by Fred Kaplan
The contrast between the Flora/Catherines, the comic side of the mothers who devour by neglect, and the Mary/Georginas, the loyal, loving, slim sister-wives, was being sharpened by depression, anger, and rebellion, much of it turned against himself. He had, he felt, neither a satisfactory mother nor a satisfactory wife. He began to believe that his decade-long restlessness, certainly since the mid-1840s, took its impetus from the interaction between his art and his motherlessness. He had no place to rest, certainly no place within himself. While he accepted such distresses as the destiny of his characters, he was not content to accept them as his, and he focused his discontent on the only target he could readily identify—his marriage. Catherine was the obvious victim. In Paris, in early spring 1856, he had the courage of his despair. “I have always felt,” he told Forster, “that I must, please God, die in harness.… However strange it is to be never at rest, and ever trying after something that is never reached, and to be always laden with plot and plan and care and worry, how clear it is that it must be, and that one is driven by an irresistible might until the journey is worked out.… As to repose—for some men there’s no such thing in this life.” There had been a time, though, when things were different, when there had been an emotional harmony in which his restlessness had been balanced by marital and familial pleasures, some past in which neither his mother nor his wife put him into the bleak mood he now felt, the time when the children were young, when Catherine was still his “little mouse,” when he was preoccupied with the struggle for success, fame, and friendship. “The old days—the old days! Shall I ever, I wonder, get the frame of mind back as it used to be then? Something of it perhaps—but never quite as it used to be. I find that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one.”20
The startling news in 1856 that Forster was going to be married provided both intense, almost breathtaking amusement and an ironic counterpoint to his feeling of alienation from Catherine. With Collins, Stone, Stanfield, Macready, and Maclise, who joined him in London in May of that year, he joked almost endlessly about the bluff, hefty, domineering, lifelong bachelor of forty-four marrying a petite widow of thirty-six “with as many thousand pounds as she is years of age.” That Forster would give up editing The Examiner was to be regretted, since “he is one of the most responsible and careful of literary men associated with newspapers.… That he does hustle an unoffending company, sometimes,” was a minor fault. He could always be counted on to do more than justice to his friends. When they argued, he would be forthcoming in the reconciliation. Such arguments were an essential part of the relationship, the result of the differences between them that had made the friendship productive. As Dickens coped with his own frustrations in the next two years with what seemed to Forster unwise, compulsive decisions, he sometimes found his friend’s conservatism unbearable. Often he seemed insufficiently empathetic. When Forster opposed his giving readings for profit, Dickens unkindly concluded that Forster seemed “extraordinarily irrational about it.… His money must have got into his head.”
In his sympathy with Dickens’ unhappiness, about which he knew more than anyone else, Forster urged patience, tolerance, optimism, reminding him of the problems “that might and must often occur to the married condition when it is entered into very young.” Forster had been an intimate of the household for so long that his association with Catherine and the Dickens marriage had a degree of loyalty and respect that Dickens himself hardly felt at this point. Since the late 1830s, Forster had held in his hand the third glass of champagne at birthday parties and anniversary celebrations. He had been Catherine’s guest and friend for over two decades. She had welcomed him into a share of the Dickens domesticity, which had meant much to him. Though not a man to indulge in idealizations, he was completely sincere in telling her thankfully in May 1856 “that I associate you so much with the change that is about to befall me—and that I have never felt so strongly as within the last few months how much of the happiness of past years I owe to you.” There was tactful indirectness in signing the affectionate letter “with increasing wishes and prayers for your continued happiness.”21
In his Paris apartment, which Dickens made a temporary home and a workplace, Catherine was an institutional reality rather than an emotional necessity. Georgina took care of many of the practical daily details. Charley worked at Baring Brothers in London, living at Tavistock House with the Hogarths, who were house-sitting. Walter, Frank, and Alfred were at school in Boulogne. Henry might soon join them. Sydney had lessons at home. The two-year-old “Little Plorn” continued to be his father’s delight. Mamie and Katie, like younger sisters to “Auntie,” took lessons in languages and in the arts of domesticity. Each night at dinner, Dickens, surrounded by “my women,” schooled them all, especially the impressionable children, in the complications of his personality. His dissatisfaction was frequently visible, though usually debited against the account of genius working at a new novel. Like an uneasy patriarch, he kept himself and his family on edge. He felt no urgency to return to London, which he expected to do in the autumn. And there was at least the prospect of the new theatricals, which he began to anticipate.
What most excited, and for a while frustrated, him, though, was the purchase of Gad’s Hill Place. The negotiation proved more complicated and time-consuming than he had anticipated. When he first saw the for-sale sign in February 1855, he imagined that it would soon be his. When he finally paid the purchase money in March 1856, he “turned around to give it to Wills, and said ‘Now isn’t it an extraordinary thing—Friday! I have been nearly drawing it half-a-dozen times, when the lawyers have not been ready, and here it easily comes round upon a Friday, as a matter of course.’” He never doubted that he wanted to buy it. When he saw it in the February snow, he immediately recognized that it was “a dream of my childhood,” connected to his own mythology about his origins as a writer. “I used to look at it as a wonderful mansion (which God knows it is not) when I was a very odd little child with the first shadows of all my books in my head.”22 He associated it with the Shakespearean model for authorship, with the nurturing memories of Rochester and the stable cathedral, with the need to become the success that his father was not. From the summit of the hill “a noble prospect” glowed across all the landscape of the happiest portion of his childhood, the valley of the Medway, the river and Rochester in one direction, the distant Thames and Gravesend in the other, Cobham woods close by.
The delay in purchasing the house resulted partly from the slowness of the legal procedures, partly from his haggling about the price, though with his increased income he could readily afford it. At moments, the negotiations seemed “to be a sort of amateur Chancery suit which will never be settled.” He did not want to overpay, as a matter both of principle and of patrimony. He felt that he needed to keep in mind that his savings were small, that he had a large family for which to provide, and that his earnings depended on his maintaining his reputation, popularity, and health. Previously he had only leased. This was to be a freehold purchase. Wills, who had accidentally discovered, soon after Dickens learned that Gad’s Hill Place was for sale, that it belonged to the writer Lynn Linton, whom he had met at a dinner party and who seemed to him charming, acted as his negotiator-messenger.
In July 1855, the invaluable Henry Austin, his engineer brother-in-law who had supervised the renovations at Tavistock house, offered to evaluate its condition and appraise the prospective purchase. Dickens was grateful for being put “in such complete possession of the facts” about the roofing, water supply, plumbing, foundation, and so on. His commitment unqualified by anything but the price, he immediately began to explore renovations, such as raising the roof to transform the garret into full-size rooms. The owners were asking over £2,000. Though he would give up to £1,750 or £1,800, he empowered Wills to begin with an offer of £1,500. He doubted that they would take even the larger sum. He felt, though, that he could not “afford to buy the place” for his “own occupation, or it
might be worth more to me. I can only regard it as an investment, and test it by the return it would give to me in money, for so much money laid out.”23 By November, with the negotiations still unresolved, he became momentarily adamant about his offer, partly because Austin had advised that “£1,800 would be too much.” He agreed, if Austin would concur, to offer £1,700, then £1,750. “If he does not,” he told Wills, “let it go, since they won’t take our money.”
But wanting the house too much to take the chance of losing it, a few days later he offered the higher sum, which was soon accepted. Rather than use savings, he sensibly borrowed the money from the compliant Bradbury and Evans, to be repaid from future earnings. He took advice from Wills and Forster, but he had a well-known solicitor, Frederic Ouvry, draw up the contracts. He hoped to complete the purchase by the end of January 1856. His plan was to renovate modestly, complete the furnishing, and rent it as an investment, at least for the time being. He would occupy it himself only if he could not find a tenant to replace the “old Tory” Reverend Joseph Hindle, who had lived there for twenty-six years and whose wish to stay until the lease expired at the end of March 1857 he readily agreed to. As the negotiations drew to a conclusion, he decided that he would occupy the house himself for the summer of 1857 to have the pleasure of living in it and improving it before he let it out. With potential tenants in mind, he queried Miss Coutts and then Frank Stone, and wanted the word spread that he would soon have a fine property available for a suitable tenant. When he went down with Wills in mid-February, “the country, against every disadvantage of season,” seemed beautiful. “The house is so old fashioned, cheerful, and comfortable, that it is really pleasant to look at.” On March 14, 1856, the purchase was finally completed. He gasped at the amount of money paid. But he was excited. Next March “we will dash in with our improvements and furnish the place … occupying it for that summer.”24 The house became of inestimable value to him, and his last home. He never rented it to anyone.
When his Paris stay was over in May 1856, he returned briefly to Tavistock House, still occupied by the Hogarths and Charley, where the dust lay an inch thick on the first floor. He was irritated by the presence of his in-laws and by the dirty condition of the house, transferring his anger at Catherine to her parents, though he had always previously felt affection for George Hogarth. “Getting books and papers put away,” he wallowed in the dust for four hours, describing plans for his and Collins’ new play to Stanfield, who hung “out of the centre back-window of the schoolroom, inventing wonderful effects.” Soon he had “purified every room from the roof to the hall,” as if the house had been defiled, and celebrated with his friends over a bowl of punch (Catherine was in Paris, soon to go with Georgina, the children, and the servants to Boulogne). “Headache!” he said the night after, “there is no such thing in my punch.” In late May, as the country celebrated the end of the Crimean War, he stood with some friends at the top of St. Paul’s and remarked, “what a wonderful sight Illuminated and Fireworked London was.”25 He then joined his family in Boulogne, the last summer he was to spend at any resort town. There was a great deal of Household Words business to manage, a great deal of Little Dorrit still to be written. At the Villa des Moulineaux again, surrounded by roses and geraniums, with “sweet peas nearly seven feet high,” whose “blossoms rustle in the sun, like Peacocks’ tails,” he was absorbed in work. His spirits were high with anticipation. “We have honey-suckle that would be the finest in the world if that were not at Gad’s Hill.”
Invitations brought brief visits from Stanfield, Benjamin Webster, Collins’ good friend Edward Pigott, Shirley Brooks, a young writer and literary journalist, Lady Blessington’s two nieces, and Mary Boyle. The Reverend Chauncey Hare Townshend stayed close by. Despite the latter’s jewelry collection and expertise, when Mary bought “an emerald ring for a franc and a half” he was completely taken in and “admired the mock emerald as something quite priceless.”26 A warm invitation to Hans Christian Andersen, whom Dickens had met in London nine years before, made another visit likely, perhaps the next summer. The Danish writer idolized Dickens, who responded gallantly to his “dear and worthy Hans” with an affection that far exceeded any actual friendship between them. At the moment, it was a relationship of idealization and expectation. They had spent only a few hours together. The premier visitor, though, constantly expected and finally appearing in mid-August, was Wilkie Collins. The entire family, and particularly Mamie and Katie, wanted the new play, The Frozen Deep, written immediately. Though the initial idea had been Dickens’, the first draft was to be Collins’. Ideas had already been exchanged, the outline was clear, new effects were being improvised, difficult turns of plot and character resolved. The two girls were to have starring roles. Georgina and Janet Wills had committed themselves to parts. Mark Lemon was to have an important one. The chief supporting role was Collins’, and Dickens was to be the star. There were no plans for Catherine to participate.
By the end of August, the play, which Collins had been working on since April, was mostly completed. For a few weeks the leaves had been “tinged with yellow, and the berries … turning red.” They had “already begun to talk sometimes” of their “return home early in October.” Suddenly, precipitately, at the beginning of the fourth week of August, a month before his lease was up, Dickens rushed his sons, with Catherine, back to London. He had had an urgent warning from a friend in Paris, Dr. Joseph Olliffe, the medical consultant to the British Embassy, about a typhoid epidemic in Boulogne. It had broken out in June. The townspeople, though, had suppressed the news “for the sake of their own interests.” Its initial symptom was “malignant sore throat,” followed by brain fever. In June, twenty children had died. “Being far out of town,” they had “only heard vaguely about the disease.” When Katie developed a cough and lost her appetite, she and Mamie were sent home. Fortunately, it turned out to be only the whooping cough. Though Mr. Gibson, his sons’ headmaster, determined that there was “no reason for postponing the opening of the school,” Dickens decided to keep his children in London until he felt absolutely certain. Death, though at a slight remove, suddenly made Boulogne seem desolate and wretched. The popular dramatist and companionable member of the Punch staff Gilbert à Beckett had become ill at his boardinghouse. The visiting Douglas Jerrold, a good friend of Beckett’s, brought Dickens daily reports. They walked about the garden together, “talking about these sudden strikings down of the men we loved in the midst of us.” While Beckett raved, his son died in the next room. His friends hoped that Beckett would rally, “but he sank and died, and never even knew that the child had gone before him.” On September 3, Dickens was in “all the confusion and bewilderment of moving” to England, to be followed the next day by Georgina and the servants.27
COVENT GARDEN THEATRE HAD BURNED TO THE GROUND IN EARLY March 1856. From Paris, Dickens lamented that “such a Fire should have come off in my absence,” a little less than a week before he was due in London with number five of Little Dorrit. He had mixed feelings, both for having missed such a fiery spectacle and for what the theatre had embodied. A century of history and decades of personal memory smoldered in its ruins, the theatre in which Macready had acted triumphantly, in which the novelist had for over two decades seen Shakespeare performed, opera sung, melodrama declaimed. The moment he reached London, four days after the fire, he went to see the ashes. Though the “audience part and the stage were so tremendously burnt out” and nothing remained “but bricks and smelted iron lying on a great black desert, the theatre still looked so wonderfully like its old self grown gigantic that I never saw so strange a sight.” The magic of imagination and transformation still hovered in the smoking shards. The roof had come down bodily. The fragments were “like an old Babylonic pavement, bright rays tessellating the black ground, sometimes in pieces so large that I could make out the clothes in the Travatore.”28
He had, though, his own living theatre at Tavistock House. The impetus for the play that h
e and Collins conceived that same month came from Dickens, who, covering all the costs of its production, saw nothing incompatible in producing, directing, and acting while writing a novel and editing Household Words. With theatre and a theatre community, the solitary hours at his desk could be balanced by company and communal creation. Personal frustration could be forgotten or even discharged. He was to have the unique opportunity of producing and directing the premier performance of a play that he himself had helped to write. As co-author, he would have control over the script. The words as well as the manner in which the actors recited would embody his vision. The roles would be created with the casting already in mind. The setting and lighting would be created while the script was being written. All aspects of the production would be enhanced by a cohesiveness of a sort that he had never had the chance to experience before. This was to be an act of creation in which text and performance would be a unified expression of his view of human nature.