by Fred Kaplan
Dickens continued to supplement his royalty income and his earnings from the journal by public readings. After the first reading tour in 1859, he had no doubt that through carefully planned tours he could guarantee his and his family’s financial security as well as have the satisfaction of constant applause. In the spring of 1858 he had stepped onto the platform with some hesitation. The success of the provincial tour in the autumn and Smith’s sure grip on the business details had increased his confidence. Having resisted the temptation to read in America in the fall of 1859, he found it a small matter to read in the provinces in October, with only the final chapters of A Tale of Two Cities still to be written, and to “have a Christmas series in town.” Stepping into the All the Year Round breech with Great Expectations, struggling with the “terribles,” he did not read again until March 1861, when he gave six performances in London. “After paying a large staff of men and all other charges,” including Smith’s 10 percent, he still had over five hundred pounds profit. Suffering painful facial neuralgia, finding it a strain both to read and to continue writing, he felt glad when the series ended, though the demand for tickets was so great that he could have extended it indefinitely.
The readings at St. James’s Hall were wildly successful, partly because of Arthur Smith’s business expertise, mostly because of Dickens’ increasing professionalism in creating a stage atmosphere and projecting a distinctive image. He had a special reading desk constructed. Dressing identically for each performance, he kept his formal hat and gloves in a special place on the desk, the elbow of the hand in which he held his book resting against the lectern. The stage lighting was manipulated by dark curtains and gas illumination that he provided, employing his own “gasman” even when he traveled, in order to throw completely even light on his face and figure. Purposefully, he made no attempt to perform from memory. These were to be readings by a great author from his own works. Usually beginning in a flat, somewhat nasal voice, he wanted the audience to be aware, no matter how empathetic and dramatic the eventual presentation, that these were characters in a book and that he was their creator.
In the summer of 1861 he concentrated on preparing new readings, having committed himself to an extensive series in the fall. Each morning he labored for at least three hours at Gad’s Hill, condensing the narratives and perfecting his delivery. By August, he had “the Copperfield reading ready … and am now going to blaze away at Nickleby, which I don’t like half as well.” Finally, after great effort, he had “made a continuous narrative out of Copperfield,” something that had been on his mind for years, “that I think will reward the exertion it is likely to cost me.” It became his favorite reading selection. Though he made constant efforts to add to the repertoire, particularly from Christmas stories such as “Going into Society” and “Doctor Marigold,” the core of his readings were the selections from Copperfield and Nickleby, the death of Paul Dombey, the trial scene from Pickwick, the selections from Oliver, including Sikes’s murder of Nancy, created in 1863 but not performed until 1868, and the reliable A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth.28 Though he later experimented with a reading from Bleak House, on the whole he seems to have found the novels after Copperfield not as amenable to condensation for reading performance.
In late October 1861 he was to begin a series of forty-six readings throughout England and Scotland. For good measure he had agreed to read his six-chapter version of David Copperfield in mid-January 1862 in “the place with which my childhood is inseparably associated,” for the benefit of the Rochester Mechanics’ Institute. To his distress, the one man he credited with the business success of the readings became ill during the summer. Dickens shared with Arthur Smith a fellowship of common-sense labor and mutual protectiveness. They were business partners in a successful venture in which each respected the other’s strengths and weaknesses. Smith kept Dickens’ nervous world calm. Used to carrying the business burden of life mainly himself, Dickens felt secure in Smith’s competence, free to devote himself to other things. When he first heard a “bad account” of his health in early September, he was shaken. He urged him to come to Gad’s Hill, where they “would take the most careful charge” of him. He seemed to be making himself worse with his worry that he would not be able to supervise the fall reading tour. On October 1, he died, “a friend whom I can never replace—who always went with me … and without whom, I fear,” the readings “will be dreary and weary to me.” For his tombstone, Dickens wrote a loving epitaph: HERE ALSO LIE THE REMAINS OF MR. ARTHUR SMITH, IN THE GRAVE OF HIS BROTHER AND FATHER, HE DIED IST OCTOBER l86l, AGED 36 YEARS. FOR HIS ZEAL, INTEGRITY, AND FIDELITY, HE WAS WIDELY BELOVED AND HONOURED. AND IT IS BELIEVED BY THOSE WHO KNEW HIM BEST, THAT HE HAD THE CLEAREST HEAD IN AFFAIRS OF LIFE, THAT WERE EVER UNITED TO THE SIMPLE TASTES, THE SWEET TEMPER AND GENTLENESS, OF AN AFFECTIONATE CHILD.29
On the day of Smith’s burial, Henry Austin died. Weak in the chest and throat, he expired of “inflammation of the windpipe.” Dickens had visited earlier in the day. One funeral followed another. His macabre sense of humor allowed him to comment that “the manner in which every body sat against the wall was wonderful. And there was the usual ghoul-like indispensability of cake and wine.” Austin had been one of his earliest friends, a companion in amateur theatricals when they had been young bachelors together, a mature collaborator in sanitary reform in the 1840s. Always self-reliant, Austin had been a welcome addition to the family, a loving husband, whose unexpected death at the age of forty-nine left Letitia in shock. With his fear of emotional scenes, her brother initially “had a dread of going near her.… God forgive me.” Given the circumstances, though, “she certainly came out better today than I had expected.” Since Austin had left little besides an insurance policy and the value of the lease of their house, Dickens immediately offered “ready money” and practical advice. As executor, he supervised the payment of outstanding bills.
Worried about Letitia’s health, he was keen “to know how you are, and that you are finding some rest and support under your heavy trial.” When she began to suffer choking spasms, he recommended an “intensely bitter” medicine that John Elliot-son had prescribed fourteen or fifteen years before, when he had had “a nervous seizure in the throat.” He soon began a tactful campaign to have her awarded a government pension in recognition of her husband’s contributions as an engineer and sanitary reformer. The day after his fiftieth birthday he reminisced with her about how twenty-eight years before Henry had celebrated with him his twenty-first birthday at Furnival’s Inn, “and stayed there all night.… All wounds want time—wounds of the heart and mind, most of all.” When, after correspondence with Shaftesbury and Palmerston, the pension of sixty pounds a year was finally granted in June 1864, he was “so delighted that I can hardly write to congratulate you.”30
After Arthur Smith’s funeral, reading was difficult. Dickens had to force himself “to open one of the books, and screw the text out of [him]self, in a flat dull way.” It was as if his right hand were gone. The opening performance in Norwich seemed to go badly, his ghostly presence an absence that pained him. He was not at all himself. The next day he went for a brisk walk in the bright air, exhorting himself to get command of himself. “The readings must be fought out, like all the rest of life.” Though he missed “poor Arthur dreadfully,” and “the sense I used to have of compactness and neatness about me while I was reading is gone,” he felt the loss not because of anything to do with the readings “but because I loved him and he deserved it well.” His new manager, Thomas Headland, seemed noticeably undeserving, “a very honest fellow, but what we shipmates call a dull sailor.” He was “the best man I could lay my hand on when I lost the man who is never to be replaced.” Soon Headland appeared incompetent, “the worthy man with the genius for mistakes,” whom Dickens would tolerate only as long as necessary. For the time being, though he was “damned aggravating,” he would not “blow him up.” Whatever his abilities, he of course could not compete with
the memory of Arthur. “Headland and all the rest of them are always somewhere, and he was always everywhere.”31 The second night in Norwich went better. The following afternoons and nights through the next three months in Bury Saint Edmunds, Colchester, Hastings, Brighton, Canterbury, Dover, Newcastle, Berwick, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, went from satisfactorily to brilliantly.
The new readings, particularly Copperfield, were, in Dickens’ self-laudatory rhetoric, “a wonderful success.” In Canterbury, the audience seemed “positively perfect… an intelligent and delightful response in them, like the touch of a beautiful instrument.” Everywhere he “found that peculiar personal relation between my audience and myself on which I counted most when I entered on this enterprise.” In Scotland, in late November and early December 1861, Headland broke down totally. Dickens, though, had already risen to exhilaration and remained there temporarily. In Newcastle, he prevented likely injuries when the threat of fire from a fallen gas batten caused a momentary panic in a huge audience. “A lady in the front row of stalls screamed, and ran out wildly towards me, and for one instant there was a terrible wave in the crowd. I addressed that lady laughing … and called out as if it happened every night, ‘There’s nothing the matter, I assure you; don’t be alarmed; pray sit down’; and she sat down directly, and there was a thunder of applause.” In Glasgow and Edinburgh the large crowds, when tickets were oversold, were accommodated on the stage, “like some impossible tableau or gigantic picnic; one pretty girl in full dress lying on her side all night, holding on to one of the legs of my table.”
In Liverpool, in the middle of December, when he learned of Prince Albert’s unexpected death, remembering that “the Queen has always been very considerate and gracious to me,” Dickens postponed the performances as a sign of respect, though he later thought the queen’s protracted mourning unhealthy. The prince himself “was neither a phenomenon, nor the saviour of England; and England will do exactly without him as it did with him. He was a good example of the best sort of perfectly commonplace man.” At Gad’s Hill for Christmas, Dickens took advantage of readings in Plymouth, Leamington, and Birmingham early in the new year to visit Macready, “decidedly much older and infirm.”32 When he read Copperfield, he was amazed and deeply touched to see tears running down the retired actor’s face. After the Plymouth readings, he went back to Liverpool to do those he had postponed earlier. He had already committed himself to another spring series in London, as if once he had gotten started he could not stop.
From March to June 1862, having exchanged Gad’s Hill for “the nastiest little house in London,” near Hyde Park, he gave eleven readings at St. James’s. By the beginning of May, he felt exhausted, “the readings … becoming very trying; the continuous effort and exertion, in so large a place, being quite wearing on a hot night.” He went to France with Ellen for a week before the last performance, which “ended with a most tremendous crowd and great enthusiasm.” Then he took a long holiday. He entreated Forster, who wanted the rest to be an indefinite one, “to go back to what you know of my childish days, and to ask yourself whether it is natural that something of the character formed in me then, and lost under happier circumstances, should have reappeared in the last five years … in the never to be forgotten misery of this later time.” To Georgina, he remarked that he “never could have borne the marriage” even for as long as he did if he “had not been reading.” He had partly replaced his marriage with a more dramatic version of the most sustained relationship of his life. “Success attends me everywhere, thank God, and the great crowds I see every night all seem to regard me with affection as a personal friend.”
During the summer and autumn, he flirted again with the temptation to read abroad, this time in Australia. The offer was for ten thousand pounds for eight months’ work. “If it were not for the hope of a gain that would make me more independent of the worst, I could not look the travel and absence and exertion in the face. I know perfectly well before-hand how unspeakably wretched I should be. But these renewed and larger offers tempt me. I can force myself to go aboard a ship, and I can force myself to do at that reading-desk what I have done a hundred times.” If he went, he would travel as an independent entrepreneur, with his own staff, the Australians acting as paid agents. With the prospect, he now imagined, of at least twelve thousand pounds in six months, he “should come back rich.” Though he would have to postpone the novel in twenty monthly parts that he had in mind to start soon, the experience probably would enrich his writing. If he put off the trip for a few years he might then “not be so well fitted for the excessive wear and tear.”33
The indecision went on for months. He consulted with Bulwer-Lytton, who “was all for going.” The whole population would attend. He would get ideas for a new book. Both the readings and the book would make a fortune “over there as well as here.” Such unlimited confidence seemed even to Dickens almost absurd. Richard Henry Home wrote from Melbourne, as usual asking for a favor but also urging him to come to Australia. Dickens could not determine “altogether to abandon the idea, and yet it is immensely difficult to pursue it.” Vacationing in Paris, he spent much of November 1862 trying to make a decision. “There are so many reasons for and against, and I am so very unwilling to go, that it causes me great uneasiness of mind in trying to do right and decide for the best.” The prospect of leaving family and friends for such a long period depressed him, and he cquld not take Ellen with him.
There was a new pressing anxiety. In the summer, Georgina had become ill with “degeneration of the heart.” Weak and short of breath, she had palpitations and “excruciating pain in the left breast.” In June, he took her to Dover “in the hope of doing her service through a little change.” He was “so anxious and distressed about her,” though, that he felt “altogether dazed” for weeks. “Our best and dearest friend,” Georgina was “the most unselfish, zealous, and devoted creature that ever lived on earth.… No one can ever know what she has been to us, and how she has supplied an empty place … since the girls were mere dolls.” She was soon “certainly better than she was.” But she was also depressed, perhaps frightened by her physical condition, perhaps also experiencing some traumatic long-delayed nervous response to the separation and its tensions. “All that alacrity and ‘cheer of spirit’ that used to distinguish her, are gone.… And she is very low about herself, almost as soon as one has ceased to speak to her after brightening her up.” Though she was noticeably improved by late fall, there was still “cause for great anxiety about her.”34 By the end of the year she seemed considerably better. To Dickens’ great relief the threat disappeared almost as suddenly as it had come.
If he went to Australia, Dickens hoped that Thomas Beard, who was in need of employment, would go with him to help keep him in good spirits and to take care of personal details, “seconding the Inimitable in the ring, delivering him at the scratch in fine condition, keeping off the crowd, polishing him up when at all punished, and checking the local accounts.” Beard’s profit would be substantial. Would he do it? “There are not six men in the world I would go with—and I don’t know the other five.” Beard said no. By early December 1862, Dickens had decided nothing. The balance, though, was slightly turning in his mind “against Australia.” The week before Christmas he was not absolutely sure that he would “not go.” By Christmas Day he had decided against it. Beard’s declination “unquestionably … brought down the scale on the home side.”35 Feeling immensely relieved, he solaced himself and his restlessness with the prospect of a few weeks more in Paris at the beginning of January 1863 and perhaps a trip to Genoa.
FRIENDS BEGAN TO DIE. THE ELDERLY PROCTER, FRIGHTENED, FEELing his decrepitude, moaned to Forster that “everybody seems to die and leave us.” When the once lovely Frances Yates died, it seemed as if “a beautiful part of [his] own youth” were gone, “and the dream that we are all dreaming seems to darken.” Some of the casualties were Dickens’ contemporaries in age as well as in spirit. Dinner with family and friends
in October 1864 was interrupted by a telegram. He kept his eyes on the paper and quietly read aloud its condensed, definitive message, LEECH DEAD. A sudden “silence fell upon us,” Marcus Stone remembered. “No one said a word. What was there to say? We had been laughing a moment before. We now all remained with bowed heads until Dickens rose from the table saying, ‘I must go up early tomorrow morning to see his poor little wife. I may be of some use.’”
Five years younger than Dickens, Leech had struggled for the last year with angina. In late 1863, Thackeray had felt frightened at the state of Leech’s health. Frank Stone had dined with him at the Garrick the week before his death. They had “talked much of the beloved Dickens.” Depressed, looking “weary and ill,” Leech said that he had had a horrible attack the other day. “I thought I was going to die, and managed to get off my horse and lean against a gate.” He forced himself out of bed a few days later to participate in a children’s party at home, in order to create the appearance of normalcy. Annie Leech was in tears. His pain relieved by an opiate, he returned to bed. The party went on downstairs. Alarmed, Frederick Evans and Shirley Brooks came from the Punch office. John Everett Millais, one of his closest friends, who had that day returned from the Continent and found his dinner appointment with Leech postponed, received a message to go to his home immediately. As Millais entered, racing up the stairs, Leech died in his bedroom. Downstairs, the noise of the children’s party still tinkled through the house.36
Weary, deeply saddened, having helped Millais make the funeral arrangements, Dickens returned to Gad’s Hill the next day. The widely liked Leech brought together at Kensal Green cemetery a lifetime of friends and associates in art and literature. Dickens took his place, following the coffin on “a bitterly cold” November afternoon, next to Lemon, Evans, W. H. Russell, Edmund Yates, Hablot Knight Browne, Cruikshank, Edwin Landseer, William Frith, Millais, Tom Taylor, and Marcus Stone. The reading of the funeral service seemed “pathetically” bad. “Shocked and distressed,” Wilkie Collins felt too fragile to attend the burial of a man with whom he had had “many nervous troubles in common.” Constantly ill with “pain in face and head,” Katie’s husband wrote to his mother from Geneva, where they had stopped on their way back to England, “poor fellow how he suffered, and people thought it fancy.”