Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  Summer in Boulogne, though, had its delights. This was the second of three that he was to spend there with his family. Close to London, with an excellent hotel, a lively seafaring industry, a fertile countryside, and about twenty-five thousand residents, it seemed relatively unspoiled. Its attractions in 1853 having encouraged him to come again, his landlord, Ferdinand Beaucourt, provided him with an even better house in 1854, high on the hill overlooking the town, with luxuriant roses and a long field for early-evening impromptu cricket matches. With the addition of a few friends, Dickens had enough sons to comprise a team. “A trap, bat, and ball on the premises, and a fine field to play in. Post every night, parcel communication every day, electric telegraph every minute.” Beaucourt hardly needed to add the pride he felt at being the landlord of a distinguished novelist to his own childlike appreciation of his property. Thinking it “the finest situation” he had ever lived in, with the exception of Genoa, Dickens sent laudatory and beseeching letters to friends about this “AMAZING!!” place. “Range of view and air, most free and delightful; hill-side garden, delicious, field stupendous.” And the costs were modest. The house was five guineas a week. He drank the best inexpensive wine he had ever tasted. The villa, “bright, clean, and lively,” was “a regular triumph of French domestic architecture … all doors and windows. Every window blows every door open, and all the lighter articles … fly to all points of the compass.” Unlike the hot oven of London, where there was a record heat that summer, “the cool sea-breeze blows over us by day and by night.” When he returned in 1856, writing his way “through the summer in rosy gardens and sea airs,” he was again in the Villa du Camp de Droite, which Beaucourt had improved even more, a paradise of roses and geraniums.24 Boulogne also had a year-round attraction, an English-run school that Dickens thought well of and in which he enrolled two of his sons. They could be visited on his way to Paris. They could be left there at the end of the summer holidays.

  In addition to the kite, a bright Union Jack and a Tricolor, “hoisted … on a haystack” in honor of the English-French alliance, flapped in the breeze at the Villa du Camp de Droite in 1854. In Boulogne, loud drums and bugles resounded in every street. Concerned that they might be disturbed, he was pleased that not a sound penetrated his privacy. “We never see or hear of it, unless we choose.” The pageantry was stirring. At the end of August, he and Collins attended “military mass” at the nearby camp in honor of Napoleon’s birthday. “When the Host was raised, the artillery fired their great guns and the ten thousand men presented arms—the bayonets and swords all flashing up together into the sun.” Up close, the British and French soldiers looked like filthy rascals, and the camp was threateningly unsanitary. In early September, the royal yacht, “decked out with streamers,” with Prince Albert “in a blazing uniform, left alone on the deck for everybody to see,” sailed into the harbor. A blaze of salutes punctuated the silence. Making his own contribution to the celebratory spectacle, he illuminated the villa English-fashion. “The French illuminate outside their houses, with oil lamps … with which the wind interferes.… We,” Collins boasted, “shut all the front windows in the English way, and put candles in them.… We had 114 candles burning, stuck on 114 nails, driven into the window sashes. When we were ready to light up, every soul in the house … was stationed at a window. Dickens rang a bell—and at that signal we lit up the whole 114 candles in less than a minute. The effect from a distance was as if the whole house, was one steady blaze of light. It was seen for miles and miles round. The landlord went into hysterical French ecstasies—the populace left their illuminations in the town … to stare in amazement.” Dickens, who rushed to a distance to look at it, was thrilled.25

  Ardently patriotic, he felt deeply concerned about the war and allied leadership. Detesting Louis Napoleon, who seemed not only a corrupt tyrant but a dangerous incompetent who had risen to a new level of threat when he left his exile in the drawing rooms of England for the throne of France, he thought the French-British alliance a weak basis on which to confront the Russians. In the middle of September, returning with Georgina from a country walk, he suddenly found himself “face to face with Albert and Napoleon.” He took off his hat, “whereupon the Emperor pulled off his cocked-hat; and Albert (seeing, I suppose, that it was an Englishman) pulled off his. Then we went our several ways.” The emperor had changed for the worse since “the old times when we used to see him so often at Gore House.” In early October, Dickens attended the review at which a telegram erroneously reporting the fall of Sebastopol brought flushes to the checks of the empress, whose beauty he admired, and cheers to the lips of the vast assembly. This was theatre of a high order, though with more than the usual amount of ambivalence and heartache. With “mixed feeling about the war—admiration of our valiant men, burning desires to cut the Emperor of Russia’s throat,” Dickens felt “something like despair to see how the old cannon-smoke and blood-mists obscure the wrongs and sufferings of the people at home.”26 Also, those who were actually directing the war seemed dangerously incompetent. Reports from the Crimea made it clear that stupidity, elitism, and sclerotic bureaucracy were damaging the war effort severely. Many “valiant men” were being needlessly killed on the battlefield. They were also, though, being killed in their camps and hospitals. Convinced that the war was a just one, Dickens felt that the country was being betrayed by its leadership and its rigid structure. When the suffering took its toll and when the cost became clearer (an income tax had been instituted), he feared that the public would tire of the war much before Russia, feudally autocratic and a major threat to British power, was soundly defeated. The main obstacle, though, to a strong Britain abroad was a weak Britain at home. The same forces that were responsible for domestic misery would be responsible for foreign tragedy. Still, Dickens’ full anguish about the war was months away. Pageantry had the upper hand for the moment. And Boulogne was a wonderful vantage point, a place where he could work and play as comfortably as his restlessness would permit.

  Enthusiastic invitations brought visitors during these summers in Boulogne, some for long stays, others for brief appearances en route to other places or as short breaks from work in London. Always ready to provide a bed, “two to a space, at a pinch three,” or a booking at the best hotel in town, Dickens usually met friends at the dockside customs house, where a card in hand introducing the visitor as his guest produced expeditious service.27 Whisked through the door into the tumult of bargainers and beggars, the new arrival was soon embraced by the friendly arms of “the Inimitable.” In moments of good humor, such ritual self-flourishes were an essential part of his persona. So too was hospitality. Frank Stone brought his family to spend the summers of 1853 and 1854. Usually pinched, his recent election as an associate of the Royal Academy of Art had helped make the summer holidays possible. Particularly fond of Marcus Stone, the younger of Stone’s two sons, Dickens put Georgina to work to find them a house. Almost a part of the family, Collins stayed with them for much of the first two summers, working at his own fiction, which his mentor praised highly, and on writing projects for Household Words and for the stage.

  An otherwise likely visitor unexpectedly died in March 1854. Talfourd had been among the friends of the first years of Dickens’ success, an ardent supporter whose association with Pickwick Papers contained both the comic allusion to his role in the Norton-Melbourne trial and the serious development of his strong support for international copyright. A warm, vain, generous man, with a strident wife, he had been an early companion from the older, successful generation that included Macready and Procter. Talfourd’s hope that he himself would be the great writer of the new age had been disappointed. That, though, had not undermined his worshiping admiration of Dickens. In 1849, on the Isle of Wight, he had shared with him his happiness at being appointed a judge of the Court of Common Pleas. In January 1854, he had sent him a copy of his new book, the preface to which was “an example to all of us,” Dickens told him, “of modesty and of that ge
nial disposition to be pleased which is one of the finest qualities to be found in the heart of man.… It has cleared away the fog of the morning and lightened the day.” Under no illusion about the limitations of Talfourd’s talent, Dickens always searched for grounds on which to praise him. Recently, the friends had made “two engagements,” one to visit a farm Talfourd had recently purchased, the other to visit Talfourd’s burial plot in Norwood cemetery, which he “was very fond of,” having “accustomed himself to associate it with a day of rest.” In the middle of March 1854, while “walking in Covent Garden,” Dickens met Mark Lemon, who had just seen an evening newspaper with the news of Talfourd’s death. While summarizing an appeal on behalf of the accused, Talfourd had “faltered, his thoughts seemed to wander for a second or two and then he fell senseless,” apparently the victim of a stroke. “Three doctors instantly pronounced that he was dead.” Dickens immediately went to Talfourd’s London home, where the family knew from a telegram only that he had been suddenly taken ill. He soon fulfilled one of his two engagements with Talfourd, prematurely. Soon after the funeral, Forster, also deeply affected, told Leigh Hunt that “we turn to old friends at such a time as this—when the past seems all that really belongs to us.”28

  The aging Hunt probably did not attend Talfourd’s funeral. Recent tensions in his relationship with Dickens may have affected his feelings about members of his circle. In the 1840s, Hunt and Dickens had become friends of sorts. He had received from the younger writer some of the formal veneration due a senior citizen of the literary community who had become a convenient symbol around which to rally the profession to raise funds and to criticize the government for neglecting the arts. When, after his pension had been granted, Hunt tactlessly returned to his friends for additional help, Dickens felt put upon. Well known for his financial carelessness, Hunt soon became the model for Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, the irresponsible artist whose sponging self-indulgence is immoral. That he made the identification of Hunt as the source for Skimpole unavoidable, even to the extent of using Hunt’s house as the model for Skimpole’s, angered Hunt’s friends.29

  But Skimpole’s hypocrisy, immorality, and oily rhetoric were Dickens’ invention, not Hunt’s characteristics. Used to transforming life into fiction, Dickens forced an equation between Hunt and Skimpole when consciously he meant the resemblance only as the loosest starting point. Slow in making redress, he felt resentful in being called to account. For a time he managed to keep out of Hunt’s way, though Hunt went out of his to demonstrate that he had no hard feelings. More interested in smooth relations than in confrontation, he wanted some public expression from Dickens that they were friends. Dickens was slow to comply, though, suggesting both that he resented being held to account for Skimpole’s origin and that he had had a good deal less respect for Hunt than he had ever admitted outside the pages of Bleak House. In the spring of 1855, he begrudgingly made amends with a favorable notice in Household Words, “the best means,” he told Hunt, “that could possibly present themselves of enabling me to express myself publicly about you as you would desire.” After many postponements, he accepted one of Hunt’s invitations to tea. “But I hope you will not now think it necessary to renew that painful subject with me.… In that better and unmistakeable association with you by name, let all end.” The episode was not over, though. At Hunt’s death in 1859, the obituaries mentioned the identification with Skimpole. Again, trying both to make amends and to exculpate himself, Dickens admitted in an article in Household Words that he had “privately referred the proof sheets of the first number” of Bleak House “to two intimate friends of Leigh Hunt … and altered the whole of that part of the text on their discovering too strong a resemblance to his ‘way.’” He had not “thought,” though, “that the admired original would ever be charged with the imaginary vices of the fictitious creature.”30

  With Forster, relations were always intense. During the Crimean War, they often found themselves not seeing eye to eye politically, though Forster’s blustering insistence on taking rhetorical responsibility for the whole conduct of the war left Dickens more amused than bored. Forster’s ill health sometimes kept them apart. His rheumatoid arthritis, his gout, his overweight, and probably angina, made him partly an invalid, though he continued his economically necessary editorship of The Examiner, his book writing, and his occasional lecturing. One night in 1854, when he was bedridden, Dickens read to him “something out of Goldsmith,” their mutual favorite. “I fell upon She Stoops to Conquer, and we enjoyed it with that wonderful intensity, that I believe he began to get better in the first scene, and was all right again in the fifth act.” Though Forster made occasional visits to Boulogne, Dickens saw more of him on his own monthly visits to London. The shocked author enjoyed with hysterical hilarity the secret news in March 1856 that Forster was engaged to marry Eliza Colburn, the wealthy widow of the publisher Henry Colburn. It is “the most prodigious, overwhelming, crushing, astounding, blinding, deafening, pulverizing, scarifying secret of which Forster is the hero, imaginable by the united efforts of the whole British population. It is a thing of that kind, that after I knew it (from himself) this morning, I lay down flat, as if an Engine and Tender had fallen upon me.” His friends could not resist teasing him and amusing themselves. Maclise gave Dickens “the most wonderful account of Mrs. Colburn…. ‘By God Sir the depreciation that has taken place in that woman is fearful! She has no blood Sir in her body—no color—no voice—is all scrunched and squeezed together—and seems to me in deep affliction—while Forster Sir is rampant and raging, and presenting a contrast beneath which you sink into the dust. She may come round again—may get fat—may get cheerful—may get a voice to articulate with, but by the Blessed Star of Morning Sir she is now a sight to behold!’” When Forster told Stanfield that he had a grave secret to tell him, the overjoyed painter thought he was going to tell him that he “was about to turn Catholic!”31

  Stanfield’s Catholicism did not dampen his ardor for the theatre. Nor did his health. Though “he seems to be subject to some little disorder, which is half internal and half nervous,” he frequently came down from Hampstead to Tavistock Place, set on a half-price theatrical evening with Dickens and any other friend who could be enlisted. Despite his age and the recent death of a chronically ill son, he was capable of bursts of saltwater enthusiasm. Soon he was willingly drafted by Dickens into painting marine backdrops to two amateur theatricals. But visits to Boulogne, in fact traveling at all, did not especially appeal to him.

  Macready’s rare visits to London seemed to Dickens like the return of his old friend from a premature grave. It filled him “with pity to think of [Macready] away in the lonely Sherborne Place.” John Elliotson, “everybody’s friend,” who, with his network of mesmeric and medical associates, traveled frequently, did come to Boulogne for a short stay. The impish Marcus Stone noticed during his 1853 visit that Elliotson’s “only flaw was his habit of dying his hair a quite improbable colour.” During the next summer, Thackeray stayed in Boulogne, his large, burly, but gentle presence noticeably out of scale in the small streets of the old town. Working hard at his new novel, aware of illness behind and illness to come, he enjoyed Dickens’ company. One evening in July he dined with the family of “9 children 7 boys.” They played parlor games afterward. The next day, returning to London briefly, Dickens played the role of Thackeray’s postman, carrying letters across the Channel.32

  Among the welcome guests was Thomas Beard, for whom his affection, going back to his days as a journalist, never diminished. Beard’s journalistic duties, though, allowed him only brief vacations. Invitations to come to Boulogne notwithstanding, Thomas Mitton had grown increasingly peripheral. Like Beard, he knew intimate family details—Dickens had known him from his early years—and Mitton kept for safekeeping in a locked box in his office a cache of letters between Dickens and his family that told the unhappy story of constant requests for money.

  Among the necessary, and welcome, guests
at Boulogne was William Henry Wills, who had become invaluable at Household Words and whose qualities as a human being Dickens strongly admired. He had managed to combine self-interest with Wills’s interests by stipulating that the assistant editor would be a partial owner. When Wills’s mother died, when his health became acutely troublesome, Dickens immediately offered additional financial as well as emotional support. When Miss Coutts decided to employ an executive secretary on an annual retainer to help her with correspondence of a sort that Dickens could not continue to add to his heavy responsibilities, he was successful in persuading her to employ Wills. The shy, competent assistant editor, ferociously loyal, was delighted to hold the fort at Wellington Street, to exchange an endless number of letters with “the Sparkler” and with contributors, to travel across the Channel with articles and page proofs in his briefcase, and to become partly absorbed, especially through the talents of his wife, into the Dickens amateur theatricals.

  Though Dickens was able to free himself from a tight umbilical cord to London, John Leech and Mark Lemon were not. Making considerably less money than he did, both lived more modestly, Leech with his small family on Kensington High Street, Lemon with his many children as close as possible to his favorite child, Punch, just a short distance from Tavistock Square. Leech constantly needed to negotiate wood blocks for illustrations with engravers, publishers, and authors. The highly nervous, unsmiling artist anguished about meeting his weekly obligation to provide Punch with a cartoon. To Marcus Stone, he was “not really melancholy, his somewhat rare smile was exquisite, like the dawn of a summer day.” Always working under pressure, though, “there were no long holidays for him.” When he spent a few weeks in lodgings in Boulogne in 1854, “the French sunlight dazzlingly bright on white houses,” there were no indications of the heart disease that he was soon to develop. Lemon had to be at the office regularly, but when he, “so irresistibly funny and amiable with children,” came across for numbers of visits in 1853 and 1854, Dickens and his family delighted in “Uncle Mark’s” boisterously amiable company.33 He took up an immense amount of space graciously and well. Companionable with the children and Georgina, he also got along easily with Catherine, for whom, as part of his own domestic commitment and good spirits, he felt warm affection. An editor, writer, and expert amateur actor, he was for some years the perfect companion. Neither competitive nor possessive, he would gladly share in the fun but also unselfishly accept that others were having fun without him. He responded to Dickens’ gift for making all his friends feel special. And when he visited Boulogne, he happily joined Collins and Dickens on their excursions.