by Fred Kaplan
Impressed with performances that he thought intuitively brilliant in the creation of character, Dickens became Fechter’s confidential adviser and semiprofessional impresario in London. When, in loyalty to Wills, Dickens resigned from the Garrick, Fechter, in loyalty to him, resigned also. By the early 1860s, the friendship was an intimate one. With an invalid French wife and one child, a second having been accidentally killed by his closest friend in a stage duel, Fechter became Dickens’ constant companion in amusement both onstage and off. Dickens believed in Fechter’s genius, “a man of remarkable capacity … with the quickest and brightest understanding.” When, in 1862, he did Hamlet, it “was a performance of extraordinary merit; by far the most coherent, consistent, and intelligible Hamlet” he “ever saw.… Foreign accent, of course, but not at all a disagreeable one. And he was so obviously safe and at ease, that you were never in pain for him as a foreigner.” The combination of picturesqueness and romanticism on the one hand and “a remorseless destruction of all conventionalities” on the other deeply impressed him. Fechter’s performance that same season in Othello, though, he thought “an utter and unspeakable failure.” Always a temperamental artist, Fechter sometimes brought to the stage stubborn misconceptions. Quarrelsome, “given to fits of ungovernable temper,” he needed Dickens, the one friend he never alienated, to provide mediation and advice. His management of the Lyceum was a moderate success. In 1867 his performance in the stage version of No Thoroughfare helped the dramatization to a long run. In 1865–66, certainly as a favor to his friend, he provided Frances Ternan with her final acting roles in two plays in which he himself acted and in the production of which Dickens assisted.38
For Fechter’s own American tour in 1869, Dickens provided advance publicity in a laudatory article for the Atlantic Monthly, praising, among other things, the rapture of Fechter’s “passion—that sheds a glory on its object, and raises her, before the eyes of the audience, into the light in which he sees her.” Seeing in Fechter a mirror image of some of his own idealistic impulses and self-definitions, particularly his transforming energy and passion, he had found himself in the summer of 1865 sitting in a two-story summer house, a miniature chalet that the impulsive, generous Fechter had given him as a gift. Early in the year the residents at Gad’s Hill Place had been astounded by the appearance on the front lawn of fifty-eight boxes containing the ninety-four parts of some mysterious whole. Having been “constructed in France in bits,” it was put together in England and erected amidst the shrubbery on his small piece of land across the Gravesend Road at Gad’s Hill, “with the British Thames and British ships visible from its windows.” Varnished a warm blond-brown, with decorative chalet trim, it had two rooms, one on each floor, a small balcony, and the atmosphere of an expanded dollhouse or tree house for grown-up children. It was like a set for a stage, a place for performance. Fechter “completed his charming present… by furnishing it in a very handsome manner.”39 Dickens added mirrors on all the walls of the second floor, finding in the brightness, light, and beauty of the reflections an expansion of his small space and enclosure into a brilliant world of imaginative openness.
THE INFANT PHENOM, THE BOY PRODIGY, THE PERFORMANCE PERsonality, the inimitable Boz had become the grizzled, sunbronzed squire of Gad’s Hill. He delighted in his possession of the property, in “the golden beauty of an early harvest,” as if his English landscape had been additionally internalized by ownership. The lower-middle-class orphan of the feelings was proud of the harvest he had brought in. The reality of Kent, though, was not all golden sunshine. There were hot, uncomfortable summer days. There were winter mornings so cold that water froze in the basins and the piercing wind made his study uninhabitable. As much as he identified with Gad’s Hill, his family was scattered, his domestic arrangements unusual. His sense of dislocation and his private needs motivated him to seek alternatives both to Kent and to London. But the “stout, red-faced … old-fashioned family house … with a wide porch and a bell tower” was made as comfortable as possible.40
On the right, from the central entrance, was his study, about eighteen by fifteen feet, lined partly with false book titles brought from Tavistock House and shelved into the back of the door. Built-in bookshelves extended around the room to a fireplace decorated with twenty delft tiles. A bow window like a glass triptych faced northeast toward the Gravesend Road. To the left, the living room. Behind the study, the billiards room, one wall half-tiled to prevent cue-stick damage to the plaster. Behind the living room, the dining room. Upstairs, off the central hallway, four bedrooms and a bathroom. Tiles brightened the house, mirrors extended it. To the living room he added an extension, to the dining room he added in 1869 a conservatory with a tile floor in a traditional pattern of brown, blue, and white and large glass windows with curved window-top frames. Into opposite walls of the extended living room he had floorlength mirrors embedded that “gave the effect of an endless corridor.” Between the main house and the coach house he added a servants’ hall. The upper floor of the coach house became a dormitory for children and visitors. A tunnel constructed under the Gravesend Road created safe, private access to his small property opposite. In 1862, he negotiated successfully with the Sir Joseph Williamson’s Free School in Rochester for the exchange of a parcel of land he owned in return for the meadow behind his house, thus rendering his “little property more compact and complete.” He now had twelve acres in all. From the gardener’s cottage behind the coach house the staff kept the acres well trimmed, the flower beds bright in season. Responding to his pride at glass and flowers, Katie remarked, “‘Well, really, papa, I think when you’re an angel your wings will be made of looking-glass, and your crown of scarlet geraniums!’”41
Each morning, before going to his desk, the squire of Gad’s Hill inspected his property, including his stable of dogs, most of whom accompanied him in a small pack on his hikes through the lanes. Most were presents, including Turk, a mastiff; his favorite Linda, a St. Bernard; and Sultan, a magnificent Irish bloodhound, a gift from Percy Fitzgerald. They earned their keep by providing early alarm against the tramps who in the mild weather found the Gravesend Road their natural route between Rochester and London. Fascinated by the tramps, Dickens wrote about them with a mixture of attraction and repugnance that resonated with his sense of his hard-fought elevation to middle-class status, his sympathy for the homeless poor, and his own restlessness. Disguised as the squire, he too was often on the road. Performing the squire’s role, he had neighborhood working people onto his back meadow for cricket matches and foot races for which he sponsored prizes.
To his regular guests from the Higham Cricket Club he was fastidious, even priggish enough to complain that it “did not escape [his] notice that some expressions were used the other day which would have been better avoided.” He dismissed them from his mind, though, “as being probably unintentional.” At Christmas 1866 he had “two thousand people here.… The road between” Gad’s Hill “and Chatham was like a Fair all day. Having distributed to the visitors a sententious printed bill stating that “Mr. Dickens puts every man upon his honour to assist in preserving order,” he felt his liberal civic-mindedness redeemed when there were no arguments, no drunkenness, not a rope or a stake displaced. He was delighted when one of the workingmen raced 120 yards and jumped ten hurdles “with a pipe in his mouth, and smoking it all the time,” and came in second. “‘If it hadn’t been for your pipe,’” Dickens said to him at the finish line, “‘you would have been first.’ ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he answered, ‘but if it hadn’t been for my pipe I should have been nowhere.’”42
When his sons assembled during holidays, there were dramatic performances, particularly old favorites from childhood like The Miller and His Men, cricket on the meadow, croquet and bowls on the lawn, and continuous bouts of billiards. “Cool cups and good drinks. Good beds. Harmony, most evenings.” To the stomach-tortured Charles Collins there seemed always to be “eating and drinking on an alarming scale.
” For some life at Gad’s Hill was delightful. “You breakfasted at nine, smoked your cigar, read the papers, and pottered about the garden until luncheon at one. All the morning Dickens was at work, either in the study… or in the Chalet.” Then came a long, quick-paced walk. With family and friends competing, the billiard and cricket matches were intense, each participant having a reputation and handicap. At cricket matches, he tended to be an umpire, in the billiard rooms an observer, in croquet an occasional participant, and in the theatricals a regular performer.
Alfred, and then Henry, edited a home newspaper, the Gad’s Hill Gazette, published irregularly during the holidays and supported by subscriptions. It contained capsule accounts of arrivals and departures, of most major events, such as a plague of tramps with their “Runaway Rings,” or a persistent hot drought, or a storm so violent that the flagpole in front of the house had been knocked down, or outrageous things done by the family pets. When it faltered because of a defective printer, Wills donated a surplus machine from the All the Year Round office. After 1865, it became defunct. The last editor sent the Christmas number to each of his “subscribers free of cost, as a very slight token of my gratitude to them for their consideration to me and my journal.”43 The heavy footsteps of boys running on the stairs lightened and disappeared. With increasing departures to foreign places, the theatricals and the games declined.
His son Walter’s death in 1864 was the first of many farewells that were, for all practical purposes, just as final. Feeling “undoubtedly one of the sons of TOIL … for having brought up the largest family ever known with the smallest disposition to do anything for themselves,” he joked that he expected to be given the proverbial “pewter watch” in honor of his achievement. “I never sing their praises, because they have so often disappointed me.” He did boast, though, about his midshipman son, Sydney, who in the summer of 1866 received an appointment to sail on the Bristol off the west coast of Africa. She had the reputation of being an unlucky ship. He was destined to be an unlucky young man, dying in 1872, at the age of twenty-five, probably of consumption. Frank’s failure at the war office seemed “quite unaccountable” to his father. Seemingly useless at the All the Year Round office, he left for India in 1864, not to return in his father’s lifetime. In May 1865, at twenty, after two years of unsatisfying work for an import-export business in London, Alfred left for Melbourne, eager to seek his fortune, his father glad “to dispose of this boy of mine in Australia.” Two years later he found it convenient to believe “the very best tidings of Alfred. He is hard at work in the veritable Bush life—has never had an hour’s illness of any kind—is highly interested in what he has to do—and reports himself as perfectly happy. His industry and adaptability to the strange circumstances, have put him on a pecuniary footing which enables him to be quite independent, and he leaves untouched some money that I had banked for him in case of need.”44 The most difficult departure, as final as Alfred’s, was Plorn’s in 1868 to join his brother as a sheep farmer.
Only his eldest son, who by 1868 had made him a grandfather five times over, and the next to the youngest, Henry, remained in England. An unsuccessful businessman, Charley seems to have had even less of his father’s unqualified affection after his marriage in 1861 to Bessie Evans. He only hoped that his son’s marriage would “not be a disasterous one,” since he believed that it had been schemed by “his foolish mother” and “he cares nothing for the girl.” Their annual production of a child must have been distasteful to Dickens. Used to being disappointed, Dickens only hesitantly, and then gradually, recognized his good fortune when Henry, who seemed brighter, more purposeful, and more disciplined than his brothers, began to show talent as a scholar. At the age of sixteen, he told his father “that he did not wish to enter the Indian Civil Service” but to go to Cambridge. Among his reasons may have been his image of Walter’s sudden death in Calcutta. His father resisted. “Many of us have many duties to discharge in life which we do not wish to undertake … we must do the best we can to earn our respective livings and make our way.” He wanted the terms of his cooperation absolutely clear, for the family name “is too notorious to help him, unless he can very strongly help himself.… I bear as heavy a drain as can well be attached to any one working man, and … could by no means afford to send a son to college who went there for any other purpose than to work hard, and to gain distinctions. After consulting with his son’s teacher, he thought his chances worth the risk and expense. Soon there was highly gratifying praise for Henry, and then, to his father’s pleasure, a scholarship.45
In different ways, Mamie and Katie were also problems. “Attractive … decidedly pretty,” Mamie had a small “petite figure” with “well-shaped features.” Aggressively witty, “her power lay in her interesting character—its curious spirit of independence and haughty refusal of submission.” Her independence sometimes seemed eccentricity. Her wit often took the form of badinage. Her father felt “grievously disappointed” that she could “by no means be induced to think as highly” of Fitzgerald as he did. By 1866, though, she seemed “round and matronlike,” increasingly like her mother. Probably stifled by her triangle with her father and aunt, she looked for alliances elsewhere. Katie confided to a friend that Mamie was “to be pitied … but added mysteriously, ‘she takes her happiness where she can, and a few visits to town have given her all she cares for.’” Mamie’s dissatisfactions were widely noted in the Dickens circle. She “may blaze up in firework any day.” Rumors circulated that both sisters were “going to the devil as fast as can be.”
Katie’s problems were more concrete. Family and friends generally agreed that Charles Collins “was guilty of an ‘infamy’ in marrying at all.” Undoubtedly as aware of his daughter’s sexless marriage as of her childlessness, by 1864 Dickens had come to the conclusion that she “was likely to be left a young widow.” Increasingly impatient, angry, and probably guiltily self-protective about her situation, he began to make bitter remarks, sometimes in other people’s presence, perhaps in the presence of his daughter and son-in-law as well. Collins’ semi-invalided appearance at the breakfast table at Gad’s Hill became a painful death’s head. At moments, apparently, Dickens wanted nothing but that Collins should die and get it over with. The situation was awkward for Wilkie, aware of the tensions and deeply loyal to his brother. Dickens, though, had moments of constructive sympathy for his children, even for “the charming, attractive, feckless Charlie [Collins].” In May 1867 he “doubled … Katie’s marriage portion.” Wilkie thought that “liberal and just” and hoped that his brother’s luck was turning.46 But Charlie’s fortunes remained as bad as ever. His stomach ulcers, eventually cancerous, kept him in torment until 1873.
Katie, meanwhile, made do with an unhappy father, an ill husband, and a troublesomely large amount of unexpressed life and spirit of her own. At a party at Chorley’s, she and her sister behaved frenetically and impolitely. When she “smiled, something of her former pretty self appeared, only to make the pained and woebegone expression that would follow more distressing.” She took up acting “on the private stage.” She had, like her father, theatrical talent. She also was gifted as a painter. But she had no marketable skills, and few hopes. When an aristocratic friend put on “a series of Tableaux for the Prince of Wales,” she took a small part, Charlie (Collins) noting that “our future monarch is very nearly as broad as he is long” and “getting bald very fast.… He talks the language of the country which he is to govern with a foreign accent, and will be in a year or two a little fat Hanoverian of the type of the three first Georges.” Friendly with Thackeray’s daughters, in June 1867 she attended Minny’s wedding to Leslie Stephen, “a somewhat dry uninteresting personage—a Saturday Reviewer and Pall Mall Gazattier of the modern type.” Trying to survive on Collins’ small inheritance, sporadic earnings as a writer, and their marriage portion kept them close to their bourgeois-genteel, nonworking grindstone. “Rather delicate—about the chest and heart,” through much of the 18
60s she suffered from unexplained debilitating illnesses, with some serious episodes that worried her father and her friends. When she was ill in late 1866 with a “low nervous fever,” he felt that “she is a bad subject for illness, having long been in an unsatisfactory and declining state.” Flirting and teasing regularly, she appeared “so discontented … so intensely eager to find other lovers,” that she was “burning away both character and health slowly but steadily.”47
Fortunately, the sunshine at Gad’s Hill shone on Ellen as well as on his daughters and friends. The Gad’s Hill Gazette, of course, makes no mention of her comings and goings, and the carefully expunged record conceals any indication of how frequently she visited. With relatives in Rochester, she had occasion to be in the area separate from her friendship with him. Mamie, Katie, Georgina, and a few intimate friends had partial to full knowledge of the relationship, but her visits need not have revealed to those on the perimeter more than the impression that she was a friend of the family. The younger boys undoubtedly were told nothing other than that. A veteran of the 1858–59 conflict, Charley Dickens would have assumed that the relationship was an intimate one. As they grew up and then survived their father, some of his other sons learned the basic facts, including the possibility that their father and Ellen had had a child. Whether that was one source of Dickens’ anxieties is unclear. Diligent detective work has not uncovered the secrets of the supreme detective, capable of throwing even himself off the trail of self-awareness. There are only shadows of possibilities, a circumstantial network of connections between one of his pseudonyms and the name of a child on a birth certificate, a few dim, half-thoughtless recollections that they had had or someone had said that they had had a son, and the less circumstantial statement by Henry Fielding Dickens in 1928 that unto them had been born, etc.48