by Fred Kaplan
Though he returned to town with Collins, Dickens went, with Catherine, almost immediately across the Channel to Boulogne for two weeks to write the next number of Bleak House. The “very bad passage over” (he felt as if he had exchanged his “eyes for two brass bullets”) did not detract from his favorable impression of the French seaside resort, with its winding streets, unfinished cathedral, and gracious hillsides from which the town and the sea glittered. In France, Dickens could work with less interruption from the idly curious. The anonymity was restful. Having been hard at work on Bleak House since December 1851, he found the novelty of the French language relaxing. The previous February, less than six months after he had completed Copperfield, he had felt “the first shadows of a new story hovering in a ghostly way” about him, “as they usually begin to do, when I have finished an old one.” The story simmered through the spring and summer of 1851. In August, he went with Henry Austin to Gloucestershire, having in mind using it as one of the settings for the new novel. While headquartered in Broadstairs from mid-May until October 1851, he delighted in “the associations of the place in which [he] finished Copperfield.… Corn growing, larks singing, garden full of flowers, fresh air on the sea … have set me to work with great vigor.”45
By September 1851, he was “in the first throes of a new book.” The difficulties of getting into Tavistock House set him back, but nevertheless one of the mock titles for the library was History of a Short Chancery Suit in twenty volumes. In mid-October, Bradbury and Evans announced a “New Serial Work by Mr. Charles Dickens.” In late November, he was writing the first number of what he had decided to call Bleak House, and he finished it about the tenth of December. He pushed ahead, eager to get as much of a head start as possible on future numbers. In mid-February 1852, he read the first number to friends, including Miss Coutts. The hectic theatrical touring for the guild and the demands of Household Words did not interfere with its publication on February 28 for March I, and the appearance of a new number on the last day of each of the next eighteen months. While he was not quite sure that he “ever did like, or ever shall like, anything quite so well as Copperfield,” the new novel had “very good things in it.… You may come to like Bleak House,” he wrote to a literary acquaintance, “as well as its predecessors! And I shouldn’t wonder! For I see a something ‘looming in the future’ that looks pretty.” Writing a new novel was partly revivification, partly additional exhaustion. He had felt in the summer of 1852 as if he had for some time “been thinking my brain into sort of a cabbage patch.”46 By late September, having finally finished the guild performances, he could enjoy Collins’ company in Dover and read the eighth number of Bleak House with a sense of having a fairly free calendar for the first time in two years.
Soon he was “so busy, leading up to the great turning idea of the Bleak House [No. 9] that I have lived this last week or ten days in a perpetual scald and boil.” He advised Collins, whose Basil he had just read and admired, that “writing can be done [only with] the utmost application, the greatest patience, and the steadiest energy of which the writer is capable.” He had been assembling the ostensible elements of Bleak House for many years. His long involvement with social, political, and legal matters was central. From his preoccupation with emigration and his awareness of Caroline Chisholm’s Family Colonization Loan Society (her bad housekeeping and her children’s dirty faces haunted him after a visit to her home), he created Mrs. Jellyby and telescopic philanthropy.47 From Leigh Hunt and Walter Savage Landor he created Harold Skimpole and Mr. Boythorn. From images of philanthropy and benevolence, including Richard Watson, he created Mr. Jarndyce. Rockingham was transformed into Chesney Wold. From elements of Mary and Georgina Hogarth he created Esther Summerson. Most of all, though, he projected from himself a narrator so passionately angry at injustice and exploitation that his voice combines both the retrospective memories of life in the blacking factory and his biblically resonant, prophetic denunciation of what England had become.
Exhausted as well as exhilarated, he confronted the challenge of using two first-person narrators, one a female, the other his own voice. By the end of 1852, a little more than half finished, he was “already looking forward to the completion of Bleak House in August, and to bachelor wandering afterwards into Switzerland and Italy.” The winter was a difficult one. His “old horrid nervous choking” at night recurred. He went to Brighton in March 1853. It poured for his entire stay. He felt rheumatic in his back. Often, though, he was “too hard at work to be able to stir.” As far as Bleak House and the law were concerned, “I think the giant who said Fie Fi Fo Fum, must have been an impersonation of the Law. Grinding Jack’s bones to make his bread.…” His old American friend Cornelius Felton came to visit. So too did Harriet Beecher Stowe, whom he did not like. He was distressed to learn “that they have kept from me that Frank (the cleverest of all the children) stammers so horribly as to be an afflicted spirit.” Eager to be out of London, he made arrangements in mid-May to summer at Boulogne. “Hypochondriacal whisperings tell me that I am rather overworked. The spring does not seem to fly back again.… I really feel that my head would split like a fired shell if I remained” in London.
Suddenly, at the beginning of June, he became seriously ill. The illness began in his right side. It seemed identical to what he thought of as the old illness, the weakness in the right kidney or recurrent renal cholic. It may have been a viral infection. He desperately needed to get out of London. Otherwise, he imagined, he never would recover. He made it to Folkestone, where he thought the sea air would help him. He began to get better, slowly. “I have been ill and in great pain—six days in bed for the first time in my life.… I have been shaving a man every morning—a stranger to me—whose appearance was rather irksome and oppressive. I am happy to say he has at last retired from the looking-glass, and is replaced by the familiar personage whom I have lathered and scraped these twenty years.”48
By early July, he felt fully recovered, though there had been rumors he had been near death’s door and had aged terribly. It was “an old afflicted KIDNEY,” he explained, “once the torment of my childhood, in which I took cold.” The weather at Boulogne was wonderful. “I am getting my book done in peace, and am (thank God) very vigorous and very brown.” The “Manager is himself again … energetic, muscular, the pride of Albion and the admiration of Gaul.” The cross-Channel packet brought welcome visitors, the Leeches, Collins, Beard, Forster, and Stone. Collins thought that the latest number of Bleak House, which he read in manuscript, “contains … some of the finest passages he has ever written … brought out with such pathos, delicacy, and truth, as no other living writer has ever rivalled or even approached.” Concentrating on finishing his book, Dickens rejoiced in the celebratory dinner in Boulogne attended by Bradbury, Evans, Forster, Lemon, Browne, and Collins, and on August 25, 1853, he read the last number to family and friends. He now relaxed into “the first drowsy lassitude” of having finished, prowling “about in the wind and rain.”49 But he was eager to prowl greater distances. With Egg and Collins as traveling companions, he had made arrangements to form an “Italian Triumvirate.” They would leave in early October for three months in Italy.
CHAPTER NINE
The Sparkler of Albion
(1853–1855)
THE TRIUMVIRATE CROSSED THE CHANNEL IN OCTOBER 1853 WITH expectations of adventure and delight. For the two bachelors, the world lay all before them, though to different degrees and in different ways. Collins was sophisticated, self-indulgent, amusingly and unselfconsciously conceited. He was returning to the country of his childhood. In Rome, nothing astonished him “more than [his] own vivid remembrance of every street and building in this wonderful and mournful place.” He saw “all the favourite haunts” where he and his brother “used to run about as little boys.” He lectured Egg on art, drove Dickens “into a frenzy by humming and whistling whole overtures—with not one movement remembered correctly,” and gave his companions “a full account of h
is first love adventure” in which “he came out quite a pagan Jupiter.” Egg and Dickens calculated “that at this precocious passage in his history, he was twelve years and some odd months old.”
The dark-haired, slender, idealistic, and intensely moralistic Egg had never been south of the Alps. An increasing favorite of Dickens’, he had had the good sense the previous year to propose marriage to Georgina, and the misfortune to be turned down. Neither the proposal nor the rejection endeared him the less to the novelist, who saw where his own self-interest lay. “It would have been a good thing for her, as he is an excellent fellow, and is well off.” But “he is very far her inferior intellectually,” though “five men would be out of six … not to mention her being one of the most amiable and affectionate of girls. Whether it is, or is not a pity that she is all she is to me and mine instead of brightening up a good little man’s house where she would still have the artist kind of life she is used to, about her, is a knotty point I never can settle to my satisfaction.” As they traveled, Egg readily shared the “general sentiment expressed this morning, that Georgina ought to be married.” Perhaps, Dickens wryly told his wife, “you’ll mention it to her!”1
With his family safely in place in London, he welcomed the opportunity to be off on his own for three months with his bachelor friends, though he alternated between missing his family and delighting in his freedom. He had never had such freedom before. From Venice, Collins proclaimed that “we lead the most luxurious, dandy-dilettante sort of life here.” Except for writing two brief articles for Household Words, Dickens also did just that. But, used to sitting up in carriages and trains in England, and having scratched among the fleas at provincial inns, eaten shabbily and on the run, and journeyed day and night to get to desired destinations during his previous visit to Italy, he wanted to travel fast and far. His companions did not, and objected. Though he had planned a whirlwind schedule that would allow him to visit Sicily for the first time, the more stately pace determined that Naples, a city he detested, would be their southern terminus. Primarily Dickens had undertaken the trip because he felt stale, restless, and burdened by having finished a long novel. Its completion had left him both exhausted and explosively energetic. The decision to go to Italy was also an attempt to return to aspects of the past, to relive youthful experiences, to see friends as well as places associated with a time when his burdens seemed less heavy. He had never been to Spain, Greece, Russia, Scandinavia, Central Europe. Yet Italy was his destination again, as if he meant to prowl inwardly. “It is so strange and like a dream to me, to hear the delicate Italian once again.… So beautiful to see the delightful sky again, and all the picturesque wonders of the country.” Travel, though, neither provided him the opportunity for rest that it did his friends nor exhausted his compulsion to keep moving. “I am so restless to be doing—and always shall be, I think, so long as I have any portion in Time—that if I were to stay more than a week in any one city here, I believe I should be half desperate to begin some new story!!!”2 But the new story, ultimately to be Little Dorrit, was the old story again, deepened and intensified, the story he carried with him into Italy and needed to exert himself not to write. In one sense, he needed rest from the most emotionally demanding activity of his life. In another, the only rest was in the activity that his restlessness promoted.
Paris in the middle of October was “extraordinarily gay, and wonderfully improving.” It was, though, “literally overflowing with English travellers.” The quays had been paved, the new boulevards were being constructed, “the broadest and the grandest in the world.” After dining with Miss Coutts there, the triumvirate journeyed to Strasbourg “by the best railway” they had ever traveled on. They spent one morning “getting through the ‘sights.’” Collins was delighted with the “fantastic puppet show … every time 12 o’clock strikes.” At Basel, they transferred to a horse-drawn carriage. Soon they “began to get into the real Swiss country. Immense masses of hills … with the most vivid autumn red, yellow, and purple.” Traveling together forced on them a keener awareness of one another, and mostly good-humored accommodation, of which Collins and Dickens had a great deal. Despite constant tutoring, Egg, “with a bitter bad memory,” was unable to learn Italian quickly, his slowness soon declining from an irritation into an amusement. “I cannot remember what Egg called a bird yesterday … something compounded of English and French with an Italian termination—something like Birdoisella.” They traveled “in a state of mad good spirits,” Collins remarked, “and never flag in our jollity.” Dickens made the arrangements and handled the funds. Collins, the most easygoing of the three, “eats and drinks everything. Gets on very well everywhere.…” On the road, Egg sometimes wanted “trifles of accommodation … which could hardly be got in Paris, and Collins sometimes want[ed] to give people too little for their trouble. But a word [put] it all right in a moment.” Occasionally, to Dickens’ amusement, his companions would “burst out into economy—always on some wretched little point, and always on a point they had previously settled the other way.”3
Their first destination was Lausanne. Soon “miles on miles of soaring mountains … burst into view.” The eccentric, wealthy Reverend Chauncey Hare Townshend, an expert on mesmerism, jewelry, and ghost stories, insisted on their staying in his delightful country house on the lake. There was a large dinner and an elegant evening party. The reason, though, for the Lausanne visit was to see old friends, to revive old feelings. With the exception of Lavinia Watson, who was in England, and Richard Watson, who was dead, the rest of his 1846 coterie was still in place. Dickens’ heart warmed to find Haldimand “roaring with laughter, disputing, discussing, and contradicting, in exactly the old way.” His vivaciousness, though, had become a regular part of a cycle of a few weeks’ alternation, the other extreme of which was “a black humour,” silence, and seclusion. De Cerjat was delightful company again, though he had become thin and grey. Mrs. de Cerjat was “just the same as ever, but very deaf.” His Lausanne friends “crowded down on a fearful, bad morning” to see them off.4
Ascending to Chamonix and the Mer de Glace, “through pretty deep snow … and the climbing very difficult,” he exalted in his physical strength, the headiness of a man of slight, wiry build, with legs taut from years of walking, willfully pushing himself to his limits. The Inimitable steamed “with perspiration from head to foot.” Impressed, the guides “pronounced [him] ‘a strong intrepid’” who “ought to ascend Mont Blanc next summer.” Halfway up, the two younger men transferred from a carriage to what looked to Collins “exactly like a rotten sedan chair on wheels,” which they stayed in throughout the entire climb. “Imagine almost a thousand feet of perpendicular precipice.” In the brilliant sunshine, they “looked down into one of the crevices—an awful place, two or three feet wide, and three hundred feet deep, with the ice-walls shining blinding green all the way down.” At the top, they “warmed [themselves] at a wood fire on the ice.” Though the day had begun with a 4 A.M. departure from Geneva, they continued on mule to Martigny and then over the Simplon pass into Italy. The next day they drove “in the warmest brightest sunshine along the lovely shores of Lago Maggiore.” An “old blind fiddler … sang Italian national songs” as they crossed on the ferry. Deeply moved, Collins felt like “bursting out crying.” For Dickens, Italy now was like a dream revived or a dream that had somehow never ended. Even the exotic forms of transportation were fantasylike. “We have been in the most extraordinary vehicles—like swings, like boats, like Noah’s arks, like barges and enormous bedsteads.” In Milan, they went to the opera. Egg and Collins did the tourist sights. Two days later they were in Genoa, the second of his three personal destinations. On a wet afternoon, he took his friends to look over the Peschiere and its memories. “The garden is sorely neglected now, and the rooms are all full of boarding school beds, and most of the fireplaces are closed up; but the old beauty and grandeur of the place were in it still.”5
Genoa itself struck him as having grown
immensely, the somnolent, semimedieval town of 1846 having expanded into the bustling materialism of the nineteenth century. Dickens was both pleased and disappointed. On the one hand, growth meant progress. On the other, such change deprived him of touchstones from his past and reminded him of personal loss. One of his Genoa friends greeted him with puzzlement. “‘I expected to find a ruin, we heard you had been so ill. And I find you younger and better looking than ever. But it’s so strange to see you without a bright waistcoat. Why haven’t you got a bright waistcoat on?’” He “apologized for [his] black one.” Her eyesight, though, was askew. There had been both subtle and gross changes. The youthful Dickens of 1846 had become, to most observers, noticeably older, his complexion ruddy and wrinkled, his hair thinner, his large, brilliant hazel-gray eyes restlessly set in middle-aged sockets and skin. In pouring rain, he visited the de la Rues and the Thompsons. The first reunion was a warm one. Emile and Dickens had corresponded regularly. Nursing “her foolish sick mother who wears out everybody near her body and soul,” Augusta still suffered an attenuated version of her convulsive attacks. Though he said little about it in his letters to Catherine and Georgina, the experience with the de la Rues in 1844–45 was much on his mind, the excitement of being her beneficent doctor, the mesmeric ménage of husband, wife, and healer, the histrionics of Catherine’s jealousy. The few days in Genoa strengthened his sense of having been injured by his wife’s limitations. At a “ruinous Albaro-like Palace,” he visited Christiana and James Thompson, who had two daughters. The talented Christiana, who now added painting to her piano playing, he thought “greatly flushed and agitated” to see him. She was as beautiful but also as unstable as ever, “her excitability and restlessness … a positive disease.”6