by Fred Kaplan
At the beginning of June 1858, Forster recommended that, as an extension of the personal-letter campaign, Dickens write to some well-known American who, with the facts before him, would help counteract the rumors there. Consulting with Ouvry, Dickens decided that the “American idea is altogether untenable. Surely on your knowledge of human nature (to say nothing of the peculiarity of the American character … ), you cannot think it possible that I should write to any distinguished man in America, asking him to do for me what I have not done for myself here! It is absurd. And it is just because no public step can possibly be taken for my good, anywhere, until I have taken one here, that I feel I must move—somehow.” Having made this determination, he composed a statement for publication, which he sent to Catherine. “I will not write a word as to any causes that have made it necessary for me to publish the enclosed in Household Words. Whoever there may be among the living, who I will never forgive alive or dead, I earnestly hope that all unkindness is over between you and me. But as you are referred to in the article, I think you ought to see it. You have only to say to Wills … that you do not object to the allusion.”23 He also intended to have it published in all the journals and newspapers, and to encourage its republication abroad. Apparently she did not object or her objections were dismissed. On the day on which he solicited her consent to his referring to her in the statement, she signed, in Brighton where she was resting, the final version of the separation deed. It provided two hundred pounds per annum more than had the earlier draft.
The next day Forster talked for an hour and a half with John Delane, the editor of the Times, about the wisdom of publishing the statement. Having been forced by Forster’s doubts to reconsider, Dickens soon triumphantly reported to Mac-ready, who “will see that some printed words of mine were laid on the breakfast-table this morning in the Times,” that “Delane on the whole decided in favor of the publication. This turned the balance—as we had settled that it should, either way.” On June 8 Dickens’ statement appeared in the Manchester Guardian, and he expected its publication in other newspapers and journals. He had arranged for its front-page appearance in the next issue of Household Words, on June 12, under the heading PERSONAL. TO Macready, he was specific and named names. “The question was not I myself; but others. Foremost among them—of all people in the world—Georgina! Mrs. Dickens’s weakness, and her mother’s and her youngest sister’s wickedness, drifted to that, without seeing what they would strike against—though I warned them in the strongest manner.”
Naturally, the published statement was bland, much like the letter he had written on May 25 and entrusted to Smith. “Some domestic troubles of mine, of long-standing” have “lately been brought to an arrangement” with “no anger or ill-will.… By some means,” though, “arising out of wickedness, or out of folly, or out of inconceivable wild chance, or out of all three, this trouble has been made the occasion of misrepresentations, most grossly false, most monstrous, and most cruel—involving not only me, but innocent persons dear to my heart.”24 Whatever there was of truth in the statement, it was sufficiently awkward to convince no one not already convinced. The rhetoric seemed hollow at best, cowardly at worst, an excess of protestation, both an unnecessary falsehood and an inappropriate truth. It brought to the attention of otherwise uninformed people that their favorite writer was the center of a domestic scandal.
IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING THE PUBLICATION OF HIS PERSONAL STATEment, Dickens found himself even more on the defensive. Depression and exhaustion came to his rescue. He made no more public statements. He tried to free himself from his need to be defensive, at least to do whatever he could to force it out of his mind. At first, he was only partly successful. He felt the pain of being a victim, reliving an adult variation of the feelings he had had as a child. “If you could know how much I have felt within this last month, and what a sense of wrong has been upon me, and what a strain and struggle I have lived under, you would see that my heart is so jagged and rent out of shape, that it does not leave me hand enough to shape these words.” By the middle of June 1858, he was claiming normalcy, particularly to Edward Tagart, the Unitarian minister whose church he had attended and with whom he maintained a friendly acquaintance. “Though I have unquestionably suffered deeply from being lied about with a wonderful recklessness, I am not so weak or wrong-headed as to be in the least changed by it. I know the world to have just as much good in it as it had before” and “I hope to regain my composure in a steady manner.” He had Wills, though, raise with Ouvry the possibility of suing the Court Circular and Reynold’s Weekly Newspaper for libels against him.25 His lawyer sensibly advised against additional self-inflicted wounds, though probably the argument that worked was that libel judgments were difficult to obtain.
At moments he affected philosophical composure. “I will not complain.… I can never hope,” though, “that any one out of my house can ever comprehend my domestic story.… I have been heavily wounded, but I have covered that wound up, and left it to heal. Some of my children or some of my friends will do me right if I ever need it in the time to come.” He appealed to the judgment of posterity, and to the sifting of literature from the vagaries of life. “I hope that my books will speak for themselves and me, when I and my faults and virtues, my fortunes and misfortunes are all forgotten.” He was tempted, though, into an access of self-justifying gratitude when he received, through Fanny, from a cousin of the Ternans’ in America, a strong affirmation of his innocence. Rehearsing for the role of Podsnap, a character in a novel he was to write six years later, he thanked his supporter “most heartily for the comfort and strength I have derived from the contemplation of your character … my admiration of the noble instinct with which the upright know the upright, all the broad world over.” There was not “a man more blamelessly and openly” a friend of Fanny and her mother and sisters than he. While “wild misrepresentation and amazing falsehoods” are “a dark place in the social life of many countries and especially of America, I know well … the chivalry and integrity of the general American character and I trust myself to it with implicit confidence.”26
With those who did not see things his way he ranged from being short-tempered to being irrationally vindictive. He saw no place for neutrality, only for taking sides. Only one acceptable side existed. Desiring personal testimonials from friends, either in letters or in oral exchanges he put them to what became an absolute loyalty test. The dividing line was not Catherine but the Hogarths. Forster, Collins, Wills, and others were allowed to maintain their cordiality with her as long as it was clear that it did not mean giving any credence to the charges against him. As far as Dickens was concerned, Catherine was innocent of those. She had cooperated with the separation on the grounds of general incompatibility. Though he wanted to have nothing more to do with her, he had no objection to friends of his who had known her for decades remaining in social contact with her. Of course she was to have free access to the children, where the children resided or at her home. But when he thought Leech had told someone that Charley lived with his mother because he sided with her, he lectured his old friend harshly, strengthening the myth that he had determined Charley would reside with her.27
In the middle of July, Charley fulfilled the awkward obligation of clarifying for his mother a confusion that had arisen in regard to access to her children. It resulted from Dickens’ insistence that those who had cast aspersions on his personal integrity were anathema to him. On the grounds that they were a slight upon her, Dickens had had removed from the separation deed “the usual formal clauses” about her visiting rights. She was welcome at Tavistock House or anywhere, with an important proviso. Since he would never forgive his children’s maternal grandmother and her youngest daughter, just as he as a child had vowed never to forgive his mother, the Hogarth women were neither to be seen nor spoken of. Anyone whom he had any control over was not to come into their company. The children were even forbidden to go to any home at which the Hogarths were received. If the
y were to find themselves by accident or by someone’s design in their company, they were to leave immediately. “I positively forbid the children ever to utter one word to their grandmother or to Helen Hogarth. If they are ever brought into the presence of either of these two, I charge them immediately to leave.”
Charley painfully enunciated to his mother that “he has, as their father, an absolute right to prevent their going into any society which may be distasteful to him, as long as they remain under age.” Charley’s own bed of torture was made more painful by two further prohibitions. “In regard to Mr. Lemon, I positively forbid the children ever to see him or to speak to him, and for the same reason I absolutely prohibit their ever being taken to Mr. Evans’s house.”28 For reasons that must have seemed tenuous, incredible, and even vindictive, he had decided that Lemon, having performed honorably as Catherine’s intermediary, had betrayed him. So too had Evans. As editor and publisher, they had declined to publish his personal statement in Punch on the grounds that it was incompatible with the humorous tone of the magazine.
Neither intended the declination as taking sides in the dispute. Though Evans had expressed criticism of Dickens, Lemon had not. The former believed Catherine to be “absolutely free from the offences charged against her.… Mr. Dickens’s temper was so ferocious to her that his nearest friends could not bear to go to the house.” Sympathetic to Catherine, Evans helped her to find a house near his own. Dickens felt that he had been betrayed, and used the Punch declination to condemn both publisher and editor. Lemon felt hurt, bewildered. Evans was angry. Though he had been a general friend of the family, his children were close friends of Dickens’, particularly Mamie, Katie, and Charley. Actually, Charley and Bessie Evans were in love. Charley’s position was miserable. “I have had stern occasion to impress upon my children,” Dickens wrote to Evans, “that their father’s name is their best possession, and that it would be trifled with and wasted by him if either through himself or through them he held any terms with those who had been false to it in the greatest need and under the greatest wrong it has ever known. You know very well why (with hard distress of mind and bitter disappointment) I have been forced to include you in this class. I have no more to say.” Three years later, in November 1861, Charley married Bessie Evans. Dickens, who would not separate his grudging consent from tacit disapproval, refused to attend the ceremony or the reception. “My father was like a madman when my mother left home,” Katie said afterward. “This affair brought out all that was worst—all that was weakest in him. He did not care a damn what happened to any of us. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home.”29
Dickens had an effective way to punish Bradbury and Evans. If they would not support him, he would not support them. When his statement did not appear in the June 17, 1858, issue of Punch, he immediately decided to change publishers. The next day the incredulous Bradbury and Evans learned of his intention. Probably his determination had been hardened by a critical remark of Evans’ having been repeated to him. Just finishing his first London readings and preparing for a provincial tour, he decided to postpone taking action, especially since his business sense told him that he would do well to initiate the change at the half-yearly audit meeting in November. Bradbury and Evans had been his publisher since he had left Chapman and Hall in 1844 (some of his copyrights were still partially in his former publisher’s hands). His arrangement, though, did not allow them any residual rights in his novels. They were partners only in the publication of Household Words, of which the publisher owned 25 percent; Wills and Dickens owned the remainder. “No proprietor was permitted to sell or transfer his share without first offering it to his partners.”30 Either they would sell him theirs or they would purchase his, leaving him free to start a new journal. Otherwise he would refuse to produce Household Words, which would then make the publisher’s investment worthless. Its primary asset was its editor.
Though Bradbury and Evans resisted, their efforts were futile. The incorporation agreement did not provide a procedure for ending the agreement if the partners disagreed. Since each of the owners had a single vote, the result was easy to predict. In accordance with Dickens’ decision to have nothing to do with them ever again, he refused to participate in the negotiations. On November 9 he informed them in writing that he wished to end their partnership agreement. On November 15, Forster appeared at the half-yearly meeting with Dickens’ power of attorney, which Bradbury and Evans refused to recognize. Acting as secretary, Wills took the minutes. While the publisher insisted that Forster could not act for Dickens, Forster insisted that he could. He proceeded to do so, proposing “that the present partnership in Household Words be dissolved by the cessation and discontinuance of that publication on the Completion of the Nineteenth Volume” at the end of May 1859. Wills seconded the motion. Then “Mr. Forster and Mr. Wills voted in favour of the resolution,—but Messrs. Bradbury and Evans” declined to vote. The resolution seemed to them “contrary to the deed of partnership and therefore illegal.”
When, in December 1858, they declined his offer of one thousand pounds for their share plus an additional sum for the stock, Dickens proceeded with his plan. If they would not accede, he would advertise the end of his association with Household Words and his initiation of a new journal. By late January 1859, he had a title, “really an admirable one,” All the Year Round, “‘The story of our lives from year to year,’—Shakespeare.… A weekly journal conducted by Charles Dickens.”31 Forster had had to dissuade him from his initial preference for the title “Household Harmony.” In March, on legal advice, Dickens advertised his intention in a separate handbill. The publisher took him to court. Later that month, the infamous Chancery, basically ruling in his favor, declared that the property was to be put up for sale. The ruling stipulated, as Bradbury, and Evans desired, that it be sold as “a going concern.” But that made no practical difference.
Though a war of words followed, the result was predictable. At the auction on May 16, Dickens bought the entire ownership and all the stock for £3,550. With the assistance of friends and confederates, including Frederic Chapman, the new young power at Chapman and Hall who had eagerly agreed to become his publisher again, he successfully conspired, “to the great terror and confusion of all the room,” to mislead those bidding on behalf of Bradbury and Evans. That evening he celebrated a prearranged victory dinner at Verey’s on Regent Street, his favorite gourmet restaurant. There was much to celebrate. Most of the purchase was purely on paper. Of course he did not have to pay anything to himself. Wills’s payment took the form of a slightly increased share of the ownership of the new journal. He immediately sold the stock, valued at £1,600, for £2,500 to his new-old publisher, who was not allowed any ownership interest in All the Year Round. Whether or not he shared any of the £900 difference with Wills, Dickens had made a handsome profit there, since he had to pay Bradbury and Evans only their one-fourth share of the purchase price, excluding the value of the stock, or about £500. It was a small amount for such a heavy loss and half of the £1,000 that he had originally offered. He told Emile de la Rue only part of the story. “The simple truth is, that I am not pleased with Messieurs Bradbury and Evans … that I am resolved to have no more of them—and that I have made up my mind to work what I do with my own capital, and to have no publisher at all except as a paid agent and instrument.”32
At the same time, he fought another battle on another front, a more complicated, tenuous, and less forthright struggle. For decades he had had an amicable relationship with Thackeray, originating in the young artist-journalist’s interest in illustrating Pickwick Papers, his publishing in Bentley’s Miscellany, and his gradual emergence during the 1840s as a successful member of the London social-literary establishment. His two daughters became close friends of Mamie’s and Katie’s when they were neighbors in Paris for part of 1855–56. With the success of Vanity Fair in 1847–48, Thackeray had become, in some people’s minds, Dickens’ rival. Members of some of th
e same clubs and circles, both writers made nothing of it publicly and little of it privately. They genuinely admired one another’s works, Thackeray lavish throughout the 1850s in his praise of Dickens’ novels, particularly David Copperfield. There were some moments of tension, even antagonism, but they were quickly diffused. Thackeray bore gracefully his occasional jealousy of Dickens’ success and his feeling that he was not loved as a writer with the unreserved passion with which Dickens was. Until the summer of 1858 their relationship had remained amiable, with touches of intimacy or at least generous good feeling.