by Fred Kaplan
At the beginning of March, his friend Emerson Tennent, with whom he had climbed Mount Vesuvius sixteen years before, was much on his mind. He talked about him with Dolby. The next morning news came that Tennent had died. With split-second timing and hardly a moment’s leeway, he engineered a trip from York to London that enabled him both to give his reading in York that evening and to attend the funeral. When he read the murder of Nancy in Cheltenham, Macready authoritatively pronounced it to be equal to “two Macbeths!” Soon Macready’s tubercular daughter, Katie, died. Her death brought “a rush of old remembrances and withered joys” that struck him to the heart. To commemorate his final reading in Liverpool, he allowed the corporation to host early in April a farewell banquet in his honor that over 650 people attended. In the brilliantly lit St. George’s Hall, decorated with plants, flowers, and silver, with hundreds of additional people in the gallery, he gave an unusually long speech of thanks, reminding his listeners of what a warm and long relationship he had had with Liverpool audiences, concluding with a strong statement about the dignity of literature as a profession.
Soon after the banquet, reading in Leeds, he appeared so utterly exhausted that Edmund Yates, who had been pleasantly surprised at his appearance when he returned from America, was shocked. He lay stretched out on a couch, one of his boots off, the foot swathed in bandages. “He looked desperately aged and worn; the lines in his cheeks and round the eyes, always noticeable, were now in deep furrows; there was a weariness in his gaze, and a general air of fatigue and depression about him.” A few days later Dickens told Mark Lemon, who had begun a reading tour of his own, that perhaps if he had given a timely rest to his favorite watch, which had had “palpitations” for six months after the Staplehurst accident, the watch might have recovered sooner.38
The lines that Yates noticed etched into Dickens’ face at this point had nothing to do with a need for rest. They were physiological self-portraiture by a man who for a long time had been transforming inner images into external equivalents, images of tiredness, resentment, restlessness, insecurity, and financial anxiety, images of denial, resistance, fear of age, and fear of death. Christmas and renewal had mostly long since faded into transparency. Recognizing that he was “a difficult subject,” Dickens did not like most of the efforts to capture his image, as if the inner vision that he had attempted to portray in his fiction had a reality for him that any photograph of his external appearance denied. Frequently photographed and much more frequently besieged to sit for portraits for sale and display, he did not believe that any photograph embodied his own sense of himself. He felt “intense weariness and horror” at the prospect of sitting for “a new photographic portrait… an unremunerative investment of time and temper.” He seriously joked with one photographer that his snapshot had “a grim and wasted aspect, and perhaps might be made useful as a portrait of the Ancient Mariner.”39 When Yates saw him on his couch of exhaustion at Leeds, he did indeed have some resemblance to the Ancient Mariner. He had also just come from compulsively retelling in his readings the story of his life.
What his contemporaries saw when they looked at him varied from one perspective to another. The photographers mostly missed the realities of personality, though some did better than others in capturing aspects of his public presence. He rarely appeared in group photographs, and then only by the accident of a few impromptu snapshots at Gad’s Hill. Most depict him alone, partly disguising his shortness and the premature shrinking of an inch or so from his original five feet eight, his slightness most apparent when he was not inflated by the excitement of performance, when he relaxed or collapsed into exhaustion, when the mask of his ruddy cheeks became transparent enough to reveal that the energetic look was at best skin-deep. Nearsighted, he refused to wear glasses in public or to be photographed wearing them at home. His gray-blue eyes still sparkled, sometimes with more life than his body normally supported, intensely focused when concentrating on talking to someone, otherwise seeming to gaze off into the distance. By the late 1860s his hair had thinned so much that he could hardly bear to joke anymore about his partial baldness. His longer, straggly beard gave him the impression of being off-balance. Often, partly to disguise baldness, he wore a hat, particularly a jaunty bowler. His sporty street clothes, especially checks and plaids, spoke of the country gentleman. But his wrinkles, his weariness, his thinness, and his appearance of pained concentration did not speak of country relaxation, of the balanced life, of a personality at rest.
Some of the verbal portrait painting projected his culture’s expectations about what the greatest writer of the age should look like. Some of these stereotypes were internalized or at least acted out. There were various Dickenses: the meticulous editor, the sharp businessman, the responsible father, the reliable friend, the writer of genius, the good citizen of literature, the man of the theatre, the public performer, the national celebrity, the patriotic Englishman, the friend of the poor, the liberal reformer, the stylish dresser punctilious about his clothes, the narcissist constantly combing his hair, the well-traveled European sophisticate, the sporty country squire with dogs and walking stick, the London boulevardier who “always was theatrically dressed.” Often his public image combined sober Victorian responsibility with a touch of Romantic theatricality. But he was a whole cast of characters himself, a performance personality with as long a list of disguised and fully dressed variants on the basic model as the list of characters in any one of his novels. He delighted in consciously and unconsciously playing many roles, partly as a relief from the burden of an otherwise singular, rigid, brittle personality. One evening in 1863, after hearing him read, Carlyle said, “Charlie, you carry a while company of actors under your own hat.” To some, he seemed “about as odd a character as any he had ever drawn from his fruitful imagination.”40
At the office, he smoked cigarettes insatiably. At home or with friends, he smoked cigars. Alcohol appealed to him in the form of wine with dinner, champagne at celebrations, and, after dinner, port, sherry, or brandy to punctuate good fellowship. Convivial in company, he seemed to many a paragon of cheerfulness, a public image that his association with Christmas, hearth, and friendship encouraged. His seeming good spirits, though, did not mean self-exposure, confidences, intimacy. In that regard, he kept a narrow company, mostly Forster and Georgina, sometimes Collins and a few others, probably Ellen. Otherwise his emotions, like his private life, were played close to the vest. Only appropriate, carefully censored feelings were allowed verbal expression other than in the disguised forms of his fiction. Deeply private in that sense, he often expressed gaiety in public as a performance in which the real Dickens usually was far out of sight, though he attempted to keep as narrow as possible the distinction between cheerfulness and happiness. An American visitor, during a visit in the summer of 1869, thought the Gad’s Hill household and its master “perpetually jolly.” Sometimes, though, his joviality seemed forced, overwhelming and wearying people, as if they doubted its spontaneity or felt it inhumanly exhausting in its powerfulness, almost a physical assault. Often when he seemed happy, he was moody, depressed, and angry. Annie Fields remarked that it is “wonderful, the flow of spirits C.D. has for a sad man.”41
Generous when unchallenged, his notion of compromise was total victory. His aggressiveness, stubbornness, and inflexibility seemed tyranny to some, the power of genius to others. Yates, to whom he was a surrogate father, felt the force of both his love and his authority as a son would. “He was imperious in the sense that his life was conducted” on the principle that his will was his command. “Everything gave way before him. The society in which he mixed, the hours which he kept, the opinions which he held, his likes and dislikes, his ideas of what should or should not be, were all settled by himself, not merely for himself, but for all those brought into connection with him.… Yet he was never regarded as a tyrant; he had immense power of will, absolute mesmeric force.”
Completely loyal, Dickens expected total loyalty in return. “
His nearest and dearest friends were as unwilling to face as they were unable to deflect the passionate pride which suffered neither counsel nor rebuke.” Thackeray complained that “‘there is nobody to tell him when anything goes wrong.… Dickens is the Sultan, and Wills is his Grand Vizier.’” Bulwer-Lytton remarked that one of the signs of his mastery of “the practical part of Authorship beyond any writer” was his creating “a corps of devoted parasites in the Press.” When he went to friends for advice, he expected unflinching support once his decision had been made, as if they were cabinet members pledged to the will of the chief executive. Even his gaze struck some people as imperial, the kind of “economy of apprehension” of his “merciless military eye” that one would expect of a general surveying a battlefield. Often he was both general and private, a man used to shouldering the burden of leadership and of performance. Having set the highest standards, he regularly punished himself whenever he failed to fulfill them. To avoid certain forms of self-punishment he was punishingly rigorous with himself. “He was so anxious to be in time that he was invariably before time.”42 He found relaxation almost impossible.
When Dickens looked at himself, always an indirect and deflecting activity, he had shadowy glimpses of an evasive and evading self-portrait. “I cannot see myself,” he constantly complained. Often he did not care to. He had trained himself into willful, then habitual secretiveness. He “can even be insincere but unconsciously so,” Bulwer-Lytton remarked. In the two most revealing activities of his life, though, he was sincere, his public readings and his writing of fiction, both intensely autobiographical, the disguised self-revelation that he was attracted to and with which he felt comfortable. Though constantly on his own trail, he was determined never fully to catch the “him” that he was following, ultimately more successful as the pursued than the pursuer, the criminal than the detective. The readings were an “interpretation of myself.” So too were the writings. His 1868 short story “George Silverman’s Explanation” revealed his most concentrated psychological portrait of the mono-identity of the pursuer and pursued. As he wrote it, the story seemed to him strange and unusual, exercising a powerful fascination, the source of which he could not identify.
His fascination with murdering Nancy, “continually done with great passion and fury,” was also partly self-portraiture in which he played both victim and victimizer.43 Nancy resonated with his vision of the innately good women in his life. In her murder he enacted the lives and deaths, both physical and emotional, of Mary Hogarth, Little Nell, Little Em’ly, his sister Fanny, and the emotional sacrifices of Georgina Hogarth and Katie Dickens, the ideal vision of moral purity embodied in the life of a prostitute who by her very nature must love and help the deprived child. Some of his terror in presenting her murder derived from his knowledge that the murderer was not only Bill Sikes but also her author and creator. When he enacted Sikes’s killing of Nancy, he created the stage illusion that he was Sikes, that his will and his heart were committed to the crime. They were. In repeatedly murdering her, he expressed himself with displaced violence against the horrible women of his life, his mother and his wife. Perhaps he also expressed some of his occasional ambivalence about what he had done to Georgina and Ellen. In murdering Nancy, he committed a crime of vengeance and self-assertion available to him only within fiction. So powerful was his identification with Sikes that not even Sikes’s death could free him from the emotional grip of that identification. An unworthy criminal still prowled on the loose, within himself. After the reading, when he left the theatre, he almost expected to be arrested in the streets. He looked over his shoulder to see who was pursuing him.
WALKING ON THE BEACH IN BLACKPOOL IN APRIL 1869, DICKENS unhappily faced the possibility that he would have to cancel the remaining twenty-six in this farewell tour of one hundred readings. The buoyant, healthy Dickens had disappeared. Instead, there was an elderly man with lines of exhaustion so deeply etched into his face and posture that the couch of weariness Yates had witnessed seemed preparation for the final bed. On Saturday, April 17, in Chester, he had felt giddy, “with a tendency to go backwards, and to turn round. Afterwards, desiring to put something on a small table, he pushed it and the table forward, undesignedly. He had some odd feelings of insecurity about his left leg, as if there were something unnatural about his heel… some strangeness of his left hand and arm.” He “missed the spot on which he wished to lay that hand, unless he carefully looked at it.” Unable to lift his left hand readily, especially toward his head, he could not get the brush to where he wanted it when he tried to brush his hair. The weakness and deadness were “all on the left side. “ Writing to Dr. Frank Beard immediately, asking if the medicine he had prescribed could possibly be responsible for these effects, he had gone on to Blackburn, then Blackpool on the twenty-first. “Nothing would uphold [him] through such work … but the prospect of soon working it out.” He still hoped to complete the tour. “Six weeks will carry me through the Readings,” he wrote to Beard, “if you can fortify me a little bit, and then, please God, I may do as I like.”44 At the end of his “delicious walk by the sea” and his day’s rest at a charming beach-front hotel, he felt some flickers of optimism. He had slept well. His appetite improved, his foot felt better.
Beard responded peremptorily. Immediate medical attention was necessary. “There can be no mistaking the symptoms,” the doctor wrote, though he resorted to their favorite euphemism of “overwork.… I wish to take you in hand without any loss of time.” While Beard hurried northward on the London-to-Preston train, Dickens still expected to continue with the readings. His friend knew, though, what Dickens admitted to only with evasions, qualifications, and vague references to a disorder of the nervous system. For over three years Dickens had had symptoms of coronary illness. Beginning in 1866, in response to “degeneration of some functions of the heart,” he had been taking a combination of iron, quinine, and digitalis, prescribed by Beard, “to set [the heart] a-going, and send the blood more quickly through the system.” Stethoscopic examination revealed some “fluttering” of the heart. His left vision played tricks. Sometimes he could not read the right half of signs in the streets. Recently, he had difficulty remembering names and numbers, though he claimed that he had always done that, and admitted that “sometimes [he] lost or misused a word.” In fact, he did so regularly, dyslexically reversing syllables and stumbling over consonants, occasionally while reading before an audience. Now the discomfort was in the left foot. For over three years, he had been willfully deceiving himself. Echoing what must have been the judgment of many of his friends, Yates remarked that “he has pain, inflammation, every possible gouty symptom in the foot, the chosen locality for gout, but it is not gout.… As he walks along the street one day, he can read only the halves of the letters over the shop-doors that were on his right as he looked. ‘He attributed it to medicine’ … It is really almost too astonishing.”
In Chester, Dickens had probably had a minor stroke. In Preston, where he was scheduled to read that night, the symptoms he had had in Chester returned. After examining him, Beard, who had arrived in the afternoon, ordered him to cancel the readings for the next few days and to return with him immediately to London for consultation with a heart expert. Though he claimed that Beard only confirmed what he had himself already fully realized—“that the readings must be stopped”—he now for the first time accepted that it would be physically impossible for him to go on.45
Returning to London that night, he was examined the next day by Sir Thomas Watson. The verdict was dismal. Dickens felt sure, though, that a week or two of rest would take care of the whole matter. Try as he would, he could not induce the doctor “to hear of more Readings anywhere.” Still, the only practical consequence was that he could not do the London farewells in May. Yes, Watson granted defensively, “preventive measures are always invidious, for when most successful, the necessity for them is the least apparent.” He had been, though, “on the brink of an attack of paralysis of hi
s left side, and possibly of apoplexy … the result of extreme hurry, overwork, and excitement, incidental to his Readings.” There was no mention of the likelihood that he had already suffered a stroke, that he had perhaps had a series of minor strokes during the last three years, and that there may have been permanent damage to the heart. Since he still owed the Chappells twenty-six readings, the answer to that debt was to do the London readings at a later date, probably the next winter. When he had left Preston, he had worried that if he were seen walking onto the London train, his credibility would be questioned by the press. He now had Watson and Beard sign a certificate for public distribution. “The undersigned certify that Mr. Charles Dickens has been seriously unwell, through great exhaustion and fatigue of body and mind consequent upon his public Readings and long and frequent railway journeys. In our judgment Mr. Dickens will not be able with safety to himself to resume his Readings for several months to come.”
Pledging “implicit obedience” to his doctors, confident that rest would make him completely well, he refused even to imagine it possible that he would or even should never give public readings again. Unable to “bear to be hurried or flurried,” feeling all right “except for a rather dazed sensation of being greatly fatigued,” he declined a dinner invitation from Forster. Resting, the next day he felt that he had begun “to recover himself.” Soon he announced that he was “in a quite brilliant condition already.… I should be almost ashamed of myself, if I didn’t know the unconditional knocking off for a time, from all ‘reading’ wear and tear, to be a cautionary rather than a curative measure.” Still essentially denying the seriousness of his condition, he returned to Kent, the place from which all his “early imaginations dated.… I took them away so full of innocent construction and guileless belief, and I brought them back so worn and torn, so much the wiser and so much the worse!”46