by Fred Kaplan
Four years later, Macready had “aged exceedingly,” though not enough to prevent Dickens suspecting that there was “some prospect of another addition to the family party.” On his seventy-fourth birthday in March 1867, Dickens sent him his “most affectionate and long-cemented love.” The next month, when he read in Cheltenham, Macready was too ill to attend. He joked that he meant “to go on reading the Trial,” Macready’s favorite, in Cheltenham, “at intervals, until you come to hear it. Let them therefore expect no variety from me. “ The next year he was delighted to find his dear friend “in a tone so bright and blooming.”29 But by 1868 Macready’s slow decline had brought him noticeably close to an end that did not occur until three years after Dickens’ own.
In the summer of 1862, Forster had remarked with purposeful casualness about the estrangement since 1860 between himself and Macready, “‘If I was wrong …’” Dickens “immediately struck in, ‘There is no doubt upon it in my mind. You were wrong.’” Forster said nothing more. A year later, he inquired about Macready’s health. After Dickens replied, he said, “in a softened manner, that we were all growing older, and that it made him uneasy to think of the terms on which” he and Macready stood. He then added, “‘I should like Macready to know that I believe I was wrong, and that I am sorry for it.’” Excitable and intemperate, Forster had, since his marriage in 1856, become wealthy without becoming wise. In late 1862, he moved into a new house, the formidable bourgeois-palatial Palace Gate near Hyde Park. Pushing himself puritanically, he maintained both his writing schedule and his position as secretary to the Commission on Lunacy, which demanded frequent travel. In 1861, he became a commissioner on the same committee, often “smoking all over his head and fuming exactly like a steamboat ready to start,” fulminating at people and institutions with a regularity that occasionally had him as estranged from his closest friends as from his enemies. At a dinner in 1860 at Tavistock House, he had been “a little ferocious … but calmed down afterwards. Lord!” Dickens had told Macready, “I wish you could have seen him in Montague Square a fortnight ago, concerning some oysters that the fishmonger had opened tardily.”
Nineteen years younger than Macready, Forster had gout, rheumatism, circulatory difficulties, and bronchial problems. Frequently ill, increasingly reclusive, he seemed to Dickens to have “gotten into an old way which is not wholesome. He has lost interest in the larger circle of tastes and occupations that used to girdle his life, and yet has a morbid sort of dissatisfaction in having subsided into an almost private personage,” a change that influenced “his health quite as much as his bodily illness.” Deeply loyal, Forster still read manuscripts, corrected proofs, and assisted with personal and professional matters. His commitment beyond question, his combination of bluster, stubbornness, and experience often served Dickens well. Ready to argue with anyone, he was also ready to love, respect, and work for the friends with whom he argued. Wills and he growled “at each other like angry dogs” whenever they met at the office. Despite Forster’s compulsive argumentativeness, though, Dickens had no doubt that he “has great tenderness under a tough exterior.” When they fought, the estrangement conveyed the emanations of an inseparable friendship. After one argument, as Dickens “conversed in the hall with all sorts and conditions of men,” Forster “flitted about the Athenaeum … and pretended not to see me—but I saw in every hair of his whisker (left hand one) that he saw Nothing Else.” As with most of their brief alienations, the sacred “Nothing Else” was their transcendent friendship. Neither of them would behave in any way that would permanently damage it. Responding in 1864 to the publication of Forster’s life of John Eliot, Dickens had thought it “as honest, spirited, patient, reliable, and gallant a piece of biography as ever was written.… And what I particularly feel about it,” he told him, “is that the dignity of the man, and the dignity of the book that tells about the man, always go together and fit each other.”30
During the 1860s Wilkie Collins also had serious health problems. His professional success was undercut by the problems of gout, obesity, arthritis, digestive disorders, fainting spells, and heart palpitations. Sometimes he felt as if “the gout has attacked my brain. My mind is perfectly clear—but the nervous misery I suffer is indescribable.” His ill health was so widely known that it seemed at best an ironic April Fool’s joke to learn that he had been reported dead, a Frenchman writing “to say he has betted ten bottles of champagne that I am alive—and to beg I will say so, if I am!” The view in the mirror was unflattering. Frequently abroad for his health, he wrote to his mother that “here is ‘forty’ come upon me—grey hairs shrinking fast… rheumatism and gout familiar enemies for some time past—all the worst signs of middle age sprouting out on me.” Feeling “fat and unwieldy,” his own “horrid corpulence” distressed him. Despite all this, though, “I don’t feel old, I have no regular habits, no respectable prejudices.”
He did have an unrespectable semidomestic life. Though he protected its privacy as much as possible, his friends were familiar with it. Middle-class women frightened him, marital restrictions repelled him. His first loyalty was to his mother, Harriet Collins. “‘The British female,’” he wrote to her, “is as full of ‘snares’ as Solomon’s ‘Strange Woman’—a mixture of perjury and prudery, cant and crinoline—from whom (when we travel in railways) may the guard deliver us!” The “danger from virtuous single ladies whose character is ‘dearer to them than their lives’” was greater than from traveling thieves and murderers. He channeled his fears and susceptibility into two long-term relationships, neither of them marriages, neither of them subjects of discussion between him and his mother. In 1867, with Caroline Graves and her daughter, Harriet, he moved into 90 Gloucester Place, Portman Square. Charles Collins had made the matrimonial break from his mother’s home in 1860 when he married Katie. Wilkie Collins made no such commitment to Caroline.
A “young woman of gentle birth,” her liaison with him had started no later than the spring of 1860. Dickens watched with interest, eventually accepting, probably liking, Caroline. In August 1860, he reported that Wilkie had finished writing The Woman in White and “if he had done with his flesh-coloured one, I should mention that too.”31 The relationship continued. During the 1860s it had all of the flavor of a marriage, with few of its restrictions. Collins took parental pleasure in Caroline’s daughter, the three of them spending evenings at home entertaining themselves and close friends, including Dickens, who sent his “love to the Butler,” his nickname for Harriet Graves, “from her ancient partner in the card trade.” He also sent his “kind regards to the Butler’s Mama.” When Collins was in great pain from gout, Caroline would mesmerize him “into sleeping so as to do without the opium” to which he had become addicted. They wintered in Rome in 1863–64, where she had health problems of her own, particularly “nervous-hysterical” attacks with nightlong palpitations.
In October 1868, the relationship changed radically. Caroline married Joseph Clow, Wilkie attending the wedding. His “affairs defy all prediction,” Dickens commented. “For anything one knows, the whole matrimonial pretence may be a lie of that woman’s, intended to make him marry her, and (contrary to her expectations) breaking down at last.”…32 It may have been her response to Collins’ affair with Martha Rudd, a working-class woman who soon took her place in his home and gave birth to three children within a short period. Dickens did not live to see the further developments. Caroline returned to live with Collins in the 1870s. What happened to Martha Rudd and the three children is unclear. Apparently he set up a second household, provided financially for both of them, and alternated between them. With the same first name as his mother, Harriet Graves became his secretary and emotional support in his old age.
In 1867 Dickens lured him back as a contributor to All the Year Round. Attracted by the money, his health somewhat better, Collins proposed that he write a new novel, The Moonstone, for serial publication. Dickens urged him also to collaborate, “we too alone, each takin
g half,” on a new Christmas story. “The thought that we shall have a bout of work together again … fills me with pleasure and interest.… Wills is ready to go into the ‘figures’ (as he calls it), and there is no chance of any difficulty in that direction.… Of course it will be for you to name your own convenient times of drawing money here. All times are alike to us.” The collaboration on No Thoroughfare gave them both great pleasure, though the actual writing became an irritating burden to Dickens as he began in the fall to move in the direction of America. Collins had long before predicted that he would eventually cross the Atlantic again. Unlike Forster, who opposed the decision, he thought it inevitable. Different as they were, and differing in their attractions to Dickens, he and Forster maintained a pleasantly distant companionship throughout the 1860s, connected by their mutual friend, who frequently had them together as his guests. There were some moments of estrangement. In 1861, though, Collins barely stretched the truth by stating that Forster “is a very intimate and valued friend of mine.” Later that year, he delighted in hosting on “a capital day on the river, in a private steamer … the Dickenses, Forster, etc.” The plural of the “Dickenses” probably included Ellen.33
The “etc.” also meant Wills, who was a close companion during the 1860s, partly because they worked together on All the Year Round, partly because he had no competing loyalty, partly because he had become a combination of private secretary, confidant, and trusted friend to Dickens. Shrewdly binding him with an annual salary and a partnership interest amounting to two thousand pounds a year, Dickens made him the indispensable quiet man who knew his place, filled it well, and found it consequently one of high trust. No other two men “can have gone on more happily and smoothly, or with greater trust and confidence in one another,” as if a more reliable Frederick were running the errands again. In late 1864, Wills gave him an attractive small carriage, proof, Dickens felt, of Wills’s “ever generous friendship and appreciation, and a memorial of a happy intercourse and a perfect confidence that have never had a break, and that surely never can have a break now (after all these years) but one.”
The gradual deterioration of Wills’s health, which had long been fragile, did threaten that final break a few times during the 1860s. Severe illnesses in the late 1850s and thereafter evoked Dickens’ compassion. They also forced him to carry much of Wills’s load at the office, with the help of Henry Morley and sometimes Collins. Throughout much of the spring and summer of 1864, Wills was an invalid. In the fall, he had the great disappointment of being blackballed at the Garrick, albeit with the support of the resignation of Dickens, who had proposed him, and Collins, who had seconded him. The next month, seeing that his health was still precarious, Dickens urged him not to return too soon. Just as his health was a concern to Dickens, the latter’s worried Wills. In the spring of 1866, when Dickens undertook a brief reading tour, Wills, “partly that he may have assurance of there being nothing amiss with me, and partly that our All the Year Round business may go on as usual,” accompanied him everywhere. When he left for America in 1867, Wills put in his hands confidential instructions about his business and personal affairs. The next year, Wills, a hunting enthusiast and a fearless rider who had just moved to the country, received a concussion in a fall from his horse. It left him hearing “doors slamming” in his head for the rest of his life.34
The late 1850s and the belated, even tired, 1860s, brought the refreshment of new friends to supplement the old. Some were young, with the admiring attitude of disciples, some his contemporaries. The editor of the Sun, Charles Kent, became a hero worshiping friend and a contributor to All the Year Round. Other journalists and writers became minor companions in work and pleasure, to some extent Augustus Henry Sala and particularly Percy Fitzgerald, twenty-two years younger than Dickens. He never completely warmed to the dashing, unstable, pleasure-loving Sala either as a friend or as a writer, but he developed a strong affection for Fitzgerald, who became a regular contributor to All the Year Round, a visitor at Gad’s Hill, a guide during the Irish part of his 1867 reading tour, and, for a short while, a potential husband for Mamie. Fitzgerald, who met Dickens in 1858, cultivated the relationship slowly but assiduously. A handsome, self-centered, ambitious Irishman, he ultimately transformed the friendship into a self-serving industry of personal glorification. It was not an exaggeration, though, that he “was received always as a friend and an intimate.” Dickens continued to take a protective, even fatherly interest in Edmund Yates, who was amused one night by Dickens’ exemplifying his own theory that “no one ever liked to be thought that he or she could sleep in public.” Dickens fell into a doze on the train. When he awoke, Yates said, “‘You’ve been asleep, sir!’ [Dickens] looked guilty, and said, ‘I have, sir! and I suppose you’re going to tell me that you haven’t closed an eye!’”35
Eccentric, passionately devoted, often at Gad’s Hill, Henry Chorley became a satellite member of the family. A thin tall man with a squeaky voice that “reminded one of a guinea pig” and blond hair that had turned white, he was a well-to-do aging bachelor in search of companionship and a home. A heavy drinker, in the 1860s he would “sometimes … arrive at a friend’s house for dinner in a very confused state, assume that he was in his own … and start ordering the servants about.” As he grew older, he became “more feeble, more cantankerous, and more bibulous,” though his friends’ affection for a while generously absorbed his performances. By 1869, when Dickens visited him in his rooms, he seemed “a sad and solitary sight.… Poor Chorley reposed like the dregs of last season’s wine.” Devoted to Mamie, perhaps in love with her, he insisted on incorporating into his will a legacy for her, “an honest desire to pledge himself as strongly as possible.” A prolific writer of novels, plays, and opera librettos, Chorley maintained great power in the contemporary musical world through his position as music critic for the Athenaeum. A contentious and musically narrow man, who never missed a chance of showing his “immense importance,” he used his power to reinforce his prejudices. When he gave public lectures on musical topics, Dickens advised him on elocution, and then complimented him on the amazing “improvement in [his] delivery.” Under pressure, Dickens published a few of his turgid articles in All the Year Round. 36 Chorley, though, excelled as a sumptuous host at his home on Eaton Place, obsessed by his dinner menus for weeks in advance, and as a friend whose desperate search for affection made him always loyal, sometimes sweet, and occasionally generous. He was frequently in Dickens’ and his daughters’ company at Gad’s Hill, at Eaton Place, and at Woodlands, the Highgate home of Frederick and Nina Lehmann, Janet Wills’s niece.
Born in Germany, Lehmann had come to England as a young man to initiate a successful business career, becoming a partner in the industrial firm of Naylor Vickers. In 1852 he had married Nina Chambers, a perky, dark-haired, and beautiful daughter of the successful Scottish publisher Robert Chambers, who had moved to London to be near the libraries when he launched Chambers’s Encyclopaedia in 1859. Through Wills, affectionately known as “The Dodger,” Nina Lehmann had been introduced to Collins and then to Dickens. She already knew Bulwer-Lytton, George Henry Lewes, and George Eliot. She soon knew most of Dickens’ and Collins’ friends. A frequent house guest, Collins probably was half in love with her, and Chorley became infatuated with her sister Amelia, “Tuckie,” one of Katie’s bridesmaids. Through Frederick’s brother Rudolph, a minor, moderately successful painter, the Lehmanns got to know most of “the Victorian artistic establishment.”
Nina’s spacious Highgate home soon became an informal salon and familial visiting place for the Dickens family and Nina and Mamie intimate friends. Restless, Mamie spent long periods at Woodlands and traveled abroad with Nina. Dickens liked and respected Frederick Lehmann, whose expertise on American affairs provided the facts that gradually reduced his prejudices and misconceptions. A generous friend and a good companion, Lehmann gave gifts, favors, and his company at Woodlands, in London and Paris, and on long city and country walk
s. Their young son, who regularly attending Dickens’ London readings, vividly remembered how “the face and figure that I knew” as Dickens transformed himself into Mr. Justice Stareleigh in Pickwick Papers. Dickens “seemed to vanish as if by magic, and there appeared a fat, pompous, pursey little man, with a plump imbecile face, from which every vestige of good temper and cheerfulness … had been removed.” After the performance, his parents took him to the dressing room, where, as soon as Dickens caught sight of the boy, “he seized me up in his arms and gave me a sound kiss.”37
In his reading career Dickens had become a professional stage performer. Though always amiable, he rarely was intimate with theatre people in these years. He did become a warm admirer and close friend of the actor Charles Fechter. Of German, probably Jewish, background, with a French mother, Fechter came to England in 1860, where he overcame the disadvantage of his accent to have a successful though brief career as a romantic actor and as the director of the Lyceum Theatre. He reminded Dickens, who first saw the thirty-five-year-old actor perform in Paris in 1859, of one of the fine performers of his early London days, Edmund Yates’s father, Frederick. “He has the brain of a man combined with that strange power of arriving, without knowing how or why, at the truth, which one usually finds only in a woman.” Offstage, in repose, he appeared “a fat, clumsy-looking figure with a very dark sallow face and close black hair.” When he performed, “his countenance reflected all he heard,” his face lit up, his expressions became dramatically mobile and moving. Sharp in conversation, idealistic in his friendships, he seemed “the greatest all-around actor” of his day, with “a tenderness and delicacy that was absolutely inimitable.”