Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  In April, he stayed at a hotel in Gravesend, to be closer to the work at Gad’s Hill, which, he crowed, “is full of the ingenious devices of the inimitable writer.… If you don’t like it,” he joked to Miss Coutts, “I shall set it on fire—particularly as it is insured.” Invitations soon went out to friends to come to visit him just “an hour and half from town” at his “good little old fashioned breezy, shady, sunny, leafy place.” On May 11,1857, he finished Little Dorrit. A week later, triumphantly, always at his best at a party, he took a “small and noble army” of friends and relations down with him for a cold-meat dinner to inaugurate Gad’s Hill Place.39 It was the first piece of property that any member of the Dickens family, past or present, had ever owned.

  THOUGH THE SUMMER OF 1857 BEGAN WITH QUIET DAYS, IT SOON WAS transformed into a whirl of activity and a decisive crisis. The crisis had come for which Dickens had unconsciously spent years preparing. The contentment existed only on the surface, the glow from the green landscape that he surveyed from his Kentish hilltop. Beneath it were bitter memories and the vague hope of radical change. In early May, before going to Gad’s Hill, he went to the Borough to see if he could find “any ruins of the Marshalsea.” The visit had nothing to do with Little Dorrit, which he was within a few days of finishing. “Found a great part of the original building.… Found the rooms that have been in my mind’s eye in the story. Found … a very small boy, who … told me how it all used to be.… He was right enough.… There is a room there—still standing, to my amazement—that I think of taking!” It was the room in which he had watched his father and the other prisoners signing a petition. But “the spikes are gone, and the wall is lowered, and anybody can go out now who likes to go, and is not bedridden.”40 It was a wish for repossession and transformation. That room in the Marshalsea now represented freedom, a place into which he could come and from which he could go at will.

  At the end of May, he attended a testimonial dinner at Greenwich for a new friend, W. H. Russell, the foreign correspondent for the Times, whose dispatches exposing the maladministration of the Crimean War he had admired. With Russell and Jerrold, he took advantage of the lovely day to go down by steamboat, particularly to have a good view of the Great Eastern, which was under construction. When they met at Leicester Square, Jerrold seemed slightly ill, having been sick the previous three days, attributing it to “the inhaling of white paint from his study window.” Suddenly he “fell into a white, hot, sick perspiration, and had to lean against the railings.” He felt much better, though, on the boat trip. In Greenwich, they took a ride in an open carriage. Though he was very quiet at dinner, Jerrold had recovered some of his good spirits, sipping some medicinal water and wine. Before they said good-bye—Dickens got a ride up to London with Leech—he invited him to visit Gad’s Hill, and Jerrold assured him that he was all right now. Dickens, though, thought that he still looked sick. The next morning Jerrold was so ill that he could not get out of bed. He rallied slightly, but had a relapse and died two days later, “‘at peace with all the world’… and asking to be remembered to friends.” If he had offended anyone with his sharp tongue, he asked to be forgiven.

  Dickens at this point knew only that Jerrold had been ill and was better. But he dreamed on the night of his friend’s death that Jerrold came and showed him something that he had written, eager that he should read it. He “could not make out a word of it,” and “woke in great perplexity, with its strange character quite fresh in my sight.” The next day, coming up by railroad from Gad’s Hill to London, he heard a passenger, unfolding his newspaper, say to another, “‘Douglas Jerrold is dead.’”41

  Dickens’ relationship with the Punch wit had not been a particularly intimate one. The tiny, semicrippled Jerrold, from a pinched, lower-middle-class background, was a waspish, sensitive man, with a sharp, sometimes cruel tongue. He was also generous, loyal, and often quite tender. He had flourished as a Punch raconteur, as an editor, and as a comic writer of a considerable but minor talent, best known for his successful popular play Black-eyed Susan. He and Dickens had argued impersonally but sharply in 1849 about capital punishment, which Jerrold opposed under any circumstances, whereas Dickens had been willing to settle for the banning of executions in public. After months of estrangement, they found themselves dining separately but in the same room at a club. Jerrold “openly wheeled his chair around, stretched out both his hands in a most engaging manner, and said aloud, with a bright and loving face … ‘For God’s sake, let us be friends again! Life’s not long enough for this!’”42

  Even before the funeral, Dickens began organizing a series of memorial benefits for the widow and children. Far from destitute, the family was not in want, though it had not been left in the comfort that Jerrold’s prominent career initially led his friends to expect. He had been “in the course of making a good provision for them, and would have succeeded in doing so, if his life had been spared a little longer.” Later, “young Jerrold,” whom Dickens thought “just contemptible,” objected to what he felt was a slur on his father’s and his family’s honor by an exaggeration of the family’s condition. Such ingratitude made Dickens “sick at heart on the subject,” though he was determined “to let the whole matter rest until the Resurrection Day.” His insistent generosity was most probably partly an expression of his need to disrupt his summer, to be active if not frenetic again, to find an outlet for his “superfluous fierceness,” of which there was none more appropriate for him than the stage and fraternal charity.43 Pressing into service Jerrold’s friends in the theatre, Dickens had the satisfaction of seeing them undertake a benefit performance of Black-eyed Susan. He committed himself to two readings and at least two performances of The Frozen Deep. He was not yet ready to forsake Richard Wardour.

  Dickens was also, perhaps, looking for an excuse to neglect his long-awaited guest, Hans Christian Andersen, “tall, gaunt, and rather ungainly,” who had arrived at Gad’s Hill on June 11, 1857. He had come to England expressly to see Dickens, with the promise that “you will have me with you a week or a fortnight, and … I shall not inconvenience you too much.” Nothing could have been more of an understatement. Andersen idolized Dickens; but, in return, he needed lavish praise, attention, and the assurance that his work was admired and he loved. For Andersen, there could never be “enough sugar in the tea.” Dickens was too busy, too self-centered, too superficially committed to supply these reassurances, though probably no amount of attention would have been sufficient. To the increasing irritation of everyone in the family, except the frequently absent paterfamilias, Andersen’s visit became twice the length that had been intended. In the continental fashion, he needed to be shaved each morning. When the boys refused to do it, he had to be driven into and back from Rochester. Probably he thought walking socially demeaning. His poor English was both held against him and used as a justification for neglect. With the children, his malapropisms, gaucheness, and egoism prompted occasional bad manners. He found the boys pleasant companions sometimes, but mostly insolent. Georgina was “piquante, lively and gifted, but not kind,” Catherine beautiful, though plump and “rather indolent.” Mary, who resembled her mother, and Kate, who has “quite Dickens’s face,” seemed to him the centerpieces of “a harmonious household.” One evening, “Mary and Miss Hogarth played from Lucia,” the next day they played “the whole of Don Juan.”44

  Dickens did little for his guest except to be companionable at dinner, to chat with him some evenings as they walked about Gad’s Hill, watching the sun glitter “upon the windows in Rochester,” and to console him when his new novel was harshly reviewed. Catherine apparently found him pleasant, even soothing, company, responding warmly to his affection. Blinded by his self-centeredness and ignorance of English patterns, Andersen could hardly see, let alone have a clue to, the tensions of the household. He admired Catherine, praising “a certain soft womanly repose and reserve about her”; but when he occasionally saw her crying and once saw her “come out of a room toget
her with her mother with her eyes full of tears,” he made no suppositions about the marriage until later events forced interpretation on what he had seen. When he left, Dickens cruelly wrote on the mirror over the dressing table in the guest room that “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family AGES!” Actually, he had stayed part of the time with other friends, particularly in St. John’s Wood with Bentley, who was his publisher, part of the time at Tavistock House. He visited the Crystal Palace, “like a fairy city,” and attended the theatre. He disliked, though, the “horrid dust, heat, smoke, and noise” of London. Gad’s Hill, especially with Dickens there, was a place where “dew-spangled gossamers lay spread like veils over meadows and ditches.” And the visit had been extended when Dickens begged him “most charmingly not to go before I had seen the performance they were giving for Jerrold’s widow … that he, his wife and daughters were so glad to have me with them.” Before he left in early August, Andersen acknowledged that this “highlight of my life” could not have been easy for the family, and he humbly asked his friend to “forget in friendship the dark side which proximity may have shown you in me.”45

  In his glory again as Richard Wardour, Dickens performed his own dark role brilliantly. Andersen was astounded. Dickens “showed himself to be a quite remarkable actor, so free from all those mannerisms one finds in England and France in tragic parts. It was so true, so natural … the death-scene so moving that I burst into tears at it.” The farce went as well as the tragedy. In the worshiping Andersen’s eyes, Dickens was “so rich in humor and fun that it was a fresh revelation.” This particular performance, on July 4, 1857, was a private one before the queen and her guests, including the king of Belgium, Prince Albert, and the prince of Prussia, for whom “the entrance and stairs were beautifully decked with flowers.” The queen had agreed to attend at the Gallery of Illustration when Dickens respectfully declined to put the play on at Windsor. Her appearance was a compromise between her desire to see the play, after he had called her attention to it, without surrendering her principle of never formally supporting private charities through public appearances, and his reluctance to put it on at the court, mainly because he felt it inappropriate for his daughters to act where they had not been officially introduced. To the delighted queen’s invitation to come to her box to accept her thanks, he replied that he could not, since he was in his “farce dress.” He did not see himself, as a matter of self-definition as well as an assertion of the dignity of literature, appearing in makeup offstage. When she tried a second time, he “again hoped her Majesty would have the kindness to excuse my presenting myself in a costume and appearance that were not my own.”46

  Apparently she did, and so did the audiences in London on July 11, July 25, and August 8. Those who managed to get tickets to see the performances, which were wildly praised in the press and by word of mouth, had the excitement of seeing well-known literary figures performing what had become a national ritual in which glamour, art, and charity were united. After the royal performance, the company had an exultant champagne supper at the Household Words office. After the first public performance, they reveled at Albert Smith’s large suburban house at Walham Green, everyone in evening dress feasting in a tent on the green lawn in the afternoon, then drinking iced claret on an “Italian warm” evening. At St. Martin’s Hall, on the 24th, before two thousand people whose “enthusiasm was something awful,” Dickens read A Christmas Carol. Before the middle of July, he received an invitation to follow up another such reading on July 31 in Manchester with one or two performances of The Frozen Deep. He had not himself thought of doing it there. He would, though, “if a sum of any importance could be gained” that would move him closer in a quantum leap to his goal of raising two thousand pounds.47

  But there were significant obstacles. He particularly feared the Free Trade Hall was so large that, in such “a wilderness of space,” the stage effects would be obscured and his amateur actresses would not have the power of voice to make themselves heard. “We are committed to nothing,” he assured Miss Coutts, who had been sour on his theatricals for decades. He was under pressure, though, to make a decision, and his inclination, despite his exhaustion—”it is rather hard work, after a long book”—was for action and engagement. He decided on July 25 that he “would today discuss our engaging actresses.” There was precedent for doing so. In Montreal, in 1842, for the sake of propriety, he had replaced Catherine and the other amateur ladies with professionals. The moral climate in regard to acting as a profession had changed somewhat. His own feelings had changed considerably. Now it was not a question of propriety but of practicality. During the intermission in his reading in Manchester on the thirty-first he made the decision. “Some of the foremost people” urged him to do The Frozen Deep “in their city.” They “were absolutely certain of the success of two consecutive nights in the Free Trade Hall.… If careful calculations should prove the likelihood of a good result,” he would do it. “We went into them immediately after the readings—worked them out—and got the advertisement into the next day’s paper, before going to bed.” As he had already determined, the “Free Trade Hall is too large and difficult, and altogether too public for my girls. So we shall take down actresses in their stead.”48

  AT GAD’S HILL, EARLY IN AUGUST 1857, HE ATTENDED TO TWO problems related to the Manchester performances. He did not want to have to perform in the farce immediately after the “agitation and exertion” of playing Wardour. Would Frank Stone relieve him of the burden? Dickens, embarrassed, had to resume the obligation when the Manchester people and Arthur Smith, Albert’s brother; whom he had begun to rely on for business advice, urged upon him “in the strongest manner that they were afraid of the change.… There was a danger of it being considered disrespectful.” On August 2, Dickens asked Emmeline Compton, a professional actress in semiretirement who had acted in his amateur theatricals, to play the role of Lucy Crayford, “Compton and babies permitting.” They did not. He then consulted theatre friends, including the manager of the Haymarket, John Baldwin Buckstone, who was also the author of Uncle John, the farce accompanying The Frozen Deep. He needed three competent professionals on short notice. Perhaps on Buckstone’s recommendation, probably on the advice of Alfred Wigan, who managed the Olympic Theatre, he immediately hired Frances Ternan and two of her three daughters, Maria and Ellen.49

  After reminding Wills to have “the ladies parts in the 1st and 3rd acts … immediately copied,” in the next two weeks he rehearsed them for hours and hours.50 To his delight, they were not only thorough professionals, part of an acting family whose commitment to the stage had begun in the latter part of the previous century, but charming people. Frances Ternan’s father had worked as a prompter at the Theatre Royal in York. His wife, a minor actress, had a moderately successful career whose descent she alleviated by devoting herself to the rise of her infant prodigy, Frances, who, as Fanny Jarman, had a series of starring provincial roles in the 1820s and 1830s. In 1834, Frances married the handsome Irish actor Thomas Ternan, whom Macready worked with and disliked. Ternan’s career did not go well. Under the strain of a failing career and a growing family of young daughters whom their mother began to train for the stage, Ternan went from disappointment to depression to despair. He last performed in 1844. When he attempted suicide, he was placed in a mental home, where in 1846 the impoverished actor died. Macready insisted on helping the family financially, and he also offered work. Supporting her three daughters and herself, Frances Ternan now acted in supporting roles to Macready. Most likely, Dickens saw her in Shakespeare or in Virginius.

  Frances Ternan’s daughters could not escape the family fate. The eldest, Fanny, born in 1835, the year before Dickens’ marriage, became a minor child star. With an attractive singing voice, she soon aspired to opera, which she pursued until she gave that up for writing fiction. She had a sharp mind, varied talents, and a distaste for the ordinary stage. Born in 1837, Maria joined Fanny in their joint deb
ut as professional actresses in March 1840, and in 1842 the third daughter, three-year-old Ellen, made her debut. Unlike her two sisters, Maria, whom Dickens remembered seeing perform when she was a little child, would remain on the stage into the 1860s. By the mid-1850s, Frances, wanting a stable life in London for herself and her daughters, had given up touring. Fanny had recently begun to sing professionally. Further training would be necessary. Maria was successful in small comedy roles with Charles Kean at the Olympic. The least theatrical and stage-assertive member of the family, Ellen made her adult debut at the age of eighteen in April 1857. In skimpy male attire, she played Hippomenes in an extravaganza called Atalanta, by Frank Talfourd, Thomas Noon Talfourd’s son. Having known and liked Frank since his infancy, Dickens may have been at the performance at the Haymarket, and his friend Buckstone may have introduced him to the young actress, who is reputed to have been in tears, embarrassed by her costume.51