswater. Probably Dickens also had some sense of Collins as a writer who had recently published a travel volume and a first novel. Having known his father “very well,” he told Egg that he “should be very glad to know him.” A successful minor painter who specialized in landscapes and genre painting, William Collins had kept his wife and two sons abroad with him for long periods, particularly in Italy, and had taken long painting trips while they remained in London.
Briefly a law student at Lincoln’s Inn, Collins hoped to become a dramatist and novelist. Without an ascetic bone in his body, he enjoyed hypochondria without being seriously frail. Badly nearsighted, he wore rimless glasses that dropped low onto his moon-shaped face. His delight in food, wine, and sensual enjoyments established a reputation that his plumpness, softness, shortness (he was a little less than five and a half feet), and twinkling wittiness supported. Living with his mother in a comfortable house on Hanover Terrace, the ambitious Collins gracefully balanced the disparate elements of his life, his friendships with various pre-Raphaelite painters, his late-night writing stints, and now his inclusion in Dickens’ dramatic company. With the editors of the Leader, his friends Edward Pigott and Thornton Hunt, he argued about the proper distinction in a newspaper between news articles and editorial intrusion, especially on religious matters. Despite his secularism, he believed “Jesus Christ to be the son of God,” and that it was “blasphemy to use his name” in a newspaper.42 In his novels, though, he had begun to reveal a strong sensual feeling for unusual romantic situations and relationships, for the excitement of mystery and exposure, for erotic and psychological tensions.
Immediately a dedicated member of the cast, he pleased Dickens, who breathed a sigh of relief when “everything went to perfection.” On short notice, “Collins was admirable—got up excellently, played thoroughly well, and missed nothing.” Collins’ good humor, his pleasant temperament, and his adequate talents as an actor encouraged Dickens to invite him, when Jerrold deserted in February 1852, to take a larger role. As the performances went on into the spring and summer of 1852, the acting colleagues crossed the line into personal friendship.
Not prone to idealize, Collins seems to have had a good sense of Dickens’ personality, his restlessness, his managerial drive, his possessiveness, his emotional ruthlessness, his instinct for power. In April, he published his first contribution to Household Words, the oddly macabre and partly Dickensian “A Terribly Strange Bed,” probably written to please the editor. He also had a sense of Dickens’ vitality, excitability, and fraternal warmth, his capacity for food, wine, song, and companionship. Collins knew how to be fun. For him, it was a heady combination. For Dickens, the young writer provided relaxing companionship. With his flexible schedule, he was frequently available for recreation. With his curiosity and bohemian sophistication, his experience with women, sensual pleasures, and travel, he had none of the dark-waistcoat conservatism of some of Dickens’ other friends. Unlike Dickens, he had been a habitué of casual sex since his teenage years. Partly because of his background, he had none of Dickens’ drive toward respectability. He was ambitious for fame rather than social status. General sweetness of temperament, the readiness of his company, and his easy acceptance of himself and others made him a young man whose admiration Dickens could respond to. By the time the guild performances came to an end in September 1852, they were sufficiently intimate for Collins to “go (with Egg) to stay with Dickens at Dover,” where he “received the kindest and heartiest welcome.… The sea air acts on me as if it were all distilled from laudanum.”43
AS HIS GUEST IN DOVER IN SEPTEMBER 1852, COLLINS FOLLOWED “the example of [his] host,” who was at work on the eighth number of Bleak House, and actually finished his “hitherto interminable” novel Basil. The young writer was delighted to have his usual irregularity stiffened by his mentor’s work and exercise ethic. “Our life here is as healthy and happy as life can be. Work in the morning—long walks—sea-bathing—early hours—famous meals.” They breakfasted “at 10 minutes past eight.… Dickens goes into his study, and is not visible again till two—when he is visible for every plea
sant social purpose that can be imagined for the rest of the day.… When he first came,” the tourists “used to waylay him every morning—and have a good long stare at the ‘great man’ as he went to his bath.” Dickens did not find such prying eyes amusing. Dover seemed crowded, expensive, and inordinately public. Collins’ company, though, was pleasurable. Also, Dickens’ family found him an attractive guest. And he was an appreciative audience. “Dickens read us the two first chapters” of “a glorious number of Bleak house… as soon as he had finished them—speaking the dialogue of each character, as dramatically as if he were acting his own personages; and making his audience laugh and cry with equal fervour and equal sincerity.” On his host’s strong urging, Collins was persuaded to stay a few days more. In early October, they walked the fifteen miles to Canterbury together, the “Cathedral white and brilliant against the brightest of blue skies.”44