by Fred Kaplan
At Gad’s Hill again, Dickens felt dessicated, unable to work. “He could do nothing; seemed for the time to have quite lost the power.” With someone wanting to write “a Biographical account” of himself, he would not cooperate, “as I may think it time to pursue the subject when my life is over.”37 Apparently he still had it in mind to do a memoir or autobiography. When the man who had read the funeral service so badly solicited information for a biography of Leech, Dickens responded that “it is a pity to write that kind of Biography at all. It seems to me that such a man’s life is always best told in his works.” And what would he say of Leech in that hypothetical memoir? He might say that, despite his gloomy shyness, his nervous temperament, and his disappointment in his inability to paint in oils, he had become the premier illustrator of Victorian domestic life, a generous satirist who loved the world he satirized. Deeply devoted to his wife and two daughters, he took his recreation as a gentleman hunter.
But in his private memory, Dickens would recall that, always pressed for money, Leech had too generously supported an exploitative father, who outlived him, and numbers of unmarried sisters, and he would note the similarity between John Leech, Sr., whom he employed briefly on the Daily News in 1848, and John Dickens. He would most remember their warm companionship during the 1840s and early 1850s: his contributions to the Christmas books; his participation in their amateur theatricals; “all our near intercourse of many years in the confidence of autumn holidays by the sea … all the little jokes we humoured and exaggerated”; their long walks and excursions of exorcism and revival; Leech’s wife’s giving birth to a daughter in the railroad hotel at Euston Station in 1847, a baby who died soon afterward, an anticipation of the heartache he was to feel at his own infant daughter’s death; the mesmeric healing of Leech in Bonchurch in 1849; and his special relationship with little Sydney Dickens. Whenever Sydney was home from a cruise, Leech would take him to the Garrick for dinner and to the theatre. “On the first of these occasions the officer came out so frightfully small, that Leech told us afterwards he was filled with horror when he saw him cutting his dinner… with a large knife. On the other hand he felt that to suggest a small knife to an officer and a gentleman would be an unpardonable affront. So after meditating for some time, he felt that his course was, to object to the club-knives as enormous and gigantic—to remonstrate with the servant on their huge proportions—and with a grim dissatisfaction to demand small ones. After which, he and the officer messed with great satisfaction, and agreed that things in general were running too large in England.”38 Also, Dickens would remember that they had never quarreled, except for the one instance in which he had rebuked Leech for accepting, without checking with him, the claim that Charley was to live with his mother on his own volition rather than on his father’s wish. Though Leech may have known that Dickens was wrong even in his claim of what the truth was, he had been, and continued to be, for twenty years a loyal friend.
At the funeral, he would have been reminded of a fellow artist with whom he had been less intimate. Leech’s gravesite was next to Thackeray’s, one of Leech’s oldest, closest friends, with whom Dickens had never been completely reconciled after the hostility of the Yates-Thackeray-Garrick Club affair.39 There had been no coldness, though, between Katie Dickens and Thackeray and his daughters. Since the mid-1850s, they had been warm friends. Only abroad intermittently now, since expenses on the Continent were “fast becoming dearer than England,” Katie had seen the Thackerays regularly in London, where she and her husband had an apartment. Aware that Thackeray, sometimes depressed, brooded about his estrangement from her father, she had encouraged him to take a reconciling initiative. “‘Oh, you mean I should apologise,’” he said. “‘No, I don’t mean that exactly,’” she said, “hesitating.… ‘You know he is more in the wrong than I am,’ said he.… ‘Even if that were so … he is more shy of speaking than you are, and perhaps he mightn’t know that you would be nice to him. He cannot apologise, I fear.’ ‘In that case there will be no reconciliation,’” Thackeray said decisively. After a long pause, he added, “‘And how do I know he would be nice to me?’… ‘Oh,’” Katie said, “‘I can answer for him.’” Soon, at the Athenaeum, he had broken away from a conversation to confront Dickens at the head of the stairs. “It is time this foolish estrangement should cease” and “we should be to each other what we used to be. Come; shake hands.” Dickens responded amiably. Afterward, Thackeray had told Katie, “‘Oh … your father knew he was wrong and was full of apologies … and we are friends again, thank God!’”
They had never been close friends, though. The reconciliation, mostly perfunctory, satisfied Dickens’ conscience and his sense of decorum without touching his feelings. Dickens knew that Thackeray “had long been alarmingly ill.” Katie had a note on Christmas Eve 1863 asking her to come to nearby Palace Green to celebrate the holiday with the Thackerays. Feeling depressed, she declined. In the morning, his daughters found him “lying as though peacefully asleep,” dead from a cerebral stroke at the age of fifty-two. At his funeral a few days later, “Dickens clasped the hand of his old friend Mark Lemon, when, as each looked into the moist eyes of the other, bygone became bygones.” Whatever the degree of truth in his daughter’s accounts of these incidents, he did not become intimate with Lemon again. They still went their separate ways. Dickens was not the forgiving sort, except in principle and when the cost was minimal. When an intermediary had tried in October 1863 to promote a meeting with Catherine, neither the five years that had passed nor their children in common could make the slightest dent in his defenses. “My wife has gone her way and I have gone mine and when we took our separate courses I took mine for ever.” When Miss Coutts tried once again to promote an informal meeting between them at a time of mutual mourning, he claimed that “a page in my life which once had writing on it, has become absolutely blank, and … it is not in my power to pretend that it has a solitary word upon it.”40 Though he could manage formal reconciliations with Thackeray and Lemon, the scars still remained.
In bitter December weather, Thackeray’s coffin was watched into its grave by the tearful eyes of family and friends. Though he had never been intimate with Thackeray but “always met on friendly and pleasant terms,” Wilkie Collins eulogized later that “he has left a great name, most worthily won.” Dickens obsessively stared at one of the black crepe funereal decorations of the kind whose lachrymose ostentation he had always deplored as an insult to honest feelings and to the simplicity of death. Supposedly, he looked at the grave for sometime after almost everyone else had left and had such difficulty talking with people that he walked away by himself. Pressured by Thackeray’s friends, he agreed the next month to write a eulogy, published in February 1864. “The injudicious and absurd writing of some of his—miscalled—friends had made it a very difficult thing to do, with his children looking on.”
The difficulty had to do partly with ambivalent feelings about Thackeray, partly with the closeness of so many deaths. The list had become long. In November 1859, his neighbor Frank Stone, fifty-nine years old, had suddenly died of an aneurism, a “spasm of the heart,” two days after they had walked together in Tavistock Square. Dickens went to Highgate cemetery “and bought the spot of ground … appointed the funeral,” counseled the family, gave Arthur Stone, Stone’s eldest son, shorthand lessons, and Marcus Stone letters of recommendation. Having been in Stone’s confidence about his intentions, Dickens supported the surviving daughter and her brothers in fulfilling Stone’s wish that the children and their mother live separately after his death.
The news in March 1862 that the sculptor Angus Fletcher had died touched his memory and his feelings, more a reminiscence than a trauma. The “affectionate and gentle creature” had lived to a respectable old age. The next month, Cornelius Felton, fifty-five years old, his oyster-eating companion on the streets of New York, died three thousand miles away. With “a shock of surprise,” he regretted that their “ways had [not] crossed a litt
le oftener.” Closer to home, the recent death rate in the White family, all of whom Dickens and his older children knew intimately, had been high. The mordant sixty-two-year-old James White, his friend and landlord in Bonchurch, had by the spring of 1861 become chronically ill. White began indulging in morbid, humorously grotesque predictions. “Whenever they go away from home, he minutely calculates how long it will take him to return by a particular day, to be buried. And he cheers them of an evening by calculating in how many months there will be none of them left but the little dog.…” In April 1862, he “was seized with such excruciating pain that it was very difficult indeed to get him to bed. For the last two or three hours he seemed to have no pain … but passed very quietly away.”41
One year later another April had brought an even sharper blow. The slim, gentle, loyal Augustus Egg, who had long ago proposed to Georgina, died while traveling in Algiers. Dr. Frank Beard, who thought him sickly, probably had recommended the North African trip. On his way there he had briefly visited Dickens and the recuperating Georgina in Paris, and Dickens was forebodingly “struck by his extreme nervousness.” Four years younger, he had been both friend and protégé and had almost become a variant of a brother-in-law. With a talent for friendship, he had been the warm host and unostentatious center of an artistic circle of talented young men with whom Wilkie and Charles Collins were also intimate, and he had helped provide Dickens with a link to the new generation of painters. Holman Hunt brought “the dreadfully shocked and distressed” Wilkie Collins the news. “Nothing can replace the loss,” Collins moaned, “he was a man in ten thousand. It is a calamity, in every sense of the word, for everyone who knew him.” Dickens was deeply pained. He would not cooperate with Hunt in making public “private companionship and confidence.… His words and ways, in that half-gypsy life of our theatricals,” were now “sanctified by his death.” He had “always been sweet-tempered, humourous, conscientious, thoroughly good, and thoroughly beloved.… There is not a single grain of alloy, thank God, in my remembrance of our intimate personal association.”
Memories of all their happy days together rose with persistent vividness—Egg vainly trying to learn Italian when the triumvirate went to Italy, Egg sitting in their hotel room in Venice “eternally posting up” long entries in his mysterious travel diary, “that wonderful necromantic volume which we never shall see opened,” Egg falling out of a hammock during rehearsals of The Frozen Deep. That brought to mind how many of the actors in the play had already succumbed to “the Great Frozen Deep” that “lay under those boards we acted on!” He attempted to turn away from his melancholy. “This won’t do. We must close up the ranks and march on.” Dickens’ willful, self-exhortatory affirmation of positive thinking had a hollow sadness to it. He intoned the gloomy necrology. Of the participants in that play, Alfred Dickens, Arthur Smith, Albert Smith, Frank Stone, Henry Austin, and now Augustus Egg were dead.42 With barely suppressed anguish, he realized “what a great cemetery one walks through after forty!”
On New Year’s Eve 1863 he had been eerily disturbed by a symbol and a premonition. Playing charades with the children, he made, out of black cloth hung on a stick, “something to carry, as the Goddess of Discord.… It came into my head as it stood against the wall while I was dressing, that it was like the dismal things that are carried at Funerals.” He cut away some of the black calico in order “to remove this likeness.” While using it in the charades he “noticed that its shadow on the wall still had that resemblance, though the thing itself had not.” When he went to bed, he brought it into his bedroom. It still looked exactly like the object at which he had obsessively stared a few days before at Thackeray’s funeral. Disturbed by the insistence of that resemblance, he “took it to pieces” before he went to sleep. At five-fifteen the next afternoon, his second son, Walter Landor Dickens, died at the age of twenty-two in Calcutta. Exhausted and ill, he had been hospitalized to regain his strength for the journey back to England. His army career had been a gradual, then precipitous, failure, mainly because of chronic indebtedness. Charley had visited him in 1860, paying, “as he supposed, Everything. Yet before he got back to England, there was more to pay.”
When Walter expressed his desire to put his name down for home service, his father rebuked him for his folly, including the loss of overseas supplement, and turned down his request for additional money. “He must now, as a matter of common reason and justice to his other brothers, live upon his own means.” Vowing to Georgina that they would not hear from him until he was out of debt, Walter did not keep the resolution. In early December he wrote to Mamie to say that he was “so weak that he could hardly crawl.” A few days before Christmas, not having seen his son for six years, Dickens sent Frank “out to Calcutta,” also to make a career in the army. On the afternoon of New Year’s Day Walter “was talking to the other patients about his arrangements for coming home.” He “became excited, coughed violently, had a great gush of blood from the mouth, and fell dead … in a few seconds.” He had an “extensive and perfectly incurable aneurism of the Aorta, which had burst.” His father had “reason to believe (but I do not tell them so, on Georgina’s account) that if he had lived, as I could, have wished he had, to see home again, he might probably have … died at the door.” When Frank arrived in India, he found that his brother had already been dead for a month. The attending doctor wrote from Calcutta on January 4. The letter arrived on February 7, 1864, Dickens’ fifty-second birthday. Six months later he received a request from the colonel of Walter’s regiment asking him to pay the last of his son’s outstanding debts.43
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Sons of Toil
(1864–1868)
THE EXPRESS TRAIN FROM DOVER TO LONDON, ITS BRAKES SCREECHing its speed down to twenty-five miles an hour, hurtled off the tracks on a sun-bright afternoon in June 1865. On the morning of the accident, Dickens was returning from a ten-day holiday in France. At Folkestone, he boarded the train. Its hours varied each day with the tide, whose advantage the cross-Channel ferries needed to enter the harbor. Forty miles southeast of London, the foreman of the work crew replacing worn timbers at the small Staplehurst viaduct from which two sections of rails at the eastern end had been removed had misread his schedule. He expected the express two hours later. Ordinary safety rules “had been consistently disregarded.…” The engineer saw a red flag, then the gap in the rails. The rudimentary brake system was partly in control of guards who did not see the danger. The work crew was helpless.
Leaping the forty-two-foot gap, the engine smashed through the side of the viaduct. Within seconds all but one first-class carriage tumbled into a muddy ravine. In the carriage caught by the bridge, the “beating and the dragging” threw the passengers against whatever resistance chance provided. On Dickens’ left, Ellen Ternan screamed. Opposite him, Mrs. Ternan cried, “My God.” He “caught hold of them both.” Quieting their panic, he asked them not to “‘cry out. We can’t help ourselves. Let us be quiet and composed.’” “‘Rely upon me,’” Mrs. Ternan replied, “‘upon my soul, I won’t call out or stir.’” Huddled “in a corner of the carriage,” unaware of how they had gotten there, they stayed “perfectly still” for a short while. “‘Will you remain here without stirring, while I get out of the window?’” “They both answered quite collectedly, ‘Yes.’” Carefully, reassuringly, he crawled out of the carriage, which hung “inexplicably in the air over the side of the broken bridge.” Looking down, he saw that that side of the viaduct was gone. Below was a sheer ten-foot drop, at the bottom a scene of bloody, mangled bodies and traumatized grief. The first quiet crying and moaning for help had begun. Dickens “could not have imagined so appalling a scene.”1
Above him, the two women remained in the suspended carriage. People in “other compartments were madly trying to plunge out the window,” with “no idea that there was an open swampy field … below them, and nothing else!” Two distracted guards, one with a bleeding face, were running about quite wildly. D
ickens called out sharply, “‘Look at me. Do you know me?’ ‘We know you very well, Mr. Dickens.’ ‘Then … for God’s sake give me your key, and send one of those labourers here, and I’ll empty this carriage.’” Tilting the planks into a ramp, he helped Ellen and Mrs. Ternan down. Going back into the carriage, he got a half bottle of brandy from his luggage, tied it around his neck, and climbed down to the wreck. He filled his hat with water. Carrying it in his hands, he gave himself up to almost three exhausting hours of trying to help the survivors. Many were partly crushed under “the extraordinary weights … twisted up among iron and wood, and mud and water.” One man was so “wedged under a carriage, with another over it, that they could only manage to convey some brandy to him but could by no possibility get him out. He sighed there calling for help for more than 2 hours and then … gave up the ghost, suffocated, crushed to death.”
A man with a frightful cut in his skull staggered against Dickens. After giving him brandy and laying him down on the grass, he watched him die. Stumbling over a woman “on her back against a little pollard-tree, with the blood streaming over her face,” he asked if she could swallow. When she nodded, he “gave her some [brandy] and left her.” The next time he passed, “she was dead.” Soon the tree-shaded ground, where Ellen and the other “unhurt ladies” were gathered, “had as many dead in it as living.” One dazed man, whom he helped pull “out of a most extraordinary heap of dark ruins in which he was jammed upside down,” unaware that he was bleeding from the “eyes, ears, nose, and mouth,” searched vainly for his wife. A few seconds before the crash he had changed places with a Frenchman who disliked having the window down. The Frenchman was dead. So too was the man’s wife.2