by Fred Kaplan
There were ineffective efforts at mediation. Georgina tried. The differences, though, were beyond her powers of amelioration, let alone reconciliation. Her own temperament and loyalty were more inclined to Dickens, who had made himself the center of her life, than to Catherine, who could not effectively compete with him for children, family, or friends, even for the loyalty of her own sister. Some of her lassitude over the years may have been an effort to make a passive virtue out of unavoidable defeat. He was perfectly capable of insisting on managing everything himself, and then blaming Catherine for being dependent on him. Aware of the estrangement, the Hogarths tried to reconcile their daughter and son-in-law. Dickens’ resentment of his in-laws had increased in tandem with his anger at Catherine. They seemed another family burden, an exploitation, a cannibalizing of his substance, even the more painful because he had at times encouraged their dependency. He did not want to hear the family’s Scottish accent ever again. Probably the reticent George Hogarth did little more than keep his fingers crossed. Dickens had never liked the elder Georgina Hogarth. Her efforts to rally her daughter both doubled Catherine’s tearful, irritating presence and strengthened his detestation of both of them. The Hogarths were in no position to help their daughter. When, in February 1858, Catherine wrote to Miss Coutts for help in finding a job for her brother Edward, whose unemployment was “a serious and anxious thing,” Dickens’ anger flared. He was being used again. “I hope you will forgive her,” he told Miss Coutts, “more freely and readily than I do.”3
In November 1857, he sent Collins the little he had done of the new Christmas story on which they were collaborating. “Hope you are all right at last?” He himself was dismal, alternating between fantasies of escape and episodes of depression. Not even hard work was sufficient relief. The Christmas number, “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners,” which he had “planned with great care” and of which he had written two of the three chapters, was an effort to celebrate “some of the best qualities of the English character that have been shewn in India.” His depiction of the natives, displaced from India to the South Pacific, was bitterly racist, as were his many private comments on British enemies in the Orient in these years of the India Mutiny and the Chinese wars. The heart of the story, though, was a personal fantasy that dramatized variants of himself as St. George rescuing from a devouring dragon a slim, blond English beauty, who, as Mary Hogarth had, lives with her sister and brother-in-law. The narrator, much beneath Lady Maryon’s station, devotes his life to protecting the woman he loves. He is contented that she be happy in another man’s deserving arms as long as he may continue to serve her. One of the ways in which Dickens could serve Ellen was through the power of his influence, his friendships. In October, he had expressed his appreciation to Buckstone for employing her at the Haymarket Theatre. “I need hardly tell you that my interest in the young lady does not cease with the effecting of this arrangement, and that I shall always regard your taking of her and remembering her, as an act of personal friendship to me. On the termination of her present engagement, I hope you will tell me, before you tell her, what you see for her, ‘coming in the future.’”4
Whatever he could envision of his own future, apparently he imagined Ellen playing an important role in it. Whatever the combination of daughter, sister, lover, and wife his romantic fantasies and his lifelong female archetypes created, his emotional commitment probably was strengthened by his sense of the obstacles that had to be overcome. “I don’t like the Realities except when they are unattainable—then, I like them of all things.” At this point, he could hardly put the obstacles in concrete terms. At times he found it easier to express himself as if he were being a father to a fatherless child, a protector and friend of the family. In March 1858, he responded to a request from Richard Bentley that he had no influence with theatre managers. If he had “any really serviceable influence in such wise,” Dickens told Bentley, “there are claims upon it which would go before all others and exclude all others.”5 Dickens’ attempts to advance Ellen’s and her sisters’ careers had some of the urgency of his efforts for his own children. But he was not a man who needed or wanted more children. Using his influence for Ellen’s advantage could not have been misunderstood by his friends. His own confusions were understandable.
Through the fall and winter of 1857–58, he struggled to get his work done. He found it difficult to sleep. When awake, he could not keep to any one task. He did keep up with his Household Words chores, but there he had Wills, Morley, and Collins to rely on. He fulfilled his usual pattern of long walks and private dinners, and managed to maintain an air of business and social normalcy. Occasionally, though, domestic desperation and romantic obsession burst through, especially when writing at length to old friends. A few of them, and certainly his family, knew of his distress. His association with Ellen was not hidden, only disguised. He missed Bryan Procter’s birthday party in November for the first time in years, for “a special, made, engagement—not to be broken.” Worst of all, he found it difficult to write. Much of the energy for writing “Perils” came from the imposition of immediate fantasy onto his restlessness. Also, the Household Words deadline imposed an unavoidable discipline that not even he could escape. After it was done, he felt in the Richard Wardour mood again. At the end of January 1858, he discussed with Forster his “growing inclinations of a fitful and undefined sort … to fall to work on a new book.” If he could start now and work on through the summer, “the anxious toil … would have its neck well broken before beginning to publish, next October or November.” He had a possible title, “One of These Days.” But he was ambivalent, indecisive. “I had better not worry my worried mind for a while.… I think it would be of no use if I did, for I couldn’t settle to one occupation.”6
The first weeks of 1858 passed with an absence that those in his immediate circle could not avoid noticing. For the first time in years, he had neither the desire nor the energy to organize Twelfth Night theatricals in honor of Charley’s birthday. He made improvements at Gad’s Hill, yet he did them almost mechanically. “I have no interest in the place,” he told Forster on New Year’s Day. Against his better judgment, he had made commitments long before to read A Christmas Carol for charity, unable to resist the flattery and the challenge. He read three times in January 1858, in Rochester, Coventry, and Bristol, where an observer noticed that “his hair had been thinned upon his head, and the lines have been deepened upon his face.…” He had also committed himself to read in Edinburgh in April. In December 1857, though, he had told his old friend Arthur Ryland, a wealthy Birmingham businessman, that he could not read in Birmingham “this Christmas.… I have nothing to read.” He did not want to repeat A Christmas Carol. “My work in the summer for the Jerrold Fund—and very hard work indeed, it was—completely deprived me of the opportunity I had expected to have, of getting some new reading together.… I have not a chance of getting to the work of considering any of my larger books; and when I look at your letter again, I drift away, bodily, out to sea. You know I don’t want the will. But what am I to do without the power?”7
His explanation to Ryland was mostly candid. He had for some time desired to create readings from his novels, particularly from David Copperfield, and he had not done so. He already had more commitments than he wanted. In addition, the idea of doing readings on a more extensive scale for his own profit still simmered. It would be foolish to take on more charity readings (though he could not tell that to Ryland) at a time when that idea was becoming increasingly attractive. And he was tired, certainly depressed. The dark winter months were unusually difficult. He did find the energy in February to fulfill his promise to preside at a dinner to raise funds for the new Hospital for Sick Children on Great Ormond Street. He gave a lengthy, moving speech, invoking a neglected infant he had seen in an egg box in Edinburgh years ago, asking “why, in the name of a gracious God, such things should be!” With unconscious resonances of his own childhood neglect always available to him, he
could summon energy on that topic no matter what his resources otherwise. In March, all his misery seemed focused on one source. “The domestic unhappiness remains so strong upon me that I can’t write, and (waking) can’t rest, one minute. I have never known a moment’s peace or content since the last night of The Frozen Deep. I do suppose that there never was a man so seized and rended by one spirit. In this condition though nothing can alter it.”8
What was the “one spirit”? Was it hatred of his life with Catherine? Was it love of Ellen Ternan? Was it seemingly irresolvable conflict and confusion, for which he had always had so little tolerance? Though the answer is not forthcoming, the condition was intensely felt. He responded to it characteristically. Better to consume himself in outward action than in immobilizing introspection. He had a stage at hand. He had been preparing himself to give public readings for his own profit for many years. Ample precedent existed for public lectures by distinguished literary people, like Carlyle and Thackeray, who had been well paid for reading from their own writings. Previously he had acceded to Forster’s objections to his idea that he do a reading series for profit. His own desires and reservations, though, had been expressed in comic form, a sure sign of his seriousness. Anyway, his preference was for acting rather than for reading, and it remained that. But professional acting seemed incompatible with his career as a writer and troublesome to his hard-earned status as a gentleman. Public readings from his own works were less dangerous.
In September 1857, before going to Cumberland, he had again raised the idea. Forster remained opposed, primarily on the grounds of the dignity of literature. Going onstage seemed too much like going to the public with hat in hand. Probably Forster also had in mind that the energy expended on the stage would be lost to literature. With the success of Household Words and royalty income from copyrights, the financial justification seemed hardly compelling. Conditioned by a lifetime of insecurity, Dickens had put it as a monetary proposition, connecting it to the high cost of purchasing Gad’s Hill. Forster’s opposition was based partly on his own long-standing ill health having made him cautious about wasteful expenditures of energy, partly on the scars he still felt from many bitter years of ambivalent social standing. Also, his profitable marriage had made him less sensitive to Dickens’ financial anxiety.
If Dickens had any self-protective conservatism, it was only about the status of the literary profession. In March 1858, he argued persistently against his friend’s strongly stated objections. Forster worried that readings would put an additional strain on his marriage. Dickens, though, urged him to consider it as a totally separate subject that could have no effect on what was essentially a dead relationship. He wanted advice “apart from all personal likings and dislikings and solely with a view to its effect on that particular relation (personally affectionate and like no other man’s) … between me and the public.” In spite of Dickens’ urgent request for guidance, it is likely that he was well on his way toward making up his mind. As a favor to the author, he had just spent a stultifying evening, exerting himself not to fall asleep, listening to a minor playwright, Westland Marston, read “a very bad play.” Afterward, at Tavistock House, over cigars with Wilkie Collins, Dickens “fell into a chair with such a sudden relief from the oppressive bottling of a cask of absurdity through three long hours” that he laughed himself “into hysterics.”9 What Marston did so badly, he could do superlatively well.
After a brilliantly successful reading in Edinburgh in late March (he never tired of emphasizing how successful his readings were) Dickens had made up his mind to go ahead. For months, in a state of “energetic restlessness,” he had been “devising all sorts of things.” As much as he desired to, he could not be Richard Wardour again upon the acting stage, with the “transitory satisfaction of sending my very heart out of my body.… It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together, in the palm of one’s hand.” It was not, then, mainly a question of money. “The mere physical effort and change of the Readings,” he told Collins, “would be good, as another means of bearing” his marital situation. He seemed unable to do anything else that was productive. After consulting Miss Coutts, whom he reported not at all dismayed by the idea, though she had always opposed his theatrical activity, on March 15 he raised it as a business proposition to Evans. How would such readings influence the sales of his next book? “If it had any … at all, would it be likely to be of a weakening or a strengthening kind?” He put it to him as if he had already made up his mind. After his last benefit reading on April 15, 1858, he would give in May and June a course of four or six readings at St. Martin’s Hall in London and then “in August, September and October, in the Eastern Counties, the West of England, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Scotland. I should read from 35 to 40 times,” and afterward return to those places where it had been successful. “By March or April a very large sum of money would be cleared and Ireland would be still untouched; not to speak of America where I believe I could make (if I could resolve to go there) ten thousand pounds.”10 Probably Evans did not demur. It could only increase the sale of books. If he had, it would have made no difference.
To Forster’s objections, Dickens granted that the question was “a balance of doubts.” No one felt more deeply the honor of the literary calling. “But … do you consider that the public exhibition of oneself takes place equally, whosoever may get the money? And have you any idea that at this moment … half the public at least supposes me to be paid …? Out of the twenty or five-and-twenty letters a week that I get about Readings, twenty will ask at what price?” When he returned from Edinburgh, where he had been given a lovely cup to the applause of two thousand people, he confessed that all the rational arguments were unavailing. “My determination is all but taken.” Of course he would not do it unless there was the opportunity for immense profit—he was a professional man, with large expenses. With a collapsing marriage and the possible expense of separate homes, perhaps even new dependents, of course he would need every penny he could earn. But he had to make some change anyway. The emotional pattern of his life was unbearable. “I must do something, or I shall wear my heart away. I can see no better thing to do that is half so hopeful in itself, or half so well suited to my restless state.”11
Throughout April 1858 “a crowd of cares” pursued him. He kept as best he could to his usual activities and away from Catherine, eliminating her from invitations he accepted with the excuse that she hardly ever dined out. On April 29, he walked “rather stiffly, right shoulder well forward,” with a geranium in his buttonhole and his gloves in his hand, to the front of the platform of a crowded St. Martin’s Hall. There was “a roar of cheering that might have been heard at Charing Cross.” The most popular author of his generation, whose words and face were a household vision in the English-speaking world, found himself basking alone in the spotlight of a curiosity and adulation so strong that it was as if audience and author had been preparing a lifetime for such a mutual apotheosis.
There were some preliminaries to dispatch. These were his friends, his supporters, his lifeblood, if not intimate at least precious companions. He had an intuitive sense of what was the right thing in their relationship. He owed them an explanation. At an expense of time and money, he told them, he had for years been giving readings for charity. Under the pressure of more requests than he could fulfill, he had either to give up reading altogether or to make it a regular part of his professional life. He had satisfied himself that “it can involve no possible compromise of the credit and independence of literature,” that “whatever brings a public man and his public face to face, on terms of mutual confidence and respect is a good thing,” and that he already knew from experience how helpful such readings were in “strengthening those relations—I may almost say of personal friendship—which it is my great privilege and pride, as it is my great responsibility, to hold with a multitude of persons who will never hear my voice or see my face.… I proceed to read this little book, quit
e as composedly as I might proceed to write it, or to publish it any other way.”12 He opened The Cricket on the Hearth, and began to read.
ON THE MORNING OF MAY 10, 1858, HE TOLD HIS ELDEST SON THAT HE and Catherine had decided to live separately. The stunned young man, taken entirely by surprise, was the only one of the children to be faced with a choice, perhaps because he was the eldest, perhaps because he was a male, perhaps because his father feared criticism if Catherine had none of her children living with her. He could either maintain his residence with his father or live with his mother. The rest of the children would stay with their father at Tavistock House and Gad’s Hill Place, since to allow Catherine to have more than one child would undermine his claim that the separation was justified partly because of her incompetence. To others, he implied that Charley was the only one of the children willing to live with her. Clearly, though, it was his son’s decision. Later, Dickens persuaded himself and repeatedly claimed that he had generously determined that their eldest son would live with his mother, as an expression of his own fairness, generosity, and concern. That afternoon, Charley told him “that I am afraid I did not completely make myself clearly understood to you.… Don’t suppose that in making my choice, I was actuated by any feeling of preference for my mother to you. God knows I love you dearly, and it will be a hard day for me when I have to part from you and the girls.”13