by Fred Kaplan
When, at the beginning of January 1854, Dickens returned from reading A Christmas Carol in Birmingham, he “found the children getting up a dull charade” for Twelfth Night and Charley’s birthday. In 1852, they had put on Guy Fawkes, a burletta by Albert Smith, a well-known popular lecturer, dramatist, and impresario whom Dickens liked, an eccentric, “always badly dressed” man in his late thirties, “with large head, large body, short legs; long hair, long reddish-brown beard and moustache.” In 1853, it had been a popular extravaganza, William Tell. Now they put on a version, created by their father, of Fielding’s Tom Thumb, with little Henry Fielding Dickens playing the role with minuscule cuteness. The family theatricals, performed before private audiences, had become a tradition that the children continued even when Dickens seemed too busy to dominate the arrangements. He always, though, had enough time to ensure that they were up to standard. They “derived considerable notions of punctuality and attention from the parental drilling.” Unwilling to allow a performance to go on without a role for himself, he played “the Ghost, and Mr Lemon (as great a child as himself) the Queen of the Giants.” In early January 1855, Dickens was “in the agonies of getting up a gorgeous fairy play for the children,” his own adaptation of James Planché’s Fortunio and His Seven Gifted Servants, with “Mr. Wilkini Collini” as Gobbler and Mark Lemon as Mudperiod the Dragon.34 Though the theatricals were always partly for the children, they were also important to him, an excitement and an anodyne, an emotional connection between the boy in Chatham who had stood on the table to perform for his father’s friends and the famous novelist for whom stage performance had become a necessary part of life.
Aware that he had more than enough commitments without becoming a paid public performer, Dickens was assisted in resisting that temptation by sharing to some degree the Victorian position that gentlemen do not appear on the stage, except privately. When the Dickens theatrical company performed in the 1840s and then in 1851, the proceeds were entirely for charity. Like Macready, Dickens believed it was the rare actor who could overcome society’s prejudice against the profession. Yet it was also clear to him that he could risk a limited number of unpaid public performances without endangering his social status. The subject was occasionally on his mind in the early 1850s. Public lectures by literary people had become increasingly popular. In the 1830s and 1840s, Carlyle had lectured successfully on historical subjects. Emerson had lectured unsuccessfully, mostly unheard because of his droning monotone and the rustle of newspapers. Thackeray lectured humorously on his version of eighteenth-century history and literature, and Forster, somewhat uneasy about propriety, had lectured on the civil war. Dickens disagreed with Forster’s long-standing uneasiness about “paid public lecturing” undermining the dignity of literature. “On the contrary, if the lecturing have any motive power at all (like my poor father this, in the sound!) I believe it would tend the other way.” He was not ready, though, to put his principle into practice. The plays at home were private performances. Also, he had nothing to lecture on in the intellectual way.
But reading his own works was another matter. After the successful readings in Birmingham at Christmas 1853, he was deluged with requests, particularly to read for nonprofit institutions, some of which offered to pay him well, and to speak at dinners. He curtly turned down one of the requests, explaining that he did “not read for money or as a commercial speculation.”35 In late December 1854, however, he read A Christmas Carol, as a favor to Talfourd, at the Literary and Mechanics’ Institute in Reading, as a favor to Macready at the Literary Institution in Sherborne, and then for the Educational Temperance Institute at the huge hall in Bradford, where they sat 3,700 people.
The next Christmas, in bitter cold weather, he returned from Paris briefly to fulfill promises to read A Christmas Carol in Birmingham, Sheffield, and Peterborough, where “they took the line ‘and to Tiny Tim who did NOT die,’ with a most prodigious shout and roll of thunder.” The effect was hypnotically exhilarating for both reader and audience. They shared a text. They shared cultural values. They shared an unforgettable experience. So strongly did he sense the possibilities that he tried to expand his repertoire “to get out of the restriction” of the two Christmas books, particularly for his favorite audiences in Birmingham. Early in 1855, in a retrospective mood, he pored “over Copperfield (which is my favourite), with the idea of getting a reading out of it … by some such name as ‘Young Housekeeping and Little Em’ly.’” The aesthetic and emotional challenge defeated him. For two months, he reverted to it constantly. When, by the end of February, he had “not advanced an inch,” he gave it up for the time being. But he soon elevated amateur theatricals to a new level of commitment. This project was to be “a grownup Play” performed in the middle of June 1855 in “the children’s theatre” in the schoolroom at Tavistock House. It had been expanded to create a larger stage at the expense of fewer seats, about sixty. Since “the real Theatre is so bad … I have always a delight in setting up a sham one—besides deriving a pleasure from feigning to be somebody else—with the addition of the odd novelty that this sort of invention is executed in company.” It was his first independent production, associated neither with a birthday nor with a charity. “Mr. Collins has written an odd MeloDrama” called The Lighthouse. “He shewed it to me for our advice, and some suggestions.” Stanfield, almost as if young again, “full of nautical and theatrical ardor, has taken possession of the Schoolroom, and will really paint and make out an illusion of a very fine kind.”36
With himself in the starring role, with the talented regulars in place, with a clamorous demand for seats, Dickens’ expectation of a brilliant success was high. He asked the police to put a man on at his expense each of the three nights “to direct the setting down and taking up of carriages, and to prevent the intrusion of any stragglers into the enclosure before the house.” Performed in “THE SMALLEST THEATRE IN THE WORLD, LESSEE AND MANAGER MR. CRUMMLES,” the play was “perfectly wonderful.” A professional actress, Elizabeth Yates, archly complimented him: “O Mr Dickens what a pity it is you can do anything else!” His energy and restlessness intensified by the excitement, he and the company, after the final performance, “turned to Scotch reels … and danced in the maddest way until five” in the morning. The next day, exhausted though still exhilarated, he expected “the postmen … to sink under the fatigue of delivering letters of enthusiasm from three audiences. They come showering in every hour.”37
ON HIS FORTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY, WITH WALLS OF SNOW “FROM THREE to six feet high on either side,” Dickens saw Gad’s Hill Place again. After a festive banquet in Gravesend, he sauntered, with Beard, Lemon, and Collins, through the country of his childhood. The square stone tower of Rochester Cathedral was visible in the distance through the leafless trees. Rooks flew overhead. The Medway valley was warm in its white silence. Having returned frequently to Kent for day trips and holidays, the walk on the Gravesend Road on February 7, 1855, past the Falstaff Inn and over Gad’s Hill, brought him through the most familiar landscape of his life. This time, though, something was significantly different. Gad’s Hill Place was for sale, “the spot and the very house … literally ‘a dream of my childhood,’” inhabited by the ghosts of Shakespeare and of John Dickens.38 Aware of his patrimony, he imagined that he could be comfortable there. He had never owned property before; his houses had been leased. Like Shakespeare, he could return to his childhood home as a country gentleman. He could fulfill the dream that his father had not been able to achieve. Before leaving Kent, he got the particulars from the business agent. They were formidable but not insurmountable. Until he was ready to live in it himself he could treat it as an investment. The rental income could help pay the purchase cost.
The powerful memories that Gad’s Hill evoked made him receptive to another highly charged talisman from the past. Unexpectedly, he relived an important episode of his youth as intensely as he had when writing David Copperfield. In January, when attempting to create a reading fro
m that novel for his Christmas performance at Birmingham, he had tried to fashion it from material that dealt with Dora and first love, the conflict between romantic passion and the need for an appropriate person to be passionate about. Two evenings following his birthday visit to Gad’s Hill, he paused, while reading at his fireside, to look at the envelopes of “a handful of notes” that were laid down on his table. Since none of them had any personal meaning to him, he returned to his reading. His mind, though, kept “wandering away through so many years…. At last it came into [his] head that it must have been suggested by something in the look of one of those letters.” Suddenly he recognized Maria Beadnell’s familiar handwriting. “Three or four and twenty years vanished like a dream, and I opened [her letter] with the touch of my young friend David Copperfield when he was in love.”39 He was not exaggerating. The effect was overpoweringly dislocating.
The Beadnells had not been altogether out of sight since Maria had rejected him in May 1833. Possibly he, Catherine, and Georgina had been her guests for dinner soon after her marriage to Henry Winter, a businessman, in February 1845. Georgina made that claim years later.40 If it is true, it is a measure of the changes that had occurred in him. In 1845, on the drive back from that putative dinner, he had apparently laughed at his former feelings. In February 1855 he felt overwhelmed by the strong emotions her reappearance provoked. He had not, though, been out of touch with the Beadnell family. As sore a wound as Maria’s rejection had left, he had sufficient warmth for the family to maintain a correspondence with her father, who had apparently found the young Dickens as likable as he had found him inappropriate as a suitor. The circumspect exchange of greetings over the years carried guarded but pleasant regards to George Beadnell’s children. Also, just as occasionally Dickens must have heard something about them in conversations with Letitia and Henry Austin, who remained friendly with the Beadnells, he must certainly have been an occasional topic of conversation, and perhaps regret, among the Beadnells. For whatever the reason, Maria, thirty-five years old at her wedding to a man who had no special distinction of position or wealth, was noticeably late in marrying. In the years of her spinsterhood, Dickens had become famous and rich. The balance of power between them had shifted. It was now she who was writing to him.
His initial response was to an image, a handwriting, a text like David Copperfield, what Maria represented in his feelings rather than what she had been or had become. She was an autobiographical moment, a reconstituted personal fiction come alive at a time when his feelings were desperately in search of a new self-definition in which the past had to play a formative role. If her letter had not unexpectedly come, he would have found another form in which to send himself the message that he needed to have. His restlessness, his dissatisfactions, were rooted in the past. At least part of the explanation for his sensibility in the present focused on some powerful moment of coalescence in his experience as a rejected suitor, including his resolve never to be rejected again, never to be unsuccessful at whatever he did. The deadness that he felt in his cold relationship with his mother had its necessary antidote in the quickening of feeling that he felt in romantic attachments. Those passions in which he could entirely immerse himself were always based on the remembrance that he had never felt more vitally alive than he had in his affair with Maria. To the degree that he associated her rejection of him with his mother’s, he had located an unhealthy aspect of himself, which he was to dramatize in Pip’s relationship with Estella in Great Expectations. To the extent, though, that his heart beat faster when he saw that handwriting, he yearned again for some romantic fulfillment that he felt he had never had. Now, with Maria, he had little to fear. His passion was for himself, not for her.
The next morning, answering her letter, he told her how much he had been moved by hearing from her. “There was something so busy and so pleasant in your letter—so true and cheerful and frank and affectionate.” She could not “more tenderly remember our old days and old friends” than he did. Most of all, though, he told her, her letter “is more touching to me from its good and gentle association with the state of Spring in which I was either more wise or more foolish than I am now.… You so belong to the days when the qualities that have done me most good since, were growing in my boyish heart.… “ That she now had two daughters seemed “a prodigious phenomenon.… What strange stuff all our little stories are made of,” and not necessarily all happy and desirable stuff both in the details of personal history and in the passage of time. Less than a week later, from Paris, where he remembered that Maria Beadnell, “the Angel of my soul … had been sent … to finish her education,” he wrote to her again at length. He had arranged for her letter to be forwarded to him. When she took him up on his offer that he choose some trinkets for her and her daughters while he was in Paris, he was delighted. His response to the rediscovery of Maria was partly romantic flirtation. He had been practicing with Mary Boyle, who had visited him in Boulogne, and he had had the opportunity to practice again the previous winter with Frances Colden, who had been visiting in London, though he had been initially inattentive because of business pressures. His response, though, was mostly a reinforcing of the personal myths by which he lived, for “whatever of fancy, romance, energy, passion, aspiration and determination belong to me,” he wrote to Maria, “I never have separated and never shall separate from the hard-hearted little woman—you—whom it is nothing to say I would have died for, with the greatest alacrity…. It is a matter of perfect certainty to me that I began to fight my way out of poverty and obscurity, with one perpetual idea of you…. I have never been so good a man since, as I was when you made me wretchedly happy. I shall never be half so good a fellow any more.”41
As revealing as all this was, he apparently had little intention, from the first moment he saw that handwriting, of attempting to re-create the old relationship. On the one hand, his tone was confessionally revelatory. On the other, it was reserved, almost secretive, the expression of a man who had the ability to tell without revealing, to create self-protective stories in which the emotional truths and the real messages had to be read between the lines. His passion was all for the past, for what had not been. The satisfactions were redemptive. The wound could be staunched by rewriting the past, or at least filling in what the past had omitted. On his return from Paris, he was followed by a letter in which she claimed that she had indeed loved him all those years ago. She had rejected him only because of parental pressure. It was a message that he was eager to hear. “Though it is so late to read in the old hand what I never read before, I have read it with great emotion, and with the old tenderness softened to a more sorrowful remembrance than I could easily tell you.” If he had known that then, he would have overcome all obstacles. That he knew it now allowed him to take up the challenge of her desire that they become confidants “in perfect innocence and good faith.” For whom, he asked, “can you ever trust if it be not your old lover?”
Still, he did not want “to begin afresh.” He could accept the offer of friendship that she proposed, and their correspondence could be private. But their meetings would have to be public and mediated. “I am a dangerous man to be seen with, for so many people know me.” His comic impulse supported his desire that this was not to be that kind of affair. “At St. Paul’s the Dean and the whole chapter know me. In Paternoster Row of all places, the very tiles and chimney pots know me.” The best procedure would be for Catherine to call on her, and for Maria to return the visit at a time when she knew Catherine would not be at home. They could then have their first meeting privately. Thereafter they would meet as friends among family and friends. “Remember,” he concluded, “I accept all with my whole soul, and reciprocate all.—Ever your affectionate friend.”42
Catherine was persuaded to make the call. Maria soon came to Tavistock House. He probably saw her privately, and then certainly a number of times in company in the next month or so. She had warned him that she was “‘toothless, fat, old and ugly.’” Th
at was a purposeful exaggeration. She was certainly, though, substantially less good-looking. She showed her age, and she was noticeably overweight, looking more like the Catherine of the present than the Maria of the past. Undoubtedly her appearance in the flesh made her less useful to him as a catalyst for remembering and invoking his youth than her appearance in the letter and the spirit. He was not interested in her in the present other than as a momentary sounding board for unresolved needs that she could no more respond to now than she had been able to twenty years before. Though he may not have been frank with himself about that until after he had seen her, his letters, even before their first meeting, are not about her or them but about himself, not about a present relationship but about one that was over long ago. Though he switched momentarily from “My Dear Mrs. Winter” to “My Dear Maria,” the change indicated distance rather than endearment. Under the disguise of a gentle rhetoric he made clear his ultimate message. She was the Maria of his memory. The Maria of the present had only a limited, brief usefulness. By April, he had politely discarded her. She was to make her most vital appearance in parodic form as Flora Finching in the new novel that he had begun to think about and that he started writing in the spring of 1855.