by Fred Kaplan
Though the “patient,” whose health never fully recovered after the Staplehurst accident, may have enjoyed the recuperative sunshine of Kent, she had a comfortable residence of her own at Ampthill Square. By December 1865 Ellen felt well enough to attend a dancing party, hosted by the brother of her brother-in-law-to-be, Anthony Trollope, with scarlet geraniums in her hair. In January 1866, she moved to Elizabeth Cottage in Slough, seventeen miles from London, across the river from Windsor and three miles from Eton. The proceeds from subleasing the Ampthill Square house probably helped support her and her mother. Using the pseudonym “Charles Tringham,” partly borrowed from the name of his tobacconist in Covent Garden, partly from a story that Thomas Hood had published in 1839 about a scandal in the “tattling village of Tringham,” Dickens paid the rent and the taxes for the comfortable cottage. A frequent visitor, he could easily see across the river the towers of the castle outside of which he and Maclise had romantically rhapsodized about the young queen. Slough provided both ready access from the All the Year Round office and sufficient privacy for him to move through the neighborhood with semianonymity. Undoubtedly, Georgina, his daughters, and Wills knew that he might just as well be there as in London or at Gad’s Hill. Often, as far as the extended circle of friendship and business knew, he was at the other of the two acknowledged places.
The move to Elizabeth Cottage may have been prompted by a desire for greater privacy. If there had been a pregnancy in late 1865, then the move in January 1866 would have been sensible. In October 1866, Ellen did not attend the Paris wedding of her eldest sister to Thomas Trollope, though Maria and her mother did. Frequently at Slough, at least during the summer of 1866 and almost certainly from January 1866 to May 1867, Dickens did his usual lying to disguise either his whereabouts or why he was there, dating his letters from Eton or from town. With deceptive casualness he explained the Eton postmark. He was “merely walking in the Park here, but write from this place, in consequence of having omitted to do so in town.” Usually, though, he was in Eton waiting for the train to London, having walked across the back fields from Slough, as the Eton station was on a line more convenient to the All the Year Round office. He also preferred to be noticed, if at all, at the Eton rather than the Slough station.49 In March 1867, he gave up Elizabeth Cottage and rented, using a variant of his Tringham pseudonym, a larger, more comfortable house much nearer to central London and Gad’s Hill, Windsor Lodge, at Linden Grove in Peckham, not far from Herne Hill and Dulwich. Ellen moved there in May 1867. A frequent visitor, he wrote one of his most psychologically revealing autobiographical stories there, “George Silverman’s Explanation.” Very few nonfictional explanations were forthcoming from the increasingly secretive novelist.
His departure for America later that year involved goodbyes at all his residences. Perhaps the most dramatic good-bye had already taken place in October 1866. Now huge in size, Sultan, Fitzgerald’s gift, was docile and loving, though aggressively possessive. He had become his master’s favorite, partly because of his affectionateness, partly because he rejected and detested everyone else. “So accursedly fierce towards other dogs” that he had to be muzzled in order to be taken out, he attacked everything moving or still, with a special “invincible repugnance to soldiers.” Dashing “into the heart of a company … he pulled down an objectionable private.” The price of such total love was the problem of how to deal with his creature’s unmitigated enmity to the rest of the world. To Dickens, he was the finest dog he had ever seen. “Between him and me there was a perfect understanding.” Breaking his muzzle frequently, though, he came home “covered with blood, again and again.” One day he swallowed an entire blue-eyed kitten, afterward suffering “agonies of remorse (or indigestion)?” When he seized the little sister of one of the servants, Dickens flogged him. The next morning he took the dog to the meadow behind the house, accompanied by a half-dozen men with guns and a wheelbarrow. Sultan bounded out cheerfully, anticipating “the death of somebody unknown.” He paused, meditatively, with his eyes on the wheelbarrow and the guns. “A stone deftly thrown across him … caused him to look round for an instant, and then he fell dead, shot through the heart.”50
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A Castle in the Other World
(1867–1870)
GLASSES WERE RAISED HIGH TO HONOR THE GREAT NOVELIST OF THE age. The arched top of each of the twenty wall panels in Freemason’s Hall had had inscribed on it in great gold letters the name of one of his novels, “the post of honour over the chair being given to the Immortal Pickwick.” When the doors were thrown open on the evening of November 2, 1867, Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton entered arm in arm. “A cry rang through the room, handkerchiefs were waved on the floor and in the galleries … and the band struck up a full march.” The faces looking up at his radiated with the belief that they were attending “a high historical event.” The 450 distinguished literary and social gentlemen who glowed through the crowded dinner and the 100 women sequestered in evening-gown splendor in the gallery had no doubt that the young newspaper reporter from somewhere had long ago arrived to help make them themselves. He was the author whose name Queen Victoria was soon told “will hereafter be closely associated with the Victorian era.”1
The dinner arrangements had been made mostly by Charles Kent, with Dickens’ encouragement. The honor appealed to his vanity. It would provide an infusion of communal warmth before he sailed into a comparatively solitary adventure. It would generate publicity that would precede him to American shores. It would provide him with a forum in which to speak of his positive feelings about the former republic of his imagination. Determined that in this second coming there would be no politics, no international copyright, no divisive speeches, he wanted only amity and financial success. At a dinner hosted by Wilkie Collins a few evenings before, he responded to all eyes being drawn to “a most wonderful pin” in his cravat, “large in size, strange in form,” with a substantial jewel at its center, “I hope, that there is no such pin as this in America. I have invested in it for the whole and sole purpose of pleasing my friends over the water, and I hope you all think I shall succeed.” Public and private celebratory dinners filled his engagement book. There could not be enough memorializing. The enlisting of a huge honor role of stewards for the farewell banquet gave Forster the opportunity to reaffirm the platform of nonpatronage, that “vile” custom of listing aristocrats separately on the program. Among other things, the dinner was to affirm “the common fellowship of professors and lovers of literature,” the lifelong effort that his career represented to make literature a respectable profession.2
Surrounded by the community that he had been instrumental in creating, Dickens seemed radiantly happy, his excitement unaffected by Bulwer-Lytton’s garish makeup and his “ingeniously bad” speech, by the “drunken waiters … greasy fragments of tepid dishes … cold plates with the soup.…” The mood was laudatory, the self-praise of an idealizing culture in which tears and cheers went together. If there was a sepulchral resonance, it was regal, congratulatory, expressing a sense of the momentousness of the occasion. This was to be, as Procter told the ailing Forster, “the Dickens apotheosis.” One of the speakers declaimed, “Happy is the man who makes clear his title-deeds to the royalty of genius while he yet lives to enjoy the gratitude and reverence of those whom he has subjected to his sway.… Seldom … has that kind of royalty been quietly conceded to any man of genius until his tomb becomes his throne.” The title had been conceded long ago. There was no need for quiet now. When Dickens rose to speak, “the air… full of electricity,” the entire company surged to its feet. His friends at the front tables rushed forward, forcing their way up the aisles until only a solid wall of admiring faces glowed before him. “Men leaped on chairs, tossed up napkins,” spilled champagne, “waved glasses and decanters over their heads.” In the galleries the women, “scarcely able to breathe for the smoke and heat,” waved their handkerchiefs. Flushed with excitement, his “wonderful eyes” flaming
“around like a searchlight,” he waited a long while until the storm of shouts faded into silence. His voice faltered. He needed to take “a desperate hold” of himself or he “should have lost [his] sight and voice and sat down again.” “Tears streamed down his face.… It seemed to be a sacred moment.”3
In his best oratorical style, he thanked his audience of brother artists for testifying that the cause of art had been safe in his keeping, “and that they think it has never been falsely dealt with by me.” His fondest hope was that he might “leave its social position in England something better than I found it.” For “the public believe, that with a host of imperfections and shortcomings on my head, I have as a writer … tried to be as true to them as they have ever been to me.” As always, he spoke not from a text but from memory and inspiration. He kept in mind the prepared image of his speech as a wheel, with spokes as its subtopics. As he turned the wheel, each spoke dropped away. He turned to the spoke of literature as free enterprise, as an open community. He had heard “a great deal about literary sets and cliques, and coteries, and barriers, about keeping this man up, and keeping that man down, and about sworn disciples, and sworn unbelievers, and mutual admiration societies” obstructing the upward path that he had begun “to tread when [he] was very young, without influence, without money, without companion, introducer, or advisor,” but he had never encountered these barriers.
For the moment, the blacking factory, the struggle to find a vocation, his battles with Bentley, his sense that he could never run too fast or too far to keep ahead of rivals and detractors, his pursuit of friends of influence and a supportive community faded into the background. He then turned the wheel to the spoke of America. With the flags of the two great nations above his head, he did not hesitate to say that “the story of my going again … is very easily and briefly told.” Since he had last been there, the best known of his books, David Copperfield, had been published, “a vast entirely new generation [had] arisen,” and he had been beseeched to visit by many strong American voices of personal interest… and personal affection.” He wanted to see for himself “the astonishing change and progress of a quarter of a century over there, to grasp the hands of many faithful friends whom I left upon those shores, to see the faces of a multitude of new friends upon whom I have never looked, and … to use my best endeavour to lay down a third cable of intercommunication and alliance between the old world and the new.… And so, as Tiny Tom observed, ‘God bless us every one!’”4
The story, though, was more complicated, the blessing less generalized. He and his friends had no doubt in their minds and in private discussions that his main motive for going was financial gain. What an American might have frankly stated, English Victorians had to disguise. With his sensitivity to being thought mercenary, he felt compelled to idealize his intentions. With Wills, Forster, and his new business manager, George Dolby, he was unflinchingly candid. “To get that sum in a heap so soon is an immense consideration to me—my wife’s income to pay—a very expensive position to hold—and my boys with the curse of limpness on them. You don’t know what it is to look around the table and see reflected from every seat of it (where they sit) some horribly well remembered expression of inadaptability to anything.”
For his spring 1866 reading tour he had been paid £1,500 by the theatrical management firm of Arthur and Thomas Chappell, “speculators, though of the worthiest and most honourable kind,” who took care of all the arrangements that could be made from their office and by their agents. He had settled in advance with them for a guaranteed fee, the Chappells receiving all the profit beyond that and his expenses. From mid-January to May 1867, he had done a series of forty-two readings in London and the provinces, for which he had been paid £2,500. With his usual passion for getting it right, he had worked up new selections, particularly from his recent Christmas stories, “Barbox Brothers” and “The Boy at Mugby,” which by January 1867 had reached “the extraordinary circulation [of] 256,000 odd hundred of copies.” For the first time he learned all his readings by heart, “so as to have no mechanical drawback in looking after the words.” Since the completion of Our Mutual Friend in November 1865, his mind had not been on fiction, except for some short pieces and the loose agenda of a new novel somewhere off in the distance. The reading experience (and “when I read I don’t write … I only edit”) sustained him emotionally and bolstered him financially.5
It was never only a matter of money. During the winter and spring of 1867, in England, Ireland, and Scotland, “constantly travelling … here, there, and everywhere, and (principally) nowhere,” through snow, sleet, rain, cold, on trains that set his nerves trembling, through insistent evenings in hot crowded reading halls, he revived at the sound of applause, his energy surged at the sight of waiting audiences. His performance personality and his financial insecurity were catalysts for one another, two sides of the same coin of his neediness. Every seat was always taken and usually “the success the most brilliant” he had ever seen. In one mood and to one kind of correspondent he found the most idealized terms for his fascination with the readings. “When I first entered on this interpretation of myself … I was sustained by the hope that I could drop into some hearts, some new expression of the meaning of my books, that would touch them in a new way. To this hour that purpose is so strong in me, and so real are my fictions to myself, that, after hundreds of nights, I come with a feeling of perfect freshness to that little red table, and laugh and cry with my hearers, as if I had never stood there before.” Dolby had no hesitation, though, in confessing what they sometimes both felt. In the tedium of business “our travelling life had become so much a matter of system with us, that the routine of it became almost monotonous. Day after day we were doing the same things at the same time.”6
No sooner had Dickens finished the spring 1867 readings than he started to succumb to the lure of the American invitations. Early in May he was so tired that he could “hardly undress for bed.” On the same day he felt frustrated by “expenses … so enormous” that he began to feel himself “drawn toward America, as Darnay in the Tale of Two Cities was attracted to the Loadstone Rock, Paris.” Darnay had had a narrow escape. Dickens must have sensed the implication of the comparison. Through much of 1866 he had been unwell, with contradictory diagnoses about his lameness that pointed to gout or erysipelas, with undiagnosed long-standing neuralgic symptoms, with some indication of cardiac illness, which one doctor called “‘great irritability of the heart.’” Still, in February 1866 he “sold” himself “(rather in the Faust way!) for 30 readings.” In September 1866, twice in one week he was “seized in a most distressing manner—apparently in the heart.” Persuading himself that it was “only in the nervous system,” through the winter and spring he suffered from various ailments, constantly in the diagnostic shadow-land between overexertion and the possibility of serious illness. Exhaustion and rationalization obscured organic symptoms. Illness contributed to exhaustion, which he blamed on overwork.
Until February 1867, he dismissed any relationship between his symptoms and the possibility of “degeneration of some functions of the heart.” Thereafter he resisted but could not completely deny the possibility. Reading in Liverpool in January 1867, he became “so faint afterwards that they laid [him] on a sofa at the hall for half an hour.” He attributed “it to [his] distressing inability to sleep at night, and to nothing worse.” Two nights later it happened again. Though “heavily beaten,” he consoled himself with the claim that he “was not faint … only exhausted.” The next week, “severely shaken on an atrocious railway,” he could not sleep. In February, he began to feel “a curious … soreness all round the body.” Soon he had a recurrence of bleeding from piles, which he had not suffered from so severely since the early 1840s. He managed to make it to the end of the readings in May. On May 9, he told his sister that, “thank God, I am getting on splendidly, and resting amazingly.”7 The next day was the one on which he could hardly undress himself.
F
or five months he hesitated to announce that he had succumbed to the magnetic attraction. The decision was implicit in his feelings in May and an almost inevitable expression of his character. America had been long on his mind, as a concept and as a business enterprise. When he had declined to read there in 1859, he had reserved the likelihood of a more propitious time. A world of American connections needed attending to, needed to be fully reconciled with. Also, there was a market for his works and his readings. Feeling a constant grievance about the lost royalties from the American sale of his books, the proceeds of which would have made him rich, he could, by giving readings there, reclaim some of the gold that rightfully belonged to him, the unrewarded sweat of his brow during thirty years as a writer. And the emanations from America were fraternal as well as financial. He responded warmly whenever the two came together. His Boston publisher, James T. Fields, and his wife, Annie, had visited him in London and at Gad’s Hill in July 1859. A petite, dark-haired, intelligent, and attractive woman, eager to transform hero worship into friendship, Annie Fields quickly become one of his platonic female favorites. Seventeen years older than his second wife, James T. Fields was a soft-spoken, generous, hospitable man whose social and professional position made him a prominent representative of New England literary culture. Dickens liked him immensely, and was especially pleased with his compact edition of Our Mutual Friend.8 Editor of the Atlantic Monthly and the active partner in the firm of Ticknor and Fields, Fields urged him to give America another chance.